Osama (10 page)

Joe and Ricky edged backwards, then slid ten metres down the hill on their backs before standing and running back to the unit. They were still in a circular formation, each of them kneeling and with their guns pointing out into the desert. Joe approached Hernandez directly. ‘It’s a no-go,’ he said. ‘The wadi that leads into the town is fine, but the open ground around it is crawling. They’ll spot us when we go over the hill, no question.’

The American considered it for a moment. ‘OK, listen up. We’re going to re-route. Cut round, enter the town from the south.’ A bead of sweat was running down his face. It collected on his upper lip just where the scar was. ‘We move in pairs—’

‘Hang on,’ Ricky interrupted.

Hernandez stopped talking and looked at Ricky as though he’d only just noticed he was there. ‘You got a problem with that?’

‘You’ve seen the mapping, brudder. The area south of Nawaz is shit?ful of legacy mines and IEDs. That’s why we’re supposed to be heading in from the west . . .’

Hernandez took a step closer. ‘Well, here’s the thing,
brother
. You want to go back up there, get your head full of holes, you be my guest.’

‘I’m not walking into a fucking minefield.’

‘You’ll walk where I damn well tell you to walk.’

An ominous pause. In an uncomfortable instant, Joe realized there were three Colts pointing at him and Ricky.

It was Hernandez who broke the silence. ‘As you’ve studied the maps so damn carefully,’ he said, ‘you’ll know that bomb disposal teams have marked safe passage through the area. You’ll see the chalk lines on the fucking ground. Even you Brits aren’t so dumb you can’t follow the white line.’

Joe breathed deeply. It was true that he’d seen pathways through the minefield marked on the mapping. ‘He’s right, Ricky,’ he murmured.

‘What is it, friend?’ Hernandez interrupted. ‘Lost your nerve?’

‘Fuck you.’ Ricky looked in contempt at the others. ‘You can tell your homeys to point their rifles at the bad guys, Hernandez,’ he hissed, before turning back to Joe. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If we’re going, let’s go.’

0742 hours.

The desert was already a furnace, and Joe’s clothes clung to him. He took a pull of warm water from his Camelbak and surveyed his position. To his nine o’clock was the incline of the hill, a little gentler now that he and Ricky had covered 500 metres east from their insertion point. At their three o’clock, open, empty ground and the mountains in the distance. At six o’clock, two of the Yanks 400 metres back, indistinct in the heat haze. And at twelve o’clock, a fucking wasteland.

There were three derelict breeze-block buildings approximately 500 metres ahead. They delineated the edge of the town – about 200 metres beyond them were more buildings, though it was clear that this area was seldom visited. There was no sign of any human activity; just a thin, lame cat that limped towards them from the direction of the breeze-block huts, and stopped, 100 metres from their position, when it saw Joe and Ricky. It stood still for five seconds, before limping away in the opposite direction.

‘How many lives do you reckon Tiddles has used up?’ Ricky murmured.

More than nine, Joe thought to himself. The 500 metres of ground between them and the breeze-block hut was like a junk yard. The burned-out shells of cars littered the whole place. With his scope, Joe could make out the ravaged corpse of some unidentifiable animal, the size of a large dog, but headless. And, a few metres to its left, what looked like the remnants of a kite, knotted and tangled round a twisted chunk of metal, drooping in the windless air.

Five metres from where they were standing, the hard-baked earth was stained white. A straight line – it was only a couple of inches wide – extended twenty metres in the direction of the shacks, before veering left at forty-five degrees and straightening up again after another five metres.

‘Follow the yellow brick road?’ Ricky said.

‘I don’t like it,’ Joe replied, his voice low. ‘Maybe we should skirt round the whole area.’

Ricky shook his head. ‘We don’t know how far the frickin’ things extend. The Russkis mined this place to hell, you know. If the Yanks’ minesweepers have done the hard work, we should follow their line.’

