In the grey light of morning, Andy saw a small group of Afghans in a field perhaps fifty metres away. They stared at them as they entered the green zone. They might be peaceful, ordinary villagers; or they could be enemy spies. Their gnarled, weather-beaten faces gave no suggestion that they either welcomed or disliked the soldiers. Either way, there was no sign that they were carrying weapons, so the soldiers could do nothing but walk past them and continue into enemy territory.
They walked in single file along a line of trees. Between the soldiers and the trees was a ditch; to their right was a field of low dry stalks. Andy recognized it as a poppy field — he’d seen enough of them during his time in Helmand, after all. He felt vulnerable. Beyond the poppy field were two compounds; between the compounds and the soldiers there was nothing but open ground.
And open ground, as they well knew, meant they could easily come under fire.
Still, Andy thought to himself, they’d come out here to pick a fight. Some kind of sixth sense told him that a fight was exactly what they were going to get…
Ben awoke from a half-sleep to the sound of voices outside. He pushed himself up from the ground. Aarya was already by the door, her ear against the lock.
‘What’s going on?’ Ben whispered.
‘Shhh!’ she hissed, waving a hand at him in irritation and keeping her ear pressed to the door. ‘I’m trying to listen.’
Ben joined her by the door and pressed his own ear against it. There was definitely activity in the compound. ‘What are they saying?’ he breathed.
‘I do not know,’ Aarya replied. ‘I heard them say the word “soldiers”, but I cannot hear anything else.’
More activity outside. Muffled voices. ‘I think we can safely say they’re not getting ready to leave,’ Ben muttered. ‘Not during daylight.’
Aarya shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They are arguing. Some of them want to fire their weapons. Amir is telling them not to.’ A pause. Aarya looked like she was going to say something, but as she opened her mouth there was a very different kind of noise from outside. The unmistakable sound of a gun being fired.
‘The weapons!’ Ben hissed. ‘The ones they had against the wall. They’re using them to attack someone. Aarya, we’ve got to do something.’
‘What can we do?’ Aarya demanded. ‘We’re locked in.’
Ben banged his fist angrily against the wooden door. ‘Let us out!’ he shouted. ‘Let us out!’ His words, however, were drowned by a sudden burst of fire. ‘You said they were talking about soldiers!’ Ben yelled. ‘They must be firing on them!’ He took several steps back, then ran at the wooden door, barging it with his shoulders. The door rattled, but it remained locked.
It was just as he was preparing to bash his bruised shoulder against the door for a second time that Aarya grabbed him. ‘Don’t be foolish, Ben!’ she scolded. ‘We are safer in here than out there.’
‘But we’ve got to stop them.’
‘They are men with guns, Ben. We have nothing. We need to take shelter.’
With that, she tugged at him. Ben, reluctantly realizing she was right, didn’t resist. The two of them ran to the far side of the room. Ben upturned the thin mattress from the only bed and propped it up in front of them. It was hardly robust, but it made them feel a bit better as they listened in horrified silence to the sound of their captors’ guns, and wondered what kind of devastation was going on outside…
There was a stillness in the air. The sun had only spent fifteen minutes in the sky, but already Andy could feel its heat. He wanted to drink some water, but that would mean stopping. And there was no way he was going to st—
‘GET DOWN!’
Andy heard the barked instruction from one of his men just as a bullet whizzed over his head. Just inches away? He couldn’t tell, but it had been very, very close. Andy threw himself to the ground, then rolled heavily into the ditch. He felt his clothes becoming soaked with water, but just now that was the least of his worries. The enemy had opened fire, and all of a sudden the air was alive with rounds. Keeping himself pressed down against the oozing mud at the bottom of the trench, he loosened his rifle and prepared to return fire.
All his muckers had performed the same manoeuvre. As a single body of men, they had taken cover in the ditch. ‘Is anyone hit?’ Andy shouted as he propped the end of his rifle against the edge of the ditch. ‘I said, is anybody hit?’
‘Negative!’ came the reply. And then: ‘They’ll have to do a bit better than that!’
A wave of relief crashed over Andy. He was responsible for the men in his platoon. If any of them died, he’d live with the guilt for the rest of his life.
The British soldiers returned fire, and for a moment the air sounded like Bonfire Night. Andy’s ears went numb from the sound of his own weapon and everybody else’s.
A minute of sustained fire from both, and then the guns fell silent.
Andy was out of breath; sweat poured from him. The shooting might have stopped, but they were still in the enemy’s sights. Moving out of that ditch was a no-no — they were pinned down, easy pickings for any snipers in the enemy compound. Keeping his head low, he crawled on all fours, past six of his men to where the commanding officer was stationed.
As he crawled, however, there was a screaming sound in the air.
‘RPG!’ someone shouted, and Andy pressed himself face down in the ditch once more. The grenade exploded somewhere behind him — too close for comfort. Andy stayed put as he counted five more grenades being fired, one after the other in quick succession. By some miracle, none of them found their target.
Andy pushed forward another twenty metres. Major Graves had his back against the wall of the ditch, a map of the area opened out in front of him. To his side, a radio operator was speaking coordinates into his communications system.
‘I’m calling in an artillery strike on the compound,’ Graves told Andy.
‘Roger that,’ Andy replied. He turned to the radio operator. ‘Time till impact?’ he asked.
The radio guy held up one finger as he listened to his earpiece. ‘Forty-five seconds,’ he said.
They waited. In one corner of his mind Andy found himself praying that the artillery shells hit their target accurately. The enemy compound was only a hundred metres away. It didn’t leave much room for error.
A boom in the distance. Then another.
Andy held his breath and covered his ears.
Impact.
The whole ground shook as though a sudden earthquake had hit them, and from the direction of the compound there were two terrible explosions.
‘Three more coming in!’ the radio operator yelled. Andy tensed up and waited for them to hit. The shells slammed into the compound with three brutal booms just as the acrid smell of cordite drifted towards them.
Then, silence.
Major Graves spoke. ‘Andy, we’re going to advance on the compound and clear it. Your platoon to flank round to the south; we’ll take the north.’
Andy nodded. He pushed himself to his feet and then, keeping his head low, ran back down along the line, gathering his men and preparing to advance on the enemy — or at least what remained of them.
When the artillery shells had hit, Amir was a long way back from the front wall. He had been in enough battle situations to know how it would go. They would exchange fire for a while, then the hated British soldiers would call on their more powerful assets to bring the contact to an end, like cowards. It did not make his brothers any less eager to fight, but Amir feared for their weapon. If some kind of ordnance hit it, the explosion would be bigger than anyone expected. Amir did not care about losing his life — that was in the hands of forces greater than himself anyway; but the green zone of Sangin was not where anyone wanted the bomb to go off.