Private Mears would check on her every couple of hours, a smile constantly on his young, earnest face. ‘All A-OK, Dr Kelland? Feel free to sunbathe if you like… What do you mean, you didn’t bring your bikini?’ Under other circumstances she would have found his chirpy comments annoying; out here she was grateful for them. They helped take her mind off gloomier thoughts.
‘Any news on the shura?’ she asked, just after noon on the Thursday.
Mears smiled apologetically and shook his head. ‘Looks like you’ll be staying here another night,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to start charging you board and lodging soon. I know the room service isn’t up to much, but—’
It was a noise that interrupted him. A huge, booming noise. It was distant, but still very loud — louder, certainly, than the occasional explosions Bel had become well used to over the past forty-eight hours.
‘What was that?’ she asked sharply.
Mears’s jokey expression had fallen from his face. ‘Sounds like an airstrike. Wait there — I’ll find out what’s going on.’
He sprinted across the courtyard of the compound, past the well in the centre and up to where one of the radio operators was crouching with his equipment. Bel watched as they spoke. The radio operator pointed in a northerly direction and Mears nodded as he listened to what the guy had to say. Then he came jogging back.
‘I was right,’ he said. ‘Airstrike on a cave system to the north. Enemy combatants seen entering. Sounds like we gave them a bloody nose.’
‘Sounds like you gave them more than that,’ Bel murmured. ‘Sounds like you gave them a lot more than that…’
Ben didn’t know what it was that made him regain consciousness: his aching body or the sound of strange chattering voices all around him. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel inclined to open his eyes, so he just lay there, trying to make some sense of the confused fog in his mind.
Where was he? he wondered. It was warm. Very warm. Was he on holiday? Or maybe he was lying in his garden at home and the chattering voices were those of his mum and dad. But if that was the case, why couldn’t he understand them? He gave an impatient sigh, then forced himself to open his heavy eyelids.
When he did, he got the shock of his life.
A face was looking down at him, close enough for Ben to feel breath on his cheek. It had dark, leathery skin so deeply lined that for a moment he wondered if it was actually human. He told himself not to be stupid. Of course it was a human face. It was a man. He had a long white beard and intense blue eyes that looked like they were seeing right through him. On his head was a kind of embroidered cap. The man was leaning over him, his face only an arm’s length from Ben’s, and he barely moved.
Ben grew frightened, and then all the events of the past couple of days crashed back into his head. He looked from left to right, trying to get his bearings; but still the man staring at him did not move.
‘Who are you?’ he tried to say. But his throat was so dry that he simply couldn’t speak. He wondered how long he had been out. Was it still the same day?
Like a stationary lizard suddenly moving, the man stood up. He said a single word, and as he opened his mouth, Ben saw that what teeth remained were yellow and crooked. Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he realized that he had been lying on a thin mattress in the shade of a tree. The tree itself grew in the middle of a compound and surrounding him, in a ring, were ten — maybe fifteen — people. The chattering sound came from the children, who became even more excited when he turned to them. The adults, however, looked on with a solemn lack of expression.
Suddenly he became aware of someone else standing next to him. He saw a girl — Aarya’s age, perhaps a bit younger — holding an earthenware cup. She handed it to Ben, then nodded encouragingly. Ben took the cup and looked inside.
Water.
He put it to his lips, closed his eyes and drank. The water tasted warm and stale, but that didn’t matter. It was still the best drink of his life.
When he had finished he handed the cup back to the girl. ‘Thank you,’ he said. The girl looked at him a little shyly, then disappeared.
Ben’s head was still throbbing. He looked down at himself and saw that his clothes were scorched and full of holes — a souvenir from the bomb blast, he supposed. The skin on his hands and arms was cut and sore; his muscles shrieked at him. The water had barely gone halfway to reviving him, but he suddenly felt alert again. Alert and full of purpose. ‘I need to speak to the British Army,’ he addressed the strange-looking man. ‘It’s urgent.’
The man’s expression didn’t change. He certainly gave no sign that he had understood what Ben was saying. Ben looked around at all the other people staring at him. ‘English,’ he said. ‘Do any of you speak English?’
The silence with which they replied spoke volumes.
Ben hauled himself up to his feet. A moment of dizziness: he steadied himself against the tree trunk and looked around again — blank expressions, all except the children, who seemed to have lost interest in the strange newcomer and were now tearing around the compound. Looking for the exit, he saw a rickety wooden door set into the wall. It looked as though it could easily have been a hundred years old. Ben staggered towards it, but immediately there was someone in his way — a younger man with a short, brown beard. He shook his head emphatically and then mimed the action of someone shooting a gun, before wagging his forefinger in Ben’s face.
‘I have to find someone,’ Ben said, his voice hoarse. He spoke slowly, as if that would help the Afghan man in front of him understand.
The man shook his head again, before pointing to himself, then to the door and making a walking motion with his two forefingers. He smiled again and nodded.
Ben gave him an uncertain look. The man appeared to be suggesting that he would go and find a soldier. But what was Ben going to do? Stay here? He didn’t much like the thought of that. His experience of compounds such as this hadn’t been all that great, after all. But then he looked back at the inhabitants. They had clearly picked up his unconscious body from the ditch, brought him here and laid him in the shade. They had given him water. These Afghan locals had shown him more kindness in the two minutes he had been awake than his terrifying captors had since they had been abducted. If he could trust anyone, he thought to himself, he could trust these people.
And besides, if he walked out of this compound now, where would he go? The locals looked strange to him: imagine how he must look to them. Imagine the attention he would draw, wandering aimlessly through the green zone in his ripped jeans and T-shirt, desperately seeking a British soldier but not knowing where to look. In a dangerous place like this, he’d be a magnet for trouble.
He turned back to the young man. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Please hurry.’
The Afghan man grinned, nodded and sprinted out of the compound.
Ben returned to his mattress, glad of the shade that the tree offered. When the girl reappeared with more water, he accepted gratefully, and as he drank it he looked over the brim of the cup. He was still being stared at and he tried to ignore those alien glares by closing his eyes and trying to get his head in order.
Amir still had the bomb. That much was clear. Did he have Aarya too? Ben decided that he must have, even though a nagging voice told him he was only thinking that because he couldn’t bear to imagine the alternative. And everything that had happened since their abduction suggested to Ben that he had plans to use the weapon, and soon. When their convoy through the desert had stopped for the daylight hours, the owners of the compounds where they stayed had been expecting them. Amir and his men had a plan. They knew where they were going and what they were doing. It was an operation of some kind. Ben shuddered to think what the consequences might be.