Rain (18 page)

The wagons bumped in and out of the puddles in a bid to outrun the dark. Twice they had to stop to barma VPs where they were bottlenecked. The barma team swept over the first area with their customary thoroughness, and they were four hundred metres shy of Yukshal when they came to the second VP. After this they could trust that the route north, completely in sight of Yukshal and other checkpoints, was clear. It was now very gloomy; the sun had disappeared and its residual light was being dragged away after it.

They halted at the VP, and the barma team spilt out of Jessie’s wagon. Tom’s wagon pulled up twenty metres behind them, and he watched with pride as the boys clinically and thoroughly swept the area, found nothing and then returned to their wagon. They relaxed at the doors, their tension melting away. That was the last barma in their capacity as the Mastiff troop; now they’d be back on the Scimitars and able to leave the role behind. Tom felt the strain drain away from him as well. After this VP all that remained was a clear run north. They’d be back in thirty minutes.

Tom dropped inside his wagon and saw with amusement that both the padre and Dusty were snoozing in the back, lulled into sleep by the motion of the Mastiff as it bounced up the route. Over the intercom he bantered with Davenport, who was cocooned from the world in his driver’s seat.

Tom got back up into the turret, and everything started to happen in slow motion. The barma team were still standing
at the back of Jesmond’s wagon. About to shout forward to them to get on board and stop dallying, through the shadows to his right a movement flashed in the corner of his eye, and Tom swivelled the
GMG
out of an animal instinct more than any rational judgement. A dart of light blazed from about a hundred metres away; he saw a figure standing next to a compound wall, and he realized at once that it was an RPG man. He registered a huge explosion as the rocket hit Jessie’s wagon, garish white phosphorus shooting up into the early-evening sky.

Still Tom kept the GMG turning, and suddenly he was looking down its sights at the man. Immediately and without thinking, he felt his freezing fingers switch the gun to fire and then his hand squeeze the trigger handle as he sent a hammering burst of eight grenades towards the gunman. They exploded all around him in firework-like flashes. Tom saw the man fall, pitching straight forward onto his face, and a spear of adrenaline fizzed through his brain. He realized at that moment what it was he had done: he had killed a man, and he had done it subconsciously, as an automaton. He wanted to scream with delight.

He dropped down inside the wagon. ‘Dusty, Dusty, contact, contact! I just wasted an RPG man!’ Dusty was out of his seat. He popped open the hatch at the rear of the wagon and slickly unslung the gimpy strapped inside. Tom’s earphones sprung into life. It was Jessie.

‘Hello, Three Zero, this is Three Two. We have a casualty from the RPG. I say again, casualty. My Alpha Charlie callsign. Don’t know what’s wrong with him exactly. Over.’

Tom’s throat went dry, and he looked out of the turret. His eyes struggled to readjust to the dark after the yellow light of the Mastiff’s interior. He couldn’t see Jessie’s wagon properly but could only make out in the dark a commotion
at the rear of it. Over the intercom he said calmly, ‘Dav, headlights on.’

Davenport flicked on the headlights and the scene in front of them appeared in surgical white. Three of the boys were kneeling down around another sprawled out on the ground. Through the earphones again came Jessie, panicked this time.

‘Yeah, Three Zero, Three Two. We’ve got real trouble here. Confirm
Zap number
Alpha Charlie Two Six Six Five. He’s bleeding really badly.’

Tom felt his stomach leave him, and everything seemed to become silent.
Acton
. Acton was hit. Tom didn’t even really know him. He paused just for a second, which seemed to stretch over minutes. He felt a tiny bit of bile rise from his gut; he swallowed it down and then hit it, hit the zone. Things started to happen very quickly. He dropped back down inside, ripped his headphones off, grabbed his rifle from its slot, screamed, ‘Cover me, Stardust, cover me,’ pulled his way past the padre and jumped out the rear doors on to the frosty ground and turned to sprint up the track.

He ran out of the dark into the light thrown by the headlights and came to the back of Jessie’s wagon. As he broke into their group GV looked up at him and said, ‘It’s all right, fellas. Boss here, boss here.’ Acton was lying on his back, his large round face pale with thin streaks of blood trickling from his nostrils. The boys had already put two dressings on his legs, which looked horribly torn. Blood oozed out of wounds where his trousers had been shredded away, but Tom could tell that they weren’t life-threatening; the blood was dark not arterial, and wasn’t coming out quickly. But he couldn’t work out why Acton was so white. He was convulsing in spastic, violent spasms, and was hardly responding to the boys’ efforts to get him to stay awake.

