‘I thought you said the enemy would have to be suicidal to attack us here,’ Bel shouted.
Mears gave her a grim look. ‘Yeah,’ he yelled back. ‘Trouble is, some of them are.’ He pulled her by the arm and they ran across the open ground of the base to where a high wall of sandbags had been constructed at right angles to the main compound wall. They threw themselves to the ground and pressed their backs against the sandbags while yet more rockets flew overhead.
‘Come on,’ Mears muttered to himself. ‘Come on. Come on!’
‘Come on, what?’ Bel demanded.
‘The enemy must be close if they can lob RPGs into the compound like that. We need to return fire, quickly.’ He peered over the top of the sandbags, then quickly sat back down again. ‘GPMG gunner climbing up to the compound roof now,’ he reported.
‘What’s a GPMG?’
‘General Purpose Machine Gun. You might want to cover your ears.’
Bel did what she was told, but the sudden grinding, thundering noise from the rooftop weapon seemed to go through her all the same, like a hundred tiny explosions in a line. Private Mears barely flinched — Bel supposed that he was just used to the noise.
The GPMG fire continued in short, sharp bursts, ringing out over the top of the compound. There was shouting all around, and every time Bel thought the firing had stopped, it would start up again.
‘Sounds like we’ve suppressed the enemy fire,’ Mears said. He had sweat pouring from his face.
‘What?’
‘The enemy. They’ve stopped firing. Guess they haven’t got quite the taste for a fight they thought they had.’ Mears was grinning and Bel realized that he was excited by the contact. She wished she could say the same.
‘Does that happen a lot?’ she asked, her voice trembling.
Mears shrugged. ‘Attacks on the base, no. Morning contacts, yes. When it gets hotter, the enemy all go inside to get out of the midday heat. Then things start to kick off again later in the afternoon. But I can tell you one thing.’
‘What?’ Bel was out of breath just from the sheer terror of it all.
‘After that little display, they won’t be letting the locals into the base this morning. I reckon your shura’s going to have to wait for another day.’ He smiled at her. ‘You might as well make yourself at home, Dr Kelland. Looks like you’re going to be here for a bit longer than you thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to clean my rifle. If the enemy are going to be bolshie, I’d feel a lot better knowing everything’s in good working order. Know what I mean?’
The man from the British Embassy who arrived in Kampur was stiff-backed and stern-faced. Even the teachers looked a bit scared of him. He was accompanied by two others — a man and a woman, who had the bearing of police officers, even if they didn’t have the uniforms. The Embassy man spent a good deal of time with the teachers, explaining the arrangements he had put in place to get them all back home as quickly as possible, as well as consoling Aarya’s distraught parents. It was up to the other two to interview the pupils.
Ed didn’t like the look of them. They were steely-eyed, no-nonsense types. He could instantly tell that pulling the wool over their eyes wouldn’t be like deceiving his friends, or his teachers. As they all lingered outside a classroom in the village school, waiting to be interviewed one by one, Ed felt the pressure mounting. His mouth was dry; he was sweating badly. Telling them the truth about Ben’s schoolyard antics was out of the question, of course. The lie was too deeply ingrained now. He was just going to have to see it through.
The door opened. Rebecca, the first to be interviewed, walked timidly out with a slightly wild look in her eyes. The woman appeared, clipboard in hand. ‘Ed Hughes,’ she announced. ‘Ed?’
All the others looked at him. Ed drew himself up to his full height and walked confidently past them, though his fingernails were dug deeply into the palm of his hand. The woman stepped aside to let him into the classroom, then closed the door and took her place behind the teacher’s desk, alongside the man.
‘Sit down, Ed,’ she said, indicating a seat opposite them.
Ed did what he was told.
A silence as the two adults looked at him.
The woman peered over her half-moon glasses at him. ‘We just want to make sure, Ed, that there isn’t anything about Ben Tracey and his exchange partner Aarya that you’ve forgotten to mention.’
‘There isn’t,’ Ed replied quickly. Too quickly.
The adults looked at each other. ‘You seem very sure about that, Ed,’ the man suggested. ‘Been thinking about it a lot, have you?’
‘Not really.’ Ed did what he could to withstand the man’s stare. It took some doing.
‘Sure about that?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’ Ed’s body temperature was rising and he knew he appeared flustered. It didn’t seem to worry either of them, though: they both looked at him calmly.
‘I suppose we don’t need to tell you how serious this is, Ed,’ the woman pressed. ‘If we don’t find Ben and Aarya, you’ll be having interviews with people a lot fiercer than us. Sure you don’t want to tell us anything?’
‘I haven’t seen them, all right?’ Ed was half shouting now, and his face had gone very red. Both adults raised a single eyebrow, and suddenly Ed heard himself gabbling. ‘Tracey’s an idiot, OK? He’s probably just hiding somewhere. You shouldn’t waste your time on him.’
Another silence. ‘Do you really think we’re wasting our time, Ed?’ the woman said. ‘Or is there something personal between you and Ben?’
Ed looked at the floor. This wasn’t going well and he knew it. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing.’ He heard the scratching sound of pen and paper as the two grown-ups each wrote something down. ‘What are you writing?’ he demanded. ‘Look, I don’t know anything, OK? I haven’t seen anything.’
‘No, Ed,’ the man replied. ‘It seems to me that you may have mentioned that once or twice before.’ Again, the two of them glanced at each other.
Ed felt a drop of sweat run down the back of his neck.
‘You’ll be leaving Pakistan tonight,’ the woman told him.
‘All of us?’
‘All of you.’
Relief crashed over Ed. He didn’t like it here. Back in England he could pretend none of this had ever happened.
‘We might want to speak to you again, though. Back home. That would be all right, wouldn’t it, Ed?’ They were looking directly at him now. Piercing.
Ed shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said.
‘Good. Well then, I don’t think we need to keep you any longer.’ The man’s words were friendly, but his voice wasn’t. Ed stood up and walked to the door.
‘Ed,’ the woman’s voice called softly before he had a chance to open it. He stopped and turned round.
‘What?’
‘We’ll know if you’re lying. You do realize that, don’t you?’
Ed frowned. He gave them a hard look, then dug his fingernails a little more firmly into the palm of his hand. Then he shrugged again, opened the door and walked out.
They were just trying to put the frighteners on him, he told himself.
They didn’t suspect anything.
Even if they did, they had nothing on him. Nothing at all. He just had to keep up the pretence. Do everything he could not to crack. And he knew he could do it. After all, there was no way he was going to let Ben Tracey, of all people, get any help from him…
Chapter Ten
The day passed slowly and uncomfortably. As light trickled into their new prison, Ben saw that they had indeed been put into a room that contained nothing they could use to their advantage: just a low bed with a thin mattress and very little else. He let Aarya take the bed while he lay on the hard, dusty floor. Sometimes he would fall asleep, only to be woken with a start by the booming of weaponry in the distance, or the occasional muttering of Aarya’s regular prayers. Whenever that happened he would look around, confused and not knowing where he was. But then he’d see Aarya’s terrified face and the locked door and it would all come back to him in a sickening flash.