Читать книгу Last Light - Alex Scarrow - Страница 21

6.57 a.m. local time Al-Bayji, Iraq

Lieutenant Carter’s Land Rover rolled off the end of the bridge and into the outskirts of the town, with the convoy following tightly behind.

Up close, the signs of yesterday’s chaos were apparent. Splashed across the side of the road, Andy spotted a dark, almost black, pool of congealed blood and a long smear leading away from it towards the doorway of a nearby building; no doubt the body of some poor unfortunate dragged back home to be mourned in private.

The lead Rover picked up speed as it rumbled down a relatively wide, but scarred, road, flanked with a few single-storey buildings. They approached an open area that Andy recalled passing through about this time yesterday, a market square full of traders preparing their stalls for the day ahead. This morning it was deserted.

Travelling through this open and exposed part of the town, he felt they were a little less vulnerable. The doorways, the windows, the roof terraces from which an opportunistic ambush might be launched, were far enough away from them, beyond the area of the market-place, that most of the shots would go wide, and they’d have a chance to react. However, up ahead the road that they were cruising along at a fair clip, punishing the suspension of each vehicle with every pot-hole, carried on towards the centre of town, and vanilla-hued buildings, one or two storeys high, encroached on either side. To Andy’s inexperienced eye, the way ahead looked dangerously constricted and overlooked.

‘Keep yer eyes peeled lads,’ said Westley, his cocky demeanour now subdued and replaced with a flinty wariness.

Mike exchanged a glance with Andy.

‘Rooftops an’ garden walls,’ Westley added. ‘They don’t like firing off from inside the buildings, like . . . it leaves ’em vulnerable to being bottled up.’

Mike seemed to understand that. ‘Gotcha,’ he replied.

Lieutenant Carter’s Rover led them into a shaded alley, and as the sun flickered and disappeared behind the rooftops overlooking them, it felt disturbingly like driving into the gaping jaws of some menacing beast.

‘Shit,’ muttered Andy.

Let’s do this quickly.

The road bent round to the right, a tight corner that had them slowing down to a crawl as they weaved their way past a van parked inconveniently on the bend.

And then Carter’s Rover came to an abrupt halt.

Amal responded quickly enough so that they slewed to a halt only a foot from the Rover in front.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Mike. The van and the corner were obscuring Carter’s vehicle from view.

Westley put a hand to the ear of his PRR - personal role radio - headset. ‘CO says the road round the corner’s blocked. We’ve got to fuckin’ well back up and find another way through.’

Andy turned in his seat, and saw the rear-most Rover, with Sergeant Bolton up top, reversing already.

And that’s when he heard the first crack of gunfire.

‘Ahh shit, someone’s firing already,’ growled Mike.

Turning to face forward again, he saw a flicker of movement from the balcony of a building directly ahead and above them. The squaddie on top cover in the Rover just in front of them spotted the same movement, and swung the Minimi machine-gun swiftly round on its mount, aiming upwards at the chipped and flaking waist-high balcony wall.

Instantly a string of white puffs of plaster powder erupted along the length of it and the man dropped down out of sight.

‘Ah smeg, tha’s really gonna wake ’em all up now!’ shouted Westley.

Amal, meanwhile, was reversing their Cruiser following the other vehicles backing up along the narrow road.

They had passed a right-hand turn fifty yards up, just a few moments earlier, which would take them more or less in the direction they wanted to go. It was another narrow street, overlooked by tall buildings with balconies, but maybe it wasn’t blocked.

Andy spotted movement now in the windows of several other buildings: the fleeting faces of some children and their mother, in another an old man wearing a white dishdash staring out curiously from the darkened interior of his home.

The rear of Lieutenant Carter’s vehicle now appeared, reversing around the corner, the young officer and the soldier beside him double-tapping - firing two or three-round bursts - at the balcony to keep the man up there down on the ground and out of trouble.

The convoy moved backwards slowly, with no further rounds being fired at them. That single shot seemed to have been all there was; and even then, Andy wasn’t sure it had been a gunshot. It could well have been a vehicle misfiring in a nearby street for all he knew.

Still, the damage was done. The Minimi burst, and the subsequent bursts from Lieutenant Carter’s Land Rover must surely have roused the locals.

They pulled past the right-hand turning, going back several dozen more yards to allow the two vehicles in front to back up past it. Then, with a squeal of tyres and a shower of gravel spat out from beneath it, Carter’s Rover spun right into the narrow street, and the rest of the convoy swiftly followed suit.

‘Let’s go!’ Mike urged Amal, banging repeatedly with his fist on the back of the driver’s seat.

The short exchange of gunfire had definitely stirred the townsfolk. They spotted many more faces peering from darkened windows and doorways down the narrow street and on the balconies above them. Andy, looking up, could only see a narrow strip of blue sky criss-crossed with electrical cables and dangling laundry. This street was even narrower than the one they had just backed out of.

We’re going to get trapped.

To him that seemed bloody obvious; a foregone conclusion the way things seemed to be going already. They were getting tightly boxed in here. If there was an obstruction this way, things could get hairy.

