For Valour (12 page)

‘Everything.’

4

‘The Chinook dropped us ten Ks away from our target and we tabbed in at last light. You know what it’s like up there. Whoever has control of the high ground is king, especially around the mouth of the dam, and we wanted to be dug in well before the players showed up.’

I could tell from Fred’s body language that a part of him was already back there.

‘Some hope. The Taliban were already waiting, precisely where we wanted to be. God knows how many of them. We started taking fire seconds after we got in the zone.

‘We knew we wouldn’t get anywhere near the players without top cover, so we took cover beneath an outcrop, Guy got onto the task commander back at Bastion, and he sent in the Apaches. Then we split into two groups, to work our way around each flank in time to cut off their escape.’

He leaned back and massaged his right knee.

‘It was never going to be easy fighting our way uphill.’

I nodded. It never is.

‘It was almost vertical in places. We should have brought belaying ropes and crampons. We were in our regular kit, hanging on with our toecaps and our fingernails. But by then we were committed.

‘My group managed to stay together. Guy’s …’ Fred concentrated hard on ripping the lid off another bottle of Cobra. He wasn’t thirsty. He just needed to buy himself some time. ‘Guy’s team weren’t so lucky.’

He gripped the beer bottle but rotated it on its base instead of raising it to his lips. ‘They found their way into a gully. Like a lift shaft, in cover, all the way to the top. They piled up it, thinking all their Christmases had come at once.

‘When we heard the Apaches, we thought we were back in the driving seat. They started to hose down the high ground and the Taliban scattered. The four of us had skirted around the back of their position, as we’d planned, and were laying down some fire …’ He closed his fingers around the neck of his bottle like he was trying to throttle it. ‘Then we heard Chris lose his footing over the PRR …’

Chris Matlock had been bringing up the rear. Maybe he got careless. They heard him say, ‘Fuck,’ then a scrabbling sound, then nothing. They reckoned that either his headset had become disconnected or his radio had been shunted off his body armour as he bounced back down the mountain.

‘He must have fallen thirty metres, Nick, maybe more. The Amigos couldn’t call down to him without giving away their position, and he couldn’t call up.’

‘Sam went after him. But he wasn’t quick enough. The Taliban got there first. At least a dozen of them, Sam told us. All over Chris, like maggots. And they carried him off. He didn’t even fire a round. He must have damaged himself or got separated from his weapon on the way down as well.’

Fred went silent again, staring right through me. Ken moved in closer to him and clapped a party-size arm around his shoulders. After a moment, he continued.

‘The Taliban kicked off two or three RPGs at the Apaches and they lifted away. The helis with the bayonets weren’t due to show up for another couple of hours. Everything went quiet.’

They could see movement below them through their NVGs, but couldn’t be certain where they’d taken him. The ground dropped away in a series of terraces. They headed back downhill, away from the reservoir. But the main enemy force had dug themselves in a couple of hundred or so further on, and had no intention of letting Fred’s lot get any closer.

They knew that the Taliban were up to something, but every time they raised their heads, they got brassed up. The Three Amigos were in a similar position, five hundred further along the bank of the reservoir.

Then the screaming began.

First it carried to our guys through the night. Then Chris’s captors got his PRR working again and fed it straight into their heads.

Fred swallowed hard. ‘I’ve never heard a sound like it. I hope I never will again. His cries drilled into my soul. But his whimpers were almost worse. His cries were filled with pain, but also defiance. The whimpers were filled with desperation, then despair.

‘About fifteen minutes in he was pleading with them to end it.’

The distress on Ken’s face was something I’d never seen before. He was hurting more for Fred than he ever would have done for himself.

‘We finally hooked up with the Amigos at first light, when the Two Rifles helis arrived. The screams had stopped well before then, and the enemy melted away.’

They made their way down, keeping eyes on the ground for booby-traps and on the hill for snipers. There was a massive overhang at the bottom of the escarpment. Beneath it, they found Chris’s body nailed to a wooden cross. Not a Jesus-type cross – a diagonal cross, so his arms and legs were splayed.

Fred sucked a lungful of air through his nose, trying to keep the memory at bay. Then he focused on me again. ‘You know the colour of that terrain, Nick? The deepest rusty red, the colour of blood. It was like every drop of Chris’s blood had been soaked up by the Helmand dust. His flesh was like raw chicken meat …’

I knew what was coming.

