This gig was different. Farzana had a story to tell. Farzana had lost a sister and the audience was damn well going to know about it. The band struck up. And we were in. Fuzz sang under the onstage moon.
‘
I’ve
gotta
be
good
or
Mama
will
scold
me
I
asked
her
and
this
is
what
she
told
me
Mother
,
may
I
go
out
dancing
?
Yes
,
my
darling
daughter
Mother
,
may
I
try
romancing
?
Yes
,
my
darling
daughter
What
if
there’s
a
moon
,
mama
darling
,
and
it’s
shining
on
the
water
Mother
,
must
I
keep
on
dancing
?
Yes
,
my
darling
daughter
...
’
I was in Mrs Kirpachi’s garden. I looked around. Nope, I was definitely awake. The garden was bathed in the most beautiful moonlight, from a moon the size of a hot-air balloon. It hung in the trees, and then settled down into them. How had I got here? I’d been in my flat a minute ago. The moonlight illuminated the lawn and there was Bang-Bang. Except she wasn’t Bang-Bang, she was a fox in a kimono. She took my hand and wiggled her shiny black nose.
‘C’mon, retard, it’s our wedding.’
A raccoon tugged the leg of my combat trousers. I looked down at it. Its eyes weren’t raccoon eyes, they were like the eyes of someone on Ecstacy. Deep, pitch-black pools like the dead doll button eyes of a shark. It spoke, but it seemed to have a speech impediment. ‘Wiz. Reddingth.’
My eyes were drawn to the lawn we were standing on. The lawn was slicked with blood and cartridge cases. How strange blood looks in moonlight. Black.
Behind us Mrs Kirpachi was sobbing uncontrollably. Bang-Bang turned to both of us and scolded ‘Mum! You should be happy! It’s what you wanted, it’s our wedding!’
With a start, I realised there was a gunshot wound in her kimono and blood was pouring from it. The moon split apart and there was a blinding light. The light went blue, to white, to blue and...
I opened my eyes. Fuzz was shaking my shoulder. I was on the lounge carpet under a duvet. She placed a mug of tea beside me and walked away. I got to my feet. The dawn light streamed in. I looked out over the view to Stratford and the Thames. I was shaking. I decided to take the time to pray. Properly.
‘Cheers for the tea Fuzz. I just dreamt you were onstage with Graham Norton.’
She looked at me and finally said ‘and they say
I’m
the mad one.’
10
25th September
It was 7.49am. We were parked in the visitors’ car park at Chrome Flightplan in Crawley, just shy of Gatwick airport. A plane thundered over.
‘Remind me why we’re here again Fuzz?’
Fuzz was dressed soberly and smartly for a change, in a charcoal ladies’ business suit, a slightly too-short skirt and Christian Louboutin heels. She was obviously on a vamp mission.
‘One, this is the firm that does the logistic support for all the CIA’s rendition flights in the Eastern hemisphere. Two. Me and the MD, have… well, we have a past.’
She grinned wolfishly.
‘And you’ve got an appointment?’
‘You betchya. Give me five minutes.’
She exited the car and went for the reception, giving me a little wiggle on the way in. I clocked it and laughed to myself.
I turned the news up on the radio. BBC Five. John Gaunt had Tommy Robinson fulminating about Islam and Islamism, and the EDL’s legitimate right to protest. He was adamant that they would be marching, and soon. Gaunty was giving him a hard time. Tommy was punching back, but he kept saying “Inam” rather than Imam. I switched to Sunrise and tuned out. I looked out across the car park. Not much going on apart from rain until...
A shower of glass was raining on the car and an office computer was sliding leftwards off the bonnet. As I watched, it slid off and hit the tarmac with another crash. I got out of the car on autopilot, picked up the PC and slung it on the rear seat. Instinctively I looked up. There was a gaping hole in the office window above me.
The reception doors banged open and Fuzz came walking out with a bounce in her step. She was grinning as she got in. ‘Let’s go, bhai.’
We drove away, me trying to act smooth.
As we hit the ramp for the motorway I asked her.
‘OK. What happened?’
‘I gave him one minutes’ grace and sweet talk, but he wasn’t having it. So I put my pistol to his nose and got him to print out the flight manifests for the 16th. Just in case he was fudging, I threw his PC out the window so we could check it.’
She waved a sheaf of papers. ‘Now we check.’
I laughed, and then stopped laughing as I realised I was going to have to explain the dents and scratches on the pool car to the beancounters at the office.
Back at mine we dismantled the PC with a screwdriver and pulled the hard drive out. Years ago, Bang-Bang had taught me how to do this. I had a gutted terminal she’d left here years ago with the motherboard exposed for this kind of thing, and networked in. SATA cable in, power on… and fingers crossed.
