Blood Lily Company - Afghanistan, year 1

XXX

Time passed, Christmas got closer.

The day after our fascinating conversation about the Legion and its traditions, Kris, Tito and I set out to lay our electronic sentries. It was one of Lin's three packages.

They don't replace human sentries or dog noses, but they do help. And would allow us, on Christmas Eve, to all gather in the mess hall to celebrate together. We were taking a calculated but controlled risk thanks to the electronic sentries.

When my brain went on vacations, the guys finished Erk's Ditch. It had the same depth everywhere now and, above all, it was impassable without our help. Well, a guy on horseback or motorbike and more than a little crazy could hope to cross it. But landing would be bad. Allow me to explain.

The guys had installed a swing bridge: two large reinforce metal slabs, set with just enough space between them for the Land-Rover or a light truck. The slabs rotated around an offset axis, set in concrete and on ball bearings. It took only two men to tighten the cable that lifted the other end and to rotate the whole thing to cross the ditch. The cable was released so as not to interfere with the vehicle, and the maneuver was repeated the other way to set the slab aside. Of course, for the bikes, we would move only one, right?

No horse worth his oats would ever agree to cross these metal slabs that undulated or echoed under their feet.

When I say that landing is bad, it's because on our side of the ditch, the ground was riddled with hand-dug holes, deep and narrow, real leg-breakers for horses, from which emerged a metal stake whose tip, perfectly polished and faceted, shone under the sun. These spikes were lethal for motorcycle or car tires. We had set them up in a swath five meters wide, all along the ditch.

Of course, there was a safe way. But we had solid silicone tires, puncture-proof, essential here, so far from everything as we are.

If that was not enough, the second ditch, crossable by a real drawbridge, same metal slabs, was preceded by a kind of wall – the earth which was in the ditch before we dug it, if you follow me – which prevented anyone from gaining momentum to jump across the hole, even on a motorcycle: the slope of the wall was too steep (70%!). Or, if the guy managed to reach the top either on horse or bike, he had lost all momentum and ended up at the bottom of the ditch, impaled on the metal spikes that had been set up there at the very beginning.

It that wasn't still enough, there was the barbican and the third ditch, 10m from the walls of the caravanserai. And within reach of our guns, mortars and the like, while keeping us safe.

When Erk had been kidnapped by the SRH, he had crossed "his" ditch by the dirt bridge that still existed then, ultimately placing himself in the hands on his captors.

Our sentries, eight in number, had portions of the perimeter of the piece of land that started at Erk's Ditch, north of the compound, and ended at the cliffs, south of it, above the village. They would walk from one end of their section to the other without waiting to meet their buddy, since they were tracked by the GPS chip in their belt. Every day, the starting points of the section changed, just to be unpredictable. Lin and Fatso were scheduling those on the very morning. We had painted numbers on small rocks around the perimeter, and so we would start at the number chosen in the morning.

What Tito, Kris and I set up that morning looked like 10cm long tent pegs. Each peg was planted a little inside the sentry perimeter, 5m apart.

Of course, they weren't tent pegs. These were things that cost an arm and two or three legs because their technology was secret and their electronics overprotected. They could be killed with an EMP flash, but that wouldn't be discreet and these pegs had a sort of dead-man switch: the peg would whistle loudly upon being "killed" by the EMP. A pressurized air capsule was kept closed by the program and would open when the EMP killed the electronics in the peg, then a jet of air would come out through a small opening with a reed, like a flute, producing the whistle.