they had, but it said something about these boys that made Andy feel proud to have struggled out of Iraq alongside of them.
Well done lads.
He approached Westley. ‘You okay?’
Westley nodded. ‘Bad enough losin’ your mates in a contact with the enemy . . .’
He left that unfinished but Andy knew what he wanted to say.
But it really stinks when you lose them to friendly fire.
‘Get the boys back inside. The Yanks are going to lead us to an airstrip nearby.’
Westley looked up. ‘Seriously?’
Andy offered him a tired smile. ‘Yeah. It looks like we’re out of here.’
CHAPTER 67
4 a.m. local time Southern Turkey
Half an hour later, they took a turning off the main road, down a smaller road - a single lane in both directions. As they approached the airstrip it became clogged with civilians, mostly on foot, many carrying a meagre bundle of possessions on their backs or dragging it behind them.
Tajican honked the coach’s horn, and slowly the vehicle edged its way through the thickening river of people towards a hastily erected spool-wire perimeter lit every few hundred yards by powerful floodlights. Behind the curls of razor wire, US marines stood, evenly spaced, guns ready and coolly regarding the growing mass of people only a few yards away from them.
The American soldier sitting beside Private Tajican urged the Fijian to keep the vehicle moving and not let it come to a complete standstill.
‘They’ll overrun us in seconds,’ he muttered warily eyeing the surging crowd ahead and either side of them.
Andy was impressed at how Tajican calmly kept a steady forward momentum, his face locked with concentration, whilst all around him palms and fists thumped noisily against the side and front of the coach.
Something suddenly flew into the coach through the open, glassless front; a stone, a rock . . . whatever it was, it glanced off Tajican’s head, and he clasped a hand to the gash it had caused. Blood rolled down the back of his hand, his arm and soaked into his sleeve.
But he continued calmly driving forward.
When another projectile arced through from the front into the coach, the American soldier sitting at Tajican’s side decided he’d had enough. He swung his assault rifle down and fired a long burst over the heads of the people outside.
The effect was instant. The road ahead cleared.
‘Hit the fuckin’ gas!’ the American shouted. Tajican did just that, and the coach sped up towards the perimeter fence ahead and the entrance gate - a Humvee, parked lengthways across a twelve-foot wide gap in the razor wire. The Humvee rolled out of the way at the very last moment, allowing the coach through, and then immediately rolled back to prevent the thick gathering of people surging through in its wake.
Andy was unprepared for the level of chaos he could see around him. He had seen the inside of several US and UK army bases since he’d started doing field-work in Iraq; always a hive of activity - chaos to the untrained eye. But the disarray he witnessed before him bore no resemblance to any military camp he had seen.
The sky was still dark, but showing the first pale stain of the coming dawn. The airfield was lit by dozens of floodlights erected on tripods and deployed along the main strip. From what he could see, it was an airfield that had been mothballed in recent years, but, in the space of the last forty-eight hours, had been hurriedly revived and adapted to meet immediate needs. There was a control tower to one side of the strip. Clearly the building had, at some point in the past, been gutted of all its electronic equipment, but was now being used in an ad hoc way. At its base a communications truck was parked, whilst several men stood up in the observation tower monitoring the steady stream of transport planes coming in and taking off; they were using laptops that trailed thick cables out through the tower’s rusty old window-frames down to the truck below.
Along the airstrip Andy could see hundreds of men, clustered in groups, most of them lying down; a patchwork quilt of exhausted soldiers, each group awaiting its turn to board a plane.
On the strip, Andy watched a Hercules C130 coming in to land at one end, whilst at the other, another plane was awaiting its chance to take off. Halfway along the strip, on a tarmac turn-off, a plane was being hurriedly loaded up with a group of men who had been