Jacko McGuigan had applied to join the Royal Military Police when it had become clear that his career in the Scots Guards was leading precisely nowhere. He was ambitious, and joining the military police gave him options. Sure, it meant that none of his former army mates wanted anything to do with him. But that was an occupational hazard. He’d soon learned to keep his distance from regular army guys. You didn’t want to get too friendly with someone you might have to put behind bars. Not that there were many British Army guys here in camp. Jacko was an anomaly, only here because he knew there were operations occurring in the region that certain members of the British Army wanted to keep tightly under wraps. To a member of the Royal Military Police, that was a red rag.

  As he watched Doctor Karim sprint towards the medical centre, Jacko knew something interesting was happening. There was an anxious buzz about the place. He had learned to read the atmospherics. When, ten minutes later, a Chinook banked over Camp Shorabak towards the landing zone, the anxious buzz heightened. He watched from the shadows as an ambulance, lights flashing, siren blaring, stormed from the LZ towards the medical centre, and four men removed a casualty on a stretcher and carried him in. The urgency and efficiency of it all told him that this was not an Afghan casualty. This was a Brit or a Yank. Jacko would find out soon enough.

  He looked at his watch. 01.35 hours. He needed to sleep. He was just turning to head back to his accommodation block when his phone rang.

  ‘McGuigan,’ he answered.

  ‘It’s me, boss.’ An Afghan voice.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We have another one. The ones you’re interested in.’

  McGuigan stopped. Looked around to check he wasn’t being overheard.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. And he felt a little bit of excitement.

  Regular squaddies scrapping and smuggling hooch into camp were not Jacko McGuigan’s quarry. That would be like a top detective nicking drivers for parking violations. No. Jacko was RMP through and through. He knew that the way to impress his superiors was to go after bigger game. Marines. Paras. And of course special forces. SBS would be a good catch. But the scalp everybody wanted was 22 SAS. Those guys were out of control, and all the RMP knew it.

  But damn, it was like catching smoke. Jacko had been embedded in Helmand Province for four months now and he knew that a Regiment kill team was active here. The Special Investigation Branch was aware of their activities, but the crime scenes did not always match up with the reports that were being fed through to the RMPs. The SAS were acting illegally and not admitting to the full extent of their activities. Jacko knew it. His boss Mike Holroyd knew it, although even Jacko had to admit that Holroyd’s vendetta against the SAS was bordering on the obsessive. Less a criminal investigation, more a religious crusade.

  Be that as it may, the Regiment’s behaviour had to stop. And Jacko was not above hanging on to Holroyd’s coat-tails. If he managed to help Holroyd nail the Regiment, he’d be fast-tracked to the top of the tree.

  So he listened hard to what his contact had to say. He was an officer in the Afghan National Police. The ANP were an improving law enforcement outfit, but they were not above accepting a backhander. Not strictly legal, of course, and Jacko wasn’t stupid enough to think his guy wasn’t also taking bribes from the Taliban and any other groups that wanted his services. But for the reasonably modest sum of fifty pounds a week, the officer provided Jacko with regular updates of any crimes that ticked certain boxes. And as the officer spoke, Jacko agreed that this one might. A night-time hit? Check. High-value Taliban target? Check. No evidence of the perpetrators within several miles of the crime scene?

  ‘The army, they sent in Chinook.’ Said the ANP officer down the line to Jacko in his serviceable but patchy English. ‘Wounded soldier, British. They airlift him to Camp Shorabak. And boss, this one, it’s messy. Even my men, they can’t look at it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jacko said, glancing back in the direction of the medical centre.

  ‘The family, boss. They killed the family too.’

  Jacko felt his expression harden. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Gareshk, boss. Ten miles south of Shorabak.’

  ‘I need to see it.’

  ‘You must hurry, boss. I cannot keep the Taliban away for long.’

  ‘Can you arrange transport? Protection?’

  A pause as the officer hesitated at the end of the line.

  ‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ Jacko said.

