James Craig - Shoot to Kill

‘Okay.’ Gasparino smiled as Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’ took over the task of numbing his brain. He scanned the dense orchard littered with mines and other ordnance which concealed the irrigation canals used by the Taliban to move freely under the noses of the coalition troops.

‘A chess game,’ was how their Commander had described it in an interview with CNN a few months earlier, ‘played with bullets and IEDs.’

A chess game? Like fuck . Gasparino glanced at the ground a metre in front of him in a half-hearted attempt to identify anything suspicious. Not only was it a waste of time, it only made him feel worse about his situation. Your best hope was that, if you did get blown up, the IED was sufficiently powerful to blast you to smithereens, so that small parts of your body were scattered to the four winds before you even had a chance to realize what had happened. Far better that than losing your legs and bleeding in agony while watching the confused, helpless expressions on the faces of your mates.

‘Your best hope.’ A familiar feeling of the pointlessness of what they were doing engulfed Gasparino. Every day was the same. It was truly remarkable how nothing ever changed. They had about as much chance of pacifying the country as he had of becoming Prime Minister. An estimated 25,000 Taliban fighters kept 140,000 coalition troops, plus the ANA and Afghan police, at bay. The bogus body counts – the US Army claimed to have killed 952 Taliban and captured 2,469 in the last three months – fooled no one. ‘On average,’ said one commander, ‘we’re killing three to five mid-level enemy leaders.’ Well , thought Gasparino, enraged by the corruption and fecklessness of the Afghan government, there are plenty more where they came from .

Not quite twenty-six years old, Gasparino was already on his fifth tour of duty. After three trips to Iraq, this, his second in Afghanistan, would be his last. For him, the war ended here, in the area known as the Devil’s Playground. He had promised Justine, his heavily pregnant wife, that he would leave the Army and get a civilian job.

Time was quickly running out on Gasparino’s Army career. In little over a week, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment were due to turn over their stretch of the Arghandab River Valley, sixty miles from the Pakistan border, to their American replacements from 2-508th Parachute Infantry. The Brits and the Americans were currently patrolling together as part of the handover process. In the pre-dawn twilight, twenty-eight soldiers had left their combat outpost a mile away, heading for the Taliban-controlled vineyards and pomegranate orchards. In the abandoned compound they would wait to engage the enemy as they did almost every day with monotonous regularity.

As he watched his comrades take up their positions around the compound, he idly wondered what he would do in civvy street. Nothing ever came to mind. With a single GSCE in woodwork to his name, Gasparino was not exactly well equipped to deal with the so-called ‘real world’. He had never had a hankering to do anything in particular; that’s why he had joined the bloody Army in the first place. The situation vexed him but there was no point in worrying now; it was something he would just have to deal with next month, when he would be back in England for good.

Alain Costello scratched his belly. ‘I need some new games,’ he told his father down the phone.

Je m’en fous , Tuco Martinez thought angrily. Not for the first time in recent days, he wondered what had happened to Alain’s mother, a nightclub singer from Toulouse who had run off with her ‘business manager’ (read pimp) less than a year after their child had been born.

She had really put one over him. He felt an overwhelming desire to give the bitch a slap for lying to him about her birth control.

And for giving him the clap.

And for stealing 240,000 francs from him – at a time when that sum was still worth something. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was sure she was long since dead, he would have hunted her down and killed her.

On the other hand, she was the only woman who had managed to give him a son. It drove him insane. Disappointment or not, Alain was his only hope for handing the business down to the next generation.

‘I’m bored,’ Alain complained. ‘I need to get something good, like God of War: Ghost of Sparta .’

Tuco shook his head. What did people do before computer games? Wandering around all day like zombies; these things were worse than drugs. He sincerely hoped that the boy was just winding him up. The alternative – that he was just stupid- was something that he refused to contemplate. ‘Enough with the games!’ he barked.

‘It’s totally boring here,’ the boy whined. ‘I want to come home.’

Tuco sighed. Looking out through the open windows, past the terrace towards the cool blue of the Mediterranean, he tried to work out where the sea ended and the sky began. It was a view he could stare at for hours on end without getting bored; one of the few things in life that made him feel calm. ‘ Tu dois rester là-bas pour le moment ,’ he told his son.

‘Fuck. C’est trop banal ici. Je crève d’ennui et il pleut sans cesse .’

Tuco allowed himself a little laugh. He knew what the kid meant. He didn’t like going to London himself. It was a total shithole. But it was a shithole full of customers. He was in business, so you had to respect that. The market was always right: you had to follow the money. Aucune question .

Traditionally, outside of France, Tuco had always lacked what business analysts called ‘critical mass’. London was waiting for him like a big, fat whore, her legs wide open. The problem was, his dick was just too small to give her a proper seeing-to. He needed more sales, growing revenues if he was to become a player and take the business to the next level. That meant finding a serious local business partner, someone with a successful track record and a good reputation. After a couple of expensive false starts, Tuco was optimistic that he had finally found that man.

He suddenly caught sight of one of the hookers he’d brought down from Paris for the weekend strolling towards the pool. Black as ebony, she wore a fetching canary-yellow bra but was naked from the waist down. ‘Look,’ he said to Alain, his voice thickening. ‘You have to stay where you are for a while. I need some time to sort this out.’

‘But-’

‘No buts,’ Tuco snapped. ‘Just keep out of sight. I will speak to my – our – business partner in London. He will make sure you are well looked after. I’ll even ask him to get you some more games.’ Before the boy could complain any further, Tuco ended the call. Tossing the handset onto a nearby sofa, he headed for the pool.

The temperature was well on the way to a humid 100 degrees. Sitting in the dust, with his back resting against the outside wall of an empty hut, Adrian Gasparino took a mouthful of water from his bottle and thought about Justine back home in Worthing. Hopefully she would be getting a good night’s sleep around now. He hadn’t spoken to her for a few days. She was due to have a scan of the baby this week but he couldn’t remember which day. Gasparino wanted a boy. Justine hadn’t been convinced that they were ready to start a family, but couldn’t go through with an abortion and he had talked her round. They could have a boy now and then a girl later, once he had sorted himself out with a decent job. Maybe a third one a little later down the line.

Perfect.

From behind his Oakley M Frames, he watched as one of the Americans, a sergeant called Anthony Withers, strolled over, placed his M-16 carefully against the wall and dropped heavily onto the ground beside him.