Spare (22 page)

You watched a sand dune. And another sand dune.

If there’s anything duller than watching paint dry, it’s watching desert…
desert
. I wondered how Baxter hadn’t gone mad.

So I asked him.

He said that after hours of nothing, there’d be something. The trick was staying alert for
that
.

If Kill TV was dull, Kill Radio was mad. All the handsets along the desk gave off a constant babble, in a dozen accents, British, American, Dutch, French, to say nothing of the various personalities.

I began trying to match the accents with the call signs. American pilots were Dude. Dutch pilots were Rammit. French were Mirage, or Rage. Brits were Vapor.

Apache helicopters were called Ugly.

My personal call sign was Widow Six Seven.

Baxter told me to grab a handset, say hello.
Introduce yourself.
When I did, the voices all perked up, turned their attention to me. They were like baby birds demanding to be fed. Their food was information.

Who are you? What’s happening down there? Where am I going?

Besides information, the thing they wanted most often was permission. To enter my air space or to leave it. Rules forbade pilots to pass overhead without assurance that it was safe, that a battle wasn’t raging, that Dwyer wasn’t blasting away its heavy guns. In other words, was it a hot ROZ (restricted operating zone)? Or cold? Everything about the war revolved around this binary question. Hostilities, weather, water, food—hot or cold?

I liked this role, keeper of the ROZ. I liked the idea of working closely with top guns, being the eyes and ears for such highly skilled men and women, their last link to terra firma, their alpha and omega. I was…Earth.

Their need for me, their dependency, created instant bonds. Strange emotions flowed, weird intimacies took shape.

Hey there, Widow Six Seven.

Hey, Dude.

How’s your day?

Quiet so far, Dude.

We were mates instantly. Comrades. You could feel it.

After they checked in with me, I’d hand them over to the FAC in Garmsir, a little river town nearby.

Thanks, Widow Six Seven. Goodnight.

Roger, Dude. Stay safe.

After receiving permission
to cross my airspace, a pilot wouldn’t always cruise on through, he’d arrow through, and sometimes his need to know conditions on the ground would be urgent. Every second mattered. Life and death were in my hands. I was calmly seated at a desk, holding a fizzy drink and a biro (
Oh. A biro. Wow.
) but I was also in the middle of the action. It was exhilarating, the thing I’d trained for, but terrifying. Shortly before my arrival an FAC got one number wrong when reading out the geo coordinates to an American F-15; the result was an errant bomb landing on British forces instead of the enemy. Three soldiers killed, two horribly maimed. So every word and digit I spoke would have consequences. We were “providing support,” that was the phrase used constantly, but I realized how euphemistic it was. No less than the pilots, we were sometimes delivering death, and when it came to death, more so than life, you had to be precise.

I confess: I was happy. This was important work, patriotic work. I was using skills honed in the Dales, and at Sandringham, and all the way back to boyhood. Even to Balmoral. There was a bright line connecting my stalking with Sandy and my work here now. I was a British soldier, on a battlefield, at last, a role for which I’d been preparing all my life.

I was also Widow Six Seven. I’d had plenty of nicknames in my life, but this was the first nickname that felt more like an alias. I could really and truly
hide
behind it. For the first time I was
just
a name, a random name, and a random number. No title. And no bodyguard.
Is this what other people feel like every day?
I savored the normality, wallowed in it, and also considered how far I’d journeyed to find it. Central Afghanistan, the dead of winter, the middle of the night, the midst of a war, while speaking to a man fifteen thousand feet above my head—how abnormal is your life if that’s the first place you ever feel normal?

After every action there would be a lull, which was sometimes harder to deal with psychologically. Boredom was the enemy and we fought it by playing rugby, our ball a heavily taped-up roll of loo paper, or by jogging on the spot. We also did a thousand press-ups, and built primitive weightlifting equipment, taping wooden crates to metal bars. We made punch bags out of duffels. We read books, organized marathon chess matches, slept like cats. I watched grown men log twelve hours a day in bed.

We also ate and ate. Dwyer had a full kitchen. Pasta. Chips. Beans. We were given thirty minutes each week on the sat phone. The phone card was called Paradigm, and it had a code on the back, which you punched into the keypad. Then a robot, a nice-sounding woman, told you how many minutes you had left. Next thing you knew…

Spike, that you?

