It was another long passage, ascending slightly. The midsection was in shadow, but at the far end you could see light spilling from some kind of cavern, and we could just make out the soft murmur of voices. Bradley pulled us back and spoke quietly.
“If the intel is good, that’s Mohammed Ben-Amini in there, the fuckin’ Butcher of Al-Landy, plus three mullahs and maybe a dozen men. Her Majesty’s MoD has politely requested, if it’s at all possible, we bring Ben-Amini back in one piece so they can give him a fat pension and a big house in Surrey, and spend the next ten years pumping him for information. So, if you can take him alive, please do. If it gets too hot, plug the bastard. Let’s go.” He held up three fingers. “Flashbang, grenades, carbines.”
We spread out and moved down the passage at a silent run, avoiding the few rocks that littered the sand. At six feet from the end, where it turned right and opened out into the firelit cavern, Bradley stopped and raised his left hand. He dropped to his belly for the third time, crawled a couple of feet and peered in. He grinned malevolently, pointed at me and jerked his thumb. I pulled a G60 stun grenade from my belt, yanked out the pin and hurled it into the cavern.
There was a metallic clank, a second of silence, then sudden shouts and an almighty flash of three hundred thousand candles of light and one hundred and sixty decibels of detonation. We were ready; four grenades followed and exploded in rapid succession.
Then we moved in, carbines at our shoulders and goggles to protect our eyes from the dust. It was carnage, a charnel house. Six men lay partially dismembered around a large fire. Two were mullahs, the other four were Taliban fighting men. A seventh man lay beyond the fire, clutching at his belly, his lips pulled back over his teeth, weeping and crying out. Skinner shot him in the head. We moved on, walking quickly, scanning left to right, following a narrow path among boulders. Two men in white robes, one on his knees, vomiting, the other lying facedown with his hands over his ears. I double-tapped twice and shot them both.
Voices up ahead, crying out, shouting and weeping. The cave was growing darker as we moved away from the fire. We switched on the flashlights under the barrels of the carbines. The Sarge began to run. We kept pace. Nine men came into view. They were sitting and kneeling in the dirt, waving their arms and shouting at us. A couple struggled to their feet. Most were holding their hands up. The beams of light from our weapons played over them. They looked confused, scared, concussed from the explosions.
Bradley shouted at them in Arabic to drop their weapons. A couple of them dropped and prostrated themselves facedown in the dirt. One of them, dressed different to the rest in a red jacket, was on all fours trying to walk away. The other six were variously on their knees or trying to get to their feet, shielding their eyes with their hands. I knew they’d gone deaf and couldn’t hear what Bradley was shouting at them. He shouted again, louder, and a couple of the guys getting to their feet took aim at the lights they could see bobbing toward them. The cave exploded with automatic fire. It was over in two seconds. They were all dead. All except Mohammed Ben-Amini, the Butcher of Al-Landy, who, dressed in his red jacket, had adopted the fetal position and was weeping convulsively.
I slung the carbine over my shoulder, pulled my sidearm and stepped over to him. He squealed like a stuck pig as I grabbed his collar and dragged him to his knees. The Sarge, Jones and Skinner gathered around and I shoved his face toward his dead comrades.
“Hey, Mohammed, you speak English?”
His face was screwed up and he was babbling incoherently. Jones stepped forward with his canteen and poured a little water over his face. Mohammed spluttered and looked up. Jones offered him the canteen.
“Here you go, boyo, have a drink. Relax.”
His terrified eyes swiveled to Bradley and then to me. I jerked my head toward the canteen. He took a swig and wiped his mouth with his wrist. I repeated, “You speak English?”
He nodded. “I speak some. Little.”
He showed me what a little was with his thumb and index.
I nodded. “We saw what you did to the village of Al-Landy. We were there...” I gestured at the four of us. “And we saw...” I put my fingers to my eyes and moved them around. “We saw what you did.”
He made a crying face and spread his hands. “It was will of Allah! They were kafir, bad, not good believers. My men...” He gestured at his dead men. “My men had God’s anger in their hearts...”
“You murdered fifteen children. Five of them were babies. You cut off one man’s head in front of his wife and his kids. You raped the women and the little girls, and then you killed them...”
He leaned forward, appealing to me. “That man, he taught blasphemy. Sharia demands justice.”
I roared, “Blasphemy? He wanted to buy a TV for the coffee shop!”
It was like he didn’t hear me. “And the women...” He reached up toward my face, “...they had been with men…”
“They were raped!”
“They allowed themselves to be raped, they did not fight… All of them, the whole village was touché! Touch by shaitan!”
There was a moment of silence. Skinner broke it by speaking what we were all thinking. “And this bastard is going to live out the rest of his fuckin’ life in luxury in Surrey, in a five fuckin’ bedroom house, while my mum and dad live on a basic pension in Essex.” He looked around at us, one by one. “That seem right to you?”
Jones shook his head. His voice was deep, quiet and melodious, and full of menace. “My brother, Ewan, still works at the mine in Blaentillery. It’s bloody hard work, I can tell you, backbreaking, and he barely makes enough to feed the kids and pay the mortgage. So no, not really...”
I looked at Bradley. He sighed, “Come on, lads, this is the British Army. We’re soldiers, not judges or executioners. We do as we’re told. Let’s get this bastard back to base and send him off to Kabul.”
I didn’t move. I could still see the terrified eyes of the little four-year-old as this son of a bitch took aim at him. Every moment of the massacre was moving through my head in slow motion, every blast of automatic fire, every slash of the blade, every scream, every child. I held Bradley’s eye, but he couldn’t hold mine. Jones and Skinner didn’t budge either. They just watched him, until Jones finally said, “Hey, Sarge, don’t you need to piss or something?”
Bradley growled, “I can piss in the cave, Jones.”
“Ah, no, but it’s not healthy, see, Sarge? Too much ammonia in a small, cramped place, without appropriate ventilation, see? Best to piss outside. More healthy.”
Bradley knew what he was being told—to piss off, as Brits like to say. He didn’t like it. He was old school, and I’m pretty sure that if it had been anybody else but this son of a bitch he would have stood his ground. But he wanted this bastard punished as much as we did. So he sighed, pointed at us in turn and said what he had to say, even if he didn’t mean it.
“But I want this man alive and well when I get back, you understand?”
I nodded. “Don’t worry about it. We won’t do anything you wouldn’t do.”
Skinner spat elaborately on the ground. “Not unless he does son-fink really stupid, like.”
Jones nodded. “Yeah, boyo. Not unless he does something really, like, stupid.”