Tom looked around him and saw Livesey vomiting and crying. ‘Hey, GV, get that cunt back in the wagon. Get him away from here.’ GV got up and hurled the cowering Livesey into the wagon. Tom focused back on Acton.
Where was the blood coming from? Why did he seem to be so badly hurt?
‘Fellas, we need to strip him down, get his body armour off.’ Tom and Ellis tore off Acton’s Osprey, which revealed his saturated under-armour shirt. When Tom pulled this up a great flood of blood spread out from his torso, washing over the white ground and, unable to soak into the hard earth, drenching their knees.

‘Where the fuck’s his wound? Where the fuck’s the wound?’ said Tom as he ripped his shemagh from his neck and furiously tried to dab away the blood to see any sign of skin rupture. He felt like an art expert feeling a piece of silver which he knew, somewhere, had a dent in it. But where was it? ‘More light, we need more light.’ The headlights were helpful but they kept on throwing shadows over the convulsing torso. One of the boys flicked his head torch on. ‘Good lad. Keep that light there, keep that light there.’ Tom kept mopping away the blood. And then he saw it. It was a cut, only about an inch long, where Acton’s ribcage met his right armpit. Blood, frothy and scarlet, was pouring freely out of it. ‘OK, OK, we’ve got the bleed, we’ve got the bleed. Someone give me a fucking hemcon.’

Again the boys’ drills showed. All the lessons and reruns that Tom and Trueman had insisted on back in the summer in the green Pembrokeshire fields paid off, and Ellis whipped out a hemcon from his med pouch. ‘Ell, get that in there.’ Ellis went to work, and Tom was able to step back from the bleeding and shivering torso, the white flesh stark against the black around it. Acton’s mouth was now frothing blood, and he was choking. Tom realized he was about thirty minutes,
max, away from death, if he was lucky. He had no idea how long he’d been over the body; he had to get on the net to start the casevac. If Acton didn’t get to a MERT within half an hour he’d
bleed out
. Tom had no idea of the extent of internal bleeding. He climbed into Jessie’s wagon.

‘Jessie, here’s the plan. I’m going to get Yam-Yam back into my car; there’s too many lads in yours and Three One’s got the generator in it. Send this to battle group while me and GV get Yam-Yam to mine. Get Minuteman Nine One on the line and tell him that we’ve got a Cat A and we’re going to get him best speed to Newcastle. Tell him to get the MERT moving to Newcastle’s HLS. Roger?’

‘Got it, boss.’

‘Also tell him that if he can, get the QRF to crash out with the doc in it, and see if we can meet him on the way. He desperately needs a doc and I reckon a shedload of blood and IV. The sooner he can get an expert the better. Clear?’

‘Clear, boss.’

‘Right, GV and I will get Yam-Yam back. When he’s in my wagon GV will run forward to you, and when he’s back, that’s your signal. Hell for leather all the way home. Stop for nothing until we RV with the doc. OK?’

‘No dramas, boss.’ Jessie switched to the battle group net and started sending to BGHQ: ‘Hello, Minuteman Zero, this is Tomahawk Three Two. Reference that Cat A casualty, plan from my Sunray. Over …’

Tom jumped back out onto the ground and briefed up the boys. Snow now swirled in the headlights. Acton was breathing softly and shivering as they tried to keep him warm and his wounds plugged. ‘Boys, on the wagon, now. GV, you’re good to take Yam-Yam back to Three Zero, aren’t you?’ He had to be. GV was the only person in the squadron
of even remotely comparable size to Acton, and they had no stretcher.

‘Yeah, boss, I got him. It’s good. It’s good.’

‘Let’s do it.’

They hauled Acton up and heaved him onto GV’s shoulders, who panted under the weight. He set off but slipped on the dark blood congealing on the ground and dropped his cargo. He lay there sprawled, his limbs intertwined with Acton’s.

‘Fuck fuck fuck. Sorry, boss. I slipped. Let me try again.’

Acton moaned with pain. They picked him up again and this time GV was all right.

‘GV, let’s go! GV, let’s go!’

The boys got back on board as GV stumbled down the track, Tom hustling behind him, still in the headlights of Three Zero and with no cover at all. And then, above the hum of the engines from their left, automatic fire came at them, and shafts of tracer pummelled into the earth at their feet and fizzed between them. ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ said Tom. He switched his rifle to automatic and on the run, from the hip, unloosed the entire magazine in a three-second burst back in the direction of the muzzle flashes.