Chels.

Your old life, down the line. The sound always made you catch your breath. To think of home was never easy, for a complex set of reasons. To
hear
home was a stab in the chest.

If I didn’t call Chels, I called Pa.

How are you, darling boy?

Not bad. You know.

But he asked me to write rather than call. He loved my letters.

He said he’d much prefer a letter.

At times I worried
that I was actually missing out on the real war. Was I perhaps sitting in the war’s waiting room? The real war, I feared, was just down the valley; I could see the thick puffs of smoke, the plumes from explosions, mostly in and around Garmsir. A place of tremendous strategic importance. Critical gateway, river port through which supplies, especially guns, flowed to the Taliban. Plus, an entry point for new fighters. They’d be issued an AK-47, a fistful of bullets, and told to head towards us through their maze of trenches. This was their initiation test, which the Taliban called their “blooding.”

Were Sandy and Tiggy working for the Taliban?

It happened often. A Taliban recruit would pop up, fire at us, and we’d return fire with twenty times the force. Any Taliban recruit who survived that
barrage would then be promoted, sent to fight and die in one of the bigger cities, like Gereshk, or Lashkar Gah, which some called Lash Vegas. Most, however, didn’t survive. The Taliban left their bodies to rot. I watched dogs the size of wolves chew many a recruit off the battlefield.

I began pleading with my commanding officers: Get me out of here. A few guys made the same plea, but for different reasons. I was begging to go closer to the front.
Send me to Garmsir.

Finally, on Christmas Eve 2007, my request was approved. I was to replace an outgoing FAC at Forward Operating Base Delhi, which was inside an abandoned Garmsir school.

Small gravel courtyard, corrugated tin roof. Someone said the school had been an agricultural university. Someone else said it had been a madrassa. For the moment, however, it was a part of the British Commonwealth. And my new home.

It was also home to a company of Gurkhas.

Recruited from Nepal, from the remotest villages along the foothills of the Himalayas, the Gurkhas had fought in every British war of the last two centuries, and distinguished themselves in each one. They scrapped like tigers, never gave up, and as a result they held a special place in the British Army—and in my heart. I’d been hearing about the Gurkhas since I was a boy: one of the first uniforms I’d ever worn was a Gurkha uniform. At Sandhurst the Gurkhas always played the enemy in military exercises, which always felt a bit ridiculous because they were beloved.

After the exercises a Gurkha would invariably walk up to me and offer me a cup of hot chocolate. They had a solemn reverence for royalty. A king, to their minds, was divine. (Their own king was believed to be the reincarnated Hindu god Vishnu.) A prince, therefore, wasn’t far off. I’d felt this growing up, but now felt it again. As I walked through Delhi, the Gurkhas all bowed. They called me
saab
.

Yes, saab. No, saab.

I pleaded: Don’t. I’m just Lieutenant Wales. I’m just Widow Six Seven.

They laughed.
No chance, saab.

Neither would they have dreamed of allowing me to go anywhere by myself. Royal persons required royal escort. Often I’d be headed to the mess, or the loo, and suddenly become aware of a shadow on my right. Then another on my left.
Hello, saab.
It was embarrassing, albeit touching. I adored them, as did the local Afghans, who sold the Gurkhas many chickens and goats and even bantered with them about recipes. The Army talked
a lot about winning Afghan “hearts and minds,” meaning converting locals to democracy and freedom, but only the Gurkhas seemed to be actually doing it.

When they weren’t escorting me, the Gurkhas were intent on fattening me up. Food was their love language. And while each Gurkha thought himself a five-star chef, they all had the same speciality. Goat curry.

I remember one day hearing rotors overhead. I looked up. Everyone on the base looked up. A chopper slowly descending. And hanging from the skids, wrapped in a net, was a goat. Christmas present for the Gurkhas.

In a great burst of dust the helicopter touched down. Out jumped a man, bald, blondish, the picture of a British officer.

He was also vaguely familiar.

I know this bloke
, I said aloud.

I snapped my fingers.
It’s good old Bevan!

