Back at Camp Bastion, Major James Strickland had gone distinctly white. He held the satellite phone to his ear with one hand; with the other he wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow.
‘Disappeared?’ he said. ‘What do you mean he’s disappeared?’
‘Just that,’ replied the voice at the other end — an official from the Ministry of Defence in London. ‘The village is being scoured as we speak, but there’s no sign of him.’
Strickland closed his eyes. This was all they needed.
‘You need to inform the boy’s mother,’ the official continued. ‘Rotten job, I’m afraid, but as you’re the liaison officer—’
Strickland interrupted him. ‘For crying out loud,’ he said briskly, ‘I don’t mind telling her. But I can’t. Not now. She’s not at Bastion.’
‘Where is she?’
‘FOB Jackson, north of Sangin on the other side of the riverbank. She’s there for forty-eight hours. Maybe longer. I can try and get her back sooner, but frankly the choppers are flat out.’
A silence. When the official spoke again, his voice was grim. ‘Can you get word to her?’
‘Negative,’ Strickland replied. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘If she thinks something’s happened to her son, she’ll go ballistic. We need our people to be thinking clearly and acting rationally. I can’t guarantee that she’ll do that, and I can’t risk her being a liability to our troops on the ground. I’ll give her the information about her son when she’s back in Bastion, not before.’
Another silence. And then, ‘Roger that.’
Strickland sniffed. He didn’t like it when non-military people used military language and there was something about this official, safely behind a desk in London, that brushed him up the wrong way. ‘What you need to do,’ he said, as if he was addressing a very junior soldier, ‘is make sure you find that kid.’
‘Don’t you worry about that, Major Strickland,’ the MOD official said rather primly. ‘You deal with things on your side of the fence, we’ll deal with things on our side. Is that clear?’
Strickland took a deep breath to hide his irritation. ‘Roger that,’ he said, with a little more meaning in his voice than he perhaps intended…
Night fell.
As Ben and Aarya’s prison grew dark, the girl quietly took a blanket from the bed. ‘What are you doing?’ Ben asked.
‘What I should have done this morning.’ A calmness had descended over her. She laid the blanket on the ground, then lowered herself to her knees and bent her head to the floor. Ben watched quietly as she started muttering to herself in prayer. A strange sense of peace filled the room; and even though Ben could not understand the words that came from Aarya’s mouth, he could tell they were said with quiet honesty.
When she had finished, she silently stood up again, folded the blanket and turned to Ben. ‘I am supposed to do that five times a day, unless there is good reason not to.’ She looked towards the door. ‘I think they are good reason.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘I think you can say that again.’
Looking through the hole in the wall, Ben could see the moon rising and the sky brilliant with stars.
‘What do you think they are doing?’ Aarya said.
Ben shrugged in the darkness. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But look… that bomb… it’s got to be something big. Some kind of terrorist thing. We’ve got to warn someone.’
They fell silent again. Somehow, locked in that room, their chances of escaping seemed pretty remote — plan or no plan.
They heard voices outside. Ben pressed his ear to the wall, desperately trying to get some sense of what they were saying. But to him, the language was gobble-degook. He couldn’t even make out the individual sounds, apart from one word that they kept repeating, and that made no sense to him: ‘Kahaki.’
‘“Kahaki”.’ He repeated the word to himself a couple of times. ‘What does that mean, Aarya?’
Aarya shook her head. ‘I do not know,’ she replied. ‘I do not recognize it. Perhaps it is a name, or perhaps a place…’
Ben wanted to bang his hand against the wall with frustration. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You listen. Can you hear what they’re saying?’
She put her ear to the wall. ‘Not well,’ she replied. ‘I think maybe they are preparing to leave.’
Ben felt his stomach twisting. It was bad enough in this strange, dark room; but the alternative was worse. And it came soon enough. There was a scratching sound as someone unlocked the door and then pushed it open. A figure stood in the doorway, one of their abductors, silhouetted against a crackling fire in the middle of the compound. He gave a harsh instruction, which Aarya translated. ‘He says we should follow him.’ Her voice trembled.
The figure turned and walked into the centre of the compound. Ben took Aarya’s hand and led her outside. The only light was from the fire, and he was aware of a number of dark figures milling around the outskirts of the compound, watching them. From behind, someone approached. ‘Get back into the truck,’ a voice said, and Ben recognized it as Amir’s. Somehow, he just knew that the terrorist would have a gun pointing in his direction.
They stumbled out of the compound to where the trucks were waiting for them, huge and sinister in the darkness. The engines were running, but Ben noticed that the headlamps were not switched on. They were about to make a journey in the dark without being seen. The door of the rear truck was wide open, and Amir pushed them towards it. Ben entered first, purposefully making sure that Aarya could sit nearest the door. Amir took his seat opposite them, resuming his guard-like vigilance with his gun pointed in their direction.
‘Where are we going?’ Ben demanded.
‘Silence,’ Amir replied. The door was shut, and moments later the vehicle started to move.
It was very dark in the truck, but it didn’t take long for Ben’s vision to adjust. He could see Amir’s white eye, wide awake, flicking from Ben to Aarya, then back to Ben again. The stony earth crunched underneath them. Ben pictured the view he had seen from their prison. Featureless. Nothingness. Stuck out in the desert by themselves they’d be in just as much danger as they were now. If they were going to escape, they had to do so while they were near the compounds. The inhabitants might not be friendly, but at least they could try and break in, maybe steal food and water. At least they’d have options. Pretty slim options, but options all the same.
He glanced over at Aarya. She was clearly waiting for that glance. Waiting for the sign they had arranged; the sign that signalled their attempt to get out of here.
Ben coughed.
He sensed her holding her breath.
He coughed for a second time.
His hand was in his pocket. He grabbed a fistful of the dust he had collected from the compound floor.
And then he coughed for a third and final time.
Aarya didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the barrel of Amir’s gun and pushed it upwards. The terrorist shouted, and Ben half expected to hear the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the inside of the vehicle. The sound didn’t come, though. He pulled his hand from his pocket and hurled the dust straight into Amir’s face. Their captor choked loudly; he dropped his weapon and put two hands up to his stinging eyes. Aarya moved quickly to the door of the truck and opened it while Ben pulled the fuel-soaked rag from his pocket and lit it with the cigarette lighter. A flame rose slowly up the rag and he threw it onto Amir’s lap. It wouldn’t be hot enough to hurt him, but when he got his vision back it would make him panic and buy them a few precious extra seconds.
By now, Aarya had the door open. Ben threw himself towards it, grabbed her hand and they both jumped from the moving vehicle.