Apache

Billy soon got his answer. Just over twenty seconds after Geordie and the marines exited the field, two AK47s appeared at the top of the wall, 100 degrees to the right of him, and began blatting away blindly on fully automatic. Billy stamped on his floor pressel.

‘Ugly Five Zero has got Taliban doing a Beirut unload from the wall sixty metres to my right. Put some fire down now.’

Nick responded instantly. ‘Ugly Five Two copies. Stand by…’

FOG was flying Nick low on a northerly axis over the treeline to the east, scanning the fort for any movement.

‘My gun.’ FOG slaved the cannon with a flick of his right thumb, aligned the crosshair and loosed off a twenty-round burst.

‘Engaging with cannon, Billy,’ he bellowed. ‘Watch my strikes.’

Great chunks of adobe flew off a long building in the centre of the compound. FOG moved his eyeball swiftly left and shifted the impact zone. A second wave ploughed into the neighbouring courtyard, shredding paving stones and slicing along the wall Billy was being engaged from.

FOG spotted movement inside the far end of it. ‘Talibs escaping; firing.’ His third burst blasted away the section of wall alongside where Geordie was overtaking RSM Hearn…

Geordie was blown a metre sideways by the pressure wave four feet above his head.

More explosions, some on the other side of the wall, others on the canal bank to the right of him. Red-hot shrapnel whipped across the path, centimetres behind him, through a waist-high, metre-long shell hole. Geordie’s ears rang and his mouth filled with grit.

Jesus, what the hell was that? An RPG? Ten RPGs?

Sound travels at 343 metres per second. So it took Geordie just over three seconds to hear the pounding of the Apache cannon a kilometre away. Shit, the guys are firing on us.

‘What the fuck is that?’ screamed Hearn.

‘Just fucking run,’ Geordie shouted.

Geordie didn’t know it was possible to run faster than they already were. But he did it then.

‘Delta Hotel, FOG. Delta Hotel,’ Billy said. ‘Good shooting mate. Keep it up.’

Billy was doing mental cartwheels. He checked the clock: 10:40 and fifty-five seconds. Jesus, almost two-and-a-half minutes on the ground. Time up. They needed to get out of there now. The next Beirut unload from God knew which direction couldn’t be far off. The Taliban would have given their eye teeth to get their hands on one of the feared mosquitoes. And now they had two of them, gift wrapped, and delivered to their door.