He’d worked for Pa for a few years. He’d even chaperoned us one winter in Klosters. (I recalled him skiing in a Barbour jacket, so quintessentially aristocratic.) Now, apparently, he was the brigade commander’s number two. And thus, delivering goats on behalf of the commander to the beloved Gurkhas.

I was floored to bump into him, but he was only mildly surprised—or interested. He was too preoccupied with those goats. Besides the one in the net, he’d cradled one between his knees on the whole flight, and he now guided this little fellow on a lead, like a cocker spaniel, over to a Gurkha.

Poor Bevan. I could see how he’d bonded with that goat, how unprepared he was for what was coming.

The Gurkha took out his
kukri
and lopped off its head.

The tan, bearded face dropped to the ground like one of the taped-up loo rolls we used for rugby balls.

The Gurkha then neatly, expertly collected the blood in a cup. Nothing was to be wasted.

As for the second goat, the Gurkha handed me the kukri, asked if I’d like to do the honors.

Back home I had several kukris. They’d been gifts from Gurkhas. I knew how to handle one. But no, I said, no, thank you, not here, not just now.

I wasn’t sure why I said no. Maybe because there was enough killing all around me without adding more. I flashed back to telling George that I absolutely didn’t want to snip off any balls. Where did I draw the line?

At suffering, that’s where. I didn’t want to go all Henry VIII on that goat
mainly because I wasn’t skilled in the art, and if I missed or miscalculated the poor thing would suffer.

The Gurkha nodded.
As you wish, saab
.

He swung the kukri.

Even after the goat’s head hit the ground, I remember, its yellow eyes kept blinking.

My job at Delhi was
similar to the one I’d had at Dwyer. Only the hours were different. Constant. At Delhi I was on call, day and night.

The ops room was a former classroom. Like seemingly everything else in Afghanistan, the school that housed Delhi had been bombed—dangling wood beams, tipped-over desks, floors scattered with spilled papers and books—but the ops room looked as if it had been ground zero. A disaster area. On the plus side, during night shifts, the many holes in the walls gave a stunning view of the stars.

I recall one shift, around one
a.m
. I asked a pilot overhead for his code, so I could key it into my Rover and see his feed.

The pilot answered sourly that I was doing it wrong.

Doing what wrong?

It’s not the Rover, it’s the Longhorn.

The Long what?

You’re new, huh?

He described the Longhorn, a machine no one had bothered to tell me about. I looked around, found it. Big black briefcase covered with dust. I brushed it off, turned it on. The pilot talked me through getting it operational. I didn’t know why the Longhorn was required for him instead of the Rover, but I wasn’t about to ask and irritate him even more.

Especially since the experience had been bonding. Thereafter he and I were mates.

His call sign was Magic.

I’d often pass an entire night chatting to Magic. He and his crew liked to talk, to laugh, eat. (I dimly recall them feasting one night on fresh crabs.) Above all they loved practical jokes. After one sortie, Magic zoomed out his camera, told me to look. I leaned into my screen. From twenty thousand feet his view of the curvature of Earth was astonishing.

Slowly, he turned his camera.

My screen filled with breasts.

Porn magazine.

Ah, you got me, Magic.

Some pilots were women. Exchanges with them went very differently. One night I found myself speaking to a British pilot who mentioned how gorgeous the moon was.

It’s full
, she said.
You should see it, Widow Six Seven.

I see it. Through one of the holes in my wall. Lovely.

Suddenly the radio burst to life: a shrill chorus. The guys back at Dwyer told us to “get a room.” I felt myself blushing. I hoped the pilot hadn’t thought I was flirting. I hoped she wouldn’t think so now. Above all, I hoped she, and all other pilots, wouldn’t work out who I was, and tell the British press that I was using the war as a way to meet women. I hoped the press wouldn’t then treat her as they’d treated every other girl I’d ever had anything to do with.

Before that shift ended, however, the pilot and I overcame this brief awkwardness and did some solid work together. She helped me monitor a Taliban bunker, right in the heart of no-man’s-land, not far beyond Delhi’s walls. There were thermals around the bunker…human forms. A dozen, I guessed. Maybe fifteen.