The Tomb

A military convoy travelling to Al hilla district in central Iraq is ambushed, with devastating consequences.

Friday October 29^th 2004: Al Hilla, Central Iraq

 

The open fronted Land Rover ‘Wolf’ sped across the Iraqi desert, kicking up vast plumes of sand in its wake. It was one of eight similar rough terrain vehicles that drove parallel to the convoy of food and medical supplies they were escorting north to Al Hilla province. They had thus far travelled under the cover of darkness, but the encroaching dawn now lit up the land an orange and purple hue. Daylight made the troops’ job more perilous than ever.

The soldiers knew, through bitter experience, that during the day an attack could happen at any time and could come from any direction. Especially when out in the open as they were. The supplies convoy was an emergency measure as air transportation was currently too dangerous in the area. It was assumed that the insurgents would be focused on cutting out the air supply, but the advice had been to proceed with caution and haste.

On board the ‘Wolf’, in the passenger seat beside the driver, was medic Sergeant Charlie Nichol. He had recently e-mailed a message to his wife and children back home in England, but his laptop and loving thought had been replaced with his rifle, readied for action and an outwardly alert state of mind. His colleagues in the tarpaulin covered back part of the Land Rover were likewise astute to any potential danger, but their part in this story is unfortunately only as significant as this brief account of them.

It was as Charlie’s colleagues removed the covering and the Wolf drove by a terrace of hilltops that the story really begins and much of the recent past becomes irrelevant.

In a sequence of fragmented moments Charlie Nichol’s world was thrown into chaos. Firstly; mortar rounds and distant gunfire exploded into life all around the convoy and its escorts. A moment later and Private Hooper, the driver of the Wolf, veered away from a nearby impact, sending sand and gravel spewing from beneath the side scuttling tyres to that made by the explosion. A successive impact, a closer call than the first that peppered the soldiers with desert, saw him steer violently in the opposite direction and they careered eastwards nearer to the hilltops and into unchartered territory. Charlie braced his shoulder against the metal framework of the open doorway and half stood to aim his sights in the futile hope of finding a target to defend against.

In that moment the right side of the Wolf disturbed a buried mine which responded with fiery fury. Shockwaves flipped the vehicle upwards and Charlie was flung from its confines into the minefield they had inadvertently driven onto. Charlie dropped his weapon as he hurtled toward the desert floor from twenty feet in the air. A fourth explosion sent shrapnel hurtling the falling soldier’s way. Charlie knew that the Wolf had been destroyed as a piece of its body narrowly missed the back of his head; embedding itself into the sand on the surface away from him.

 

This collision set off another landmine; the vibrations of this, in turn, caused the earth to part below Charlie, so that instead of landing on the desert he rolled through a tunnel that took him below the earth.

Dawn faded more quickly than it had arrived as he plummeted, then bounced and whirled down the chasm. The fall was over in seconds, although it felt to Charlie like a painful eternity, but when he finally landed he rolled someway across a flat surface and then fell again. It was a short, abrupt landing this time, but Charlie continued to roll until he stopped face down in a mess of putrid slime.

Charlie was deathly still for several minutes but came back to the waking world with a jolt. He was greeted by the agony of his injuries and his screams echoed around him in the pitch black that was pungent with decay. The mixture of pain, fear and revulsion at the odour made Charlie sick and he vomited onto the sleeves of his combat jacket. The shock of being sick brought him back to his senses and he quickly diagnosed his own injuries.

A broken tibia, left leg- fractured ribs, 5, 6, 7 and 9; shrapnel wound to upper abdomen- possible punctured lung.

Considering the ferocity of the attack and his subsequent fall into oblivion Charlie considered that he was exceptionally fortunate to be alive. Knowing this did not help quell the pain however and he shifted to his side to take out his penlight from his trouser pocket and used this to locate the painkillers in his breast pocket. They were fast acting and extremely effective, but given the extent of his discomfort he took four from the blister pack and chewed them until small enough to swallow.

Charlie gagged against their terrible taste, but held them down so that they could work their magic throughout his system.

Despite being recently sick his mouth was dry and he had no water supplies with him. The majority of his equipment was in his backpack, which had remained on the Wolf when he was flung to the desert. Charlie quickly counted the resources left to him and located the radio about his person. He trained the light on the two way transistor as he tried to communicate with his colleagues on the surface.

The hiss of white noise greeted each and every frequency he tried and, after a fruitless minute or so, he gave up with an anguished curse. With a grimace of determination he flashed the light around the immediate vicinity, but dropped the torch in fright when he saw the array of disjointed and detached bones that protruded through the thick carpet of rotting sludge.

Charlie scrambled for the light, his revulsion complete at having to reach through a rib cage to claim it, and used it to further inspect the burial site he had found himself within.  

He managed to ignore the human remains that he was surrounded by long enough to concentrate on assessing the situation. It appeared that, over time the tomb had formed into an underground cavern. The wedge shaped space sloped from its most shallow point toward the hole down which he had fallen.