‘Fifty-fifty it survived the fall’ said Fuzz.
We waited. I necked some painkillers as my side was playing up like a bastard.
The drive whirred, then there were a few quick clicks. Success. It was calibrating. Seconds later, an icon appeared on my right-hand screen. We were in.
Fuzz spoke. ‘These guys are so ubiquitous, us pilots call their charts “Chrome charts”. They supply the full package. Lemme do a search on that drive.’
She got busy. I made some tea.
Within half an hour she had it. ‘Here it is. Here are copies of the EFBs.’
‘EFBs?’
‘Electronic Flight Bags. We use them instead of the old paper systems when we can. It’s what you load into those funky green displays in a cockpit.’
She read from the screen.
‘September 16th. N6161K. One Leasing. Squawk 5331. Filed a flightplan to Frankfurt, from there to Cyprus, and from there to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan… and from there to Bagram airfield, Afghanistan.’
She went to look at the files she’d taken. She riffled through them. ‘These are hard copies of the fuel requisitions. Yep. They fuelled up at Frankfurt, Cyprus, and Ashgabat.’
She went back to the PC. ‘Yep. Bagram and then back to Ashgabat.’
She looked up. ‘Bhai. She’s in Bagram. No doubt.’
11
26th September
Out on the rainswept pan at Brize the props on the RAF Special Duties Flight C130 were turning and blurring, their whine turning into a grumbling roar that eventually drowned out the thumping rap music from Fuzz’s car. I ran up the ramp into the brightly-lit interior of the plane. Fuzz waved a goodbye and Swallow winked at her and then looked at me.
‘Ready?’
‘Born ready.’
‘Got your kit?’
I nodded at the two khaki kit bags I was carrying. ‘Packets are with me and ready to go.’
‘Good. We’ll brief you in in-air.’
Two minutes later we were climbing and I was clinging onto the orange webbing on the fuselage. Swallow was laughing. He put a headset over my ears and slapped the mike down. This was the only way we could communicate in the roaring interior of a C130.
‘Welcome back, Terry.’
For the duration of this mission I was Terry. Terry Taliban. The British Army never, ever, let you forget where you were from. Could have been worse though. Could have been Royal Signals.
‘OK Tel, come over here and have a look at the maps.’
We pulled our comms leads behind us and inched inwards to a set of aluminium cases with large-scale maps spread on them. We gathered round.
Swallow was OC for this mission. This was an SAS Revolutionary Warfare Wing gig. I recognised the two other guys. Dinger and Briney. They were from Twenty-Four (Air) Troop, G Squadron, also known as Lonsdale Troop for their tendency to fight amongst themselves. Both had black hair, seasonal tans, and nobody had shaved for several days. Blending in. Briney was wrapping two sets of NVGs in foam cut from a mattress, to cushion them and prevent breakages. I knew that these NVGs would have been bought in Peshawar or taken from captured insurgents’ inventories.
‘Guys. Listen in. The mission is to get Rizwan here to the perimeter of Bagram airbase. The mission… is to get Rizwan here to the perimeter of Bagram airbase.’
In Britarmylese, you always stated the mission twice.
‘Here’s how we do it. We traverse ISAF airspace as a normal RAF scheduled flight. Southeast of Bagram we climb to oxygen level. One piece of luck is that Bagram’s aerostat, or the big Yank balloon with cameras to you and me, is down for repairs this week. We bang out at 25,000 on a standard HAHO profile and track in. Our DZ is… here…’
He indicated a point on the map and rattled off the lat and long. ‘We stash our kit, raghead up, tab northwest and lay in Riz’s cache… here…’
He pointed to an overhead blown-up photo of what looked to be a burnt-out car. ‘Then we move again. Two clicks from the Bagram fenceline. We brass up that fenceline and bug out. Riz stays.’
He looked at me.‘And good luck with that one, Riz.’
In my headset the whole team started laughing.
‘OK weather over the target area tomorrow.’ Swallow consulted a printout. ‘Visibility good, light cloud cover, wind speed 6 kph direction west north west. Humidity 74, night time temp 13 degrees C. Moon sets at 02.53 local. And that’s when we bang out. Sunrise is at 05.15 local. That gives us an hour to glide down to the DZ and then an hour to get on target and get the attack on.’
Swallow spoke again. He was speaking to me alone. ‘Go get her, Riz. We all miss her. Bang-Bang was a funny girl. OK. Listen in. I’ve been to Bagram. I’ve walked the perimeter. There are two Bagrams. South Bagram is super-organised, ISAF and US Air Force, you get me?’
