Bel looked over the wall of sandbags in alarm. Three soldiers were rushing up the stairs that led to the top of the compound wall. The GPMG gunner was on his back, one arm draped over the inside of the wall. He lay perfectly still, and Bel thought she could see something dripping from the end of his arm. Blood.
Another soldier took up position at the GPMG post and started firing out from the compound. Bel watched in horror as the wounded man was carried off the roof and laid on the ground just by the wall. Two medics surrounded him, ripping off his clothes to find the entry wound, shouting instructions as they went. ‘We need morphine here, now! And get me a drip.’
Bel couldn’t take her eyes off the scene, so much so that she became almost immune to the sound of the GPMG raging above her. The medics worked tirelessly, inserting a drip, binding wounds, pressing on his chest. Urgent. Relentless.
But then, almost as if someone had flicked a switch, they stopped and stood up.
‘He’s gone,’ she heard one of them say. ‘We’ve lost him.’
Bel blinked. Her skin tingled with shock. For a moment nobody in the compound moved. It was as if they had all been numbed. The faces on each and every one of them changed. They became grimmer. More determined.
And then they sprang into action once more.
Suddenly there were five or six of them on the roof, supporting the GPMG gunner with rifle fire. Their rounds cracked in the air just as Private Mears ran over to Bel.
‘What’s happening?’ she demanded.
‘Enemy on all sides,’ Mears said, his voice tense. ‘We don’t know how they got so close, but there’s loads of them.’ All traces of his chirpy, jokey nature had left him.
‘The… the dead man…’ Bel stuttered.
Mears clenched his jaw. ‘A friend of mine,’ he said. ‘And I’m not going to let them get away with it. You need to stay here, Dr Kelland. You’re the only civilian here and you need to keep out of the way. This is going to be ugly. Whatever happens, stay by the protection of these sandbags, OK?’
Bel nodded, her eyes wide with fright.
Mears stood and started to sprint towards the area of the wall where the GPMG gunner was perched. He was only halfway across the compound, however, when a massive explosion seemed to rock the very foundations. Mears was thrown to the ground as a great cloud of smoke billowed up in front of him.
More shouting.
‘The gates!’ someone yelled. ‘They’ve hit the gates!’
And as the cloud cleared, Bel saw that it was true. The entrance to the compound — those huge sheets of sturdy corrugated iron — had been blown inwards. Their edges were now splintered and jagged; more alarmingly, there was now a gaping hole looking out into the surrounding area. It was almost completely dark now, so Bel couldn’t tell what — or who — lay beyond the gates. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried about that.
Bel found herself hyperventilating. She tried to get a hold of herself as Mears scrambled to his feet and ran back towards her. His face was dirty and he had a great slash across his left cheek, a souvenir from the blast that had just blown the doors open.
‘Get down!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve blown the entrance! They could be in here any second!’
Bel hit the ground as Mears knelt in front of her, pointing his rifle in the direction of the gates. Immediately the air inside the compound was filled with rounds being fired in from outside. They hit the far wall, kicking up a cloud of dust and masonry.
‘What was that?’ Bel whimpered.
‘Enemy fire. Stay down.’
Bel wanted to. She tried to. But no matter how much she feared the flying bullets, she had to know what was going on around. Pushing herself up to her knees, she peered over the sandbag wall to see four soldiers, two on either side of the doors, their weapons at the ready. One of them held up three fingers. Then two. Then one.
‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go, go, go!’
The four men swung their weapons round and jumped in front of the entrance, where they started to fire, steadily and heavily. The GPMG joined in the attack and the four men walked forward.
But they never made it through the door.
The unseen enemy returned fire, not with rifles but with a more powerful weapon, a rocket of some kind. It hit one of the four men bang in the abdomen, throwing him back about five metres before it suddenly exploded in a starburst of shrapnel. Bel watched, sickened, as the remaining three men ran back, away from the shrapnel and the mashed body of the man the rocket had hit. A second soldier had just died in front of Bel’s eyes. She wanted to be sick.
Mears was cursing. ‘Air support,’ he hissed. ‘We need air support. Where is it?’
The only answer he got was another burst of fire from the GPMG as more soldiers came forward to cover the entrance. They didn’t make the mistake of trying to step through it this time. Instead, six of them positioned themselves in two columns — three on either side of the gates — and fired at a diagonal trajectory out of the compound. Their rate of fire was slow — one round every ten seconds or so. Bel just prayed it was enough to stop the enemy advancing.
Mears turned. When he saw that Bel had put her head above the sandbags, he gave her an angry look and pulled her back down. They sat with their backs against the bags. ‘It’s a stand-off,’ Mears said tersely. ‘The enemy can’t advance, we can’t fight them back. We need support from the air.’
Bel put her head in her hands. ‘What… like a bomb or something?’
‘No,’ Mears said. ‘Not a bomb. The enemy are too close to us. We need an attack helicopter, something that can hover over them. But they won’t like doing it in the dark…’ He made a strange whistling sound through his teeth, and Bel realized that he too was trying to control his breathing. ‘We need it now. We can’t defend ourselves in this position.’
Bel gave him a worried look. ‘If the enemy make it inside the compound, what will they do? Take us hostage or something?’
The young private took his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They won’t be taking any hostages…’
He didn’t need to finish the sentence.
His meaning was perfectly clear.
Chapter Eighteen
They found Ben some body armour and a helmet. The armour was a bit big for him, and very heavy; but it felt good to slip it over his head and strap it tightly around his sides. Ben shook Major Graves’s hand. ‘Good luck, son,’ he said. The look on his face made it clear he thought this was all a very bad idea.
Ricki put one hand on his shoulder. ‘Ready, Ben?’ he asked.
Ben nodded. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ he said.
‘When the gates open, Toby and Matt will go first. Then you. I’ll follow with Jack. Keep your head down and stick with us to the landing zone. If you hear gunfire, hit the ground. Otherwise your objective is to get into the Black Hawk as quickly as you can.’
‘All right,’ Ben said, a bit nervously. The body armour really was quite heavy.
Ricki smiled. ‘Don’t worry, son. It’s normally the guys with guns that attract fire.’ He held up his weapon. ‘Let’s go.’
The gates slid open and Ben ran out, flanked by the four-man SAS unit. It was a fifty-metre sprint to the landing zone, where Ben saw the chopper, its blades already spinning. As he ran, he did his best to ignore the great hunks of rubble that surrounded the military base, each one of them a potential firing point. The chopper itself was surrounded by green army soldiers, all of them on one knee and pointing their guns outwards. It felt good to get within the defensive ring they formed around the aircraft; it felt even better to climb into the Black Hawk itself.