He had no idea whether the rounds were on target, but it felt good to send some back. His ears rang with the beat of his rifle and his nostrils filled with cordite. Still the rounds came as they continued their now painfully slow waddle. One of the yellow bolts passed between GV’s legs, and Tom felt a round whistle past his nose. And then the hammering of a .50 cal came from Trueman’s wagon in the rear of the column. Dusty on the gimpy also started to engage, unfurling a carpet of fire to cover them.

It took an age, but with Trueman’s .50 still belting out a
staccato beat Tom and GV reached the cover of the Mastiff and escaped the glare of its headlights. They reached the back, where the padre was kneeling inside with open arms to drag Acton aboard. With surprising strength he pulled him in and laid him down on the seats, and Tom, standing on the tailgate, turned to GV. ‘You can’t go back in this fire. Get aboard.’

He tried to yank him onto the wagon, but GV turned to him, his bright honest eyes gleaming with adrenaline. ‘No, boss. No room on wagon, innit. Yam-Yam gotta lie down. I’m too big to fit in, innit.’ He turned to run back towards Three Two.

Tom called after him, ‘No, GV! Come back!’ But to no avail. GV raced down the track and passed once again into the open killing ground of the ambush. ‘Dusty, Dusty, give GV some cover!’ Immediately Dusty opened up again, burst after burst flying into the dark. Tom looked back up the track, willing him to make it. A beam of tracer slewed into GV’s head, and he went down like a rabbit, his great lumbering form reduced to a rubber-limbed doll. ‘GV!’ Tom screamed, and the world collapsed in on him; this was now an unmitigated disaster. A chill swept over him; were any of them going to escape this ambush?

Just as he gulped down his fear and his muscles tensed to begin the lonely sprint over to GV’s corpse, Tom saw GV rise again from the ground, totter and then continue his run all the way to the back of Three Two, where he was dragged in by friendly hands. Jessie’s wagon immediately started moving. Tom got in his own Mastiff and clambered over the padre, whose fingers were now deep inside Acton’s ribcage and who was up to his elbows in blood. Tom grabbed the net off Dusty. ‘Hello, Three Two, this is Three Zero. Tell me about the Golf Alpha callsign. What’s wrong with him? Over.’

Jessie’s voice came back, drunk with joyful shock, his VP going out of the window, ‘Yeah, boss, it’s OK. It’s OK. GV’s just been hit on the helmet. Bounced clean off.’ He started laughing. ‘But he’s all right, he’s all right; the big ox is up again. Not even a scratch. He says he hasn’t even got a headache, but he’s sure as fuck going to go spastic on the next Talib he meets! Over.’

Rounds slammed into the Mastiff’s side, flat thuds that reverberated around the cab. Tom yanked Dusty down from his hatch, screamed forward to Davenport to follow Jessie and said to Dusty, ‘Stardust, get on the GMG. I need to be in the cab talking to Zero.’

‘No probs, boss.’ Dusty sank back down into the Mastiff’s body with the gimpy, unloaded it, rested it on the floor, swerved around Tom and got back on the GMG in the main turret. Tom could hear Trueman’s .50 behind him laying down a valediction to the ambush site.

‘Hello, Minuteman Nine One, this is Tomahawk Three Zero Alpha. Has my Three Two callsign updated you on our situation and plan? Over.’

Immediately the reply came back from Jules Dennis, friendly, understanding: ‘Roger. Tomahawk Three Zero understood. Your Three Two has briefed me up. We’re crashing out the QRF down Canterbury now, with the doc callsign. Going to make best speed to you. When you RV the doc will jump aboard and you’ll continue north to Newcastle. Roger so far over.’

Tom felt a surge of optimism. Maybe they could win this race. ‘Tomahawk Three Zero roger so far over.’

‘Minuteman Nine One, the MERT is on its way from Bastion to the HLS at my location. We’re going to need a MIST for them. We’ve got Mike and the India, but we need the Sierra and the Tango. Please send. Over.’

‘Tomahawk Three Zero roger. Wait Out.’

He put the headset down and looked at Acton. He was hanging in there but only just. His eyes were flickering open and he was trying to speak. His lips were moving, first quickly, then slowly. The padre remained with his fingers inserted resolutely inside his ribcage.

‘Padre, doc’s on his way down. I need to get his signs and his treatment for the MIST. What are you thinking?’

‘I’ve been around enough hospital wards in my time to know a thing or two about wounds. I think I’ve got the external bleed, but he’s really badly hurt internally. One of his arteries is pouring blood somewhere into his trunk and I have no idea where. I don’t know if he’s going to make it, Thomas. How long have we got to go?’