‘That sounded English,’ said Derry.
There was another long silence that settled about them, broken only by the rasping sound of their breathing, fluttering with tension.
‘Hey! You guys behind the coach! Hold up!’
Andy heard one of the boys whispering, ‘Is that a Yank?’
The voice again. ‘You guys! You American? You British?’
Westley turned to Andy, ‘For fuck’s sake. They’re Yanks!’
Andy cupped his hands. ‘We’re British! Hold your fire!’
There was no reply for a few seconds, then they heard the same man shout, ‘Come out in the open where we can see you, drop your guns!’
Westley turned to Andy. ‘You reckon they’re pukka?’
‘I don’t think we’ve got a choice anyway. I’ll go first.’
Andy took a deep breath and stood up, then with hands raised, he walked out from behind the coach, his face screwed up in anticipation of a shot slamming home. But no one fired.
He heard Westley mutter behind him, ‘The fight’s over lads. Come on.’
The Lance Corporal and the others emerged reluctantly, one by one, their hands raised, and their empty weapons left behind.
To Andy it felt like an eternity, exposed like that, knowing that even in the dark, whoever was out there had their cross-hairs trained on them, fingers resting lightly on triggers and watching them silently.
After a few moments, he heard the unmistakable clump of army boots walking down the road towards him. A torch snapped on, into Andy’s face.
‘You’re British, huh?’ said a deep, gravelly American voice.
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Fuck knows. There were fifteen of us, before you started firing, mate,’ snapped Andy.
‘Shit,’ said the voice behind the torch. ‘Real sorry about that.’
Peters had died instantly. The opening volley hit him in the head, the throat and the chest. He was dead even before he’d slid forward on to the wheel. Private Owen on the other hand, who had been hit in the aisle inside the coach, right next to Andy, had obviously lasted a few moments longer, having pulled himself up some way towards the front, leaving a snail-trail of already drying blood behind him.
Two others were killed on the road beside the coach, Private Craig and the platoon medic, Benford.
Westley saw to them, collecting their dog-tags after Benford’s opposite number in the US platoon had briefly looked them over and pronounced all four of them dead. He and the other squaddies picked them up and laid them out side by side at the edge of the road.
Andy, meanwhile, realised Mike was nowhere to be seen. He finally found the American at the back of the coach, holding Farid. The old man had taken a hit in the stomach. His pale checked shirt was almost black with blood. On his belly, a small, perfectly round hole slowly oozed blood that looked as dark as oil by torchlight. But beneath him, the pooling blood, and shreds of expelled tissue, spoke of a much larger exit wound.
Mike looked up at Andy, silently shaking his head. ‘Not good,’ he said quietly.
Farid stared up at Mike with glassy eyes. He spoke, but in Arabic; private words, not for either of them. He spoke in short bursts, punctuated by painful spasms that caught his breath and made him screw up his eyes and grimace.
A US soldier approached down the aisle. He pointed his torch down on to the old man’s face. ‘Who’s the—’
‘Our translator,’ interrupted Andy. He didn’t want to know what euphemism the young American sergeant was about to use.
‘Our friend,’ added Mike, looking up pointedly at him.
The sergeant seemed to have the sense not to say anything, and nodded silently. He turned round and shouted up the aisle, ‘Get the medic! We got a live one here!’
Mike stroked the old man’s face. ‘Hey, we got some help coming. You hang in there.’
Farid focused on him and managed a faint smile. ‘I know you are good man. Good man inside.’
‘Just a normal guy, that’s all,’ said Mike. ‘Save it for later, okay?’
Farid placed a bloodied hand on his arm. ‘God is open door to all good men.’
The medic squeezed past Andy and crouched down to look at the old man. His examination was brief, and after gently easing the old man over and inspecting the rear wound he looked up at his sergeant, barely shook his head before saying, ‘I can hit him with morphine, but that’s really all I can do.’
‘Do it then,’ said the sergeant.