Up ahead, the convoy approached another corner, this time turning left. The lead Rover spun round it quickly dislodging a cloud of dust in its wake, and the others followed swiftly.

To everyone’s relief, the street widened out, and opened on to a much wider stretch of road; a dual lane, with some semblance of paving on either side and a grass-tufted island running down the middle. There were only one or two vehicles parked on either side, and along the central, weed-encrusted island, several withered old date palms were dotted, giving the street the notional appearance of a once pleasant boulevard gone to seed. Andy noticed, though, that there were quite a few pedestrians out and about, gathered in clusters. Whether they were about their normal business, or roused by the short burst of gunfire and curious, he wasn’t sure.

Lieutenant Carter’s Rover came to a halt, and the rest of them followed his lead.

‘Why’s he stopping?’ asked Mike.

Andy leaned his head out to get a better look at what was happening ahead, and saw that the far end of the boulevard was packed with a gathering of men; some kind of town meeting in a building that had spilled out on to the road. The people were blocking the way ahead.

‘Shit, we can’t get through, the road’s blocked. That’s why he’s stopped.’

Westley cursed under his breath. ‘Shit. We could just push through, like. You know?’

Farid cast a glance over his shoulder at the soldier in the back seat. ‘You want we run over them?’

‘Yeah, smeg it. If they won’t move out of the way.’

‘I agree,’ Mike said to the young squaddie, ‘anyway, if we fire off some warning shots first, they’ll move aside. And if they don’t . . . well that’s their look out.’

‘I am thinking they will not move,’ Farid countered sternly.

‘So what? We just sit here and let them swarm us?’ Mike snapped back at the old man.

‘It is murder to just drive into them. That is haram. Bad.’

‘Them or us?’ added Westley, ‘Fuck, I say us.’

Farid turned to Amal and spoke to him quickly in Arabic.

‘What the fuck are you telling him?’ shouted Mike angrily.

Farid turned in his seat to face him. ‘I ask him if he know another way around. Amal have family in Al-Bayji. He knows the town.’

Andy, ignoring the debate, was watching the distant milling crowd. There were many faces now turned towards them, and hands pointing. The convoy of vehicles nestling discreetly in the shadow of the side-street had finally been noticed by the crowd.

‘Ahh shit!’ said Westley, listening in on his PRR headset. ‘CO says he sees some RPGs amongst them.’

Andy nearly asked what an RPG was, but stopped himself. Even little Jacob knew what those three letters stood for: rocket-propelled grenade.

The crowd began to move slowly towards them, and as they spread out, Andy could see for himself that they had a fair distribution of weapons of various types amongst them.

Whatever we do, we better bloody do it now.

As if in answer to his thought, he noticed one of the crowd stopping, kneeling down and swinging a long tube round and up to an aiming position.

The next second he saw a momentary flash and a puff of smoke, and a small black projectile weaving up the road towards them.

‘RPG! Shit!’ shouted Westley.

It whistled by the convoy easily missing them by a dozen yards, but close enough that they heard the angry hum of displaced air. It thudded against the wall of a building fifty yards behind them, dislodging a large patch of plaster, but failing to explode.

Lieutenant Carter had apparently decided enough was enough and gestured to the soldier manning the Minimi in the Rover behind to lay down some suppressing fire.

The machine-gun began chattering loudly, and Andy watched with horror as half a dozen of the men leading the advancing crowd seemed to disintegrate as pink clouds of blood and tissue erupted from chests and heads. In response, every armed man in the crowd decided to open fire at pretty much the exact same moment and the hot air just outside their Land Cruiser seemed to pulsate with shots whistling past.

Carter’s vehicle swung erratically to the left, and Andy could see the officer gesturing wildly with one hand towards a two-storey pink building with a high-walled compound in front of it. There was a sturdy iron gate in the middle of the wall that was closed and appeared to be padlocked. His vehicle cannoned towards it, bouncing up on to the kerb and a moment later crashing heavily into the gate. The gate rattled violently on its hinges as it swung inwards.

‘Go, go, go!’ shouted Westley. Amal instinctively spun the wheel round and slammed his foot down, pulling out from behind the Rover with the Minimi towards the building. The Rover in front of them remained stationary, the machine-gun still chattering suppressing fire at the crowd, keeping them from advancing any closer.

Andy realised something must have happened to it, and as they pulled past and swung left, he saw the windshield had gone and the driver was slumped forward on the dash. There were three other men in the Rover; two had climbed out of the back and were kneeling down using the rear of the car as cover, the third was still standing up through the roll bars and firing the Minimi in a series of long bursts that were rapidly eating up the belted ammo. All three were in danger of being left behind.

Amal drove towards the pink building, bumpily mounting the kerb as the lead Rover had done, everyone inside banging their heads on the roof as they rode over it and through the now open gates into the compound beyond.

Their Cruiser slid to a halt amidst a cloud of dust, and in quick succession, the second Cruiser entered, followed by the remaining three Rovers.

Through the fog of dust Andy could see that Lieutenant Carter was already dismounted, running across the compound towards the open gate and shouting orders to his men who began piling out of their vehicles. Carter took cover behind the wall, beside the gate, leaning out quickly several times to check on his three lads trapped in the middle of the street.