19
By nine next evening we were all in the main canteen. The place was packed to the rafters and the tension was palpable. Everyone knew
something
was about to happen.
I sat with Mo on my left and Bang-Bang on my right. Mo was wearing dowdy old local clothes over his jumpsuit. Bang-Bang’s two little helpers were off to one side. Tucked below me was the wastepaper basket, containing the dressings, the book, the bottle of surgical alcohol, and now, a lighter provided by Mo.
Mo spoke into my left ear. ‘Talk me through it.’
‘OK. Two things are going to happen. Any minute now, the FlameLite virus, which has been looking all over the world for my darling fiancée here, is going to descend and turn the power off. When it does, the emergency power will go on but all the gates will open. At that point, I will set fire to this crap book in this bucket and say it’s a Qur’aan…’
I nodded at the bucket between my feet.
‘And you know the effect that will have.’
He did. ‘I was here when those US troops actually did that. They threw some Qura’aans in the burn pit by the flightline. I thought the world was going to end.’
‘Right. So just hang on, and follow me and Holly.’
I leant right into Bang-Bang’s ear. ‘Remind me how you say it again.’
She murmured back. ‘Da kufer banchodan Qur’an sharif oswazaydo. “The Infidel bastards have burnt a Quran”. Say it back to me a few times.’
I repeated it back to her and after four attempts she nodded.
‘OK. Good. Now we wait for the power to go out.’
We waited. I studied the INSCOM circular. Item three was about the fabled power outages. There was a map and a graph showing how the outages seemed to be making their way north, from the capital to here, over a period of six days.
I leafed through the various magazines I’d filched from the pharmacy. Here was September’s copy of Wired with a picture of Steve Jobs and why he’d been a jerk. I looked in the articles section and a chill went over me. There was a two-page spread about “the strange phenomenom of the Web Raccoons”. Apparently they’d been seen in every social media site and several online virtual communities. I nudged Bang-Bang. She was handrolling a
particularly evil-looking fag. She put it down, speed-read the first few paragraphs and showed her teeth in pleasure. ‘Can I borrow that off you a sec?’
I handed it over and carried on looking at the other magazines. Newsweek had a large piece about the resurgent right in Britain and Europe. Things were coming to the boil and the Midlands was the focal point. The other leader was about tensions in France after the shootings in Nice, and the forthcoming NATO summits. I made a mental note to attend if and when I got out of here. On page ten was a short piece about Gregg’s the bakers doing a deal with NAAFI to serve sausage rolls in Afghanistan. Bang-Bang cast a cursory eye over it and muttered ‘as if the troops haven’t suffered enough.’
Five minutes later she nudged me again. ‘I think I’ve found the answer. Look at this piece.’
She indicated an article about a Shoreditch internet company that was making artificial lifeforms called Weavrs.
‘The day before we ended up in Stratford, I made one of these avatars, clones, dunno what you’d call it, tied it into my Twitter account and set it loose. I think these “raccoons” are being created by this thing somehow in combination with FlameLite and they’re exploring social media sites. They’ll learn as they rampage round the web.’
This was Martian to me. I shrugged and browsed through the last mag, a copy of Fortean Times. This too, among articles about MR James and zombie outbreaks, had a piece about the virtual raccoons entitled “Day of the Infomorphs”. They’d been spotted buying virtual cars and virtual small arms in Second Life and World of Warcraft. I gave up and put the magazines down.
Above us, almost subliminally, the striplights appeared to dim. I looked up, unsure whether I’d seen or felt that.
Suddenly Bang-Bang stood up and addressed the restive hordes in English.
‘HEAR ME, brothers and sisters.’
The entire block went silent.
‘I am Holly Kirpachi al-Ingleezi. Does Holly Kirpachi serve?’
Her two little helpers translated it into shouted Pashto.
As one the audience shouted a no.
She drew herself to her full height, all of five foot one.
‘I carry wounds, all got in battle!’
She gestured at her collarbone, her cheek and her nose.
