Free Osama by Chris Ryan

‘Better-looking than some of the dogs in Hereford.’
    The two men headed off to find some food.
     
    0350 hours.
    Joe lay in his low cot, still fully dressed in camo trousers and black T-shirt, but with his boots and ops waistcoat dumped on the floor beside him. It was dark inside the thin-walled Portakabin mounted on two skins of roughly rendered breeze ?blocks that served as digs for him, Ricky and JJ. The first thing they’d done when they’d moved in here was board up the windows against the possibility of mortar attack. Joe was knackered, but sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t the noise from outside. It wasn’t even the heavy breathing and occasional snores from Ricky and JJ. It was his head, reliving the debrief with the Yanks where he and Ricky had stuck to their story even though they could tell someone was smelling a rat.
    He found himself remembering the cold, glazed look on Ricky’s face in the compound. Joe had lost count of the number of kids he’d seen take on that same thousand-yard stare after a particularly traumatic op, then learned that they’d handed in their badge and headed back to their parent unit in the hope of a quieter life. But these days there were no quiet lives in the military. Even the greenest of green-army soldiers found themselves stuck in a shit-filled Afghan ditch on six-month rotation with some Taliban fucker trying to put holes in them three times a day, or separate their legs from their torso. And as for Regiment ops, they’d grown increasingly dangerous at the same rate.
    The first time he’d gone out on the ground on this tour, he’d come across what looked like a father kneeling at the roadside and weeping over his dead son. The kid was naked, his belly sliced open and his skin bloody and stained. Joe had approached, and only when he was five metres away did he realize there was more to the scene than he had noticed at first. There was a wire leading from the kid’s stomach wound to a switch in the weeping man’s hand. Only he wasn’t weeping any more. He had started muttering to himself. Joe had only needed a single shot to the head to take him out. And once he was kneeling by the two dead bodies, he followed the wire that led from the switch. He’d had to insert his hands into the still-warm innards of the boy’s stomach to pull out an old Russian mortar round that was hidden inside.
    The memory of that child with the split-open stomach had haunted him of late. Maybe life in the Regiment was getting to him too.
    His watch glowed a pale green in the dark: 0400. He hadn’t slept for days. Not properly. It was one of the things the medics had told them to look out for – but none of the guys took that shit seriously.
    He swung his legs over the side of his cot and fumbled in the darkness for the bottle of water he knew was there somewhere. His fingers brushed against it and it toppled over. He heard the contents sloshing out and felt a sudden wave of anger. He thumped the side of the bed in frustration, and by the time he’d picked up the bottle again, it was only a third full. He downed what was left, threw the bottle back on the floor and stood up. No point lying here in the darkness. He pulled on his boots and headed out of the Portakabin into the camp outside.
    The bunkhouse Joe shared with Ricky and JJ was one of twenty located behind the Regiment hangar and surrounded by yet more HESCO walls. He weaved his way among them until he found himself along the back end of the hangar itself, where the generator was sited, turning over noisily and stinking of petrol. Light was escaping from a back window where the tarpaulin had failed to cover the glass completely, and he knew that the hangar would be full of activity, even though it was only the small hours. He didn’t feel like company, so he kept to the shadows as he skirted round the edge of the hangar, not really knowing what he was doing or where he was going. Wandering without purpose.
    It was a noise overhead