I Am Pilgrim(99)

Now he was trapped inside the iron circle and he knew that the young soldiers were giving the world its best chance of avoiding the catastrophe that had been so long in the making. He crouched and darted for a low rubble wall. He made it unseen and was back in the streets, where one false step, one misremembered wire, would cost him his life.

The soldiers were moving slowly, checking every building, detonating the IEDs as they found them, advancing in ever-tightening circles. The Saracen sprinted down a curving lane, through an old goat shed, and then had to beat a rapid retreat as he almost stumbled on top of more soldiers. He backtracked past the headman’s house and into a rubble-strewn alley.

In his panicked state, it was a bad mistake: the path ahead was blocked by a pile of masonry. There was no way back: the encircling troops were so close behind that he could hear their personal communication devices. He unslung his AK-47 – better to die like a muj than forced to kneel like a dog – and looked to heaven for guidance.

He got it: the rooftops. If he could only get on to them, there were none of his booby traps up there so he would be able to move much faster. He gambled everything on it – racing towards the approaching troops, trying to get to a stone water cistern before they rounded a bend and saw him.

He reached the cistern, springing on to the flat top and using it as a stepping stone to scramble on to the roof of the old mosque. Moments later, as he lay flat, trying to control his gasping breath, the soldiers passed below. Then they stopped, trying to pick up the noise of anyone moving among the houses ahead.

There wasn’t a sound, the silence so deep on the mountaintop that Lieutenant Keating – on the outskirts of the village and commanding his men by radio – started to wonder if the village was deserted. Maybe the place had been booby-trapped years ago by the departing muj. But why would they do that? The only people likely to reoccupy the houses were poor Afghan families or itinerant goat herders. No, the more likely explanation was that they had stumbled on some target of high value and the hostiles were lying low, watching. As a consequence, the silence was about the most dangerous thing Keating had heard and he spoke quietly to his squad on the radio. ‘Slowly,’ he said. ‘Take it slow.’

The Saracen forced himself to stay frozen for a slow count of seven. He took off his soft leather sandals and, in his thick woollen socks, darted silently across the old mud tiles. He jumped one narrow alley, nearly plunged through a hole where the tiles had collapsed and threw himself behind a low parapet. That was when he saw his chance.

Peering through a small gap in the masonry, invisible to the Australians’ night-vision goggles, he registered soldiers coming down three separate alleys. That was the tightening noose he had to either bend or break if he was going to escape. He put his sandals back on, dug his chin so hard into the masonry it started to bleed, pressed the assault rifle tight into his shoulder and thanked Allah it was fitted with a flash suppressor and a silencer.

A lesser combatant, a man who had never been a guerilla, would have shot to kill. But the Saracen knew his business well – on average it takes seven men to treat and evacuate a badly wounded soldier. The dead need nobody.

He chose one target in each of the three different alleys. If he hadn’t had a silencer, they would hear the first shot and duck for cover; if it hadn’t been for the flash suppressor they would see his position and rip him and the parapet to shreds with automatic fire.

He fired. The troops didn’t even hear the three tiny pops through their static. One got it in the thigh – he was as good as dead unless they got a tourniquet on him. One took it in the throat, and there was probably nothing anyone could do for him. And the last had his forearm shattered, which was good enough for a lot of pain. All three went down screaming, their comrades diving for defensive positions, everybody trying to take each other’s back.

Good troops, disciplined troops – and these were very good troops indeed, despite their captain – will do anything for their wounded. In the chaos of trying to help their downed comrades and locate the enemy, amid the darkness and terror of a firefight, groups of them were forced to scramble from piles of rubble to gaping doorways.

From behind the parapet the Saracen watched the circle bend – and then crack. It wasn’t much and it probably wouldn’t last long but maybe it would be enough. He didn’t crouch – he just rolled down the sloping roof, his backpack and rifle clutched to his chest, and went over the falls. He watched the wall of a building flying by – Allah help him if he broke his leg – twisted in mid-air and crash-landed on his hip. The pain almost swamped him, but he got to his feet and ran. This was no time for an old muj to whimper or limp: he was a veteran of the most cruel war in decades and he wasn’t going to cry like some Christian now.