I knew there was fuck-all I could do for her, but there'd been enough killing up on the mountain. It seemed such a waste of a young life for her to have done it to herself.
She'd probably been sold into her marriage. Some of the muj I knew had sold their own daughters when they were twelve or thirteen. They even claimed a bride price as payback for raising the poor little fuckers in the first place. Others gave them away to repay bets or settle arguments.
After the girls got palmed off and married, they were raped continuously. If they complained, they might find themselves flung into prison. The ones that could afford it took overdoses. The poorer ones cut their wrists, hanged themselves or chucked themselves into the nearest river. But this one, she'd had spirit. She wasn't going out with a whimper.
I pictured her sitting there, tipping the kerosene over her head and striking a match. But she'd fucked up. Maybe she couldn't afford a full can. Now she was lying in the dust, waiting to die.
Ahmad came back with half a big green watermelon. 'Nick, please, you not be long. The meat, he nearly gone…'
'Thanks, mate.' I took the melon off him. I couldn't understand why these guys didn't care. 'She hasn't got long. But I can't leave her, can I?'
He eyed me as if I was a lunatic. 'They say her name is Farah.' He turned to leave, then stopped. 'Of course you can leave her, Nick. This her choice. This what she want.'
He walked away.
I looked down at her. What she want? No, not really.
I pulled my AK bayonet from my belt and cut into the melon. The juice flowed down my fingers, which were black with weeks of grime.
'Farah, here…' I touched a sliver of the fruit to what was left of her lips.
She sucked it in. Her eyes flickered open again and I thought I could see something resembling a smile in them. She tried her best to swallow as the juice ran down the side of her ravaged face. Painfully slowly, she shifted her eyes towards me. She began to weep gently, but no tears fell.
I cut another slice of melon. I didn't know what else to do.
The late-afternoon sun bathed her face for a moment, then disappeared. As darkness fell, we both waited for her to die.
PART ONE
1
The noise and heat, gloom and sheer fucking claustrophobia in the back of the Warrior were oppressive enough, but now the armour was suddenly clanging three times a second like the world's strongest madman was using it for sledgehammer practice. We were taking rounds. It could only mean we were closing in on target.
The engine roared and the tracks screeched over the rock.
The front end dipped hard.
'Fuck!' the Scouse driver screamed over the radio net, as he stood on the anchors. 'There's a fuck'n' bastard tank!'
The commander yelled back so loud I had to lift the PRR pad from my ear. 'Go right, you cunt — you'll hit the fucker!' Until a few years ago, the only way troops could communicate with each other was by shouting or hand signals, but every man and his dog now wore a personal role radio. It had revolutionized the infantry. Just four inches by six, with a headset consisting of an ear pad, Velcro strap and little boom mike, PRR acted effectively as a secure chat net between troops.
The Challenger's thundering growl had come from our left. The tracks squealed and we gripped whatever we could get hold of to stop ourselves being flung from our seats. We took more small-arms fire into the hull, and then there was a much louder bang two feet away from my shoulder.
'RPG!'
Rocket-propelled grenades could punch holes in concrete walls. I knew it would just bounce off the skirt of bar armour surrounding us, but I still felt like I was trapped in a locked safe while people on the outside were fucking about with blowtorches and gelignite.
It wasn't simply that I couldn't see what was happening. It was having no control that bothered me. I was at the mercy of the driver, the gunner and the commander in the turret. He was a platoon sergeant called Rhett or Red — I didn't catch it when we met, and then we got past the point where I could ask again.
Our Warrior was part of the battle group's recce platoon. Dom, Pete and I were embedded. 'Entombed, more like,' Pete said. He'd been a tankie himself once upon a time, and even he didn't like the lid coming down. We were jammed shoulder to shoulder in the eerie red glow of the night-lights. Rhett's scuffed and dusty desert boots were level with my face. The gunner was up there on his left, frantically feeding rounds into the 30mm cannon.
The wagon took one final hard right and came to a jarring, gut-wrenching halt. The stern reared up under the momentum, then crashed down like a breaking wave.
'Dismount! Dismount!'
Rhett's shout was drowned by the cannon kicking off above us.
Dom got a punch from one of the Kingsmen and hit the button above his head. The rear-door hydraulics whined. I could see stars, hear the roar of gunfire and heavy machinery.
The four recce guys tumbled out into the inky blackness. Pete shoved a hand over his lens and we followed.
My Timberlands slid and twisted on the rubble as I ducked down against the bar armour, gulping fresh but dust-laden air. Oil wells blazed out of control on the horizon. Gases and crude were being forced out of the ground under phenomenal pressure, shooting flames a hundred feet into the air.
The night was filled with the thunder of 30mm cannon kicking off across the dried-up wadi bed that separated us from our target — the buildings no more than a hundred away. It had prevented the drivers going right up to the front doors.
I was hungry for more air. My nostrils filled with sand, but I didn't care. I had my feet on the ground and I was in control of them. And, thanks to the mortar platoon, I could see what was happening. Their 81mm tubes had filled the sky with illume. Balls of blazing magnesium hung in the air above the town before beginning their descent, casting shadows left and right as they swung under their parachutes, silhouetting the two massive Challengers rumbling left and right of us.
Bright muzzle flashes from four or five AKs sparked up from the line of houses that edged the built-up area.
Our gunner switched from the 30mm Rarden cannon to the 7.62mm Hughes Helicopter Chain Gun to dish out a different edition of the same good news.
Two Warriors lurched to a halt alongside us, throwing up a plume of dust. My nose was totally clogged now. Guys spilled out of the back doors with bayonets fixed.
Pete adjusted the oversized Batman utility belt round his waist where he stuffed his lenses and shit, and raised his infrared camera to his face. He was like a kid in a sweetshop as the mass of armour surrounding the town spewed infantry into the sand.
Dom got ready to do his Jeremy Bowen bit to camera. He rehearsed a few soundbites to himself as Pete sorted the sound check.
'The Kingsmen of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment are halfway through their six-month tour. They have been shot at twenty-four/seven by small arms, RPGs and mortars, but ask any one of them and they'll tell you it's what they signed up to do.'
Tonight they were about to kick the shit out of the insurgents who were within spitting distance of taking over Al Gurnan and starting to claim the ground as their own. They had to be broken. An insurgent stronghold soon became another link in the supply chain from Iran, just ten clicks away.
The Kingsmen's mission was to do the breaking, and ours was to report it. Dom talked, Pete filmed him, and I had to make sure the two didn't get shot, snatched or run over by a set of tracks sent screaming across the desert by a bunch of jabbering Scousers.
It wasn't easy. When Dom started playing newsman, he seemed to think there was a magic six-foot forcefield standing between him and any incoming fire. Sometimes he thought he didn't even need to wear a helmet. But in this war the enemy didn't give a shit whether you were a journalist or a soldier. If you were a foreigner they wanted you out, preferably in a body-bag. If they could get you alive, so much the better: you'd be the new star of The Al Jazeera Show, and all you could do was hope your next appearance wouldn't end with them slicing off your head online.