There was no place for caution. Not any more. Ben pushed himself up to his full height and started sprinting towards the cave mouth. The sound wasn’t a buzz any more. It was a roar, filling their ears like an angry lion. He sprinted as fast as he could, aware of Aarya running across just metres behind him. Bursting through into the sunlight, the thunder of the approaching aircraft jolted through him. He bore left, down the hill and away from the cave mouth. As he ran he looked over his shoulder, checking that Aarya was still with him.
She wasn’t.
She had stumbled and fallen. She was pushing herself up even now in a desperate attempt to leave the cave.
‘AARYA!’ he shouted, stumbling at the same time and falling heavily to the stony earth.
The plane was directly above them now. His ears were numb from the noise. Instinctively he curled up into a little ball, cradling his head in his hands.
‘AARYA!’ he yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
On the high ground above the town, the fire support group waited for the bomber to arrive. In the distance they could already hear its thunder.
‘Thirty seconds!’ shouted the radio operator.
Major Black watched the cave through the viewfinder of his telescope. The enemy combatant was still there, that strange, cylindrical bergen still strapped to his back. Suddenly the man looked up into the sky, aware of the approaching plane.
He looked left and right.
And then he ran.
Black cursed. The approaching plane was deafening his ears now, and he was about to lower the telescope. Just then, however, he saw something else. Two more figures, running out of the cave. He frowned. They didn’t look like locals. More to the point, they didn’t look like combatants. They wore western clothes — a rarity in this part of Helmand Province — and there was no sign of weaponry.
He threw the telescope to the ground, spun round and held his hands up to his mouth. ‘Abort mission!’ he yelled. ‘ABORT! ABORT!’
But above the roar of the jet engines, nobody could hear him.
He ran towards the radio operator, who looked at him in utter astonishment. ‘ABORT!’ Black screamed again.
The radio operator’s eyes widened as he realized what his superior was saying. He repeated Black’s instruction into his receiver: ‘Abort! Abort!’ Even as he spoke, however, he looked out towards the cave.
The aircraft had curled upwards, climbing vertically into the sky. It was what was happening on the ground, though, that mattered. A small dot was falling through the air, directly above the cave mouth. To the eyes of Major Black and the radio operator it looked like it was falling in slow motion, but they both knew that was a trick of the mind. They both knew it took almost no time for a 500-pound bomb to hit the earth from that height.
Black saw the explosion: a flash of red. A fraction of a second later he heard it: a great thump echoing across the desert. A huge cloud of dust mushroomed up into the sky, obscuring everything. Black lurched forward and grabbed the telescope. It took a couple of seconds to focus it, but even when the view was sharp, he was none the wiser. The cave mouth was hidden. The whole area was a scene of blasted dirt and devastation.
He scanned left and right. He scanned down the hill. He continued to alter the focus, desperately trying to take in the whole scene. Desperately trying to see some sign of movement.
Desperately trying to make out the figures he had seen running from the cave.
He saw nothing. Just the rubble, settling on the ground.
No sign of movement.
No sign of life.
He let the telescope fall from his eye and turned to look, with a haunted expression, at the radio operator.
Neither man spoke.
A million unwanted thoughts rebounded in Major Black’s mind.
What had happened?
What had they just done?
Who had they just killed?
Chapter Fourteen
‘AARYA!’ Ben yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
And then he hugged the earth.
He had never known a noise like it — almost as though he himself was part of the explosion. There was heat too: the air around him became furnace-like. It burned, singeing his skin and his hair. The earth shook. Not a slight tremor, but a sickening shudder as though someone had picked up the ground and thrown it about.
Ben stayed crouched on the earth, head in hands. The air around him was solid with dust. He tried to breathe in. Bad move: his lungs rejected the filthy air, forcing him to cough, splutter and spit. The noise of the blast ebbed, echoing away across the desert, but his ears were still full of sound: tiny stones, a hailstorm of them, raining down on him. They pelted his back, hard and fast. Nearby, Ben was conscious of a much bigger piece of rubble thumping down onto the ground. A few inches closer and he’d have been pulverized. He tucked his head down further and steeled his body against the showering debris.
For thirty seconds it continued. Thirty seconds of intense, painful battering. By the time the rubble had all fallen back to the ground, Ben felt as if he had taken a hundred brutal kicks to the back. He tried to straighten himself up, wincing with the pain. And then he opened his eyes.
For a moment he thought he had gone blind. He was surrounded by a sandy mist so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of him. Then his eyes smarted and started to sting and water, so he shut them again. Realizing he was still holding his breath, he pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, then gingerly breathed in. The air stank of dust and cordite, but he managed to get some oxygen into his lungs before trying to look into the cloud of dust again.
It was a little less thick now, but Ben’s visibility was still no more than a metre. He staggered, totally disorientated, not knowing which way was which. ‘Aarya!’ He shouted her name, then dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs that bent him double.
Stay where you are, he told himself once the coughing had subsided. Wait till you can see where you’re going. Wait till…
He blinked, then rubbed the gritty moisture away from his eyes. The cloud was thinning faster now and he could see something emerging in the distance. It looked ghostly, like a dream, bathed in the sandy tones of the dust cloud. The entrance to the cave. At least, what used to be the entrance to the cave. Now it was just a thick, tumbledown wall of boulders. Half the mountain looked like it had been blown away.
Ben stared at the destruction in disbelief. And as he stared, two thoughts went through his head. Firstly, nobody who was still in the cave at the time the bomb hit was ever going to get out, even if they were still alive. And secondly, he had not seen Aarya leave the cave mouth.
A twisting sensation in his stomach. Ben felt like retching. He ran to the wall of rubble that blocked off the cave and started climbing over it, looking for a way in or out. Nothing. It was absolute devastation. He started shouting Aarya’s name, his voice hoarse and ragged. Mustering all his strength, he tried to pull heavy rocks out of the way, noticing as he did so that the backs of his hands were cut and bleeding from the rain of rubble. He couldn’t budge a single stone.
‘Aarya! Aarya, are you there?’
No response. Just the distant hum of the aircraft and the sudden boom of another battle raging many miles away.
‘Aarya! Aarya!’
But the more Ben shouted, the more he realized that it was useless. If Aarya was still here, she couldn’t hear him. And that meant only one thing.