Who had they just killed?
Chapter Fourteen
‘AARYA!’ Ben yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
And then he hugged the earth.
He had never known a noise like it – almost as though he himself was part of the explosion. There was heat too: the air around him became furnace-like. It burned, singeing his skin and his hair. The earth shook. Not a slight tremor, but a sickening shudder as though someone had picked up the ground and thrown it about.
Ben stayed crouched on the earth, head in hands. The air around him was solid with dust. He tried to breathe in. Bad move: his lungs rejected the filthy air, forcing him to cough, splutter and spit. The noise of the blast ebbed, echoing away across the desert, but his ears were still full of sound: tiny stones, a hailstorm of them, raining down on him. They pelted his back, hard and fast. Nearby, Ben was conscious of a much bigger piece of rubble thumping down onto the ground. A few inches closer and he’d have been pulverized. He tucked his head down further and steeled his body against the showering debris.
For thirty seconds it continued. Thirty seconds of intense, painful battering. By the time the rubble had all fallen back to the ground, Ben felt as if he had taken a hundred brutal kicks to the back. He tried to straighten himself up, wincing with the pain. And then he opened his eyes.
For a moment he thought he had gone blind. He was surrounded by a sandy mist so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of him. Then his eyes smarted and started to sting and water, so he shut them again. Realizing he was still holding his breath, he pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, then gingerly breathed in. The air stank of dust and cordite, but he managed to get some oxygen into his lungs before trying to look into the cloud of dust again.
It was a little less thick now, but Ben’s visibility was still no more than a metre. He staggered, totally disorientated, not knowing which way was which. ‘
Aarya!
’ He shouted her name, then dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs that bent him double.
Stay where you are
, he told himself once the coughing had subsided.
Wait till you can see where you’re going. Wait till . . .
He blinked, then rubbed the gritty moisture away from his eyes. The cloud was thinning faster now and he could see something emerging in the distance. It looked ghostly, like a dream, bathed in the sandy tones of the dust cloud. The entrance to the cave. At least, what
used
to be the entrance to the cave. Now it was just a thick, tumbledown wall of boulders. Half the mountain looked like it had been blown away.
Ben stared at the destruction in disbelief. And as he stared, two thoughts went through his head. Firstly, nobody who was still in the cave at the time the bomb hit was ever going to get out, even if they were still alive. And secondly, he had not seen Aarya leave the cave mouth.
A twisting sensation in his stomach. Ben felt like retching. He ran to the wall of rubble that blocked off the cave and started climbing over it, looking for a way in or out. Nothing. It was absolute devastation. He started shouting Aarya’s name, his voice hoarse and ragged. Mustering all his strength, he tried to pull heavy rocks out of the way, noticing as he did so that the backs of his hands were cut and bleeding from the rain of rubble. He couldn’t budge a single stone.
‘
Aarya! Aarya, are you there?
’
No response. Just the distant hum of the aircraft and the sudden boom of another battle raging many miles away.
‘
Aarya! Aarya!
’
But the more Ben shouted, the more he realized that it was useless. If Aarya was still here, she couldn’t hear him. And that meant only one thing.
Ben found himself gasping as a weird mixture of grief and panic raced through him. He jumped down from the boulders and started searching the area, looking for some sign of his friend, or indeed his enemy. Amir had been well ahead of them, the suitcase bomb strapped to his back. The very fact that Ben had not been blown to smithereens meant the bomb had to be intact. Unable to see Amir anywhere, he deduced that the terrorist had escaped with his treasured weapon.
Ben stopped. He felt himself being ripped apart with indecision. He wanted to stay and look for Aarya, but he didn’t know where to look. He wanted to chase Amir, but he didn’t know where he had gone or what he could do even if he found him. Clutching his head in his hands, he tried to clear his brain. To decide on the right thing to do.
More than anything, he realized, he needed help. But how could he find help, stuck here on a blasted hillside in the middle of the Afghan desert, unable to speak the language and with the sun beating down like a brutal weapon?
Another boom in the distance. The whole area was a battleground, riddled with enemies being hunted by the British Army.
The army.
Suddenly Ben saw things more clearly in his mind’s eye. That’s what he needed to do. Find some soldiers. Tell them what was happening. Amir. The bomb. Everything. They would be able to find him. And what if he had Aarya with him? Then they’d find her too. She had to be still alive. Ben refused to believe anything different, despite the bleak evidence to the contrary.
Now that he had decided what to do, he didn’t hesitate. He just started to run, ignoring the agonizing pains down his back as he hurried down the hill, retracing his steps into the green zone.
‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
Aarya heard Ben’s voice, but only just above the roar of the jet engines overhead. She didn’t need any urging to get out of that cave, though. Having stumbled, she pushed herself to her feet and ran faster than she had ever run before.
