the night sky.
Andy nodded. ‘I guess they’re not coming then.’
‘Are you sure Lieutenant Carter said they were coming here?’ asked Mike. ‘At eleven?’
‘I’m sure.’
There were any number of reasons why the Chinook hadn’t turned up; perhaps it had tried to make the rendezvous but had been beaten back, or even brought down, by a surface-to-air missile? Or perhaps they’d simply been considered too high a risk and left to it? It didn’t matter now. They were royally screwed.
‘Those boys back there are wondering what the hell we’re going to do next,’ said Mike, ‘they’ve lost both their commanding officers and they’re scared shitless.’
Mike was right. The lads gathered in the back of the truck were just that, boys; nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . . most of them. Andy was thirty-nine, old enough to be a dad to some. They were looking at him right now, two rows of eyes staring at him from the back of the truck, wanting to know what happens now.
Mike spoke to him quietly. ‘They’re looking to you, you know that don’t you?’
Andy nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said reluctantly.
‘So we need to think what we’re going to do now.’
‘No shit. We can’t drive south-west to the K-2 airstrip. We’d have to go back through Al-Bayji,’ he muttered, thinking aloud. He looked once more at the night sky, clear now, and sparkling with stars. There was only one thing they could do. He looked toward the north. ‘How far do you reckon?’ asked Andy.
‘How far to where?’ Mike replied.
‘Turkey.’
Mike’s eyes widened, his thick eyebrows arching above them. ‘Excuse me?’
‘If we go north, we can drive out of Iraq and make our way home via Syria or Turkey.’
‘You plan to drive all the way home?’
Andy turned to look at him. ‘I’ve got two kids and a wife who need me. I want to go home, whatever it takes.’
‘Hmmm. I guess there’s not much we can do.’
‘No. It’s not like we got a shit-load of choice here,’ said Andy. ‘Anyway, we might get lucky and run into some troops . . . yours or ours. Who knows?’
Mike nodded. ‘I guess it’s about 150 miles to the border with Turkey.’
Andy pursed his lips. ‘As the crow flies. More like 200 if we want to avoid any more big towns and stay off the main northbound road.’
‘Then what?’
Andy shrugged. ‘Then we drive through Turkey I guess.’
‘That’s the plan?’
‘That’s the plan.’
Mike grinned, his white teeth framed by his dark beard. ‘You’re a fucking tenacious hard-ass bastard Andy, I think I like that about you.’
Andy shrugged. ‘If we make it home and you meet my wife, you tell her what a big hard-ass I am, okay Mike? Right now she thinks I’m just a dick.’
He slapped Andy’s back. ‘It’s a deal.’
Andy smiled weakly in response.
‘You got a family to get home to,’ added Mike.
Andy’s smile faded. ‘Every minute that ticks by that I’m out here is another minute my kids are all alone.’
Mike nodded and looked back at the truck. ‘So you better go tell those boys then,’ he said, ‘I get the feeling they’ve put you in charge.’
‘Ah bollocks, I’m not sure I’m up to it. I can’t even bloody well fire a gun straight.’
Mike shook his head and laughed. ‘There you see, you ruined it. For a moment, you were almost sounding like a true alpha-male. ’
Wednesday
CHAPTER 43
5 a.m. GMT Between Manchester and Birmingham
Jenny stirred, and realised that she had actually managed to fall asleep in the plastic bucket seat for at least a couple of hours. The first light of dawn had penetrated the surreal, complete darkness of night, and as the steel-grey early morning hours passed, she studied the empty motorway across the narrow grass verge that separated it from the lay-by.
An empty motorway.
Such a strange and unsettling sight, she decided. At least, it was in this country. An empty motorway with weeds pushing up between the cracks in the tarmac - that was one of those iconic images of a long-dead society, a post-apocalyptic world. Well, they were halfway there, the weeds would come soon enough.
Looking around, she could see that five or six of the dozen or so people that had converged last night on the burger van, had set off during the night. There was nothing left to plunder here; the fizzy drinks and burger buns were all gone. She decided they should make a move too.
Paul stirred not long after Jenny.
He stretched a little, nodded silently at her and then with a discreet jerk of his