by McNab, Andy
‘My men only narrowly avoided being blown up by a double landmine. A goat took the blast instead. They were confirming that there had been no civilian casualties when they encountered the enemy. They faced the stark choice of firing or being fired upon.’
Jean raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure you’ve been told all the details?’
Weeks thought about that. Well, no, of course he couldn’t be sure that he’d heard the whole story. But he wasn’t going to admit that. ‘Their actions were entirely justifiable.’ He hoped he was right.
Dave had taken Sol a meal and been told that his best corporal had a twisted ankle and had to keep the weight off it for at least a week, maybe two.
‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’ he asked the departing medic.
The man turned and shrugged. ‘Shoot him?’
‘Good idea.’
‘Sorry,’ Sol said miserably. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘How the hell did it happen?’ Dave asked. ‘If it had been Finny or anyone else I’d know they were pissing about. But you . . .’
‘I was on top. I was firing. Then I shifted my weight around and . . . well I stumbled and the next thing I knew I was falling.’
The Fijian was built like a brick shithouse. He’d fallen on Dave during an impromptu football game and Dave still had the bruises.
‘Not the lads below playing some stupid fucking trick on you?’
Sol shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t do that.’
‘Not if you were under fire, I guess. I suppose we’re lucky you didn’t shoot yourself as you fell.’
‘Yeah,’ Sol said. ‘I’m trying to tell myself how lucky I am. Heard any news of Steve or Jordan?’
‘Jordan’s OK at Selly Oak. All they can say about Steve is that he’s stabilizing. Hasn’t stabilized enough for me to speak to him, though.’
Sol sighed. ‘So until my ankle gets better, Finn will be section commander?’
‘He’ll have to step up when we’re out on patrol. But I’m pissed off with him.’
‘All this stuff about Emily?’
‘Yeah. I don’t remember anything about shagging the contractors in the camp orders, do you?’
‘It’s just a wind-up. And when you’re out there and you need Finn to be good, he’s always good.’
‘Under pressure he’s good. The rest of the time he’s all mouth.’
‘You can’t step anyone over him.’
‘I know.’
‘So it’ll be Finn to command and Jamie as second i/c?’
‘Yup.’
Sol placed his empty plate on the ground beside him, lay back on his cot and shut his eyes.
‘What happened to Angus today? The lads have been ripping into him. Mal’s his best mate, but he’s been tearing Angry apart.’
Who needs sergeants, Dave thought, when you had mates to keep you in order? ‘I don’t know what’s going on with that lad,’ he said. ‘I intend to find out now.’
Angus McCall was eating by himself while Mal and the others were on the other side of the cookhouse. He was watching the TV intently. Although he must have been aware that someone was sitting down next to him, he didn’t look up.
‘Anything you want to talk about, Angry?’ From the way McCall hunched his oversized body, Dave knew that the lad had seen him enter the cookhouse and was bracing himself for what came next.
‘Nah . . .’
They both watched the screen. Impossibly beautiful women in gauzy dresses followed a man through London’s meaner streets solely because of the way his underarms smelled.
Dave glanced across the room at Mal, self-proclaimed babe magnet. Mal wasn’t watching the TV. He was locked in discussion with Finn. Jamie was laughing at them. Dave could tell from the way that Mal and Finn were squaring their shoulders and puffing out their chests that the talk was about women in general. Or maybe the elusive sex grenade in particular.
‘You’re not sitting with your mates tonight. Have they been taking the piss?’
Angus said nothing. He watched the women in their gauzy dresses.
‘You had a bit of trouble out there today . . .’
Angus still didn’t respond. His cheeks looked like they were weighing down his face.
‘It’s strange, arriving in theatre. One minute you’re at home buying a few beers in Tesco and the next minute you’re in ’Stan being asked to kill a man.’
Angus nodded and continued to stare at the screen.
‘I can’t make you slot someone. If your conscience says you shouldn’t, then don’t,’ Dave said. ‘And I’ll try to respect you for it.’
Angus shook his head. ‘It’s just because I thought he was dead and he started moving. It’s just because I wasn’t expecting it.’
‘You have the right to say: No, Sarge, let’s try to save his life.’
‘That would be fucking daft.’ Angus looked at Dave for the first time. ‘We’d only just shot him.’
‘I agree with you there, Angry. But the fact is, we were operating at the edge of the RoE and some people would say we should have carried him to a medic there and then.’
‘Fucking daft.’ Angus turned back to the TV. ‘What’s the point in firing at someone if you make them better afterwards? Makes it all a stupid fucking game.’
‘If he’s wounded, some people would say we should have brought him back for treatment . . .’
‘That’s shit.’