‘Those fuckers had skinned him alive.’

Ken tightened his grip on the boy as his shoulders started to heave. Fred chewed on his upper lip and started to shake his head, as if he could shake away the images that had been seared into his mind.

It wasn’t working.

‘Jesus Christ, Nick … Those bastards had even peeled off his eyelids.’

5

I got up and went outside. He needed some space. They both did.

My breath billowed in the cold night air and the frosted grass crunched beneath my feet.

I watched Ken and Fred through the window. They weren’t talking much. There wasn’t much to say. Jill came through with a big pot of coffee and gave her nephew a hug. I left them alone for another quarter of an hour or so before going back to my seat.

‘Sorry, Nick …’ For the first time since he’d arrived, Fred couldn’t quite meet my eye.

I waved it aside. It was time to bin the emotional shit. ‘I’ve only really kept track of Sam’s career through Trev, who never claimed to be the world’s most objective judge …’

Fred smiled, relieved to have escaped Kajaki. ‘Sam thought the world of you.’

I frowned. ‘We hardly knew each other, mate …’

Ken sparked up: ‘But you have history, man. Harry passed away when Sam was only a kid, but he used to talk about you all the time, eh? Said he wouldn’t have made it through Iraq without you.’

Fred chipped in again: ‘Sam takes you people very seriously, you must know that. But it’s not all good. You cast a long shadow. A lot to live up to. Guy felt the same way. His dad set the bar really high. He never stopped beating himself up about it.’

I could imagine that. The colonel never asked anyone to do something he wasn’t prepared to do himself, but being his son couldn’t have been easy. ‘You served with him, didn’t you, Ken?’

‘Sure I did. Sierra Leone, Iraq, Bosnia, you name it. Top man.’

I’d first bumped into Chastain in Northern Ireland. We were never going to be best mates, but that was one of the things I liked about him. Being everybody’s friend wasn’t a CO’s job. Standing by his men was, and he never let us down. It didn’t matter where – under fire, undercover, back at base, in a hospital bed: whenever the shit hit the fan, he was there for us. And he didn’t mind who he pissed off in Whitehall, which must have been the reason he never climbed any further up the greasy pole.

He also knew more about classic and asymmetrical strategy than anyone else I’ve met. And it didn’t matter which theatre you picked, from the Battle of Hastings onwards, it turned out to be Chastain’s special subject on
Mastermind
. I guessed that must have made things even more difficult for Guy. He didn’t just have the shadow of his father’s achievements hanging over him but a thousand years of military history as well.

It seemed like a good moment to pay a visit to the CQB Rooms. I fixed Fred in my sights. ‘Mate, is it possible Scott’s death had anything to do with what happened at Kajaki? I mean, did Sam take his eye off the ball? I’m getting the impression that he was a bit of a mess …’

Fred ran his fingers through his very shiny hair. ‘The truth is we were all pretty shaken. I still hear Chris’s cries in the night. I try and block my ears, but it makes no difference. I guess Sam and the Amigos felt that to the power of ten. It doesn’t matter what you tell yourself, if you’re that close, the same questions keep rattling around in your head. Could I have saved my friend? What if I’d reacted quicker? Maybe got to him before the Taliban did?

‘But if you’re asking me if Sam had lost the plot so badly that he shot one of his best mates during training, the answer is absolutely not. They were so close they were almost telepathic.

‘And, by the way, Sam never had negligent discharge in his life.’

‘Were you in the room when it happened?’

‘No.’ His jaw clenched. ‘But I’m pretty sure Sam wasn’t either.’

6

Fred was i/c Red Team, rehearsing a heli insertion – four of them fast roping from a Eurocopter above the CQB Rooms. Sam was Blue Team’s commander, coming in via the rear. Scott was part of the crew already inside; some were playing the hostage role, some were kidnappers.

The whole of B Squadron were completely mystified about what happened next. Even the squadron sergeant major running the exercise couldn’t make any sense of it. The only thing they knew for certain was that Scott had taken a round in the back of the head.

‘Where did they find his body?’

‘Nobody seems to know that either. But one of the rumours is that he was tied to a chair.’

