Untitled SF Story (first draft)

[Zaune]

Afghan-Pakistani border

August 4th

"Coming up on the village, sir." The Royal Marine lieutenant glanced through the windscreen of the Land Rover at a dilapidated collection of huts that barely merited the term. Another Land Rover and a three-ton truck were parked in the centre of the settlement, along with a battered white pickup truck. "Pakistani Army's not meant to be this side of the border," the driver continued, gesturing to one of the men in the rear of the vehicle. He stood up to man the GPMG on the roof.
"Couldn't tell you which side of the border we're on without a GPS fix," his commanding officer replied. "This place isn't even on the map. Besides, it's not them I'm worried about, it's the Ten Dollar Taliban." 'Ten Dollar Taliban' was local slang for farmhands moonlighting as hired guns between the planting season and the harvest, and despite the Coalition's best efforts it was the only way to keep food on the table for a lot of people in these parts. They were neither highly motivated nor especially skilled combatants, but like all amateurs they could be dangerously unpredictable.
The Land Rover and two Viking armoured personnel carriers parked facing back down the road, roof-mounted machine guns carefully quartering the area as the men disembarked. A couple of nervous-looking Pakistani soldiers pointed them to one of the larger buildings, and the platoon leader and his sergeant made their way over.
It appeared to be a barn or warehouse that doubled as a meeting hall, but now it had been pressed into service as a morgue. A Pakistani officer and a civilian in Western clothing were listening as an old man in local dress spoke animatedly and gestured to several shrouded bodies, whilst more local men clutching an assortment of rifles looked on.
"Lt. Paul Foster, 45 Commando Royal Marines."
"Dr Jasim Ahmrad, Medicines sans Frontiers," the civilian replied, with a broad Midlands accent. "This is Captain Hussein of the Pakistan Border Guards, and Shakid here is the village headman. I take it you received my radio message?"
"We received a message, though it was extremely garbled. Some kind of shooting incident?"
"About three hours ago a couple of shepherds disturbed a small group of soldiers, apparently lying-up to monitor the road. They opened fire," Hussein replied. "The men of the village turned out to see what the hell was going on, and there was a lengthy exchange of gunfire that ended with eight villagers killed and three more wounded. One of our border posts picked up Dr Ahmrad's distress call and summoned my platoon from the garrison, but by the time we arrived it was all over."
The village headman added something vehement in Pashtun, with a murmur of agreement from the assembled villagers. The sentiment was clear even if the words were a mystery to Foster. "Can anyone provide a description of the aggressors?" he asked. "Uniforms, weapons or the like?"
"This man says he got a clear look," Hussein replied, gesturing to a skinny young man who clutched a lovingly-maintained Lee-Enfield with a telescopic scope instead of the ubiquitous Kalashnikovs. He pointed to Foster's SA80 and spoke quickly to Hussein. "He says their rifles were shaped like yours."
"Identical or just similar?"
The young man spoke at some length. "Similar," Hussein replied. "Longer barrels, and he thought they might have a bipod. Really big muzzle flash as well."
"I recovered some of the bullets, or what was left of them," Dr Ahmrad added, holding up a Zip-Loc bag containing four misshapen lumps of metal. "Hollowpoints, I presume."
"Charming," Foster said dryly. "Has the scene of the battle been disturbed much?"
"Nothing touched but the bodies. I kept them away from the lying-up point for fear they'd booby-trapped it."
"Good. I'm going to report this and get military police assistance to investigate a probable war crime. Captain Hussein, I would be grateful if you'd alert your own commanders; the Pakistani government will want to look into this as well. In the meantime... Sergeant? Have the men split into sections and start aggressive-patrolling the surrounding area. Do we know which direction they headed when they broke contact?"
"North," Hussein replied. "Crossing the border away from the passes would take weeks, but there is another road thirty kilometres in that direction. They may be hoping to slip through before the alarm is raised, but one of them is possibly wounded and I already sent a general bulletin."
"Chances are they've gone to ground somewhere to wait for nightfall. Won't have gone that far if one of them did stop a round, either. Sergeant, keep one section here, and Marine Philips and his rifle; I'll try and get them to send the redcaps in a heli, and we'll search from the air."

An army Merlin arrived ten minutes later, with a Royal Military Police unit from the Special Investigation Branch and a couple of EOD experts. "I have been informed that we are technically inside Afghan territory, although since the aggressors apparently originated on the Pakistani side we're going to conduct a joint investigation," explained the senior redcap, a Captain Masterton, raising his voice a bit as the Merlin took off loaded with Marines. "Captain Hussein, if your men have any training in scenes-of-crime investigation I'd be grateful for your assistance."
"Once we have finished taking witness statements, they are at your disposal."