Dave watched the TV. A game show. A contestant was being offered the chance of winning fabulous amounts of money if he chose the right coloured box. The man’s face ballooned as he tried to make a decision. The audience shouted advice. They shouted louder and louder. Red! Blue! Green!
‘And then there was the bloke up the tree.’
‘I was going to do it!’ Angus looked distressed now. ‘I was just going to do it and you changed your mind and told Finn instead!’
Dave smiled. ‘Pissed you off, did I?’
‘Fucking right you did! I was going to do it!’
‘That’s another one where the RoE get a bit murky,’ said Dave. ‘Because in my heart of hearts I knew he was jammed there and so was his weapon and he wasn’t in much of a position to fire on anyone. And I was just beginning to think that maybe we’d take him in for questioning. But I didn’t think it fast enough and Finn fired.’
‘I was going to slot him . . .’
‘You need to get a grip on yourself, Angry. You could find yourself in a situation where it’s kill or be killed. And hesitation won’t help you then.’
‘I was just slow today!’ Angus protested. ‘That’s all.’
‘You’ve never killed a man, have you?’
Angus shook his head unhappily. ‘There wasn’t a lot of action in Iraq when I got there.’
‘Nothing to be ashamed of. I know men who’ve been through their entire careers without firing their weapon except in training. A lot were never operational.’
‘My dad was operational.’
‘Oh, yeah, Falklands wasn’t it?’ Dave said, as though he didn’t know already. As though he hadn’t heard a thousand times. Finny had sometimes threatened to slot Angus if he talked about his dad one more time and even Angry’s best mate Mal seemed to have some sympathy for that idea. But Dave knew that Angus measured everyone against McCall Senior.
‘My dad had to kill Argentinians. He said he didn’t feel anything at the time. But later it can get to you.’
‘Yeah, it can get to you later. If you let it. But if you remember that we’re professional soldiers and we’re doing a job here and our job is to deal with the choggies before they can deal with us, that makes it easier. We’re just doing our job.’
They watched as the man on the screen chose the red box. They waited to see if he’d become a millionaire. After a long pause it was revealed that he hadn’t. The green box had been the right one. The man started to cry. His wife, who had been shouting at him to open the green box, came on stage and started to cry too. The game show
host started to cry.
‘I’m OK with killing.’ Angus looked at Dave again. ‘Next time I’ll do it.’
‘OK.’ Dave nodded. ‘You’ll get a lot of chances to prove yourself.’
‘I will,’ Angus said. ‘I’ll prove myself, Sarge.’
In his heart, Dave wasn’t convinced. The RoE were grey and confusing but something else was holding Angry back. Dave had thought about keeping him on camp duties for a few days. He decided to let him stay with the others for now.
Dave looked across the room. Finn was talking to a group of contractors. Dave saw with dismay that they were getting out their wallets. They were young oil engineers with large salaries, which made them prime targets for Finn. Dave strode over to issue Finny with a stern warning, but he was too late. The group were already putting away their wallets and dispersing.
Chapter Nine
JAMIE’S TEXT SAID HE HAD BEEN MADE ACTING SECTION 2 I/C. WHAT did that mean? If Agnieszka saw one of the other wives and they forced her into conversation as usual then she would find a way to ask them about a 2 i/c.
She didn’t have anywhere to go today but she put Luke into the car because something had now gone wrong with the TV. Maybe she had hit the wrong button, maybe the set was really broken or maybe, maybe, maybe a thousand things but the result was the same: no TV. And she relied on TV to calm Luke down and send him off to sleep.
It calmed her down too. She liked the programmes where people went to auctions with their old junk. She liked to see their faces as the bidding went up and up. Yesterday there had been a new game show and she had watched a man almost win a million pounds. At the last minute he had chosen the wrong box and he had cried. Agnieszka had cried with him. A million pounds would turn the world from black and white to colour. A million pounds would make the bumpy road smooth.
The man had chosen the wrong box because he had not listened to his wife, who was shouting the right answer from the audience. Now they would have to drive home and carry on their unchanging lives together knowing that maybe their dreams would never come true.
Agnieszka found herself driving towards the city. There was a cathedral and in the quaint streets surrounding it were many small, understated shops. But Agnieszka preferred the superstore on the outskirts. It was a cathedral of sorts, because you felt calm and peaceful when you walked up its wide aisles.
She hummed along to the warm, soft music as she passed the stationery and art materials. The goods on the shelves were a riot of colour like indoor flower beds. Luke was sleeping deeply and she could look at the shelves undisturbed.
Agnieszka made her way to the TV department and wandered between the sets, even though she could not afford to buy one. She read the cards carefully which described the special features of each set.
