Ben Bracken: Origins (Ben Bracken Books 1 - 5) (12 page)

I’m waffling. I know this. I’m sorry for the filibuster, but, in a selfish way, this may prove hugely helpful. Steven helped me with this so much before... But even as I ramble , I know I am struggling to get around to the nitty gritty, and as I feel it loom ever closer, anything and everything feels like a better topic. But I know that isn’t helping you at all. In fact, if you have read everything in this letter leading to this point, you have done everything I asked when I first started writing - and I’m grateful. So, without further ado...

Loosely, but also oddly succinctly, we were caught up in an awful situation involving a murder hole. ‘Murder hole’ is a particularly vicious expression, but the reality is worse, I promise you. They are almost mythical in stature within the infantry, and ground excursions are always all the more tense because of them. Simply put, think of a house on a street. Now, in that house, think of the wall that faces the street - think of a hole in it, through which you can poke the barrel of a gun and point it indiscriminately at the street. You can’t see what you are aiming at, but you can see the crowd, the rush of people, and the occasional flash of British army camo. That’s usually enough to act. Murder holes are the perfect way to satisfy a lot of urges - none of them good - but if you are a Taliban fighter with a shot at a prize scalp, this is a very safe way of doing it.

As the guy on the ground that may be wary of a murder hole, it’s a seriously unsettling experience. You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You can’t feel them. But then there’s a pop and a spit of gravel, as the muzzle bucks in the hole, and someone in your vicinity goes down. And that person that goes down is rarely the intended target. I’ve seen women and children become the victim of this more often than I’d care to mention. The aftermath is dreadful, and the worse thing is, you can’t find it. You can’t find the hole to stick your own barrel down - for a hundred reasons. Too much is happening, there’s a civilian down, or a comrade is hurt, more bullets are hailing from that same tiny somewhere, and, let’s face it, we are talking about a war torn environment. There are hundreds of bullet holes, cracks and faults in the walls on your average street, and the last thing you want to do is stick the pointy end of an assault rifle down the nearest one and spray an innocent family’s living room full of hot metal. All you can do is get down and get away - as fast as you can.

Steven was indeed the victim of a murder hole, in a way. We had been on a dusk excursion across the province via air, when our Apache was hit with a small volley of bullets. They pinged and whizzed only briefly, the air in the cabin spitting hot poison for a split second, but a cruel ricochet within the cabin sent a stray bullet through the copilot’s visor. He buckled and fell forward, across the central controls. At that time, it was probably the most unlucky casualty I’d ever seen in combat. The helicopter went down fast, as we struggled to get the copilot off the column. Whoever fired the shots made himself a hero. One man with a peashooter, essentially, took down one of Her Majesty’s prize eagles. It should not have happened, but fate has a strange way of spinning you a rum one.

As we went down, our perspective shifted as the chopper angled onto it’s side. As I looked out of the open window, all I could see was faces watching. We fell into a crowd of people - a busy evening market scene was disrupted by 18,000 pounds of twisted metal. We hit a building as we fell, which slowed our descent. It saved my life - and Steven’s. It pitched the falling tin can upright, nose pointing to the sky, and we were saved because the impact threw us. It jolted us out, and we dropped 10 feet to the tarmac. Another twist of fate - everyone else was strapped in. We were lazy, and weren’t. We fell out and they stayed in - which wasn’t much use when it went up in eager flames.

The crowd fanned as we dropped and rolled, narrowly avoiding the falling chassis of the chopper, and all the other rags of blazing hardware that were dropping from above. We weren’t unscathed at all - I had a series of cuts in my scalp, so that even now when I shave my head, my hair grows back in a giraffe-style patchwork until it gets long enough. My right ankle was, if you’ll excuse the vernacular, fucked. I would eventually find out it was fractured, but at the time I barely noticed it. Steve had a flesh wound to his chest, not too deep, but deep enough to really sting and scar. But aside from that, he wasn’t in too bad a condition, and, considering he had just survived a helicopter crash, he looked remarkable.

We were out and away from the immediate crash site, but we couldn’t stall - we knew the gunfire had come from this vicinity, and that, seen as hostiles, we were surely sitting ducks. A crowd was forming, andI could sense our safety becoming ever more compromised. Dizzy and disorientated, we headed away from the centre of this village as quickly as we could, trying to find the backstreets off the central drag.