The drug had an almost instant effect, and Farid sagged, no longer tensing and flexing with the pain. He smiled. ‘I see my family soon. My son . . .’ the rest he muttered in Arabic.
‘You go see your son, and your wife,’ said Mike quietly.
CHAPTER 66
3.25 a.m. local time Southern Turkey
‘You’re kidding? How far away from here?’ asked Andy outside.
The sergeant nodded, ‘No, I’m not kidding. It’s not far, just a few miles. The landing strip’s not big enough for the large transport planes, shit . . . nowhere near long enough. But we’re getting a steady stream of C130s down on it okay.’
‘You guys can get us out?’
‘Fuck, I don’t know. We got a lot of stragglers like you, American, British, some UN troops from all over. We got planes coming in and going out like a goddamn taxi rank. It’s bedlam, man. Absolute fuckin’ bedlam. And then we got all sorts crowding outside the strip, civilians - Turks, Kurds, Iraqis - all wanting us to fly ’em all over the place, thinking things ain’t so bad elsewhere.’
‘How are things elsewhere? We haven’t heard anything much since Tuesday.’
The sergeant looked at him with incredulity. ‘You don’t know?’
Andy shook his head.
‘The answer is . . . shit. We got food riots back home. My home state’s under martial law. Fuckin’ internment camps everywhere. And I’m pretty sure we’re doin’ better back home, than most places.’
‘Hear anything about Britain?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Not much, but I heard enough to know you guys have got it pretty bad over there. It’s all very fucked up.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Anyway listen, you guys get back in your coach, and I’ll have one of my boys guide you there. You don’t want to waste any time. We’re holding that strip for just a while longer, maybe until tomorrow afternoon, then that’s it, we’re bailing out of here.’
Andy turned to head back inside the coach.
‘Listen fella,’ called out the American. ‘I’m sorry about the . . . we just. We’ve had hostiles taking pot-shots at us all week, you know? My boys’re all strung out.’
Andy nodded but didn’t say anything. ‘Sorry’ fixed nothing. It didn’t bring back to life the four young men lying beside the road, or an old Iraqi translator.
He turned back to the truck. Westley and Derry had lifted out Farid’s body from inside the coach and placed him alongside the four young squaddies, shoulder to shoulder with them. Maybe they’d not done that consciously, or maybe they had, but it said something about these boys that made Andy feel proud to have struggled out of Iraq alongside of them.
Well done lads.
He approached Westley. ‘You okay?’
Westley nodded. ‘Bad enough losin’ your mates in a contact with the enemy . . .’
He left that unfinished but Andy knew what he wanted to say.
But it really stinks when you lose them to friendly fire.
‘Get the boys back inside. The Yanks are going to lead us to an airstrip nearby.’
Westley looked up. ‘Seriously?’
Andy offered him a tired smile. ‘Yeah. It looks like we’re out of here.’
CHAPTER 67
4 a.m. local time Southern Turkey
Half an hour later, they took a turning off the main road, down a smaller road - a single lane in both directions. As they approached the airstrip it became clogged with civilians, mostly
on foot, many carrying a meagre bundle of possessions on their backs or dragging it behind them.
Tajican honked the coach’s horn, and slowly the vehicle edged its way through the thickening river of people towards a hastily erected spool-wire perimeter lit every few hundred yards by powerful floodlights. Behind the curls of razor wire, US marines stood, evenly spaced, guns ready and coolly regarding the growing mass of people only a few yards away from them.
The American soldier sitting beside Private Tajican urged the Fijian to keep the vehicle moving and not let it come to a complete standstill.
‘They’ll overrun us in seconds,’ he muttered warily eyeing the surging crowd ahead and either side of them.
Andy was impressed at how Tajican calmly kept a steady forward momentum, his face locked with concentration, whilst all around him palms and fists thumped noisily against the side and front of the coach.
Something suddenly flew into the coach through the open, glassless front; a stone, a rock . . . whatever it was, it glanced off Tajican’s head, and he clasped a hand to the gash it had caused. Blood rolled down the back of his hand, his arm and soaked into his sleeve.
