James Craig - Shoot to Kill

Not knowing when to stay schtum, the man was about to talk himself into a cell when there was an almighty commotion from the back of the stage. One of the officers, a young PC called Lea, came sprawling through a doorway, holding his nose as blood poured from it. ‘I’ve been hit!’ he groaned, stumbling over the edge of the stage and falling flat on his face. The laughter that rolled round the room was quickly followed by gasps of amazement as a raven-haired Amazon followed the hapless Lea through the door. Easily six foot tall, she was completely naked apart from a pair of incredibly high stilettoes.

Those look very classy , thought Carlyle, impressed. And she’s gone to town with the Philips Ladyshave . A true professional.

In her hand, the woman had some kind of cosh. With an angry flourish, she brandished it at Lea. ‘C’mon, you bastard!’ she screamed, in what seemed to Carlyle to be some kind of American accent. ‘Come and get another thrashing.’ Whimpering, Lea sought refuge under a nearby table.

Finally tearing his eyes away, Carlyle looked at his troops. Those that weren’t mesmerized were drooling. ‘Okay,’ he sighed, gesturing to Bishop, ‘that’s enough. Take them all in. We’ll sort this out at the station.’ Swivelling on his heel, he walked straight into a man in a baseball cap with a large video camera on his shoulder. ‘Who the fucking hell are you?’ he barked.

The guy readjusted his cap and kept filming. ‘Danny Craven, Scattered Flowers Productions.’

‘What?’

Keeping his eye glued to the viewfinder, Craven pulled a crumpled business card from the back pocket of his jeans and thrust it towards Carlyle. ‘Content providers for the Mayor’s website.’

Reluctantly taking the card, the inspector weighed it in his hand as if it was a piece of desiccated dog shit. Several thoughts passed through his mind, none of them pleasant. ‘Fuck that,’ he said, striding towards the door. ‘Sergeant Bishop! You can arrest this stupid fucker as well.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Bishop with a smile.

Sticking to his task, Craven went in for a close-up on the belligerent stripper.

‘Good man!’ Carlyle shoved Craven’s card into his jacket pocket. Over his shoulder, he gave the troops a regal wave. ‘I’ll see you back at Agar Street.’ After , he said to himself, I’ve had a decent kip .

Another day, another dollar. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Adrian Gasparino watched as a small contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers entered the compound, looking like a bunch of schoolkids on a day out. As far as he knew, they hadn’t been expecting any ANA, but that didn’t mean much – they had a habit of just showing up.

Given that the ANA were usually quite good at arriving in places where there wasn’t going to be any fighting, he was happy enough to see them. Maybe this would be a quiet day at the office for all of them. He counted a dozen of them as they stood aimlessly in a group about twenty feet from where he was sitting. None of them looked older than about fourteen; they were small, stick-thin, their uniforms several sizes too big, with hollow cheeks and dead eyes. Gasparino sighed. The idea that the coalition forces could train these boys to take the place of professional soldiers was just another of the fantasies you had to believe in if you were to try and convince yourself that this was a war worth fighting and that the billions of dollars’ of weapons, equipment and aid thrown at the locals had been money well spent.

The British Prime Minister, a feckless ex-public schoolboy by the name of Edgar Carlton, had recently said that the 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan could start withdrawing from as early as next year. British commanders were under ever-greater pressure to talk up the ANA and its ability to take over responsibility for security in the country. The 146,000 trained ‘Afghan warriors’ had to be praised at all times. Gasparino had been particularly amused by the comments of the Commanding Officer of Task Force Helmand Brigade Advisory Group at one press conference: ‘They are brave in the fight. They are willing to tackle the insurgents head on and they are astute and shrewd in their judgement when they are dealing with the local population.’

If the embedded hacks had taken the comments at face value, the soldiers had been somewhat more sceptical. ‘Bollocks,’ had been the sergeant’s mumbled response. ‘I wouldn’t want those bastards watching my back.’

Most of the ANA soldiers carried M-16 assault rifles, although Gasparino noticed a couple carried AK-74s, weapons left over from the days when the Soviets had been fighting here. One of them had a 7.62mm, M240 machine gun slung over his shoulder. All of them looked jumpy, although that was the usual state for members of the ANA. Gasparino noticed that a couple of them were holding hands, ‘man love’ being Standard Operating Procedure in the ANA. He shook his head, mumbling the local Afghan saying to himself: ‘ Women are for children, boys are for pleasure .’ It was accepted that many Pashtun men were bacha baz – ‘boy players’. Like his colleagues, Gasparino had been shocked by the tradition of Afghan men taking boys, some as young as eight or nine, as lovers. In Kandahar, on an earlier tour, he had been to a dance party where boys of around nine dressed up as girls, with make-up and bells on their feet, performing for leering middle-aged men who threw money at them before whisking them off for sex. One of the unit’s translators, Rahmatullah, had explained to him that it was down to Islamic law. Women – covered from head to foot – are invisible and unapproachable. It is commonly accepted that Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after they have proposed marriage. ‘How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?’ Rahmatullah asked. ‘We can see the boys, so we can tell which ones are beautiful.’

‘But,’ Gasparino frowned, ‘doesn’t Islamic law also forbid homosexuality?’

‘We don’t love them,’ Rahmatullah shrugged, ‘we just have sex with them.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Gasparino laughed nervously. ‘You make it sound like the Catholic Church.’

Rahmatullah gave him a confused look.

‘Never mind.’

‘Are you after a boy yourself?’

‘Er, no thanks.’ Gasparino felt himself blush violently as he beat a hasty retreat back to the camp.

It was a conversation that Gasparino had played over in his head many times. However you looked at it, the set-up was basically institutionalized child abuse. He was all for religious tolerance, but couldn’t get past the fact that many aspects of the treatment of children and women here were just plain wrong. He thought about what his own family life would be like – a world away from this – and felt more confused than ever about what he was supposed to be doing here. The whole situation made him hugely uneasy – but he had no idea what he could do about it.

He watched as one of the sergeants, Spencer Spanner, wandered over to the ANA’s commanding officer, a lieutenant who was still too young to be able to grow a proper beard, shook hands and started talking. There was the usual gesturing and waving, head-scratching and grinning as Spanner explained about the day’s operation and tried to get to the bottom of just what exactly it was that the ANA were up to. Gasparino felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. Spanner was a great bloke; he would miss him, back in England. Closing his eyes, his mind wandered to the shower he would have back at camp. After that he would try and call Justine, leaving it as late as possible, in case today was the date of her scan.

The receptionist had disappeared without a trace. Sitting in the empty waiting room, with nothing on the off-white walls, Roche looked around for something to read. But there were no pamphlets, no magazines to browse, not so much as a copy of yesterday’s Standard or today’s Metro . The idea was that you just sat there and contemplated your fate.