As we stumbled along, keeping close to the walls of the street, trying to get our bearings amid the melee, there was a little barely audible spit. Like a gasp from somewhere, the Grim Reaper himself breathing sharply from the Netherworld, excited at the close-proximity of another soul to take. Steven stumbled, but we carried on moving - wobbling, whirling, two steps forward, two steps back. The hubbub of the crowd was growing, and distant gunshots began to echo. As we trawled the street, we noticed the entrance to a sewer, embedded in the dusty pavement. I levered it open with my rifle muzzle, and the stench wafted up to us from the murk below. For want of a better expression, the smell was a barrage of hot shit. It’s seared into my nostrils, filling my sinuses with it’s filth, so that now, I can’t even drive through good old English countryside for fear of catching a whiff of something manure-like, and be transported back to the moment we dropped into that Helmland sewer.

As we landed in that infinite cesspit, the reek was unbearable. Steven was with me, and we both looked at each other to communicate one very prescient sentiment: ‘We have to get out of here’. Looking up, through the sewer access grid, we could see the purple sky we had fallen from. Glancing below... it was unspeakable. We started to move through waist deep water, that was thicker than normal water, and well... chunkier. Bits and pieces floating into my feet and hands, each time triggering a weakening gag reflex. I was wading, following the darkness, trying to put the unfriendly light behind me. I was throwing up as fast as I could take breaths. But as I trekked, I noticed that the distance between me and Steven was lengthening. For a couple of moments, I kept pressing, hoping that my pace would help spur him on. But it wasn’t working. Worse, he was slowing. I dropped back to him, and asked how he was. He said he was fine, but thought he had pulled a muscle in his abdomen. This alarmed me immediately. Under pursuit from a lynch mob, I would have thought only about tearing my hamstring from the bone would slow me down, never mind a pulled muscle.

Then I remembered the gasp as we were on street level. That sharp fizz of air augmented by trajectory. I hauled Steven to the wall of the sewer, to lean him against it. I lifted him up so he could perch on a brick shelf about a foot above water level, which was just wide and strong enough to support his weight. I lifted his fatigues, and checked his stomach. Just next to his belly button, was a small dark purple hole with black edges of wet ragged skin - a little fleshy well. And sloshing into that well, was the sewer filth. I could literally see the detritus in and around the wound, and I began to panic. Our field packs were sodden with the unspeakable, and Christ knows what our first aid kits were swimming in. Cleaning that wound and getting our hands on some antiseptics became an urgent, all-encompassing priority. But we were, bluntly put, in a dark sewer underneath a swarming village filled with any and all who might like us dead - and to make matters worse, night was drawing in.

Steven asked what I could see on his stomach, and it seems completely ridiculous to mention it now, but I told him ‘Nothing. You’re good to go.’ You know when a child falls down, or someone is in acute pain, and you tell them everything is OK, and that they are fine. There’s a million reasons we do that, and it works both ways. We say it so that they don’t worry, to ease in calming them down. For the person saying it, we are trying to hold onto something concrete and soothing while figuring out what to do next, even if the words represent a past that has recently been fundamentally altered - ‘You’re ok, you’re ok (well, you were ok a couple of minutes ago, but know I don’t know how we are going to get the care you need)’. There was no selfish inclination to me telling Steven that he was fine, other than to keep his spirits up and to keep doubt and fear from creeping in and taking vicious hold. Plus, I wanted him to keep thinking his body could function at optimum capabilities for as long as possible - we needed to move and if he started fretting about how bad the pain was and what it’s consequences might be, we would slow fast.

Whatever was going on in his head, I could’t stop what was going on in mine. Terror was creeping in. I felt intact, but my grip on composure was slipping. I knew his wound was bad. Gut wounds are nasty when they bleed out, but it’s the lack of blood that alarmed me. No blood means something serious got hit. An organ. Something of meaning - an integral part of the machine, not just the joins. And the sight of the filth seeping into the inky chasm was squeezing my terror into a fever. We needed to get out.

We managed about 500 yards before the pace of the filthy river began to quicken, and I saw we were approaching a bowl where more similar sewer tunnels congregated on all sides. As if the smell could worsen, it somehow did. It burned the nostrils, and as I choked the taste back, my tainted spit burned my throat, and send the infernal flavor down my gullet. The risk of my own illness was heightening, but Steven’s gunshot wound was so far beyond risk. I could picture infection gripping and ripping. I could see it. If not from the bullet presumably lodged somewhere within his person, then definitely from the shit swilling the wound.

