The Last Kestrel

‘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.’

‘Think you’ll secure it today?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends what we find.’

He always said ‘we’, not ‘they’, she noted. He seemed to be a man who identified with his boys.

‘You can watch the progress pretty well from here,’ he was saying. He fingered the binoculars round his neck, lifted them to his eyes to scan the valley. He seemed to be looking forward to it, as if he’d bagged her a good spot at the races.

She looked past him. Moss, the fat one, and Dillon were hunched over their mess tins, boiling up foil sachets of food. Hancock, the young lad, was lolling against the wall, his eyes closed. He had an iPod stuck in his ears, his head trailing wires like a badly made bomb. He looked stressed as hell. She wondered why he wasn’t eating. No one seemed to have noticed.

‘I’ll go in with the first wave,’ she said.

Mack lifted the binoculars away from his eyes. ‘I really don’t—’

‘My risk.’ She looked him full in the face. ‘That’s fine. I need to be up close.’

His expression was thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure I can allow that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re—’

‘Come on, Mack.’ She nodded at him, trying to camouflage her nerves and sound breezy. He was a senior officer and she was pushing her luck. ‘Sure you can.’

He paused, considering her closely. ‘I’ll see,’ he said at last, and walked off.

When Frank and Dillon stubbed out their cigarettes and got to their feet, she crossed over to them. The Sergeant Major appeared, fastening his helmet. He looked at her for a second, then pushed his eyes past her.

‘Lids on, lads,’ he said. ‘Time’s up.’

‘Fucking hope not,’ said Dillon.

Hancock, beside him, looked grey with nerves.

They tightened their body armour, fastened helmets, swung their packs onto their backs and picked up their weapons. They lined up in single file, ready to head down the hill, a tense, silent group. She stood beside them, waiting.

Just as they seemed ready to set off, Mack reappeared. He spoke in a low voice to the Sergeant Major and they both turned to look at her. Their faces were stern. She wondered what they made of her. Once upon a time, when she started all this, soldiers used to stare because she was long-limbed and attractive and they couldn’t take her seriously. Now she was pushing middle age and they must think her a liability, an oddball maiden aunt who might need rescuing when the shit hit. She shrugged her flak jacket to a new position on her shoulders, switching bruises. She could move a lot faster without the damn thing. It didn’t even fit properly.

Mack beckoned her towards him. ‘Go if you want to,’ he said. His eyes were thoughtful. ‘But it’s your risk.’

He spoke quietly, acknowledging that they both understood what might lie ahead.

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

The men around her were starting to move. She hesitated for a moment, steeling herself, then forced herself to press forward and join them before she could think any more about it. Mack stood, unsmiling, and watched her, binoculars idle on his chest. She fixed her eyes on Dillon’s broad back and fell into step, stretching her stride to match her footprint to his. Hancock was behind her, his breathing as shallow as her own.

They threaded their way down the hillside and reached the bridge. The soldiers grouped there, the bridge builders, ran their eyes over her as she mounted the treads. The rush of the river rose from below. A broad, fast-flowing river. The Taliban must have thought an attack from this side was impossible. Her boots rattled on loose metal. The scream of a jet and a dull boom from the hillside ahead told her the bombs were still falling. When she reached the other side of the bridge, her boots hit earth again and silence.

She followed Dillon into the first field, into thick curtains of corn. It was high, ready for harvesting, stretching up above her head. Visibility was terrible. The corn cloaked everything. There could be a whole army out there, low against the ground. She steadied her breathing. The corn stank, a bland, cloying smell of dry grass. Flies were buzzing round her face. Her helmet slipped heavily back and forth as she moved her head, tugging at its chin-strap. Diagonally, through the crops, she could see muddy irrigation ditches. Good hiding places for fighters who knew the ground. Her ears thumped with her own blood and the swish of corn against her boots and body.

Dillon ducked suddenly to one side and she flattened herself into the corn behind him. The firm earth was a relief and absorbed the shake in her limbs. She thought of the layout of the satellite map. They should be approaching the first compound. Ahead, someone fired a shot. Silence. The scratch of a voice on Dillon’s radio. He started creeping forward again, bent double. She followed, keeping close to him.

At the edge of the field, the land opened out. The next field was full of rows of low bushes. A dull, mud-walled building rose beyond it, a primitive house with a single round hole for a window. The walls looked thick. It must be black as night inside.

The Sergeant Major and Moss were crouching behind the low compound wall with their weapons trained on the black rectangle of the doorway. The Sergeant Major was hollering something in a Lancastrian version of Pashto. ‘Raw-ooza! Raw-ooza!’

A sudden movement to the side of the building. She swung and stared into the dopey brown eyes of a donkey as it stuttered into view from behind the corner. It reached the extent of its tether and was jerked back, its head jolted, its eyes rolling white, its long ears flattened in fright against its head. Dillon raised his gun and took aim. The donkey backed clumsily, as if it knew, and disappeared again with a toss of its head.

The Sergeant Major fired a high warning shot. Two men had appeared in the doorway, walking forward into the earth yard. Their eyes were wide with terror, their hands high in the air. One of the men was elderly, tottering on bent legs. His beard was white and ragged. His lips were moving soundlessly, either in fright or prayer. The other man was stout and middle-aged, a fat belly bulging beneath his long kameez. Their clothes looked threadbare, pathetic. They shuffled forward in rope sandals, round hats perched on their heads.

Ellen had reached the cover of the wall now and threw herself down against Dillon, her helmet banging round her face. A moment later, Hancock bumped up against her on the other side. He and Dillon stuck their weapons along the top of the wall and gave cover as the Sergeant Major and Moss went forward and pushed the Afghan men down on their knees. They pressed them against the outside of the building, their hands splayed palm-out against the mud above their heads. Moss patted them down. Nothing. The Sergeant Major was shouting for a translator, signalling the rest of them forward. The back of the old man was shaking violently as he crouched against the wall.