  ‘Meet my men at the south entrance of the camp in ten minutes,’ the officer said. ‘They will drive you here.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Jacko killed the line and sprinted back to his room where he pulled on his body armour and ops vest and checked his handgun – a Glock 17. Then he jogged out of his quarters and ran towards the area behind Accommodation Block B where the rusted old Toyota that he used to drive about the camp was parked. He floored it past the satellite dishes of the comms centre towards the southern entrance to the camp. It took him two minutes to get there. Out of the corner of his eye through the passenger window, he saw the Chinook rising from the ground in a storm of dust, and he ran past the memorial wall, lit up to commemorate the dead soldiers of Helmand Province and largely ignored by everyone. At the south gate, an ANP Land Rover was waiting for him, headlamps burning in the darkness, one rear door open. He ditched his Toyota in an open area near the guardhouse, alighted and clambered inside the Land Rover.

  There were three Afghan police officers waiting for him in the vehicle. They were plainly not impressed at being called out at this time of night, for this type of job. A night-time journey, in an un-armoured vehicle, into Taliban-held territory was nobody’s idea of a good night out. None of them attempted any pleasantries, and Jacko was too out of breath to talk as they trundled towards the outer cordon of the camp and were waved through the barrier by one of five armed ANA guys. Three months previously a group of Taliban militia had gained access to the camp and planted an explosive device. Fifteen men dead meant that the guards were a lot more diligent about checking the identities of those entering the camp than those leaving it.

  As the lights of the military base disappeared behind them, Jacko and his ANP guards drove in silence through the desert. Jacko watched the dark terrain pass through the side window. He found that was easier on the nerves than looking straight ahead, trying to pick out pressure plates or IEDs on the illuminated road. The ANP patrolled these areas all the time, he told himself. They knew what they were doing.

  And so it turned out. It took forty-five minutes on the rough desert roads to reach the village of Gareshk, but they arrived without incident at 02.31 hours. As they hit the northern edge of the village, the ANP driver took them off road and slowly negotiated the eastern perimeter of the village, coming to a halt on the northern side of an irrigation ditch that the Land Rover couldn’t negotiate. Jacko and the ANP guys exited the vehicle.

  ‘You,’ Jacko said to one of them, ‘lead the way. You two, stay on either side of me.’

  The ANP seemed to understand his command, although they looked unimpressed. Jacko didn’t care. They were there to protect him, not the other way round.

  They moved past an empty barn on their right that stank of goats, then a bombed-out building covered in weeds. Jacko’s contact was waiting for them at the entrance to a compound fifty metres beyond that. An ANP vehicle was parked outside and several police officers were guarding the entrance. Jacko’s contact stood by an open wooden gate. He wore ANP uniform, had a full black beard and carried a rifle. As always, he looked at Jacko’s goatee with undisguised amusement. ‘You have something for me?’

  Jacko handed over two hundred American dollars. His contact counted them, shoved them in a pocket then inclined his head towards the compound. ‘There were two hits. The first one was here. This way.’

  Jacko removed a torch from his ops vest and followed him in. He observed that the padlock on the inside of the gate had been cut with bolt cutters. His contact led him to a room on the far side of the compound, guarded by another ANP guy. There was no light inside. When Jacko peered in with his torch, he saw a woman and two children huddled up together on a bed. They looked terrified and had clearly been crying, and they shrank back from the light of Jacko’s torch. Then his contact led him to another room on the north-eastern side of the compound.

  The only occupant of this room was dead.

  He was almost naked, his trousers in a tangle around his ankles. As Jacko shone his torch up the length of his body he saw that his genitals were scarred and hairless from some previous trauma. There were dog bite marks on his right forearm, and he had been shot twice. Once in the head, once in the face. Jacko felt sick. He couldn’t look at it for more than a couple of seconds, and was glad his contact seemed to be in a hurry.

  ‘We should go, boss. Follow me.’