‘I have killed many men, with my own hands, in battle. I
scatter
, I
burn
my enemy’s tents. I take their flocks and herds. I am paid a golden treasure and yet… I am poor. I am poor because…’
Beside Bang-Bang her two acolytes were translating at top speed and the audience was loving it. I had to laugh, as I knew she was amending Anthony Quinn’s speech from Lawrence of Arabia. Years of Saturday afternoon telly with her dad and it was working.
Bang-Bang cast a hand over the audience. Then she held that hand up. You could have heard a pin drop. ‘… And yet I am poor because I am a river to my people and I give it away. Are you with me?’
A great shout went up.
Without warning the overhead fluorescent lights began to flick in a random pattern. And then the strangest thing happened. The overhead PA speakers squalled into life and started playing... oh my God.
“PLEEEASSSSE RELEASE ME, LET MEEE GOOO…”
From across several decades and several thousand miles, Engelbert Humperdink filled the hangar. Beside me a prisoner howled in abject terror and dived under a table. It was the cheesiest music you could imagine. FlameLite had arrived in the complex’s servers. We were SO go.
She looked at me and winked. ‘Fiancé. My creation is here and ready to kick arse.’
And then all the power went out, we were plunged into darkness and all hell broke loose. And within seconds the red emergency lights had flared on but at the same time, every door and gate in the facility rattled and banged open and jammed stuck.
Bang-Bang twirled arms outstretched in the hellish red emergency lights and shouted ‘You are with me, and I am with you… because I am A RIVER FOR MY PEOPLE!’
And as one, everyone in the audience got to their feet and roared. There was an outbreak of chaotic yelling. I poured the surgical spirit onto the dressings and the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, and dropped the lighter in.
Whoomph
. Up it went. I ran to the edge of the canteen holding the bucket in the emergency lighting. As I ran I started shouting-
‘Da kufer banchodan Qur’an sharif oswazaydo! DA KUFER BANCHODAN QUR’AN SHARIF OSWAZAYDO!’
I stopped. I jumped onto a table and held the bucket aloft. Smoke and flames curled from it, and then up it went, and I had my beacon.
The entire facility erupted. We had our riot. Bang-Bang and Mo ran to my side. She thumped my arm.
‘Jailhouse Rock. Let’s go!’
We ran to the open Exit Two and out onto the airbase. All over the base sirens and harsh yellow lights were starting up. Hundreds of prisoners were bomb-bursting out of the exits and colliding with ANA troops. To our left an army truck screeched to a halt and disgorged troops who ran past us, oblivious, into the prison. Shots began to crack and zip all over the facility. I grabbed Mo and Bang-Bang and hustled them to the safety of a revetment. Bang-Bang’s two little retainers had also tagged along with us and she was scolding them in Pashto. She kissed them both and then they grinned and ran down the fenceline.
She turned to us. ‘They’re safer going the other way. They’ll get out, they’ll be OK.’
We huddled and waited. In the distance the runway lights started flashing bizarre patterns. FlameLite was here and directing planes into each other. Without warning a taxiing USAF C17 ran into an Italian Air Force Aermacchi and blew up, turning the night into a blinding hellish day and throwing flickering shadows everywhere. Fragments hit the flightline of ISAF F16s and the first two exploded. Debris pattered around us in a patina of dust. All over the base prisoners and black-clad Afghan military police were boiling out of doors and gates and turning the place into a floodlit riot. As I watched, a star shell whooshed into the air and detonated, throwing this whole side of the base into a wobbly magnesium glare.
Bang-Bang lit her homemade cigarette and took a long drag. She didn’t offer it around so it obviously had to be full of smack. She glanced at both of us. ‘Next time we go on holiday can we go somewhere safer, like the Congo?’
We all cracked up. I looked down and checked we still had the kitbags with the uniforms. We did. I looked left. ‘Holly. Ambulance line. Let’s move.’
She nodded. ‘Straight up this fenceline and right at that hangar.’
I whacked Mo on the shoulder. We ran for the ambulance park. Two hundred metres later we were rounding the hangar. Bang-Bang skidded to a halt and put her hands on her head.
