Free Insurgency by Alex Shaw Page A

ISAF had for once blinked.

FOUR: Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan
    On the other end of the secure line the two star US General gave his acceptance. “Declare a Critical Mission Status. You have my permission to send in a team. Immediately.”
    “Thank you General.” As the SF liaison officer Matthers was glad the overall boss of ISAF operations in Afghanistan was on the same page as him. He ended the call. The firebase had as far as they could ascertain been overrun by insurgents. All contact with Rockbridge and his men had been lost. A drone had confirmed that Taliban fighters were indeed inside the base. The deployment of a Hellfire missile outside the front gates had done very little it seemed to make the unwelcomed guests leave. Matthers made another call to the QRF team; he would brief them in ten. In fifteen they would be airborne. First he had a few questions to ask the last person to see Rockbridge before the camp went dark, his fellow Brit Paige Turner.
    As Turner crossed the base from the journos’ ‘holding area’ she felt a sense of urgency that she had not experienced before. She couldn’t put her finger on it but something was happening. She had told Raymond to take his camera and go mobile on the pretence of getting some candid footage that they could cut into. In reality he was attempting to find out what was going on. She had missed the biggest story of her life the last time she had been in ‘the Stan’. She had been re-called to London by the BBC on the pretence of assisting with the build-up for the Royal Wedding only days before the capture of bin-Laden. She had gotten too close; someone had ‘pulled strings’ and had her shipped home. She’d be buggered if she was going to miss another story. She arrived at Matthers’ office, a plywood affair topped with sandbags and partly hidden by a blast-wall. Even though she found him extremely dishy to look at, she disliked the man. Perhaps it was his hair that was too well groomed for a frontline command position? He reminded her of an old ‘Just For Men’ advert. She knocked and entered without awaiting a response.
    “You wanted to see me Colonel?”
    “Thank you Ms Turner.”
    “What can I do for you?” This time she noted that he looked unusually stern.
    “Please sit.” She did so and he stared at a legal pad on his desk. “I’m not going to beat around the bush or try to hide this. We simply do not have the time to waste. We have reason to believe that Firebase Python has been overrun by the Taliban.”
    Her jaw dropped, she felt it.
    He continued. “As of 19:25 we lost contact with the base. We have been unable to raise Major Rockbridge or anyone else.”
    “But I was just there…”
    “That is why I called you in here, Ms Turner. The helo you left on with your cameraman and a handful of other personnel was the last to leave the base. You left at, what was it, 18:00?”
    “18:19.” She had a photographic memory; it served her well in the supermarket and during arguments. “The pilot made a remark that we’d get to see the sunset if we were lucky on our way here.” Suddenly she tried to hold back the tears. Did this mean that the men she had filmed, got to know and shared a joke with were now dead?
    Matthers noticed she was shaken but ignored it. “Well just after sunset was when we lost all contact. Ms Turner, what I need from you is to tell me if there was anything you noticed when you left the base, anything strange or unusual at all?”
    She reached into her pocket for a tissue and touched the corners of her eyes. “Nothing during the day but there was an unexpected helo departure the night before; I mean the same day – early hours of the morning. About two-ish.”
    “I was unaware of that.”
    “It was carrying a Russian from the GRU.”
    “Your sources are obviously much better than mine. What Russian?”
    “That’s all I could find out. The Russian got in to a helo and left. A few minutes later a Delta