Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,54

to do its thing.

‘Say hello to my leetle frien,’ Morales joked as he pressed the control that charged up the XM-25 and made it ready for use. Like his men, he had focused all his attention on the hostile position on the ridge. He had no idea that a dozen insurgents had made their way up the ravine during the night; not until the first grenade exploded inside the observation post, killing two of his men and wounding a third. Another grenade took out a fourth soldier. Morales himself was not targeted by the blasts. He and his remaining three troops were left for the Afghan fighters, inheritors of a guerrilla warfare tradition that dated back to the days of Alexander the Great and beyond, who scrambled over the HESCOs like pirates boarding a ship, armed with rifles, pistols and razor-sharp knives.

Morales had no means of protecting himself. The XM-25 was a fantastic weapon so long as its grenades exploded far enough away not to harm the soldier who had launched them. But at this kind of hand-to-hand range it was pointless: just a high-tech way of committing suicide. So Chico Morales never even fired a single round before he died, his throat sliced open by a curved steel blade. But in his last few seconds two thoughts crossed his mind. The first was that the insurgents had attacked in a way he’d never seen before: like trained professional soldiers. The second was that he could have sworn he heard someone shouting orders to them. And those orders had been given in English.

One of the insurgents stood over Morales’s body, even as the last few spurts of blood from his carotid artery were soaking into the earth around his corpse. He reached down and prised the XM-25 from Morales’s fingers.

‘Cheers, mate,’ the insurgent said. ‘I’ll be having that.’

Tuesday, 28 June

34

* * *

Carn Drum Farm

BRYN GRYFFUD AND Dave Smethurst left at four in the morning, driving the camper van; Uschi Kremer had already left in a separate vehicle late the previous night.

The remaining members of the Forces of Gaia had all woken early to see Gryffud and Smethurst off. Some of them went straight back to bed, others were gripped by a combination of anticipation, tension, anxiety and downright fear as the seconds ticked by. They brewed coffee, paced around the farmhouse kitchen, or made futile attempts to get some rest. All but one, though, stayed within Carn Drum farmhouse.

The exception was one of the two remaining women, Deirdre Bull. The closer the time came to the moment when the group would finally engage in direct action against the forces destroying the environment, the more troubled she became. Neither she nor any of the other members of the group had been told what the precise target would be – this, they had been told, was for their own protection as well as operational security – but she knew they were engaged on an act of destruction. And it made little sense to Deirdre to fight one act of ecological vandalism with another. When she’d gone to Brynmor Gryffud to voice her concerns, he had assured her that the good they were going to do in the long run far, far outweighed any short-term cost.

‘Gaia understands,’ he had assured her, knowing that Deirdre had an essentially religious view of the environmentalist cause. But Deirdre was still not entirely convinced. She had needed to get away, to be by herself, so that she could feel a sense of communion with the earth goddess and come to terms with what was going on. So around forty minutes after the camper van had set off on its journey south, just as dawn was breaking, she put on her green wellies and her cagoule – decorated with vivid, two-tone pink spots against a white background. Then she slipped out of the back door of the commune and, following a path that ended just a few metres from the house, headed off alone into the hills.

After she had walked for a few hundred metres Deirdre turned around to look back at the farmhouse down below her on the floor of the valley. The sun had begun to rise over the hills to the east and it was steadily spreading across the valley, replacing the soft-grey darkness with dazzling bright colour. Deirdre frowned as she saw two large, black vehicles heading at high speed along the drive that led to the house. From where she was standing they