"No booby-traps so far, but no abandoned kit either," the EOD robot's operator reported. "Must've been compromised before they had to time to drop their bergens. Not much spent brass so far either, if I didn't know any better I'd say we were in the wrong place." The lying-up point was the basement of a Soviet-built radar installation, flattened by Coalition cruise missiles in 2001 with devastating consequences for the Taliban military effort, though not in the way the planners had intended; what the withdrawing Soviet forces hadn't stripped out was rusted to junk, but the moonshiners who'd moved in afterwards lost all their equipment and a lot of stock.
"Stupid LUP really," Foster agreed, looking up from the radio set. "Not only is it the first place anyone would look, it's the only bit of shelter on the whole hillside. They'd have been compromised the minute some shepherd fancied a smoke."
"Nowhere else to lie up if they want to watch the road and the village," Hussein replied. "What puzzles me is why they opened fire on the searchers. Their mission was already a failure, and they had two hours until sunrise. Why risk their lives to stand and fight?"
"Yeah. And come to think of it, why not take out those two shepherds with a silenced weapon, or even just bash them senseless with a rifle butt? They could have been back over the border before they were missed."
"Clearly we are not dealing with consummate professionals," Hussein agreed. "Were I asked to hazard a guess, I would suggest mercenaries."
"That would explain those mystery guns. None of regular forces around here use a bullpup rifle with a bipod; only people I can think of who even make one are the Israelis."
"I've been flipping through a Jane's Guide since you mentioned that," Masterton added. "Barring a conversion job, the only weapons I can find that might fit the bill are LSW versions of a standard rifle, like we used to have for the 80. The only such examples still being made are the Israeli one you mentioned and something the Chinese are making for the export market. Interestingly enough, it seems that one of their early customers was Iran."
"Who hardly need go to these lengths if they're interested in monitoring the activity in this region," Hussein pointed out. "And in any case, our witness could easily have been mistaken... what the devil? Look!"
The four of them stared at the screen, which was showing what at first glance appeared to be a classic blood-spatter pattern from a bullet wound. All that was wrong was the colour, a vivid and entirely unbloodlike shade of reddish orange. "Looks like tomato soup or something," Foster said after a long and horribly confused moment. "We'll probably find bits of thermos flask all over the place."
"Hah. Of course!" Masterton agreed with a nervous laugh, though he didn't sound entirely convinced.

Masterton sounded even less convinced after going over the basement with a fine-tooth comb. "No bits of Thermos or any other kit, and not a single cartridge case either," he informed them. "Well, apart from a 7.62 that might have been there since the Russians left. Brass-catchers, do you think?"
"If they used potato sacks," Foster replied, gesturing to the dozens of fresh pock-marks in the walls of the buildings further down the hill.
"Caseless ammunition, perhaps?" Hussein wondered. "I did hear of a company in the United States experimenting with cases made of stiff cardboard that would be compatible with existing magazines."
"Quite a furore about that in the press as I recall," Masterton agreed. "All came to nothing in the end, though. The extra strain on the breach cut into the weapon's useable lifespan quite severely, and the cardboard residue fouled the mechanism so badly that even an AK47 would jam after a couple of hundred rounds. No, this must be something new."
"Strange place to field-test them," Foster pointed out, then paused. "Unless the point wasn't to test the weapons themselves in a combat situation, but their ability to confuse the hell out of people like us."
"Which would explain the apparent bloodstain..." Hussein barked a short, bitter laugh. "Ingenious, isn't it? Imagine what those villagers will think when they hear about this! And it won't matter if we prove the 'blood' is fake, the rumour mill will be working three shifts by the time you reach your barracks."
"I'm recalling that Merlin," Masterton replied. "Foster, call your men back and put a guard over... no, that would just make matters worse. Go and find the headman and that medic, tell them exactly what we've found and that we're sure it's a con."

"How sure?" Shakid enquired pointedly, via Dr Ahmrad. Foster reflected gloomily that this was not an altogether unreasonable question. "Well, without testing the apparent bloodstain we can't be absolutely certain, but on balance of probabilities... Look, feel free to use some artistic license translating this, alright?" he said pleadingly.
Shakid gave Foster a look that communicated, far more clearly than words. that being a horny-handed son of the soil didn't mean he was a fool. He conferred quietly with the doctor for a few moments. "He prefers to keep an open mind until hard evidence comes to light, but he'll exercise caution in how much he tells the rest of the men," Ahmrad said at last. "And he has a point, you know."
"You believe it might actually be..." Foster forced himself to vocalise it. "Be... aliens?"
"Right now, lieutenant, I don't know what to believe."

* * *

The blood sample and the recovered bullets were flown to Coalition headquarters in Kabul, and then to the forensic laboratories of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency in London. A carefully-worded statement to the media admitted only that ballistic and forensic evidence had been collected in a joint operation by the Royal Military Police and the Pakistani Border Guards after a shooting incident between Afghan civilians and a party of unidentified military personnel. There was a brief flurry of speculation as to who said military personnel were employed by, none of it conclusive, but in the absence of any further information the matter remained unresolved.

Or so it initially appeared.

For his part, Lt. Foster had written the incident off as one of life's minor unsolved mysteries and given it little further thought. He might have wondered at the lack of subsequent media attention had he had the luxury of time to ponder such things, but Afghanistan was a volatile region and the British presence sorely taxed for manpower, and he'd had time to think of very little except his job in the intervening months.
It was the occasion of a diplomatic visit to Kabul by the Prime Minister that brought it back to his attention. It would be the new PM's first visit to the troops on the front line, since the Commander-in-Chief of the Army had tactfully pointed out that the enormous amount of extra work created by supposed morale-boosting visits tended to make them counterproductive.
The ceremonials were kept to a minimum, but included the traditional receiving line, which the PM was supposed to walk down shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. It was a tradition better suited to the days when visiting dignitaries and Other Ranks had little of nothing to do with one another, as by the time he reached the relatively junior officers it was obvious he was running out of things to say, with still no end in sight.
"Lieutenant Paul Foster, sir." He snapped to attention.
The PM looked thoughtful for a moment. "You were part of the investigation into that strange business near the border, weren't you?" he said thoughtfully.
"Yes sir," Foster replied, surprised. Apparently more attention had been paid to it in official circles than he'd realised. "Don't suppose MI6 ever got to the bottom of it, did they?"
The PM's carefully maintained smile faltered. "Inquiries are still ongoing," he replied, with an uneasy smile.
Foster's eyes narrowed as he pondered all the possible meanings of that statement.

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Written in about four hours. Is there as much work needed as I think there is? Title suggestions would also be appreciated.