I got him.
‘Exactly. But North Bagram is total chaos. It’s meant to be run by the Afghan Security Forces…it’s a madhouse. If your fiancée is in it, she’s probably running it as we speak.’
Another voice came in. Briney. ‘Her mate punched me. That mad bird with broken teeth.’
I snapped my head right. ‘Hello Briney. That was Fuzz.’
A wave back. ‘Awight Tel. That bird’s got a punch on her.’
Swallow click-clicked the pressel to clear the channel.
‘OK lads. Let’s get Terry here trained up on tandem-rigging.’
He looked at me. ‘Don’t worry mate, doesn’t take more than twenty minutes. And it’s, oh, about four hours to Cyprus. And another four hours from there to Afghan.’
12
27th September
‘Final drills. Check weapons. Check air. Aircrew. How long, guys?’
Swallow was speaking in our earpieces. We’d climbed to 24,000 feet and gone to oxygen masks an hour ago as we passed 10,000. And we were still climbing, high above the clouds and out of sight and earshot from anybody on the ground. We were all on pure oxygen from the machine on the pallet as we waited. Breathing pure oxy was to reduce the risk from “the bends”, or nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood, as we climbed to drop altitude.
Aircrew replied in our earpieces in scratchy tones. ‘Twenty minutes. Go to carried air.’
We unplugged ourselves from the pallet and switched to the small oxygen bottles on our belts. The loading bay lights were dim red, and had been for a while. Swallow and I now began to buckle ourselves together into the tandem harness. It was a good thing he was a big lad, I was basically hanging off him. Damn this rig was awkward. We were going to fling ourselves into the Afghan airspace from four miles up, so high that no-one on the ground could hear the plane, and Swallow was going to do all the steering. We both made sure everything was strapped down tight, AKs made safe, racing jockey goggles on, oxygen masks clipped snugly. We were all wearing insulated jumpsuits made of special radar-absorbent material.
A loadie held up a flashcard. That was the signal. The team waddled down the fuselage to the carrier ramp in a close file like penguins. The loadies stood around us, holding cards which they illuminated with red orienteering torches strapped to their heads. They presented the cards just like in playschool, in a set order to make sure no-one had missed an item. The loadies also checked their harnesses were attached to the webbing on either side of the fuselage. Nobody wanted to fall out of the plane without a chute. We watched the jumpmaster.
The ramp whined open. We shuffled forward until the team was on the edge. I could hear and see nothing but howling blackness. The four turbines roared. Red lights went on on the left and right of the tailgate.
‘Red on! Red on!’ everybody shouted.
The lights went green.
‘Ready… set… GO!’
We flung ourselves out and off the ramp.
‘Enjoy the ride, Tel’ said Swallow in my headset. Above us, our drogue chute deployed. Around us in the blackness, the other team members would be forming up in a loose diamond pattern around us, watching the tiny glowfly lights on their helmets and grabbing each others’ flightsuits to hold onto that formation. I tried to remember the drills and kept my limbs as straight as possible in the buffeting air. I looked down and around as the howl of the C130’s turbines faded and was replaced by the rushing wind. Now I could see a sprawl of lights through the clouds. Maybe Kabul. If it was, that other cluster would be Bagram to the north. Hello, Afghanistan, here we come, I thought.
At 15,000 feet the diamond formation separated as the team checked their altimeters. Seconds later Swallow’s AOD went and our main chute deployed. THUMP. It was like being on the end of a bungee. We seemed to rush to a halt in the sky and the howl of air stopped. The harness bit into my thighs. Now we would all glide in a series of long curves in the air, down to the landing zone. Above me, I could hear Swallow putting on his night-vision goggles. He’d be looking for the firefly sparks of the other team members’ infra red strobes and watching his chest-harness GPS display, tacking left and right as we went to the little blip of the landing zone, many miles ahead.
‘Got ‘em.’
We trailed down through the night sky, gently forming up into a stack, Swallow and me on the top and bringing up the rear. I tried to relax and enjoy the ride as Swallow had said. I looked around. It was just past three in the morning local time. The moon had just set. We had a good twenty miles to fly and it could take over an hour, depending on the winds.
‘Get ready, Tel. Remember the drills.’
The scented ground of Afghanistan was coming up to us, and then it started to rush.
‘Stand by, stand by… bend ze knees…’
I laughed. I raised my arms and gripped his wrists as he got ready to land. Swallow pulled down on the risers and the chute flared. Below us our packs hit the ground with a small thud on the end of their three-metre line, and then THUMP.
We were down.