‘What’s the matter babe, I see a nice lovely line of ambulances?’
She pointed at a line of shipping containers opposite. ‘It’s gone.’
‘What’s gone?’
‘That container. That Nazi container full of GUNS! It’s gone…’
Sure enough, like a gap in a line of teeth, was an empty space in the line of containers. Just sand and dirt.
I patted her arm. ‘Nothing we can do about it for now- let’s get an ambo started. C’mon.’
I jogged to the nearest one. One thing I
did
know about the standard operational procedures at US detention facilities was that emergency vehicles could not be detained at the outer gates. We had a chance. Our noise was covered by a roar of a Chigo air conditioner set in the Portakabin by the trucks. I looked the vehicle over. It was a Unimog truck, in khaki with big red crescents on the side. This was a turnup. In my misspent teenage years I’d once stolen one of these to order, for a ‘Mog enthusiast. I thought I remembered how to start and drive one of these. Hopefully.
I called to Mo. ‘Dude! Jump in the back and see if you can find any tools for me.’
‘On it.’
The main cab was unlocked. I climbed in the driver’s side and Bang-Bang got in the other. We put the medic greens on over our clothes. I turned an interior light on and studied the spartan dashboard.
Bang-Bang was rooting in the storage bins. She produced some water bottles and a Michelin map and grinned at me. She then grinned even more widely and produced the compass from her prayer mat. This was also, hopefully, a start. Mo reappeared by my opened door with a kitbag full of tools. ‘Waddya need Riz?’
‘Biggest hammer you got and maybe a screwdriver or a blade.’
He rummaged in it and handed me a lumphammer and a set of wirestrippers. OK. Time to go to work. First I reached under my seat and flicked the battery master switch on. Then I half-stood in the cab and whacked the ignition switch with the hammer until it fell off. I reached inside the hole and yanked out all the wires I could. Now instinct and a short career in joyriding took over. I selected the correct wires and stripped the ends with the wirestrippers. The engine began to crank, then died.
‘Shit.’ What had I forgotten? Bang-Bang was in a world of her own, perusing the map with her tongue sticking out of her mouth. She still had that massive nosering and attendant chain running to her ear, bold as brass. Mo had disappeared into the back under his own initiative to play at being the rendered POW. Outside on the airstrip the chatter of automatic weapons fire seemed to be growing.
C’mon, Riz, I chided myself. Think.
Of course. The choke. I touched the wires again and pulled the choke out, then pushed the black starter button. The engine rumbled, hacked, and then roared into life as I revved it. Choke off. I slammed my door shut, turned the interior light off and said ‘People, we are go.’
I wrestled the crash gearbox into first and we headed out right and onto the road that parallelled the runway.
All around us the detention facility was in meltdown. As we drove south to the American end we passed line upon line of every kind of emergency vehicle speeding north and troops
of all description crashing out to deal with the riot. I searched on the dashboard, found the switches for the lights and sirens and hit them. I ground through three more gears and went for the main gate.
We roared past a line of burning A10 Thunderbolts, ammunition cooking off into the sky, and a sign saying ‘USO Bagram presents Mortal Kombat 9 Tournament’. Me and Bang-Bang both looked at each other with a “what?” expression.
I drove, I hit that pedal and raced down the flightline as behind us the night turned into day and plane after plane blew up and ammunition spattered into the sky.
Beside me Bang-Bang took a last drag on her heroin-fag, flicked the butt out of the window and readied her ID pass.
We screeched to a halt at the massive inner and outer main gate zone in a cloud of dust and sirens and blue flashing lights. The mixed ANA and US troops were preoccupied in either fussing over the gates, which had naturally stuck open, or watching the chaos taking over the base and talking on their radios. The red and white barrier was still down though. An Afghan soldier came to Bang-Bang’s window and she pushed her ID into his face and started yelling at him in Pashto. He recoiled as though confronted by a snake and flapped his arm. The barrier went up. I gunned the engine and left in a roostertail of dirt.