Wardogs

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I know those lasses well, having trained them and their dogs over the months and the years. There's not one amongst them would have baulked at being sent to the most dangerous of bases in Afghanistan. They're as brave and capable as the lads, and I know they'd have gone anywhere asked of them, but the RAVC's hierarchy is determined to protect them. God knows it'd be one hell of a public relations disaster to get a woman-and-dog team killed here.

That left the boys to take the murder postings. Dan Barron had been sent up to Kajaki, with his liver-and-white spaniel, Harvey. Dan's one of the nicest blokes you could ever meet, with his funny, high-pitched Preston accent, and a habit of dropping his aitches. Dan's only problem is his drinking: like most of us, he thinks he's ten men when he's got the beer inside him. He loves his "Arvey, and I know it'll destroy him if his dog steps on one of the thousands of deadly land mines planted up around the Kajaki area.

Then there's Pere Cheetham, all seven-foot beanpole of him, with his black Labrador, Max. Pere's got a wonderful good nature, and he'd do anything for you, although he sure loves doing his cheeky impersonations of my thick Mancunian accent.

Pere and I are great friends, which makes me all the more worried that he'd got posted to the die-hard Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala. I've got a feeling Pere's going to go up there a boy and come back very much a man. The seventh member of the 104's AES team is young Rowe. You can't help liking Ken. He's a good-looking, gobby Ken

Geordie who winds me up something proper, but I love him all the same. His confidence and brash ways remind me of myself at his age - twenty-something and ready to take on the world.

Ken's got a fantastic dog, a snowy-white Lab called Sasha. If there's one dog in the 104 that can rival Hunter's abilities, it's her. She's the only one that Hunter truly respects. He recognises her superlative search capabilities, and she's also Hunter's bit of skirt. Whenever he's around Sasha he goes all bashful, like an adoles cent with a crush. It's hardly surprising: she is one hell of a classy looking girl.

With some K9 teams the love between handler and hound becomes so strong that the dog actually stops working properly. That was the case with Sasha and her first handler, Zoe. Reluctantly, Zoe had to give Sasha up and hand her over to Ken. She feared that she and her dog had grown too close, and that their ability to seek out the bombs had become impaired by their love for each other.

I've never had that problem with Hunter. No matter how much love I give him, he always wants to work. I don't believe there's anything will ever stop him doing what we do so well together. Whenever I take him down the local hardware store at home, he's straight over to the bottles of weedkiller, sitting on his haunches and staring up at them: Look what I've found, Dad. (Weedkillers can be used to make explosives.) He can't stop being a working dog. It's what he loves.

Ken and Sasha got together only recently, but they've formed a fantastic team, one of the 104's very best. Here in Afghanistan they've been given Inkerman - a base that's arguably as volatile as Sangin, but somewhat smaller. There are more firefights at Inkerman, but there are far fewer IEDs. It's a more traditional, less sneaky kind of war the Taliban are waging there. But after Sangin I figure it's the next worst posting in terms of your chances of getting blown up or killed.

I'm worried for Ken, Pere and Dan, plus their dogs. Dead worried. They're new to combat and they've been posted to places that are pretty close to hell. They're lone teams parachuted into a variety of regiments, and I know the horrendous work rate that'll be expected of them and their dogs. But I'm confi dent that each has the personality to shine through and to win friends, which will help them cope with the loneliness, the exhaustion and the sheer relentless knife-edge terror of it all.

I've trained and worked and lived with those lads since 2003, when we first deployed to Northern Ireland together. I've coached them tirelessly for Afghan ops, trying to give them the kind of infantry know-how that I learned in my original unit, the Cheshire Regiment. But I'm not kidding myself that it's going to be easy for them, or risk- and trauma-free.

In a tiny unit like ours involved in such life-or-death work, everyone becomes close. Ken, Dan and Pere were up at my house for Christmas, just a few weeks prior to deploying to Afghanistan. I'd made sure we had a proper good time of it, and that was really my family Christmas.

I'd bought this giant turkey from a local Lincolnshire farmer to feed all of my boys. I was getting it ready for the oven when Ken tapped me on the shoulder. He had one of those smug grins on his face, which always serve to wind me up a treat.

'What you doing for Christmas dinner then, Dave? 'Turkey stuffed with giblets?' 'What's that supposed to mean, you ungrateful little so-and so?' I shot back at him.

'You ain't removed the giblets, have you?'

I peered inside the greasy white flesh and I could see that Ken was right - I hadn't. I could half remember my mum removing the turkey's innards at Christmas so she could pack it full of stuffing. I started to reach inside the big, cold slab of turkey to do likewise.

Ken was laughing outright now. "That's its b****y neck! You've got to go in the other way, and ram your hand up its arse I stepped back and gestured at the big, pimply white carcass. "There you go then, mate, you have a go.

Ken point-blank refused. As far as he was concerned I'd invited him over for Christmas dinner, so all the hard work was going to be done by me. Somehow, I muddled through, and a few hours late we sat down to the mother of all feasts. And every time one of us finished off a hunk of juicy turkey, we made sure to toss the bone to Hunter. He was in heaven, was my boy, and the rest of my team seemed pretty happy with the feasting.

Ken, Dan and Pere are like the honorary members of the Dave Heyhoe family, especially since I've got next to no hope of ever having kids of my own. I'm no oil painting, yet somehow I've managed to snare some lovely girlfriends in my time. But with none has there ever been the barest hint of a years back I'd gone pregnancy. A few to see an Army doctor, to have a quiet chat about it all. He in turn referred me to a local hospital. There I had to go through the embarrassing ritual of producing a sperm sample so the doctors could take a good look. The result that came back was that I had a less than 5 per cent chance of ever fathering a child, my sperm count was so low. And so it was that I'd learned that I was more or less infer tile.