Callsign Hades by Patrick Bury

Author:Patrick Bury [Bury, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

BAZAAR

The road to Hades is easily travelled.

Diogenes Läertius

Bion

In the dry wadi the market is bustling, a maze of poles, plastic sheeting, wooden tables, goats and people. Two stoned ANP lazily patrol through the crowds. A motorbike skids to a halt on the edge of the throng. A man jumps off and walks quickly through the mass of beards and brown and grey cloths. He closes on the ANP swiftly. Behind them, he draws a small pistol.

Pop-pop.

We are in the bazaar, only metres yet a world away, among the browns and oranges and walls and alleys, the shit and the cooking, the oil and dust.

I hear the toy gun pops. Ake firing flares?

The ANP slump to the ground, one dead, the other dying, bleeding from crimson, skull-smashed head wounds. The assassin runs through the crowd as it parts. He reaches the motorbike, the engine guns and they tear off. It is over in seconds.

We move to the wadi, helpless heavily armed pebbles in the tide of locals that are silently but quickly flowing out of the market. What has happened?

A man in a brown waistcoat and white dishdash shouts at me as he walks briskly past.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Boss, he’s saying what is the point of you being here if you can’t even keep security a few hundred metres from your base. He is angry, boss.’

I feel embarrassed. Useless.

The ANP slide the limp corpses on to a pickup. The sergeant major puts them in body bags beside the ops room. An IED goes off against the US Marines a few hundred metres from the DC, but they are only blasted by dust and stones. A suicide bomber detonates at another FOB, killing two Marines, leaving two others and twelve women and children horrendously injured. Intel suggests they’ll try to do the same to us. Sixty Taliban are preparing to overrun Nabi. Four hundred broke out of Kandahar prison. Two suicide bombers on motorbikes in the bazaar. Get ready for Sapwan Qala: you’re going.

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