The pace of the water was hastening further, at an alarming rate. I had tried body-boarding once on Anglesey, and that’s the closest thing to the sensation I can describe. That suction of water around your midriff, the quiet pressure before the crash of foam. I looked ahead and saw that the bowl was deep and churning, waste frothing everywhere - and to the far right, a solitary broad exit pipe, 4 feet across. You couldn’t see where it went, only that it was dark, and there was only a 6 inch or so clearance from the roof of the pipe and the surface. To the far left of the bowl, the ledge a foot up leveled out into a proper platform about ten feet across - a viewing platform over which to check the workings of this massive overgrown toilet. It was also embedded into the tunnel walls, offering a bricked corner behind which to crouch. A vantage point, or hiding place, whichever - it was better than the uncertainty of the pipe opposite it. At the very least, it would give us the time to assess our next move - if indeed there would be one.

I motioned to Steven the ledge, and he gave me a nod of recognition. The colour was fast draining from him now but he did his best not to show what was going on. This, Kayla, is a fine example of your husband’s bravery. Inside, his body must have been going into shutdown. But outside he was doing his best, probably trying to protect me, just like I had earlier tried to protect him. I waited for him, and we both approached the edge of the bowl, with caution. Falling would mean entering the bowl and whatever was in it. Looking at it and the spit of churn of the flow, I could’t imagine what harmful debris was stuck in that bowl, never mind the current which would spit you out into that little pipe with barely any air. We edged, terrified for our footing, and saw there was five feet from the edge of the tunnel overspill to the brink of the platformed ledge - our sanctuary. Just before the edge of the bowl, there was a step up, as the waste spilled over into the bowl. I put my foot onto it, and threw myself at the ledge. With all my gear soaked, I was less than graceful in flight, but my hands felt dry concrete and I gripped for all I was worth. Purchase assured, I hoisted myself up, and reached immediately for Steven. His body was talking his mind out of the distance of the leap, and he looked shaky as he rose onto the step over the bowl. I reached out my rifle for him to grab, which he did. I knew the rifle could take the weight of a man, but I was less sure that either of our grips would hold. Steven swung out on the rifle like a vine, and was suddenly below me, dangling over the bowl. I pulled him up, and we were there - made it.

As I dragged him back into the recess of the platform, I almost forgot the smell, as we tasted this tiny victory. Just as we slumped down, I saw the fresh wet imprints of our bodies on the dry concrete, like alligator tracks in and out of a river. I hopped up immediately and tried to cover them with dust from the recess. Last thing we needed was discovery.

Satisfied, I turned back to Steven. But Steven didn’t look great at all. The exertion looked like it had drained the last drops of fight from him. I took my gear off, and did the same for Steven. He winced a couple of times, and I asked him how his stomach was. And he responded with such grace that I almost did a double-take: ‘Thank you’. That was all he said. I never asked him fully what he meant, and I’m not sure I care. At the time, I took at as ‘You don’t need to bullshit me, but you’ve been great so far’. I dropped the act, and told him what I thought about his wound, while getting him comfortable (well, as comfortable as possible on a ledge over a giant flushing toilet sodden with clothes covered in fetid human waste).

We lay there listening, trying to steady ourselves. Exertion leaves a footprint which eventually lifts, but Steven’s exertion just wouldn’t dissipate. The darkness wasn’t complete, but my fears were now faultlessly constructed. I went through both of our packs. Some basic provisions, and a couple of containers of water - all covered in the sludge we pulled ourselves from. I used some water to clean Steven’s wound as best I could, and a touch to rinse the provisions down, and to give our rifles a quick clean. We had 3 chocolate bars, a strawberry protein bar, two bags of crackers and some gummy bears. I broke open the first aid kit, rinsed that two, and found the little bottle of alcohol gel. I cleaned Steven up as best I could, but the dressings were all destroyed. All I could do was ration the water, ration the food, ration the alcohol gel, and hope for a solution. I didn’t want to leave Steven to seek help - he wouldn’t last. We could only rely on being discovered by the right people, but considering our radio’s were destroyed, that looked bleak. Within the hour, a slow shock slipped over Steven, although his eyes remained focussed. He used his speech sparingly, and his body movements even more sparingly. And we sat there on that ledge for six days.