‘What did the SSM say?’

‘Jack Grant? I know he was gutted. But apparently no wiser than anyone else.’

I’d never met Jack, but I knew he was old school. The word was that he’d keep flying the flag long after the flagpole had been blown to matchwood.

‘Do you think he’d fill in some of the gaps, if he was asked the right questions? Or is he keeping his mouth zipped now, like everyone else?’

Fred lifted his hands, palms upwards. ‘He’s one of DSF’s blue-eyed boys, so I wouldn’t count on it. And, anyway, he’s back in Afghan.’

‘Was that always the plan?’

‘No. He’s on the same rotation as the rest of us. Something came up.’

I bet it did. ‘Bastion?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘Have Sam’s defence team done the rounds yet?’

Fred shook his head. ‘You know how long these things take.’

I did. Especially when no one at the top of the shit heap really wanted to hear the answers to some pretty basic questions. And the ones who knew the answers were prepared to go to any lengths to stop those questions being asked.

Before leaving, I asked him if he’d been present at the action for which Guy Chastain was awarded his VC. He hadn’t. He’d taken a round in the leg a couple of days after the Kajaki incident. It had become badly infected, and he’d been casevaced back to the UK. He rubbed it again now. It still gave him shit when the atmospheric pressure changed.

Ken saw me to the front door and gave me another man-hug.

I waved a hand back in the direction of the garden room. ‘He’s a good lad, Fred is. No wonder you’re proud.’

‘The best, eh?’

‘Seeing you together makes me wonder why you guys never had any kids of your own …’ As soon as I’d said it, I wished that I hadn’t.

His walnut face crinkled into that familiar grin. ‘Who says I didn’t, eh? You know us Fijian boys …’ Then a faraway look came into his eyes. ‘I’d have loved a whole rugby team, man. But I loved Jill more. And … well, sometimes these things don’t work out the way you planned, eh?’

We stood on the threshold, slightly awkwardly, for a moment longer.

‘How about you, Nick?’

I shrugged. ‘Like you said, Ken, sometimes these things don’t work out the way you planned.’

7
Fleet Services, Hampshire

Saturday, 28 January

I thought that taking the scenic route out of Salisbury would probably be an error, even before pointing the 911 north up the A360, but sometimes you just had to put these things to the test. And I wanted to check out the lie of the land around Larkhill and Barford. Time spent on reconnaissance was seldom wasted.

I first noticed the gunmetal-grey Mondeo, one up, when I turned onto the A338 at Shipton Bellinger. I couldn’t get a clear picture of the driver, but got a glimpse of Boris Johnson hair. He kept his distance, three or four vehicles behind me, but made the mistake of doing so with unnatural consistency. I kept at a steady sixty along the Thruxton stretch, which must have pissed off everyone except Eddie Stobart’s boys, then put my foot down by the Andover turning.

I kept a careful lookout for unmarked police cars to begin with, then just sat back and enjoyed the power of the machine, the growl of the engine, the fact that it did everything I told it to without arguing about it.

When the Mondeo was still in sight at Popham I was pretty sure it was no coincidence. I hung a left past the Basingstoke crematorium and mooched around for a while in the Festival Place shopping centre. I wanted to carry on travelling light, so I bought myself a daysack without holes in it and a change of shirt, socks and boxers.

Back in the driving seat, I slid the Browning from my waistband and wedged it under my right thigh, grip outwards. The Mondeo popped into my rear-view again at Junction 5 on the M3. I was now absolutely certain he wasn’t simply a fellow traveller on his way to London for dinner and a show.

When I pulled off the motorway at Fleet Services, I knew it was time to return the Porsche to Father Gerard until this shit was over. I was going to miss it, but I didn’t think he’d mind: it was still ten weeks until the end of the National Hunt Season.

The Mondeo found a space on the far side of the parking area. The driver didn’t get out. I waited five minutes before heading inside to the Gents. When I emerged via Waitrose after a decent interval with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of designer water, his wagon was empty.

I wandered across to the nearest refuse bin, got the water down my neck, then threw away the bottle and the bag. Keeping eyes on the entrance to the shops, I peeled three bananas and ate one. No one seemed to be taking a special interest in me, but I didn’t expect my new best mate to be standing in the doorway with a set of binoculars.