Swallow ran us forward a few paces and turned so the lines folded around him. He extracted himself from the chute and unstrapped us. First things first. Swallow cleared and cocked his AK, and patted my shoulder. I unstrapped my AK and tore off the protective taping. We both dropped to one knee and tuned into our surroundings.
Immediately in front of us the rest of the team had landed in puffs of dust, their packs thudding in ahead of them, and they’d done the drills we had. Their chutes and lines were gathered in and they were facing outwards in a loose semi-circle. And now we waited, waited for the night air to envelop us and ambient noises to return. Nothing.
After five long minutes had passed Swallow and Dinger made slow hand signals and we gathered on them. They took fixes of our position on their GPS sets. We took off our flightsuits and laid them in a pile along with the parachute rigs, headgear, goggles, and oxygen masks, and stashed them in a dry culvert nearby. Swallow and Dinger got some brushwood, piled it on, and then laid down something extra we’d brought with us. Desert camouflage netting liberally dressed with local thorns and leaves over it, that the team had spent a day or two making and painting back at Credenhill. We fussed with it for several minutes then stepped back and checked. Invisible for now. Eventually, the gear would be discovered by an ISAF sweep, but that would be after the event. We walked one hundred metres away, regrouped, and took the time to check each other over. We were all dressed Taliban-style, with turbans and scarves to conceal our faces. We looked at each others’ beltkits and I was shown the first aid pack. We then checked our AKs again and moved out north, beginning the walk to the cache, Bagram, and then our attack point.
After an hour’s slow, careful march Swallow held up his hand and we stopped and all dropped to one knee. The team leaders checked with their NVGs, sweeping slowly from left to right.
Before us, like a pale ghost in the pre-dawn gloom, was the hull of the wrecked car we had viewed from the overheads. Swallow came and murmured in my ear ‘we dig the packets in now, under the car’, and then went and muttered the same in Dinger’s ear. We edged forward to the car body and began digging with two entrenching tools. After ten minutes we had a good hide - hole and they placed my two kitbags inside and covered them with earth. But not before Dinger placed a two - kilo PETN explosive charge on top of them and hooked a tripwire into the nearest tyre with some fishing line and hook attached to a ringpull-fuze.
Dinger looked at me and nodded downwards. He had my attention. Any random person investigating this cache would be blown into the stratosphere, and with the amount of unexploded ordnance lying around the Afghan countryside, it would fade into the background.
Swallow took another GPS fix, then took a reading on his Silva compass to be sure and gripped my shoulder. He spoke quietly in my ear again. ‘The cache is 2,110 metres south east of Bagram airbase’s southern fence line corner, heading 2755.5 mils… which is 155 degrees, that’s one-five-five degrees. I’ve already reversed it for you. When you break out, get a fix, and tab two klicks and a bit south-south east.’
I nodded. We moved out again. Every now and again I turned and walked backwards, to look the way we’d come, burning the terrain into my memory as much as I could. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east.
We walked slowly and carefully north alongside irrigation ditches for half an hour. All I could smell was the pervasive stink from the ditches. Ahead of us was a bright glow on the horizon that became a brightly-lit fence line in the distance. An airport, no less. As we watched, a plane came in to land, blacked-out and silhouetted against the base lights.
Swallow spoke. ‘The Emerald City, lads. Here we are.’
He looked at me.‘Now we start the attack on the Septics, mate. OK, stay low, here we go.’
We jogged towards the target until we were roughly three hundred metres away. Close enough to cause a ruckus, not too close to trigger alarms.
I handed my AK to Swallow and hit the ground. I knew what was about to go down. The team ran forward in ragged order, dropped, and opened up on the fence line. I put my hands over my ears to preserve my short-term hearing. Bursts of flame lit up the night. We were go. To my right and left, the RWW guys started shouting fire control orders as they engaged the watchtowers. I hugged the dirt. They doubled back, in a haze of fire and smoke, as planned, and there I was. The sacrificial goat.
I buried my face in the grit and started counting. I counted... and counted. The echoes faded. Like wraiths, they were gone.
And then the noise from the Bagram perimeter started up.
I hugged the dirt. I kept hugging it.
Ten minutes later there was an approaching whine, like a mosquito. It got louder. I felt a touch on my shoulder. I rolled onto my back like a good Taliban insurgent. A robot was inspecting me. This would have to be the US Army. A flare fired from the back of the robot, and within seconds an alsatian was standing over me and barking like it was Doggy Christmas. Three minutes later and a Hummer screeched to a halt to my left in cloud of dust. I heard boots. Flashlights settled on me. I winced. A Specialist First Class was standing over me. She said one word as she aimed the Taser.
‘Motherfucker.’
And then the lights went out.