sweating it out on others' behalf in the briefing hut.
Not that he hadn't been pleased to be sent to Sandhurst. Only two or three Regiment NCOs received a commission each year and it had been very gratifying to be singled out. In his ten previous years of SAS service he'd seen Ireland a lot of Ireland the Gulf, Columbia, Liberia, Bosnia (where they'd given him the Military Medal), Kosovo and now Sierra Leone. And the list was even longer if you included the deniables and the 'black bag' jobs like Somalia and Sri Lanka.
Why had he been chosen? Alex wondered. Because he'd watched his mouth over the years? Because he'd managed to survive a decade of SAS service without actually decking a superior? Something like that, probably. Whatever it had made it worthwhile staying in the army for a full term of service. With a bit of luck he'd make major before too long. After that, if he played his cards right there was Staff College... But what the hell. All that lay in the future.
It had been weird, though, hanging out at Sandhurst aged thirty-four with all the teenaged officers-to-be with their sports cars and their nightclubs and their weekends in the country. There had been admin classes, report- writing classes and even an etiquette or 'knife and fork' course. Never in his life had Alex felt more like a fish out of water.
The others hadn't all been rich, but plenty of them had been, especially the ones destined for the Brigade of Guards and the other outfits where an expensive social life came with the regimental silver. Alex, whose father ran a small garage and body-repair shop in Clacton-on-Sea, and who had joined the Paras as a private to impress a girlfriend (who had immediately dumped him thanks, Stella!) found it impossible to imagine what it must be like to have money to spend on Savile Row suits and Curzon Street restaurants and Caribbean sailing holidays at that age.
For Alex, at eighteen, it had been rockfish and chips, Kestrel lager and a brown leather jacket ('sixty-five quid mate, fully lined') from the Pakistani guy who had the stall at the Saturday market. There hadn't been any foreign holidays.
'Why pay to go to the Seychelles,' his father would ask, nodding towards Marine Parade with its icy spray and mournful winter winds, 'when the sea's right here on our bloody doorstep?'
It wasn't meanness, it was just that Ray Temple didn't hold with what he called 'all that pina co lada bollocks'. What he did hold with was motor sport and lots of it. Formula One at Brands Hatch, drag races at Santa Pod, stock cars at Belle Vue, bangers at King's Lynn, night races at Snetterton any occasion involving cigarette advertising, petrol vapour and deafening noise. The Temple family attended pretty much every event in the Castrol motor sport calendar. And went first class all the way, with enclosure tickets, steak dinners at the motel if it was an overnighter, souvenir T-shirts and the rest.
The old man had been broken-hearted when, inspired by a TV documentary series, Alex had gone for the Parachute Regiment rather than one of the mechanised units.
'Don't be a tosser, son,' Ray Temple had begged him.
'If God had meant us to walk, he wouldn't have created fuel injection.'
But Alex had been adamant and stuck to his guns throughout the tough Para-selection course known as 'P' Company. He wasn't particularly big and he certainly wasn't the archetypal tattooed, scarred knuckled Tom, but when it came to the speciali sed skills of the airborne infantryman he was a natural.
He was a fast learner, excellent with weapons and always switched on in the field. His superiors marked him down as potential NCO material and posted him to his battalion's Patrol Company.
Unexpectedly, like many a town-raised soldier before him, the young paratrooper developed a passion for the wild, remote terrain in which he and his unit trained.
He enjoyed downing pints and trapping WRAC girls with his Patrol Company mates, but found that after only a few days in barracks he missed the freedom and the solitude offered by the mountains and the moors.
Shortly after his twenty-third birthday he was made up to lance-corporal, but by then a part of him had begun to wonder if there might be more to army life than the culture of the Aldershot brotherhood, with its relentless cycles of drinking, brawling, mooning, curry-swilling, shagging and vomiting.
