of the hills that he had from his window. He had read many books about the British occupation of Afghanistan that had happened more than a century ago and he tried to imagine what it had been like for soldiers in those days: the oppressive heat and dust of the summers and the bitter cold of the winters. In many ways life for a rural Afghan had not changed a great deal since those times. Hillsborough wondered what the locals truly made of the Westerners and all their mind-boggling technology. Did they envy them or did they truly want to remain as they were? He was inclined to believe the former, suspecting that most so-called Islamic extremists were nothing more than political tools in the hands of men who could not otherwise vie for power.
‘EVADE! EVADE! EVADE!’ the crewman suddenly screamed. The last word had barely left his lips before the heavy machine jerked upwards, banked heavily over and dropped out of the sky on its side.
Hillsborough grabbed his seat in sudden panic as his stomach leapt into his throat and the briefcase clattered against the floor.
The crewman had had his suspicions the instant he’d heard the co-pilot sight the vehicles.They only increased as he watched several figures moving hastily around them. He had not seen much in the way of action throughout his tour other than the time when his crew had dropped off a Royal Marine fighting troop on a hillside during a battle taking place some distance away. The Yanks had lost two helicopters in those months, brought down by ground-to-air missiles, and it remained in the back of every crewman’s mind each time he took to the air.The route from Kabul to Bagram was considered reasonably secure because of the relatively few numbers of attacks along it in the past six months. The wreckage at the head of the Shomali Plain of a US Blackhawk, shot down the year before, was a reminder to all that no helicopter was safe anywhere in this country.
The crewman had held himself back from hitting the panic button when he’d first thought he could make out the men taking something from the back of one of the trucks. He prided himself on his coolness and his caution against overreacting. But there was no mistaking the sudden flash from within the group and the instant cloud of smoke rapidly expanding behind it, the tell-tale signs of a launched missile.
The pilot had seen the threat and had initially increased power to pull the craft upwards, hoping to get above the missile’s altitude limit. But after an instant recalculation he took the lift out of the rotors and banked the chopper away in an effort to gain downward speed and move out of the weapon’s horizontal range. As he gripped the controls tightly, willing more speed into the lumbering beast, he knew in his heart that they would not make it. If the rocket was a Strela-7, rumoured to be the most common in use in the region, he needed to be over four kilometres away and above two thousand metres to stand a chance of evading it. He was short of both distances. They were in God’s hands now.
The crewman could do nothing but squat in the doorway and stare at the head of the trail of smoke that twisted and curved towards them.The helicopter swung dramatically over onto its other side in an effort to shake its pursuer but the missile’s computer nimbly adjusted the projectile’s tail fins to compensate for the move.The smoke trail corkscrewed several times in a tight curve, cutting through the crisp, clean air as it homed in on the heat signature of the Merlin’s red-hot exhausts.
Hillsborough did not know the nature of the threat but it was evident from the crew’s reactions that the situation was a serious one. He put a hand to his seat belt to unfasten it in order to have a look for himself but then he remembered the helicopter crash drills he’d been taught, the fundamental rule of which was to stay strapped into the seat. If they landed he would want to get out of the craft as soon as he could and he focused on the open door in front of him, keeping his hand on the buckle in readiness. The crewman suddenly leapt from the doorway, throwing himself to the floor, and for a split second Hillsborough could see, in the bright sunshine outside, the instrument of their