Excerpt from Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'So this camp at the end of the world, hideout for some of the worst human scum, we have positive ID, there is some talk of sending the SEALs in, like one of those night raids that they can film and then jerk off to. I say we take it out first and say it was all a happy mistake.'

A target at the end of the world? By mistake? Is that even legal? Am I to start obeying blatantly unlawful commands? The Colonel considers my silence a declaration of mutiny.

'What do you think I run here? The Salvation Army? It's a combat unit. We are pilots, not fucking monks. You go, you take it out, you take your Purple Heart and get the hell out of here before they start reassigning us to polish the silver in the officers' mess. Do it then you can go and serve your lady love. Ladies are going to bury us all one day anyway.'

Fine, Sir. Fine. But...

'Get the goat-fuckers but watch out for our own. Here is us,' he stabbed the map at a random point. 'You'll get the coordinates. Fairly basic. On one side is our Hangar. A refuelling facility. Actually a bit more than that, a rest stop. R&R for those who don't deserve it. You can't miss it. It's massive, air traffic tower, landing strip, the whole works. And on your port side is the compound. It used to be a refugee camp but they downgraded it. Basically a real bad place full of bad bad people. You can smell the evil from the skies. Nobody is going to miss this lot. Trust me on that.'

'What's wrong with the boots on the ground, Sir?' 'Should I have you court martialled for insubordination?' 'Just trying to understand, Sir,' I said.

'The Hangar was my boots on the ground. Their locals started fiddling with our comms and they shut it down. I'm walking blind in there. So get this. My Hangar is shut. But the refugee camp that's the source of all this trouble still exists. And they tell me not to take it personally. Routine. Restructuring. I think we need to take care of that bit of Mother Earth.'

And while I was still thinking whether to report him to High Command or not, the Colonel embarked on his crazy-ass mission to bomb the camp himself and basically went Elvis on us.

I should have learnt. Now say that again.


The 'Desert Survival Rules' emergency procedures section states that if your fellow zoomie crashes during a mission, you don't wait for orders. You hear your man is down, you take off and fly the same route, complete the mission. It used to be about fighting off fear, telling enemies that maybe they can bring you down but you'll still scorch their miserable lives. So they flew after Colonel Slatter and found the debris but no remains. None. Colonel Slatter had crashed his plane and evaporated into thin air. No zero-zero ejection for him. He was the most open man I knew. Now he is mission-briefing-room gossip.

In the beginning of my career there was some argument about Central Command for country, or country for Central Command. It was dropped after Central Command denied any role in running the day-to-day war and claimed it existed only to provide a sort of spiritual underpinning for the war effort. But there are no arguments in the briefing room anymore; you get your mission brief, you inspect your survival kit hoping you won't need to use it. And if it is one of these missions you pop your pill, take a swig of black coffee and hope for the best.

There was a rumour that the Central Command have been reading too many Sufi texts. That they are copying whole sections of SOPs from foreign libraries transported to the States and translated diligently by tenured professors of obscure languages. Central Command insert them into your emergency procedures, into your survival guides. But while they've probably already found nirvana, you get blisters and dysentery. And if you veer too far away from the Path of Oneness, you might get suspended from flying. And what is a pilot who can't fly? No better than a broken-winged shrieking bird.

Red Birds © 2018 by Mohammed Hanif. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.