On impulse, he applied for SAS selection. By then, perhaps jealous of his promotion, some of his colleagues were beginning to regard him coolly. No one made any specific accusations but the word got around that he was a bit of a loner. There was an unconfirmed rumour that he had turned down the chance to join in a game of 'freckle' - a ritual in which a fresh turd was hammered between two beer mats on a pub table and the least bespattered paratrooper got to buy the next round.
If he had failed SAS selection, Alex would have had a very hard time living it down. But he didn't fail.
Along with Don Hammond, then a Royal Fusiliers corporal, and a dozen others of the forty or so who applied, he passed. Badged into the Regiment, he discovered a different sort of soldier tough, self sufficient young blokes like himself who knew how to have a good time but didn't need to strike macho attitudes. The best friend he'd made in the Regiment was probably Hammond. As unmarried troopers they'd shared quarters in Hereford, along with a couple of clapped-out cars and for three ill-tempered months a Royal Army Dental Corps nurse named 'Floss' Docherty When it was announced that Alex was to be commissioned, no one could have been more pleased than Don Hammond.
The two had an instinctive sympathy in the field and neither saw any reason why this should be affected by their differing ranks.
And here he was, a dozen years and a dozen dirty wars after signing up, a bloody officer! His father had laid down his plug spanner and laughed fit to piss himself when Alex had told him that he was going to Sandhurst.
'You always were a canny bugger,' he told Alex, shaking his head in disbelief 'but this beats the bloody bank.' His mother, seeing him in his full-dress uniform for the first time alongside the public-school boys, had wept.
Well, he reflected wryly, flipping up the backsight on his M16 and taking a sip of tepid water from his canteen, he might as well enjoy it while it lasted. The system gave, but the system also took away, and took away faster than slit off a hot chrome shovel. At heart, Alex knew, he was not an Establishment man.
THREE.
Shortly after 3.30 there was movement in the camp. A tall soldier carrying some kind of hooked knife was walking amongst the prostrate soldiers, stepping over outflung arms and legs. As he reached the camp perimeter he paused to kick one of the sleeping figures.
It was one of the women, Alex saw through his binoculars. With infinite slowness, the woman began to get to her feet, only for the soldier to take her by the hair, wave his bill-hook, and start violently pulling her towards the jungle. Hastily, fearfully, she matched her pace to his. This looks tricky, thought Alex. This looks very tricky indeed. They're making straight for us.
'Coming our way, Alex,' murmured Ricky Sutton beside him.
'Seen,' replied Alex. For the second time that night he drew his Mauser knife. The pair were no more than fifty yards from him now. Whatever you're going to do to her, Alex pleaded silently with the soldier, do it right there. Don't come any closer.
But the man kept on coming. Whatever it was that he intended the curved knife almost certainly had something to do with it it was going to make a lot of noise. There were going to be screams. So he was taking the woman into the bush where her evil-spirit howling wouldn't wake the camp up.
Twenty-five yards now, and Alex could hear the woman s terrified keening and the soldier's muttering as he forced her forward. If they tried to evade, to crawl sideways out of their way, the soldier would see them.
And if they stayed put... When it came to the moment, instinct took over.
Tripping the soldier with his rifle, avoiding the scything blade as both the man and the woman fell, Alex leapt on top of him. For a critical moment the soldier must have thought that a tree root was to blame for the confusion, and that the melee consisted only of himself and the woman, for he made no noise beyond an stifled curse. And then the butt of Alex's M16 met the back of his head with bone-smashing force, and he was still.
Ricky Sutton, meanwhile, had grabbed the woman.
Behind his hand she was still keening, the sound a tiny sustained ribbon of anguish. Deliberately, Sutton moved his face into a shaft of moonlight, so that she could see at a glance that despite the black cain-cream he was European, and urgently shushed her. Their eyes met his taut and pale, hers tear-rimmed and terrified and she nodded once. She was wearing a thin cotton dress and plastic sandals.
The soldier had to be dealt with and Alex had no choice but to do it in front of the woman. Lifting the unconscious man's head by the hair, he chopped inwards and dragged the blade of the Mauser knife hard through
