Garmsir. It meant hot place in Pashto. The name was apt for more than one reason. For the last four weeks the place had been a battleground. The Americans and Calvary’s people had been trying to take on a more civil role, that of supporting and protecting the thousands of Afghan civilians returning to the town for the first time since the retreat of the Taliban. Work was in progress to set up local government once more, to build and train a police force, to ensure that the Afghan army that would be left behind was equal to the task of defending the town.
And the attacks came, in tidal waves and in lone breakers lapping at the shore. Yesterday there was a car bomb attack on a recruitment queue. Today, a pitched battle in the streets, involving high-quality Russian artillery. Tomorrow there might be a grenade thrown through the window of a perceived collaborator’s home at dinnertime, killing his family along with him.
Calvary stepped back from the road as a convoy of lorries lumbered past. Locals, mostly, with Marines riding shotgun in front and behind in Jeeps. He half waved, half saluted, got a forest of raised thumbs in response.
Walking towards him, on the other side of the street, Calvary saw Willis, his sergeant, hazy through the dust. As Lieutenant, Calvary was in command of B Company for that day’s patrol. Willis nodded. Calvary was well liked by his men. He suspected he was held in similar esteem by Major Farnborough, the head of the Company. Not that Farnborough would ever show it if he was happy with anyone’s performance.
Calvary hefted his rifle, partly to ease the stickiness under his arms. He carried the L86 Light Support Weapon, a gun he preferred over the usual L85A2 for its accuracy.
He called to Willis as they drew near: ‘One more circuit, then get Barnesy to relieve you. Grab yourself some lunch – ‘
On the last word, and past Willis’s grin, he saw the car fishtail round the corner, pluming dust behind it. An old Ford Cortina, so filthy its colour couldn’t be discerned. Two men protruding from the windows, one aiming a Kalashnikov assault rifle down the road, the other hoisting something bulkier. A rocket launcher. To Calvary it looked like one of the new RPG-28s. An anti-tank gun.
Behind the car, half hidden by the corner, stood another man, eyes wide, forefinger pointing down the street.
He yelled and dropped to his knee and was squeezing the trigger as the man with the Kalashnikov opened fire. The unmistakeable clatter bounced off the walls of the low canyon that was the street. Bullets stitched in a horizontal arc, ripping through Willis’s back and flinging him rolling and sprawling in the dirt.
Calvary’s first, second and third shots smashed into the gunman’s head and chest, smacking him back against the side of the car. His wet torso flopped doll-like out of the open window as the Cortina juddered over Willis’s body. As the car shot past him Calvary saw the driver, crouched low behind the dashboard. He drew a bead and fired, watching the driver’s head shear off inside the car.
Just as the man with the RPG fired.
The sucking noise followed the report of the firing mechanism so closely that it was hard to distinguish the two sounds. Then the Jeep at the end of the convoy upended itself, the blast flipping the rear of the vehicle vertically upwards and driving the entire car into the lorry in front of it.
Calvary put two bullets into the man with the RPG, one messy one through the top of his head, the other between his shoulder blades as he twisted away. Then he rolled and dived and continued rolling, towards the end of the street, almost making it before the fuel tank of the lorry went up a second after the driverless Cortina ploughed into both Jeep and lorry.
The sound wave was colossal, a thump of bass like a physical punch, counterpointed by the screech of shattering glass and rending metal. The fireball raked across Calvary’s back and out into the square at the end of the street. He kept low, feeling shrapnel spinning over him like hot hail.
He didn’t waste time looking back. Instead he ran out into the square at a crouch, seeing civilians scattering and screaming, some standing around, shocked and bewildered. A group of Afghan squaddies was sprinting towards him, shouting.
Down one of the grimy streets off the square, a man was running. A boy, really, the one he’d seen at the top of the street behind the Cortina. Guiding it, egging it on.
Calvary flung himself prone on the steaming gravel, levelled the rifle. Put one eye to the SUSAT telescopic site.
The boy was sprinting like an ungainly fawn, skinny legs bare below ragged cutoff trousers, feet huge in outsized trainers. He craned back over his shoulder. His beard was wispy, a pantomime disguise, though it was probably real enough.
His eyes were wide, yellow not with triumph but with terror.
The Afghan squaddies skidded in the gravel beside him, jabbering at him in Pashto. He recognised one of the few phrases he’d learned.
‘Wélem.’
Shoot.
The ring of the sight felt hot against the bone of his eye socket. Once more the boy turned to stare back. Once again, pure terror.
He was unarmed. Wore too little to be carrying a weapon.
‘Wélem.’
Calvary lifted his face away form the sight, got to his feet. Down the street the boy turned and disappeared. The soldiers snarled, took off after him.
*
Three U.S. Marines, one British soldier – Sergeant Willis – and seven civilians were killed in the attack. Lieutenant Calvary was praised by both his commanding officer and his counterpart in the marines for his prompt action. Calvary didn’t think he’d made any difference. If the three men in the Cortina had survived, they could hardly have done any more damage.
Nobody mentioned the young man who’d run away. Nobody knew about him, apart from a handful of Afghan soldiers.
Four weeks later Calvary was attending a briefing with the other two rifle Companies. Major Farnborough conducted it, together with an American and an Afghan counterpart. A new series of photographs had been obtained, a new set of identities were to be learned and memorised.
Calvary watched the slide show with the others. He saw the deliberately graphic images of flayed and twisted bodies. Of limbless collaborators, strung up from trees by their necks. Of smoking rubble where villages had been. All fresh, all recorded in the last fortnight.
Then came the parade of faces. Some blurred, captured at a distance with secret lenses. Others close up, sullen or smiling.
Pelabo Ghilzai. Aged twenty seven. Known as ‘Little Boy’ for his thinness, his gamine physical awkwardness, the smoothness of his skin. The yellow eyes were shy, the mouth nervous. But smiling.
So precocious that despite his age he was already a senior strategist in the local Taliban chapter. The one devoted to reclaiming Garmsir town, and district, from both the foreign invaders and their milksop collaborator cronies.
In another two weeks Calvary was gone. Stepping off a plane at Gatwick and into a room with Llewellyn.
*
He didn’t jerk awake at the memory of the explosion, or of the boy’s face on the projected slide. That had all stopped a long time ago. Sometimes Calvary would have memories of the hits he’d done, and in some of those the boy’s face would be superimposed on those of his victims. He wondered why his unconscious had to be so obvious about its workings.
Instead he switched to wakefulness gently but promptly, like the turning on of a light. He checked the time on his phone. Four thirty. Three hours’ sleep; it would have to be enough.
His face was gummed to the pillow and he realised he’d forgotten to attend to the nicks on his cheeks from the glass of the restaurant’s window. Picking his way through the dark, he found the bathroom and did what he could with cotton pads and a bottle of antiseptic in the cabinet. He attempted a shave.