Even so, they could still make a damn nuisance of themselves. Give a handful of insurgents a bunch of AK-47s, throw in some rocket-propelled grenades or a. 50 calibre rifle, and give them a wall or a boulder to hide behind, or a gully to lie in, and they could, at the very least, pin you down for fifteen to twenty minutes.
Then the ‘Punisher’ arrived in Afghanistan. And that changed everything.
Punisher was the nickname that its first awestruck users had given to a device the US Army categorized as the XM-25 Individual Airburst Weapons System. Simply put, the XM-25 was a semi-automatic grenade launcher rifle. But that was like saying that, simply put, a Bugatti Veyron was a car. The truth was, the XM-25 was unlike any other hand-held weapon on earth. It simply removed the concept of cover from the battlefield. And as Morales and his buddies all agreed, it looked frigging cool while it did it, like some kind of mean, black sci-fi ray gun.
The way it worked was this: on top of the rifle there was what looked like a regular telescopic sight, but was actually a computerized fire-control system, accurate up to seven hundred metres. If the insurgents were hiding behind a wall, you just pointed the gun in that direction. The Punisher calculated precisely how far away the target was, and then transmitted that information down the barrel of the gun to a high-explosive 25 mm grenade. But of course, the wall wasn’t the actual target; the insurgents hiding behind it were. So you, the soldier, used a button by the trigger to add a metre or two to the range, and the grenade adjusted itself to that, too. Then you fired, aiming just above the wall, and the grenade shot away, went over the wall, and then exploded in the air behind it, blowing the enemy away. Use an armour-piercing round and you didn’t have to go over a wall or an enemy vehicle; you could go straight through it. Man, it was a beautiful thing to behold.
So far the Punisher was still in its field-trial phase of development. There hadn’t been more than a couple of dozen in the entire Afghanistan theatre of operations. But those guns had been game changers. There were four grenades in a Punisher’s magazine. Fire them all, and the fight just ended. Engagements that used to last twenty minutes were over in less than five. US casualties dropped to zero. Soldiers in the units that had been selected to test the XM-25 would beg to be allowed to use it, like kids fighting over a new toy. Today it was Morales’s turn and he hated to admit it, but damn he was excited.
Morales belonged to a platoon that had recently arrived at COP (Combat Outpost) Wanda, a brand-new installation near the village of Aranas. It was situated on a bluff, looking down the valley to the Waygal River. The only way in or out was by helicopter. All their supplies came in by air. The first day there, as Morales looked at the hills all around him, knowing that the insurgents were out there somewhere, just waiting to attack, he’d felt like he was living in a twenty-first-century version of Fort Apache. But today he had the Punisher. Today his motto was, ‘Bring it on.’
Morales woke shortly after 4.00 a.m. and took up his post at Observation Post Highpoint, a lookout a short way from the main body of the COP. Morales and the other men in his eight-man section had built Highpoint themselves. With their trenching tools they’d dug up what meagre quantities of dirt could be prised from the rocky terrain, and used them to fill, or in some cases part-fill, the collapsible steel and nylon HESCO containers that acted as their fortifications. The observation post’s location provided superb views across the Waygal Valley for miles around. But as Morales was about to discover, this long-range visibility came at a price. A ravine ran down the side of the hill and came within thirty metres of the HESCO barricades, passing so close that the HESCOs created a blind spot for the men behind them, who were unable to see down into the bottom of the ravine. Not that they were aware of that just yet.
Shortly after dawn, the observation post came under small-arms fire from an insurgent position behind an outcrop of boulders atop a ridge about three hundred metres away. This was no big deal. The insurgents always preferred to move at night and attack with the first light of day. Morales ordered his men to return suppressing fire. They didn’t have to take anyone out just yet. They just had to keep them in one place long enough for the Punisher to do its thing.
‘ Say hello to my leetle frien,’ Morales joked as he pressed the control that charged up the XM-25 and made it ready for use. Like his men, he had focused all his attention on the hostile position on the ridge. He had no idea that a dozen insurgents had made their way up the ravine during the night; not until the first grenade exploded inside the observation post, killing two of his men and wounding a third. Another grenade took out a fourth soldier. Morales himself was not targeted by the blasts. He and his remaining three troops were left for the Afghan fighters, inheritors of a guerrilla warfare tradition that dated back to the days of Alexander the Great and beyond, who scrambled over the HESCOs like pirates boarding a ship, armed with rifles, pistols and razor-sharp knives.
Morales had no means of protecting himself. The XM-25 was a fantastic weapon so long as its grenades exploded far enough away not to harm the soldier who had launched them. But at this kind of hand-to-hand range it was pointless: just a high-tech way of committing suicide. So Chico Morales never even fired a single round before he died, his throat sliced open by a curved steel blade. But in his last few seconds two thoughts crossed his mind. The first was that the insurgents had attacked in a way he’d never seen before: like trained professional soldiers. The second was that he could have sworn he heard someone shouting orders to them. And those orders had been given in English.
One of the insurgents stood over Morales’s body, even as the last few spurts of blood from his carotid artery were soaking into the earth around his corpse. He reached down and prised the XM-25 from Morales’s fingers.
‘ Cheers, mate,’ the insurgent said. ‘I’ll be having that.’
34
Tuesday, 28 June
Carn Drum Farm
Bryn Gryffud and Dave Smethurst left at four in the morning, driving the camper van; Uschi Kremer had already left in a separate vehicle late the previous night.
The remaining members of the Forces of Gaia had all woken early to see Gryffud and Smethurst off. Some of them went straight back to bed, others were gripped by a combination of anticipation, tension, anxiety and downright fear as the seconds ticked by. They brewed coffee, paced around the farmhouse kitchen, or made futile attempts to get some rest. All but one, though, stayed within Carn Drum farmhouse.
The exception was one of the two remaining women, Deirdre Bull. The closer the time came to the moment when the group would finally engage in direct action against the forces destroying the environment, the more troubled she became. Neither she nor any of the other members of the group had been told what the precise target would be — this, they had been told, was for their own protection as well as operational security — but she knew they were engaged on an act of destruction. And it made little sense to Deirdre to fight one act of ecological vandalism with another. When she’d gone to Brynmor Gryffud to voice her concerns, he had assured her that the good they were going to do in the long run far, far outweighed any short-term cost.
‘Gaia understands,’ he had assured her, knowing that Deirdre had an essentially religious view of the environmentalist cause. But Deirdre was still not entirely convinced. She had needed to get away, to be by herself, so that she could feel a sense of communion with the earth goddess and come to terms with what was going on. So around forty minutes after the camper van had set off on its journey south, just as dawn was breaking, she put on her green wellies and her cagoule — decorated with vivid, two-tone pink spots against a white background. Then she slipped out of the back door of the commune and, following a path that ended just a few metres from the house, headed off alone into the hills.