Jill McGivering - The Last Kestrel

Two more lads were riding top cover, cut off at the chest; head and shoulders sticking up out of the vehicle, out of sight. When she tried to look forward, her view was filled by their broad thighs. Their scrambling feet kicked out wildly for support every time the Snatch rocked and pitched. Dillon, the lad next to her, kept getting a boot in the groin as they felt for footholds. He swore under his breath. She squeezed herself further into the corner to give him more room.

A sudden stink broke out in the hot air. Dillon flapped his hands in front of his face wildly.

‘Hold it in, Moss.’ Dillon gave one of the top cover guys a sharp poke.

The young lad, Hancock, riding top cover with Moss, ducked his head down for a second, caught the whiff and gave a snorting laugh. Dillon kicked out at him before he straightened up again. Ellen watched the way they argued, jostled for position. They were only kids. She’d spoken to Hancock, the quietest in the group, in the darkness before they set off. He was eighteen, he said, keeping his voice low. He’d joined up in January and been sent out here right after training. He looked shell-shocked already.

‘Sorry, Ma’am.’ Frank, embarrassed.

She shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’ I’m harder to offend than you realize, she thought. And I’ll be safer if you think of me as one of you. ‘And call me Ellen.’

The Sergeant Major, invisible to her in the front, barked something into the radio sets. Frank sighed and started scrabbling under the seats, checking wiring or groping for a piece of kit.

Dillon leaned towards her, knocking knees. ‘Sergeant Major says you’re famous. Like Kate Adie.’ His eyes were full of life. A cheeky lad, good humoured and excited.

‘Like who?’ Frank, pausing in his grovelling on the floor, had lifted his head to listen, watching her with new interest.

‘Nothing so glamorous,’ she said to Dillon. ‘I’m with a news magazine.’

‘He said you’ve covered more wars than he has,’ Dillon went on. ‘That true?’

‘I don’t keep count.’

‘Cool.’ Dillon looked impressed. ‘Which ones?’

‘Crimea?’ said Frank, and sniggered like a schoolboy.

Dillon kicked out at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody rude, you.’ A vicious bounce of the Snatch knocked him off the seat onto the floor. He cracked his shin on the metalwork of the back door and swore. Frank doubled up with laughter. Dillon, trying to regain dignity, crawled through the kicking legs to a box and handed her back a bottle of water. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he said, nodding at Frank. ‘Tosser.’

Ellen turned her face to the square of bulletproof window and watched the swirls of dust they were throwing up behind them, blurring the outline of the next heaving Snatch in line. There was a dull red glow in the sky beyond. The night was starting to bleed back into day. It was so cold, it was hard to believe that in a few hours, once the heat built up, they’d all long for the chill of night again. The stuffy darkness of the Snatch, with its swaying, crashing motion, and her nervous apprehension about what lay ahead, made her dull with sickness as they drove on across the desert and the light outside whitened into morning.

They stopped. Frank unbolted the back door and climbed out over her, weapon readied. Then Dillon. A moment later they came back for her. She dropped out of the back, weighed down by her flak jacket and helmet. The dry desert air was a relief. She stood for a moment, enjoying the escape from the petrol fumes, getting her bearings.

‘What next?’ she said to Dillon. He shrugged, looked away. Frank was already walking towards a mud-walled compound where other soldiers were sloughing off their packs. Dillon turned and followed him.

She put her hands on her hips, breathed deeply and scanned the terrain. They’d stopped just short of a natural ridge. Behind them, the way they’d come, lay a desiccated brown landscape of dirty sand, rocks and low scrub. Its lines were broken by simple mud-brick houses, each set apart from the others and enclosed in its own protective boundary walls. No people were visible. The only sign of life came from a pack of scavenging dogs. They were trotting, lean and mangy, across the plain.

Ahead, far below, the slow snake of a river drew a glistening line through a valley. Beyond it, thickly planted corn waved from fields, scored through by the lines of trees that defined the green zone. She narrowed her eyes against the light. The outline of a village was visible a few kilometres in, high on the hill. That must be the first target.

Thick dust, stirred up by the convoy of military vehicles, was billowing in filthy clouds all around her. More Snatches were pulling up, filling the air with fine grit, disgorging soldiers. The day’s heat was gathering. The men streamed towards the compound, bowed under the weight of the packs on their backs, shoving, talking in low voices, lighting cigarettes. She hesitated, watching them, then pulled off her helmet, as they had done, and followed.

Dillon, Frank and the others were settling against a low mud wall, smoking, rucksacks dumped at their feet. They looked tense. Freshly arriving soldiers streamed past them, competing for a place in the shade. To the side, a knot of officers was forming. They were talking in glassy public school voices. Binoculars hung from their necks. Radios squawked like parrots. Behind them, yet more vehicles were coming crashing over the desert, raising clouds of dust.

The young officers straightened up and lowered their voices. Mack appeared amongst them, not the tallest in the group but the oldest and broadest. She noted the way the other men shifted to accommodate him, deferring to him as the pack’s Alpha male. Mack exchanged a few words as he passed through, then barrelled straight towards her. Heads turned, following him.

‘Enjoy the ride?’

He leaned forward to speak to her. She caught the scent of army soap on his skin, undercut by adrenalin. As he opened his mouth to say more, a jet screeched overhead. A minute later, a flash of fire ignited out in the corn, on the far side of the valley. Smoke rose. A few seconds after that, a delayed boom.

‘Five hundred-pounder?’ she said.

Mack nodded. ‘Air offensive’s starting.’

The smoke was starting to disperse in black clouds across the corn.

‘Is it clear of civilians?’

‘We’ve issued warnings.’ His body was hard with tension, his face serious. She sensed Dillon, Frank and some of the other lads looking over at them.

Mack pulled a satellite map from his pocket and spread it out on the sand. She picked out the villages from the office map, several of them, and, in the fields, dozens of small squares that showed individual Afghan compounds. They’d be good defences, thick mud walls that could withstand artillery. They’d been built for war. The country had seen little else.

Mack started to brief her, pointing with a long finger. ‘That’s the river.’

She made her own calculations, fitting the map to the scene below them. The distances weren’t great but the terrain had its own natural fortification. The dips and ridges. The river and the steep rise beyond. And the scattered compounds. No wonder the Taliban had managed to hold it for the last few years. She felt a sense of foreboding, wondering how many failed assaults there’d been.

Heavy digging equipment was already being shunted into position at the waterside. Soldiers in the tan and brown of desert camouflage were waving their arms, signalling to the men inside the vehicles.

‘The engineers are throwing a basic bridge across. Then the men go in on foot.’ Mack traced their route on the map. ‘Up the far bank, through the fields, storming the compounds, one at a time. Then up there. That’s the first village we’ll head for.’