question.’
‘The Doctor wasn’t there,’ Jacko growled.
‘Right,’ Fletcher said. ‘Now remind me, are you a specialist unit under the command of E Squadron, or a bunch of
A pause. Fletcher looked at each member of the unit in turn. A question was coming. Joe could sense it.
‘Anyone care to tell me why the CO took a call from our American cousins asking if we were aware of anyone breaching SOPs during the raid?’
Silence. Joe found himself staring not at Fletcher, but at the back of Ricky’s head. Once more the OC directed his gaze at each of them. Was it Joe’s imagination, or did he linger on him slightly longer than the others?
Thirty seconds passed. They seemed a lot longer. Finally Fletcher inclined his head, plainly aware that nobody was going to give him an answer.
‘Stand down,’ he said. ‘Get yourself cleaned up. Eat. Full debrief at 2030.’ He looked in turn at each member of the unit once again. ‘Now’, he said quietly, ‘would be a good time for you all to decide what you’re going tell me. And more to the point, what you’re going to tell the Yanks.’ The OC walked from the briefing area and out of sight before any of them could even stand up.
JJ was sitting in the front row. He turned round to look at the others. ‘What the fuck was all that about?’
Nobody replied. They started to file out of the briefing area; all except Joe and Ricky, who remained in their seats.
For a moment Ricky didn’t look back. ‘Thanks, brudder,’ he said quietly.
‘We need to sort our story out,’ Joe said under his breath. ‘Right now.’
Ricky looked around and nodded.
‘Not here,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
They left the Regiment hangar and headed towards the centre of the base. It was teeming with American troops, hanging out in pairs or threes, all wearing their standard uniform of camo, aviator shades and Berettas hanging from their belts in non-standard-issue leather holsters. To a man they had crewcuts, some of them with elaborate razor-cut patterns on the sides of their heads. Then there were the air base staff – contractors, mostly, wearing blue overalls, baseball caps, cigarettes glued to their lower lips and facial hair that marked them out as non-military personnel. Very few locals. There were plenty working on the site, Joe knew, but they were mostly doing just that: scrubbing toilets, cleaning floors. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d overheard the words ‘bin Laden’. There was a mood of self-congratulation around the place.
They’d been walking in silence for ten minutes – past the packed Burger King and Subway concessions that would have made the whole place feel like a Midwestern mall if it hadn’t been for the twenty-ton MRAPs filled with troops coming back from, or going out on, patrol – when they came to another hangar. This one had its doors flung wide open, and it contained a US Air Force Boeing E-3 Sentry. The engines were turning over, and perhaps fifteen engineers swarmed around the aircraft. The noise was sufficiently loud to drown out Joe’s and Ricky’s voices. They headed round to the side of the hangar.
Joe spoke first. ‘We saw the enemy target heading to the security gates. I nailed him, you nailed Romeo and Juliet. When the gates opened, you approached and took out the dude trying to leave. We extracted to the opposite side of the path and held our positions till the Yanks left. We singing from the same hymn sheet?’
Ricky nodded.
‘Look, mucker.’ Joe looked round, checking that nobody could overhear them. ‘You’ve got to sort yourself out. You haven’t been…’
‘What?’
‘You haven’t been yourself. Not for a long time. Maybe it’s getting to you.’
‘Maybe what’s getting to me?’ Ricky stuck out his chin, oozing defensiveness.
‘This.’ Joe gestured all around him. ‘Nobody would blame you. It’s intense. I’m telling you, mucker, they’re going to be spending more on shrinks for the craphats than they are on prosthetics for the amputees.’ He paused. ‘And not just the craphats.’
‘What you trying to say, Joe?’
Joe noticed that Ricky was clenching his teeth. He could sense his mate’s tension. The noise of the E-3’s engines suddenly grew quieter. Neither man spoke.
Until finally, Ricky said: ‘I’m Hank frickin’ Marvin. Let’s get some scran.’ He turned to his friend. ‘I’m fine, brudder. Really. I fucked up back there. Hands up. It won’t happen again.’
Joe nodded. If Ricky said he was fine, that was good enough for him. ‘OK, mucker. If you say so.’
Ricky grinned suddenly. ‘So did you see the big BL? I couldn’t see fuck all from where I was…’
‘Nah,’ Joe said, shaking his head. He might be giving Ricky the benefit of the doubt, but something told him his mate didn’t need anything else to fuck with his head. ‘Thought for a minute that Malinois was going to come and sniff my bollocks, though. Could have been interesting.’
‘You should have let him,’ Ricky said. ‘Better-looking than some of the dogs in Hereford.’
The two men headed off to find some food.
Joe lay in his low cot, still fully dressed in camo trousers and black T-shirt, but with his boots and ops waistcoat dumped on the floor beside him. It was dark inside the thin-walled Portakabin mounted on two skins of roughly rendered breeze ?blocks that served as digs for him, Ricky and JJ. The first thing they’d done when they’d moved in here was board up the windows against the possibility of mortar attack. Joe was knackered, but sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t the noise from outside. It wasn’t even the heavy breathing and occasional snores from Ricky and JJ. It was his head, reliving the debrief with the Yanks where he and Ricky had stuck to their story even though they could tell someone was smelling a rat.
He found himself remembering the cold, glazed look on Ricky’s face in the compound. Joe had lost count of the number of kids he’d seen take on that same thousand-yard stare after a particularly traumatic op, then learned that they’d handed in their badge and headed back to their parent unit in the hope of a quieter life. But these days there were no quiet lives in the military. Even the greenest of green-army soldiers found themselves stuck in a shit-filled Afghan ditch on six-month rotation with some Taliban fucker trying to put holes in them three times a day, or separate their legs from their torso. And as for Regiment ops, they’d grown increasingly dangerous at the same rate.
The first time he’d gone out on the ground on this tour, he’d come across what looked like a father kneeling at the roadside and weeping over his dead son. The kid was naked, his belly sliced open and his skin bloody and stained. Joe had approached, and only when he was five metres away did he realize there was more to the scene than he had noticed at first. There was a wire leading from the kid’s stomach wound to a switch in the weeping man’s hand. Only he wasn’t weeping any more. He had started muttering to himself. Joe had only needed a single shot to the head to take him out. And once he was kneeling by the two dead bodies, he followed the wire that led from the switch. He’d had to insert his hands into the still-warm innards of the boy’s stomach to pull out an old Russian mortar round that was hidden inside.
The memory of that child with the split-open stomach had haunted him of late. Maybe life in the Regiment was getting to him too.
His watch glowed a pale green in the dark: 0400. He hadn’t slept for days. Not properly. It was one of the things the medics had told them to look out for – but none of the guys took that shit seriously.
He swung his legs over the side of his cot and fumbled in the darkness for the bottle of water he knew was there somewhere. His fingers brushed against it and it toppled over. He heard the contents sloshing out and felt a sudden wave of anger. He thumped the side of the bed in frustration, and by the time he’d picked up the bottle again, it was only a third full. He downed what was left, threw the bottle back on the floor and stood up. No point lying here in the darkness. He pulled on his boots and headed out of the Portakabin into the camp outside.
The bunkhouse Joe shared with Ricky and JJ was one of twenty located behind the Regiment hangar and surrounded by yet more HESCO walls. He weaved his way among them until he found himself along the back end of the hangar itself, where the generator was sited, turning over noisily and stinking of petrol. Light was escaping