‘Hello, Mrs Dermott.’
She looked up. A man was grinning at her. For a moment she didn’t recognize him, just knew she felt pleased to see him.
‘Darrel Gregg from the garage,’ he reminded her. But by then she had remembered. She smiled.
‘Buying a TV?’
‘I already have TV but it broken.’
Darrel’s face fell. He was reflecting her own face back at her, she realized. The corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes looked sad.
‘Let’s get this straight. Last week it was your car . . .’
She tried to turn up the corners of her mouth to see if his corners would turn up too.
‘. . . and this week it’s the TV.’
‘Also dishwasher. That breaks even before car! Also gutter!’
He gave her such an immense smile that she smiled back. He had a row of even white teeth which seemed to fill his face with smile. Then he began to laugh.
She started to laugh too. ‘My husband go and whole house fall down!’ It seemed ridiculous now. It was so absurd that all you could do was laugh at it.
‘I hope at least the car’s running all right.’
She nodded, still smiling.
‘Car is perfect. Like new car.’
He looked pleased. ‘Glad we were able to help. Now what about your lad’s hospital appointment? You got up the motorway and everything was OK?’
‘Well . . .’ She felt her face cloud again. You could laugh about broken TVs, dishwashers, cars, gutters. But you couldn’t laugh about a baby who needed fixing.
His face clouded too. ‘Not OK, then?’
Now she felt tears stinging at her eyes. She knew she must not speak or they would come flooding out of her. It was something you could do in private but never in public, certainly not with some man at the superstore. She glanced at Luke, sleeping peacefully in his buggy, his face round and his eyelashes long. He looked just like any normal baby. But he wasn’t.
The man was watching her with concern. His eyes wrinkled at the edges when he smiled and then if he stopped smiling the wrinkles were still there. He was old, she thought. He might even be thirty.
‘Mrs Dermott . . . I . . . look, what’s your first name?’
She blinked at him. Her eyes felt wet. Damn. Damn!
‘Agnieszka,’ she said in a voice so small that he asked her to repeat it several times.
Finally he repeated it himself: ‘Agnieszka!’ He made it sound like a sneeze.
She felt herself smiling. ‘Agnieszka!’
‘Bless you! But I’ll never be able to say that. I’ll just call you Aggie. So listen, Aggie, got a few minutes to come to the café with me? I’d like to buy you a coffee and hear all about this beautiful boy of yours.’ He gestured towards the sleeping baby.
She nodded and they went up the escalator together, Darrel steering the buggy expertly up the moving stairs.
She sat down and he reappeared a few minutes later with a tray.
He put a coffee cup down in front of her. ‘And crisps in case you feel salty. And a muffin in case you feel sweet.’ She didn’t move, just rocked the buggy back and forth while he unloaded the tray. It felt good to sit still and let someone else look after her.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘tell me about your little boy.’
So she told him about Luke’s fits. The trip to the hospital yesterday had been inconclusive. She hadn’t even discussed it with Jamie yet. She was waiting for his next call, when she would try to explain what the doctor had said, even though she hadn’t understood most of it and the link would disappear for whole sentences at a time.
‘Has he had a scan?’
‘He will have scan, doctor said.’ She had understood that much, anyway.
‘Did he say what’s causing the fits?’
‘He say it hard to know because Luke so young, we wait a few months to be know anything.’
‘Well, did he give any idea what it might be?’
Agnieszka shrugged. At this point the doctor had lost her. His language had become complicated and she had suspected he was being evasive.
‘Luke’s still a young baby, Aggie, and, let’s face it, arriving into this world can be a bit of a shock. Some children take a while to adjust.’
Agnieszka looked at him with admiration. He spoke so firmly and with such knowledge that he sounded like a doctor, he sounded the way the doctor at the hospital should have sounded. ‘I like that I understand every word you say.’
‘But your English is fantastic!’
‘No. But you very clear.’
‘Right then, here’s something to be clear about. We have to sort out this broken TV of yours or you’ll end up with a new one you don’t need.’
‘I don’t have money for new TV. I don’t know why I come here today, honest.’ She was glad she had, though. The coffee tasted good. It had a layer of thick milk on top and beneath, despite the two tiny sachets of sugar she had added, was the bitterness she loved.
‘Does it start when you switch it on?’ He was sounding like a doctor again.
‘It start but I don’t get good channel or good picture.’
‘Cable, digital or terrestrial?’
She didn’t
know.
‘I can sometimes sort that kind of thing out. I’m not a professional, mind. But would you like me to have a look?’
She was so surprised that she upset her coffee. Embarrassed, she mopped it up with a series of increasingly brown, soggy napkins. Then he insisted on getting her another coffee.
