Deep Black - Andy McNab [67]
Frankenmeyer turned back towards the windscreen. ‘We get a lot of them here. You been told to leave town today?’
I nodded.
‘You’re the third this week. Those guys like to keep things sweet around here. I just wish they’d do the same for us. They said we were going to be here no more than four months, period.’ He punched the driver’s arm. ‘How long ago was that, Davers?’
Davers didn’t bother to look at the captain: he was busy checking a junction left. ‘Fuck, that was Christmas, sir. And I joined the National Guard for the dental plan, not this shit.’
Davers wasn’t on his own. A lot of small-town America joined the National Guard for the medical insurance and education credits. Most saw the weekend training camps as a box to be ticked before they got to the real benefits. No one really expected to get sent away to war, let alone for a year or more.
That wasn’t the only problem. The National Guard deployed as independent units. The guy who ran the corner store back home might now be your commanding officer on operations. Everybody was a part-timer, and that always spelt trouble for command and control, and the standard of professionalism in contact. That was why most other countries integrated their part-timers into regular units.
We passed the tank and vehicle graveyard. Off-duty soldiers mooched around in the shade of their half-bombed homes. Davers turned a corner and passed a café furnished with an assortment of tables, sofas and chairs. The original Arabic sign had been crossed out and replaced with ‘Bagdad Café’ in crude white paint. The Whoopee Goldberg painting on the wall wasn’t much better. A couple of Hummers and AFVs were parked outside, alongside men and women drinking water and Coke, relaxing in the shade. Their body armour, helmets and M16s were piled on the ground at their feet.
‘Where we going?’ The fact that Frankenmeyer and the driver hadn’t bothered with their body armour and we were both in one vehicle had already given me the answer, but I thought I’d ask anyway.
He wiped the sweat from his shaved blond head with both hands. ‘Back gate, and that’s it – end of your ride.’
‘No chance of a lift back to the hotel?’
‘’Fraid not, man – you have to hail yourselves a taxicab!’ He liked the sound of that.
The driver gulped on a can of Minute Maid with such relish it made me feel thirsty. But there was no icebox in this wagon. There wasn’t even body armour on the doors, just sandbags on the floor.
We drove through the gate and turned right. The Tigris was to our left and the sandbagged sangar at the checkpoint was about two hundred metres ahead and on the river side of the road. Beyond that was the main drag, crossing the river via a big metal bridge.
The sangar looked like a square igloo built from hundreds of sandbags. As we approached I could see the rear entrance more clearly. Inside, three, maybe four soldiers were hurrying to put their belt-kit back on. They were supposed to keep it on at all times but that was a real pain in the arse. They probably just grabbed it whenever they saw a wagon coming; I’d done the same enough times.
Traffic boomed across the bridge. Trucks, cars, motorbikes stuck behind a military convoy, everyone hooting. They knew better than to try to overtake.
Awatchtower rose maybe fifty feet in the air just short of the sangar. It looked like something out of The Great Escape: four wooden pillars with crossed bracing and a little pillbox on top. Whoever was on stag up there wasn’t protected by sandbags, which seemed strange. They’d be a sitting target for any line-of-sight weapon, whether it was an AK or an RPG.
The Hummer kicked up the dust and rattled and groaned its way from pot-hole to pot-hole, so the first I knew of the attack were the dull thuds as three or four rounds slammed into the side of the cabin.
The radio crackled. ‘Contact, contact, contact!’
49
We swerved and everybody ducked. I hoped Davers wasn’t ducking as much