Ricky was right. Thank fuck it hadn’t rained for six weeks, and the chalk line was still mostly intact, although it was scuffed out in places. The chalk lines marking safe passage through a minefield weren’t just good for soldiers. Local people and enemy militia used them too.

‘I’ll go first,’ Joe said.

‘Hey, brudder . . .’

‘Forget it, Ricky. We’re good now, OK?’

Ricky grinned. ‘OK.’ If he suspected that Joe didn’t want him taking the lead for any other reason, he didn’t show it.

‘Keep a twenty-five-metre distance,’ Joe said. Ricky didn’t have to ask why: that was the buffer he had to keep to stay out of the kill zone, should Joe end up stepping on a pressure plate.

‘Roger that, brudder. See you on the other side.’

They clapped palms, then Joe stepped onto the white line.

He wouldn’t have walked more carefully if he’d been treading a high wire. He took each footstep very slowly, placing his toes down first and feeling for anything unusual before allowing himself to release his whole weight on to his foot and take the next step. The dry earth crunched slightly beneath him, sounding almost as though there was a dusting of snow. No fucking chance. It was already pushing forty degrees and the sky was an intense blue. Sweat continued to ooze from Joe’s pores, and he had only gone ten metres before he had to stop and wipe the salt from his eyes so that he could see the way ahead.

Fifteen metres.

Twenty.

He reached the apex of the line where it angled off, forcing him to change direction. He allowed himself another sip of water to ease the burning dryness in his mouth and throat. All his attention was on the line ahead and it was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw Ricky starting out on it.

The shell of a Toyota on its side – it still had a few tiny patches of peeling red paint here and there – lay ten metres to his right. Joe’s skin prickled as he passed the shattered glass that lay all around, and spotted the rough hessian bag twisted around the remains of the front seat that had perhaps once belonged to the driver. He looked up to see that he hadn’t covered more than a tenth of the distance to the breeze-block huts.

Another slug of water.

Another step forward.

He looked over his shoulder. Ricky was about thirty metres back. A safe distance. Beyond him, Joe realized he could no longer see the Americans. In a corner of his mind he wondered why they weren’t still advancing, but he didn’t have the headspace to worry about it for long.

He took another step.

And another.

Movement up ahead. It was the cat, hobbling across the chalk line. For a moment, Joe considered shooting it – if it trod on a pressure plate, they’d all be fucked – but the animal, almost as if it knew what Joe was thinking, changed direction and scampered off in the direction of the breeze ?blocks.

Joe’s blood was thumping through his veins. His right foot crunched down onto the chalk line.

Then his left foot.

Then his right again.

He almost missed it. Had the feral cat still been diverting his attention, he would have done. It was a footprint to his left, about twenty centimetres from the chalk line and facing towards it. And a second footprint, half a metre – a stride’s length – beyond that.

Joe stopped.

He stared at the ground.

Something wasn’t right.

He crouched down and touched the footprint. The indentations of the sole had made a regular, symmetrical pattern in the dust, not unlike his own prints. He recognized it as a military boot.

But if it was a military boot, why had it not been walking along the chalk line?

All of a sudden, Joe felt as though somebody had slowed time down to a crawl. He looked over his shoulder to see Ricky, still thirty metres back. His mate had his head inclined, clearly wondering why Joe was crouched down on the ground.

And he was taking a step forward.

‘
Don’t move!
’

Joe shouted so loud, his voice cracked. Ricky looked puzzled, but he continued to put his foot down.

‘
Ricky! Don’t fucking move!
’

But it was too late.

As Ricky’s boot touched the earth, he clearly realized something was different. He looked down, but only for the fraction of a second that remained of his life.

Joe had a snapshot vision of a huge geyser of dust and rock spurting ten metres up into the air, accompanied by the ear-splitting retort of at least five charges exploding in quick succession. A tremor rippled across the ground, so violent that it knocked Joe onto his side. He rolled to his front, his eyes clenched shut, before throwing his forearms over the back of his neck and waiting for the debris to fall.