But he continued calmly driving forward.
When another projectile arced through from the front into the coach, the American soldier sitting at Tajican’s side decided he’d had enough. He swung his assault rifle down and fired a long burst over the heads of the people outside.
The effect was instant. The road ahead cleared.
‘Hit the fuckin’ gas!’ the American shouted. Tajican did just that, and the coach sped up towards the perimeter fence ahead and the entrance gate - a Humvee, parked lengthways across a twelve-foot wide gap in the razor wire. The Humvee rolled out of the way at the very last moment, allowing the coach through, and then immediately rolled back to prevent the thick gathering of people surging through in its wake.
Andy was unprepared for the level of chaos he could see around him. He had seen the inside of several US and UK army bases since he’d started doing field-work in Iraq; always a hive of activity - chaos to the untrained eye. But the disarray he witnessed before him bore no resemblance to any military camp he had seen.
The sky was still dark, but showing the first pale stain of the coming dawn. The airfield was lit by dozens of floodlights erected on tripods and deployed along the main strip. From what he could see, it was an airfield that had been mothballed in recent years, but, in the space of the last forty-eight hours, had been hurriedly revived and adapted to meet immediate needs. There was a control tower to one side of the strip. Clearly the building had, at some point in the past, been gutted of all its electronic equipment, but was now being used in an ad hoc way. At its base a communications truck was parked, whilst several men stood up in the observation tower monitoring the steady stream of transport planes coming in and taking off; they were using laptops that trailed thick cables out through the tower’s rusty old window-frames down to the truck below.
Along the airstrip Andy could see hundreds of men, clustered in groups, most of them lying down; a patchwork quilt of exhausted soldiers, each group awaiting its turn to board a plane.
On the strip, Andy watched a Hercules C130 coming in to land at one end, whilst at the other, another plane was awaiting its chance to take off. Halfway along the strip, on a tarmac turn-off, a plane was being hurriedly loaded up with a group of men who had been roused from their slumber and herded at the double towards the boarding ramp.
The American soldier who had guided their coach in led Andy, Mike, Erich, Westley and his men towards a tent in the middle of the airfield. A flap was pulled to one side. The clinical blue glow of half-a-dozen halogen strip lights swinging from the tent support frame amidst drooping coils of electrical flex, spilled out through the opening into the pre-dawn gloom.
They entered the tent. Standing inside, looking harried, tired, and more than ready to grab some bunk time, was a Marine colonel; a short squat man with greying crew-cut hair and leathery skin pulled tight around a pair of narrowed eyes.
‘Colonel Ellory, sir. We picked these guys up on the border road. They’re Brits, sir.’
Ellory turned to look at them. His eyes ran quickly across Andy and the other two civilians, and then towards Westley, looking for rank insignia. ‘Okay son, where’s your CO?’
Westley saluted awkwardly. ‘We lost him, also our senior platoon NCO. I’m highest rank here, sir. Lance Corporal Westley.’
Colonel Ellory frowned as he worked to make sense of Westley’s Geordie accent. ‘You’re in charge, son?’
‘Yessir.’
He turned to the others, ‘And you are?’
‘I’m a civilian contractor, Andy Sutherland.’
‘Mike Kenrick, I’m a contractor too.’
‘Erich Feillebois, engineer with Ceneco Oil.’
Ellory nodded. ‘Okay guys. This is how it is. We’re trying to get as many of our boys home as quickly as possible. There’s a limited number of planes, a limited amount of fuel. Not everyone’s getting home. Priority goes to military personnel, and amongst them, priority goes to our boys. That’s the deal, I’m afraid. I know it sounds shitty, but . . . well, that’s how we’re doing it.’
‘Have you got any other British troops?’ asked Andy.
‘Yeah, there’s a few around. We’ve had some stragglers rolling in over the border road. A bunch of army vehicle retrieval engineers, quite a few independent security contractors, all goddamn nationalities. A mixed bunch out there. You’ll just have to take your chances with them. The Brits and the other internationals are in two separate groups down the other end of the strip.’