Subterranean darkness made it impossible to judge the width or breadth of the cavern, but the thin beam of light showed it to be intermittently littered with an array of ornamental objects, extremely old and decomposed corpses and stone tablets carved with inscriptions in a long forgotten language.

The only apparent way to reach the surface was via a stack of stone slabs that had been laid directly below where the earth had caved in. Faint daylight slumbered down from the surface until it intermingled with clouds of sand and dust; making it appear like a heavenly glow was showing him the way. The broad stone slabs, he assumed, were what had broken his initial fall from the surface before he fell again to the sodden ground.

Just his luck to have not stayed at the highest point, he mused. Crawling back up the opening may not have been too difficult, but to scale the slabs first may prove impossible.

Charlie trained the thin shard of light onto his broken leg and assessed his chances of scaling what he estimated to be a twelve foot height. There would be hand and foot holds aplenty, but they would be useless if he was not able to climb.

Besides which, in order to climb he had first to get there.

The darkness, stench and heat made the medic feel increasingly claustrophobic and so his urgency to escape was exacerbated with each fretful moment. There was perhaps three feet of space above his prostrate figure and fifteen feet of sludge to crawl through in reaching the stone slabs. The soldier grunted in determination and began to pull himself across the floor by his forearms and elbows. He yelped as each twisting movement of his body hurt his fractured ribs and each successful drag of his body sent shocks of searing pain down his broken leg. Charlie rested at each second succession of movements, but was rapidly losing the will to move. He thought he might pass out from the pain and as his body weakened his thoughts turned to childlike fear.

The thought of being trapped in this place, dying slowly from his untreated wounds, his loved ones never to know where he had met his demise. Forgotten from existence as time went by, perhaps to be uncovered many centuries in the future by some baffled anthropologist and placed in some museum of curious anomalies that successive generations could ponder upon.

‘Stop it!’ Charlie scolded himself, his cracked and parched voice echoing around the tomb and pulled himself further across the pit of putrid bones and rotting relics.

Aside from the silvery hue of the meagre penetration of daylight from this source all else was cold and dark and terrifying. His mind was still reeling from the overhead chaos as he tried to make sense of where he was in amongst the murky underworld gloom. His ears perceived a continuous and piercing shrill ringing in the silence following the din of war, every muscle in his battered body ached with effort as he realised that he was rapidly losing physical strength and the will to move beneath an all-consuming nauseous lethargy.

Putrid aroma’s caused him to wretch as each and every inch he crawled his disturbances released some new odour of ancient decay into a nasal passage that was widened in fear and exertion. Charlie writhed his neck about as he tried, in vain, to avoid breathing in more of the pungent odour.

It was then that he felt something move beneath the upper part of his arms. He looked down in sharp fright- expecting to see a writhing snake or some hideous insect. Charlie was almost relieved to see, beneath the covering of filthy slime, the skull of an apparent monarch that still wore a domed, golden crown in death below him. He supposed it had been the crown that had shifted beneath him: nothing more alive or animate than the slime lubricated rim of gold that had span beneath his shifting weight. Despite his desperation to escape the tomb Charlie eagerly removed the golden artefact from the top of the skull and slid it into the thigh pocket of his combat pants. The financial rewards for such a find may ensure he and his family could live in comfort for many years.

‘Thank you,’ Charlie muttered as he looked into the hollow eye sockets below him.

He briefly wondered who this monarch had been before again looking toward the stacked stone slabs that towered above him and prayed he had the stamina to climb them to freedom.

 ‘Wish me luck!’ he said to the corpse and made to crawl away, but found that he could not as his belt had caught onto something below him.

Charlie grunted in dismay and flashed his torch light toward where he was snagged. He moaned out loud when he saw that it was the skeletal hand of the King or Queen that had hold of his belt. Ancient gnarled fingers clutched tightly to his strapping; stopping his progress.

Charlie placed one arm across the corpse’s chest and leaned his weight on it to gain purchase in twisting his body around. He intended to reach down and unclasp the skeletal grip that it had on him, but the pressure of his approach forced a pungent black liquid rushing through the dead mouth and into the soldiers’ face.

‘That’s disgusting!’ he wretched in dismay as tried to pull the sticky substance free, but to no avail.

The more he pulled the more the black stuff spread about his person. Charlie’s face, head, fingers and hands were covered in the substance and, to his horror it began to crawl up his sleeves to his wrists and arms and down his neck to his shoulders and chest.

‘Help! Help m…’ Charlie yelled, but gagged as the gunk invaded his mouth and throat; silencing him.

The soldier writhed around the floor as he struggled to escape the fluid that invaded his body. The pain from his wounds no longer registered in a brain only concerned with survival and Charlie was only still when he had become completely covered, inside and out, by a living cloak of darkness.

 

Author's Note

I'm yet to exhaustively research aspects of the military or medical terms and/or equipment that may be omitted from this opening. If you, the reader, notice any error in the terminology I have used please feel free to correct me.