It was like a hailstorm. Rubble hammered down on the back of his helmet; stones pelted his back and his legs. He found himself tensing his body, ready for a piece of shrapnel to fall and tear into his tissue, for his ribs to crack, his legs to be mashed. His ears rang with the explosion, and with the sound of debris hitting the ground all around him, like rain on a metal roof.

And then, ten seconds after the initial detonation, a sudden and profound silence.

He looked up. At first he could see nothing but the cloud of light brown dust all around. Still settling, it reduced his visibility to less than a metre. But after twenty seconds his view cleared.

There was no sign of Ricky. Not of his body at least. Joe could see nothing but his helmet. It was lying at his ten o’clock, approximately eight metres from his position. The strap was broken and the helmet was half filled with rubble.

Joe closed his eyes. Opened them again. They smarted from the dust, and his brain felt just as clouded. He tried to clear his mind. He had probably only missed by inches the same pressure plate Ricky had trodden on.

He looked to his right, squinting through the heat haze and the dust cloud. Was he imagining it, or could he see, twenty metres away and almost parallel to the path he had been following, a line of displaced earth? Was that the original chalk line? Had they been following a dummy line, laid by whoever had left the footprint in the dust?

Joe was too shocked even to curse. He was taking in short, jagged inhalations of breath, trying to master the fear rising in his gut. He had to get off this chalk line. It was booby-trapped, that much was obvious. But now he had no way of knowing where to step. He looked back the way he’d come. Fifty metres, he reckoned, to get to the point where it would be safe.

Fifty metres, and there could be triggers, wires or pressure plates anywhere.

He started to crawl. Slowly. Gingerly. Every few centimetres he gently brushed the earth with his fingertips. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He’d recognize the small, circular pressure plate of an old anti-personnel mine, but the art and science of IEDs had come on since the Russians left their calling cards all round the country. There were countless ways to hide a detonator. They could even be remote, and if some Taliban cunt saw an enemy soldier crawling in the vicinity . . .

Five metres gone.

Ten metres.

He stopped. He looked at his right hand. It was shaking. He clenched it, and immediately remembered how Ricky had done the same thing. He gulped in more air, trying to steady himself. Up ahead, he scanned for the Americans. No sign.

Fifteen metres.

Twenty.

There was something blocking his way, two metres ahead, about the size of a bowling ball. He had thought it was a rock, but now he was up close he realized it was something else: an indistinguishable chunk of human flesh, swaddled in scorched clothing. He moved it out of the way. Ricky’s warm, sticky blood glued itself to Joe’s palm.

He continued to crawl.

Thirty metres.

Thirty-five.

How long had he been edging through the dirt? Ten minutes? A little more? He had to fight the urge not to stand up and run. Go slowly, he told himself. Go carefully.

He’d crawled forty metres when his fingers, still brushing away at the dusty ground, touched something hot. His hand flew away from it and his heart started to race even faster. At the same time he could hear shouting in the distance behind him. English, but harshly accented.

‘Hey, Amer-ee-can motherfucker! You go bang bang, Amer-ee-can motherfucker!’

He looked back. A group of kids – maybe ten of them, none older than thirteen, he estimated – had congregated by the breeze blocks. Where had they come from? The village was two klicks away, but there was nothing to stop them alerting the adult militia on the other side of the hill. One of them was waving a rifle in the air; his neighbour was pointing at Joe, clearly urging his friend to take a shot. The others were all jeering and laughing, obviously wanting Joe to give them a show by pressing on the wrong piece of ground.

He turned his attention back to the metal, blowing on it to get rid of the sand. But his breath did not uncover the pressure plate of an anti-personnel mine. It was one end of the bulbous, gun-metal-grey body of a shell of some description, embedded in the earth so that only a couple of inches were showing. And there was no way of telling the mechanism by which it was to be detonated.