  A team of five ANP guys escorted him across the village. It was clear the inhabitants knew something was happening – Jacko could hear voices and see lights – but nobody ventured out of their houses or compounds. Jacko’s contact led them across a dried-out tributary of the Helmand River and in ten minutes they had come to a second compound, this one guarded on the south side by three ANP. They stepped aside from the gate to let Jacko and his contact through.

  The compound was divided into two: up ahead, Jacko saw a dividing wall with a door in it. In this southern half of the compound there was a tree in the middle with some welding equipment underneath it. Jacko pointed towards the door. ‘That way?’

  Jacko’s contact shook his head. ‘There is nothing that way, boss. The sign of a struggle, but just empty rooms. But here . . .’ He pointed to a room on the south-west corner of the compound. Its door was open, but it was dark inside. He looked Jacko up and down, as though uncertain that he was up to witnessing the scene that awaited them. Then he shrugged. ‘Go and look,’ he said.

  Jacko hesitated. He was still feeling nauseous from witnessing the corpse in the other compound. His skin went clammy and he almost decided not to look at what was in the room. But his contact was staring at him, and this was what he’d come for after all. He raised his torch and entered.

  Jacko McGuigan would never forget what he saw.

  There were four people in this room. A woman and three children. They were all dead, but Jacko had been expecting that.

  It was the manner of their death that turned his core to ice.

  They were lying, face up, on the floor. Their mouths were covered in duct tape. Each of them had been shot in the head, clearly at a range of no more than a few inches. The children had a third of their skulls blown away, the adult about a quarter. But even these catastrophic injuries were not the worst of it.

  Each corpse was naked. Their night attire – plain robes – had been split down the middle. So had their abdomens. Each body was sliced from the neck down to the groin. The innards were bulging grotesquely out. They were still slightly glistening in the torchlight and there was a terrible stench of faecal matter and urine.

  Jacko emptied the contents of his stomach noisily on the floor. He continued to retch even when there was nothing more to bring up. He sensed the silhouette of his contact standing in the doorway. ‘Get out!’ he shouted, embarrassed. The silhouette ebbed away into the night.

  Get a grip, Jacko told himself. You’ve seen bodies before. Dead is dead. You need to see those bodies for what they are. Promotion. Advancement. He straightened up, wiped the phlegm from his mouth and removed a camera from his ops vest. He went about the grim work of photographing the bodies, and felt dizzy from the flash of the camera and the grimness of the work. When he was done, he stood in the darkness for a moment, wondering what his next move should be. This was an atrocity. A war crime of massive proportions. Jacko had truly lucked out. But he was alone in this part of the world, the only RMP representative at Camp Shorabak, and for all he knew in Helmand Province at large.

  He needed backup.

  He took out his phone and dialled a number. It rang three times before a male voice answered.

  ‘Holroyd.’

  ‘It’s me, boss. McGuigan.’

  ‘What time is it there?’

  ‘Just after three in the morning.’ He glanced at the shadowy forms of the bodies lying in the darkness. ‘You need to get out here,’ he said.

  He told his superior what he had just seen.

  Then he turned on his heel and strode out of the room. ‘Get me back to Camp Shorabak,’ he told his contact. ‘Now.’

  CHAPTER 10

  Camp Shorabak Medical Facility. 04.00 hours

  It was the opinion of Doctor Karim that his patient had been extremely lucky.

  A couple of inches either way and the bullet would have hit a major artery. He would have bled to death within minutes. As it was, a speedy casualty evacuation and some skilful surgery meant that the patient would be up and about in a couple of days. Blood and fluids had been replaced. The wound had been neatly stitched. It would hurt, of course. There was a risk of infection. The soldier – Doctor Karim didn’t know his name – would be scarred for life in the shoulder area. But he’d live.

  However, as his medical team cleaned down the operating theatre and wheeled the patient into a recovery ward, Doctor Karim found himself contemplating some things that didn’t quite add up. Those bits of the casualty’s clothes and body armour that the medics had removed or cut from his person had been placed on a metal trolley. He stepped over to it and examined the tactical gloves. The palm and the back were stained with blood. It would make sense that the palm of one of the gloves would be stained, if the casualty had used it to press against his bleeding wound. But both sides of each hand? After a bullet wound to the shoulder.

