Trial Under Fire by Zoe Sharp

Author:Zoe Sharp [Sharp, Zoë]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-909344-41-9
Publisher: Zoe Sharp

13

For the second time in twenty-four hours, I found myself lying on hard stony ground, watching a distant tableau that was overlaid by the reticle of a sniper’s scope.

The worrying thing was that it was starting to seem normal.

I had a sudden vision of the same overlay but this time the scene was of my parents sitting at the wrought-iron table on the terrace at home. Of centring my sights first on my father’s open copy of the Financial Times and imagining a small ripped hole appearing in the centre of the front page. Then on the Royal Doulton teapot and watching it shatter in my mother’s hands.

I blinked, shook my head and the image faded, to be replaced by an encampment in the Afghan wilderness, a campfire surrounded by misshapen tents. At each side were two stretched out lines, staked in at the ends, to which were tethered their horses.

The sun went down an hour before, dropping like a stone through brief amber into the blue tones of twilight and then darkness. Through the night sights clipped to my day scope, the campfire glowed hot and bright against a ghostly green background. I tried to keep my focus away from the flames so any activity near the tents was more easily visible, but the way they were spread around the camp, it wasn’t easy. We needed more eyes on the target.

We needed more of everything.

It didn’t help that they’d split the prisoners between two of the tents on differing sides of the camp. The sergeant—Scary—and Tate in one, and Posh and Brookes in another. I’d no idea why they chose those pairings, except perhaps it was obvious who the Special Forces lads were, and they wanted to keep them apart.

“Why couldn’t they have put them all in one place?” I muttered, as I tracked yet again across the camp, shutting my eyes briefly past the scorch of the fire.

“Makes sense,” Ginger said quietly from alongside me. “Divide and conquer. Less likely to do something stupid if they don’t know where their pals are and they might be at risk.”

“I’d do the same thing,” Sporty admitted. “Put each of ’em on their own if I had enough men to keep an eye on ’em that way.”

Half a dozen of the Taliban fighters had ridden out at last light. We didn’t have the manpower to follow them, so it wasn’t a hard decision to stick with the group holding the prisoners instead. We didn’t know how long they’d be gone, or what their purpose was. But it didn’t take imagination to work out it wasn’t anything good. It made sense that, with the enemy forces depleted, we were never going to get as good or timely an opportunity to mount a rescue.

“So, how are we going to do this?”

“Going to do what?” Ginger queried. “If we attempt to go in there, the chances are they’ll have killed the second lot of hostages before we’re halfway to freeing the first.”

“Can’t we go for both at once?”

Sporty let out a snort.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.