When the bomb hit, she assumed she was going to die. A silent prayer flashed though her head as her ears were deafened by that unbelievable noise. The impact threw her off her feet, forward into the air. She thought about her mother and father as she hit the ground, a crumpled mess of limbs. She imagined them weeping. As she opened her eyes and saw nothing but a sandy-coloured fog all around her, she wondered for a split second if this was what paradise looked like.
But then she realized how much she was hurting. There was no pain in paradise. She knew that was true. Aarya pushed herself up to her feet and continued to run, just as the rubble started to rain down on her. She put her hands over her head and staggered blindly into the mist.
Out of nowhere, a face. One dark eye, one the colour of milk. A body. Very close. Within grasping distance.
Aarya’s heart jumped into her mouth. He looked like a spirit, and an evil one at that. ‘Amir!’ she whispered.
Amir didn’t reply. He just grabbed her and started to pull her away from the caves, moving quickly despite the package on his back. She opened her mouth to scream, but immediately it was filled with thick, unpleasant dust and all she could do was spit and retch.
Still Amir pulled her. He seemed impervious to the rubble that was raining down on them. Impervious, almost, to pain. A small stone struck Aarya’s face. She felt blood. It dripped into her eyes and blinded her. Amir continued to pull, refusing to stop when she stumbled and just dragging her through the dirt until her feet could catch up again.
The rubble storm stopped. The fog cleared. Looking over her shoulder, Aarya searched for Ben; but they had moved round the hillside now, and she could see nothing. Just the edges of the devastation.
‘The men in the cave!’ she whispered. ‘We need to help them.’
But Amir just gave her a dead-eyed look. ‘They cannot be helped,’ he stated. He narrowed his eyes, as though he was judging Aarya in some way, like a doctor. Then he pulled a bottle of water from inside his robes and handed it to her. Aarya put the bottle to her lips and drank the warm water gratefully. She felt like she could have drunk for ever, but after a few seconds Amir pulled the bottle from her lips, allowed himself a little water, then put it away.
‘They cannot be helped.’ He repeated his earlier statement. ‘You are lucky not to have joined them. If you are not silent, you will. I will keep you alive only so long as you are useful to me.’ To emphasize his point, he grabbed Aarya by the throat and squeezed hard, so hard that she made a weak, croaking sound.
With that, he tugged her even more firmly and dragged her further away from the bombsite. Where to, she did not know.
Ben stumbled as he ran. He was so parched he felt like his body was made of sand, so weak he knew he could collapse at any moment. He needed water, but he saw nothing except dryness all around, shimmering in the heat.
He fell, knocking his shins against a rock, but there was no energy left in him to cry out. In his muddled brain something nagged at him. What was it Amir had said, an age ago when they were driving through the night?
There may be landmines in the road ahead . . .
An image filled his mind. He was in the Congo. A mine had exploded. There were body parts everywhere.
It could happen to him, he knew, as he pushed on through the heat. But what could he do? To stay here now, in the sweltering afternoon sun when he was so dehydrated, would be to sign his own death certificate.
‘I need to find the British Army,’ he whispered faintly to himself. ‘I need to find them . . .’
His head was pounding now. Ben raised his hands above it – a vain attempt to shelter himself from the sun’s rays. Stopping to catch his breath, he looked ahead. The green zone was there, but with the heat haze he couldn’t tell how close it was. All he could do was continue towards it, and hope he reached some sort of civilization before the heat defeated him.
A tree. With the sun so high in the sky, it barely cast a shadow. Ben staggered past it, then squinted. A field in the distance. He scanned the greenery, looking for people. But he saw nobody. Why would he? Who would be working in this intense, intolerable heat?
A ditch. A thin trickle of muddy water oozed along the bottom of it. It was smelly and unappetizing, but to Ben it looked as tempting as a fountain full of the clearest, freshest water. He stopped and stared. For a moment, he considered drinking it. He even found himself bending down, his hands cupped, ready to take a draught. But then, at the last minute, sense kicked in. The water wasn’t fresh. It was foul. He had to look elsewhere.
Ben drew himself up to his full height. But the very process of doing that made him giddy and nauseous. He took a step. The giddiness increased.
And then, although he tried to stop it, Ben felt himself tumbling into the ditch. He was vaguely aware of the muddy water soaking his clothes before he lost consciousness.
Chapter Fifteen
Bel had spent two days at FOB Jackson now. Two hot, sticky, traumatizing days and she wished she could be anywhere but there. After yesterday’s rocket attack, she felt like she was afraid of her own shadow. And while the soldiers around her had taken the hostilities in their stride, she could sense that some of them had still been rattled by that short, sharp contact.
She had spent most of her time trying to keep cool and drinking as much water as she could. This was drawn from the well in the centre of the compound, then sterilized using little white tablets. The water itself was warm with a rather unpleasant aftertaste on account of those tablets, but she gulped it down nevertheless. She realized that she had forgotten to remind Ben to drink plenty of water back in Pakistan and she chided herself for the oversight. But it was OK, she consoled herself. Ben was a sensible boy. He knew how to look after himself.
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 . . .’