Colonel Ellory looked like he was pretty much done with the conversation and ready to turn his attention elsewhere.
Andy stepped in quickly. ‘How long are you planning on keeping this strip open?’
Ellory sighed. ‘I’d like to say, as long as it takes. But we’ll keep it going until I get orders to pull the plug and get out.’
‘How bad is it out there?’ asked Mike.
‘Out where? You mean the Middle East? Or home?’
Mike shrugged. ‘We’ve been out of the loop.’
Ellory ran a hand through his coarse grey crew-cut. ‘The Middle East is a goddamn write-off. We sent our boys into Saudi to try and save what they could. The crazy Muslim sons of bitches made for the refineries first. Pretty much destroyed most of them before we could get in there.’ Ellory looked at them. ‘And that’s pretty fucking smart if you ask me. There’s multiple redundancy in those pipelines and the wells. Not the case with their refineries. Those sons of bitches targeted exactly the right things. And it’s the same deal in Kuwait and the Emirates. You ask me, this wasn’t a fucking spontaneous outbreak of religious civil war. It was a goddamned organised operation. Some serious military-level planning went into this shit. They hit Venezuela, they hit the refineries in Baku. These motherfuckers knew exactly what they were doing.’
‘Who? Which motherfuckers?’ asked Mike.
‘Shit. You kidding me?’
‘Don’t tell me you think it was Al-Qaeda,’ Mike laughed, ‘because if you—’
‘Do I look like a dumbass?’ Ellory shook his head. ‘Of course I don’t think it’s Al-Qaeda. They couldn’t organise a piss in a bucket. Fuck . . . they’re just a bunch of phantoms anyway. No. I can make an educated guess as to who’s behind this shit though,’ said Ellory, placing his hands on the desk in front of him and arching a stiff and tired back. ‘Those sons of bitches in Iran.’
Andy nodded. It was a possibility. Perhaps they were the ones behind all of this. They had the wherewithal to pull off something on this kind of scale. And motive too.
‘Yeah, I could believe they’re behind this,’ said Mike. ‘I mean, we stalled their nuclear programme. But this . . . this has worked better than God knows how many nukes would have done.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ellory. ‘They know goddamn well they can hurt the world far more this way, by hitting the m
ost vulnerable oil chokepoints. And shit, they got us all. But I’ll say this. When we get this crap fixed-up again, and mark my words, we will, they’d better run for shelter in Tehran, because we are going to bomb those fuckers back to the Jurassic.’
Andy wondered whether plans were already being drawn up to deliver some payback, or whether the US government, like every other government, was focusing on damage limitation right now. If Iran really had been behind this, Andy reflected, they’d better bloody well hope the world wasn’t going to recover enough to focus its attention on them and bring some retribution to bear. Proof of their involvement, or no proof.
‘Shit, we should’ve seen this coming.’ Ellory shook his head. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got time to talk this crap through with you guys.’ He pointed towards Andy, Westley and his men standing just outside the tent. ‘You guys’ll have to take your chances with the other Brits assembled at the end of the strip.’ He pointed to Erich, ‘And you need to get yourself down and join the international group.’
He pointed to Mike. ‘You, on the other hand, you’ll need to make your way over to where we’ve put all our civilian contractors, US nationals, defence contractors.’
Mike looked across at Andy. ‘These guys have been through a lot Colonel, they—’
‘I do not have the fucking time to argue the point! If we have the time and the planes, we’ll get them out, but American nationals and personnel are to go first. Now if you wouldn’t mind getting your ass out of my tent, I’ve got a million and one things to attend to,’ Colonel Ellory said, offering a formal nod and then turning towards a sergeant who had entered brandishing a clipboard.
Andy turned to Westley, ‘Okay then, I guess we do as the man says, and go find the other Brits.’
They walked out of the tent into the half-light, towards Wesley’s platoon gathered in a loose and weary-looking huddle beneath the glow of a floodlight several dozen yards away. Erich shook hands with Andy and Mike.