  And there was something else. He had placed the bullet, which he had excavated from the patient’s shoulder, in a petri dish. Doctor Karim knew something about ballistics. This was a 5.56. It had probably clipped the edge of the patient’s body armour before entering his shoulder, fractionally reducing its velocity. He picked it out of the petri dish with a pair of forceps and carried it over to the sink at the side of the operating theatre, where he ran it under the water and scrubbed off some of the blood that still remained. There was no doubt about it. Definitely a 5.56. But almost without exception, ANA, ANP and Taliban forces fired 7.62s. Only the British and Americans fired 5.56s.

  A wave of tiredness overcame him. He dropped the round into a pocket, then went to clean up. Twenty minutes later he was back at his quarters in Accommodation Block A. Lying on his bed he tried to sleep, but despite his exhaustion sleep wouldn’t come. He pulled out the round, held it up and continued to examine it.

  Time passed. He didn’t know how long. He was snapped out of his daze by a knock on the door.

  Please, he muttered to himself in Pashto. Not another one. He walked across the room and opened the door.

  The last time he had seen the British soldier with the goatee beard flecked with grey had only been a few hours ago. How different he looked now. His face was dirty and sweat-streaked. His goatee beard was matted. He smelled of vomit.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  Ordinarily, Doctor Karim would have asked him to leave. He neither liked nor trusted the man. But the haunted look on his face echoed the doctor’s own uncertainty about the night’s events. He stepped aside.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘It’s Captain McGuigan, isn’t it?’

  McGuigan nodded as he entered. At Doctor Karim’s invitation he sat on a hard-backed chair.

  ‘The casualty evacuation you received into the medical centre tonight,’ he said. ‘That was a British soldier?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Will he live?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s lucky, but he’ll be fine.’

  ‘Was there anything unusual about him?’

  ‘Apart from a bullet in his shoulder?’ Doctor Karim endured McGuigan’s unimpressed stare for a few seconds before inclining his head and handing him the round. ‘He was shot with a 5.56. I am almost certain it would have come from a British or American weapon.’

  McGuigan examined it, his face expressionless. ‘Anything else?’ he said.

  Doctor Karim nodded. ‘His gloves,’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They were blood stained. I don’t believe it was all his blood.’

  McGuigan stared into the middle distance. He looked like he was remembering something. ‘In your opinion,’ he said, ‘had the man you treated been in close contact with other casualties?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Doctor Karim. ‘Extremely close contact.’

  McGuigan’s eyes gleamed. It was a very unpleasant expression, Doctor Karim thought, given the circumstances.

  ‘May I keep this?’ McGuigan asked, holding up the spent round.

  ‘If you must,’ said the doctor. ‘Now if you will excuse me, it has been a long night. I must rest.’ He walked to the door and held it open.

  McGuigan left.

  Dawn was arriving as Jacko walked back to his own accommodation unit, a steely grey creeping through the camp as a terrible night gave way to an uncertain day. At the far southern end of the camp, he could see a plume of smoke rising from the burn pit where the refuse created by the camp’s inhabitants had been smouldering all night, but it didn’t look as grim to him as it normally did. His criteria for unpleasantness had been reset.

  Jacko’s phone rang before he reached the accommodation unit.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Holroyd’s voice at the other end. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Shorabak. I’ve just interviewed the medic who worked—’

  ‘The casualty’s name is Danny Black,’ said the voice. ‘I came across him a couple of days ago. He’s a troublemaker. 22 SAS. He was on an operation with three more SAS members. Tony Wiseman, Rees Dexter and Billy Cole. They’re approaching Shorabak from the south as we speak.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Jacko said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how I know. Intercept them as soon as they’re in camp. Debrief them fully. Find out what happened and make them squirm. Is that understood?’