‘Hold on,’ said Matt. He yanked the gearstick into reverse and swung the truck round in a semicircle so that it was facing Ricki, Toby and the crowd. Toby’s truck sped forward and Jack jumped in while Ricki, still aiming his weapon, stepped backwards until he was next to Ben’s truck. He opened the door and got into the passenger seat, then rolled down the window and aimed his weapon out of it.
‘Go,’ he instructed.
The two trucks sped to the end of the road. A few members of the crowd dispersed, but not all of them. One man held up his rifle: he was just about to aim it in the direction of the moving trucks when Ricki discharged his weapon — a wicked-sounding burst of fire that skimmed over the crowd’s head but did its job. The crowd finally dispersed, and just in time. The two trucks swung round the corner, screeching as they went. Ben felt the two wheels on the passenger’s side lift off the ground and he grabbed the edge of the seat. Ricki, though, was leaning out of the window and facing backwards, ready to discharge his weapon should they attract any incoming fire. Only when the crowd was well out of view did he pull himself back in again.
They were travelling in single file now, and fast. Toby and Jack’s truck was up front, with Ben, Ricki and Matt in the rear truck. Both engines screamed. Matt’s face was a picture of concentration as he negotiated the complicated maze of streets; Ricki leaned back to Ben.
‘Get ready for a bumpy ride, mate,’ he shouted.
‘Why?’ Ben demanded. ‘Where are we going?’
Ricki narrowed his eyes. ‘Where do you think?’ he asked. ‘If your man’s carrying out the operation tonight, we need to catch up with him. We’re following him to the Kajaki dam.’
And with that, he faced the front again, clutching his gun and staring steely-eyed through the windscreen.
Chapter Twenty-one
Dr Bel Kelland had never been so scared.
She was surrounded by soldiers — eight of them, forming a protective semicircle around her as she cowered against the back wall of the compound. Their rifles were pointing forwards, but there was no light in the compound for them to see by; just the dusky glow of the still-burning Apache on the other side of the wall.
‘Preserve your ammo!’ one of the soldiers had called. ‘Reduce your rate of fire!’
Private Mears had sidled back to where Bel was crouched. His face was bleeding and he had a harsh look.
‘Why did he say that?’ she asked him. Her voice was hoarse and dry — it sounded like someone else’s.
‘We don’t know when we’re going to get more air support,’ he said. ‘We’re firing towards the entrance of the compound to stop the enemy from trying to enter, but if our rate of fire is too high, we’ll run out of ammo. And trust me, we don’t want to do that.’
As if to highlight what Mears had just said, one of the soldiers fired a single shot. It didn’t seem like much to fend off an advancing enemy as it pinged into the Afghan night.
‘They’ve got to send someone soon,’ Bel breathed. She wasn’t sure if Mears heard what she said, because he didn’t reply.
Time passed, punctuated only by the occasional firing of a round, which did nothing for Bel’s shredded nerves. She had no idea what time it was when the sound of rotary blades drifted towards them. Half an hour later? An hour? Measurements like that had no meaning. The moment she heard the chopper, however, she felt a surge of hope.
‘Apache!’ Mears shouted. ‘Apache approaching!’
The flying machine appeared seemingly from nowhere, the thunder of its engines vibrating in Bel’s ears. For a few seconds it hovered directly over the compound, its searchlights scouring the area like some kind of UFO in the darkness, then it moved on. Outside the front wall of the compound, the Apache dipped its nose slightly. Bel found herself holding her breath.
The chopper started to fire — loud, chugging rounds coming in short, clinical bursts. The Apache turned ninety degrees so it was now facing away from the compound. It continued to pepper the surrounding ground with gunfire, and with each deafening burst, Bel felt just that little bit safer.
But not for long.
The ground-to-air rocket came from very close to the walls of the base. It looked to Bel almost as if it was moving in slow motion. As the rocket soared into the air, she almost couldn’t bear to watch, couldn’t bear a repeat performance, to see a second Apache crash and burn.
‘No!’ she gasped, clutching her dirty hair in panic.
It was almost a fluke that the chopper wasn’t downed. The rocket sailed through the rotating blades, emerging unscathed on the other side and exploding in the air. Nuggets of shrapnel rained down on the Apache, which immediately rose higher into the air. It looked wobbly, and Bel heard one of the soldiers shout: ‘The bird’s been hit by shrapnel!’
Bel turned to Mears. ‘Is that bad?’ she breathed.
‘Yeah,’ Mears replied, sweat pouring from his moonlit face. ‘Yeah, you could say that’s bad.’
‘It’s not… it’s not going to crash, is it?’
Mears’s face looked unbelievably grim. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not a pilot. But I can tell you one thing — they’re not going to risk another rocket strike like that. Not in the dark.’
‘So what’s going to happen?’ Bel’s voice was cracking up now as she tried to hold back tears of terror.
Mears’s reply didn’t give her much comfort.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, returning his gun to the firing position and settling down once more to cover the entrance to the compound. ‘I just don’t know…’
‘Do you know where you’re going?’
The two-vehicle SAS unit had left the boundary wall of the town of Angoor and was now trundling through the desert. The trucks they had requisitioned were by no means comfortable: their suspension was shot and the ground underneath them was uneven and stony. It made for a bone-shaking ride.
‘Toby has a GPS unit in his bergen,’ Ricki replied. ‘He’ll be using that to navigate.’ The unit leader didn’t look at Ben as he spoke, but kept his eyes on the road ahead.
They travelled slowly. From the reflection in the rear-view mirror, Ben saw that Matt, who was driving, had a look of intense concentration on his face, examining the road ahead with fierce intensity. Ben remembered Amir, speeding off on his motorbike with Aarya and the bomb. He hadn’t shown any desire to go slowly, and Ben felt sure he wasn’t creeping through the desert now.
‘Shouldn’t we, er… shouldn’t we hurry up?’ he asked, a bit diffidently.
Ricki looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. ‘That all depends, Ben,’ he said quietly, ‘on whether you want to make it to the dam in one piece.’
Ben felt himself blushing and he was glad it was dark. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘I mean,’ said Ricki, ‘just what I say. Of all the areas around Helmand Province, the bit near the Kajaki dam is the most heavily mined. Normally we’d be even slower, because we’d be sweeping for mines. As it is, we’re driving slowly so that Matt can keep in the tracks of the truck ahead.’
Ben blinked. It was the same strategy that Amir had told him about, and he felt stupid for not recognizing what they were doing. Then the reality of what Toby and Jack were risking struck him. ‘But whose tracks are they following?’ he asked.