Crossfire

There was a murmur as everyone stood. We headed for the brew area. Nobody was going anywhere until the attack had stopped and the munitions guys had got out there to clear the compound.

9

Pete stood up with his empty cup still in his hand and his helmet at a jaunty angle. He didn't wear one of the black Wehrmacht-style helmets like the rest of the media. He said the lip at the front got in the way when he filmed. Instead, he'd got hold of an old British steel helmet on eBay, and ground down the front of the rim.

He wore it tipped back and to the left, with a square of shammy leather underneath so it stayed at the same angle and didn't slide about on his bald head. With the corners of the shammy hanging down over his ears, all he needed was a Capstan Full Strength glued to his bottom lip and he'd have been a ringer for old Tommy Atkins in the trenches.

I tapped his arm. 'Finish your emails, Bermondsey Boy, I'll see to these.'

'Thanks.' He passed his cup. 'That's if the sat phone ain't shot to bits.'

Pete went to the other side of the room, where his iBook was rigged up to a BGAN wire running out through the window. The BGAN itself was sitting on top of one of the HESCOs outside.

Yet another rocket landed with a dull crump. It was the fourth attack we'd had that day. The last one had been mortars and had taken out two of the quartermaster's steel freight containers. No one was killed or injured, so I could just imagine the QM rubbing his hands as he prepared to compile a list of bomb-damaged goods long enough to fill two ships, let alone two containers.

When I got back to Pete with his Shirley Temple, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, his iBook on his lap. The memory stick he normally wore round his neck was jutting out of the USB port.

He wore a big smile under the helmet.

'Family stuff?' I laughed. 'So that's what you keep on those things. I thought you boys had 'em as some sort of good-luck charm. Fucking Dom walks round like he's immune to everything except green kryptonite.'

'Don't I know it, mate. It's a worry. Here you are…' He shifted the screen so I could share. 'Last year's birthday party. Six years old and bright as a button.'

A tall woman in a bikini with long wavy blonde hair was doing her best to keep control of half a dozen kids in armbands and goggles. The camera panned to take in more of the background.

I did a double-take. 'Fuck me, Brockwell Park lido! That takes me back a bit.'

'Done a few laps in your time, have you?'

'We used to go and mess about there as kids.' I watched his grin widen. 'We'd get out at Brixton and go to the market first, see what we could nick. We usually landed up with a couple of tomatoes or some green thing we didn't even know the name of, but it still made a nice picnic. Then we'd doss by the pool until we got thrown out for divebombing the grown-ups.'

Pete had been nodding along. He gave a burst of laughter louder than a 30mm. 'I got chucked out too! Wrongly accused of being the previous owner of a turd they found floating in the deep end. Wasn't you, was it? Too much exotic veg?'

I pointed at the screen. 'That Tallulah?'

'Yes.' He beamed. 'And that's the birthday girl.' His finger touched the screen and lingered as she blew out the candles on her cake. He was lost in his own world for a bit. 'I've missed every one of the last three…' He looked up suddenly. 'But do you know what, Nick? I'm not fucking missing her seventh, in three weeks' time. Or any of the others after that. I'm jacking it in, mate. Local news and quality family time, that's me from now on.'

I wasn't sure if he was serious. 'But you'd miss all this.' I waved my arm to embrace the chaos.

'Miss what? A reporter on a personal crusade he won't let me in on, crap tea — no offence — and an arse full of sand?' He tapped the screen again. 'No contest, mate.'

I understood the tea and sand bit. 'Crusade?'

He blew out his cheeks. 'He's always been hungry for it. Passionate, you know? I used to be up there with him, righting wrongs, changing the world. But I just don't have the appetite for it any more. It's partly the fact that all we're producing here is tomorrow's chip paper. Disposable news — nobody gives a fuck.' His eyes roamed back to the birthday party. 'Partly that other things, like spending time with Tallulah and watching Ruby grow up, are a whole lot more important to me now.' He shrugged. 'Don't get me wrong, the awards we got for the Kabul doc mean something because they were recognition for exposing the fucking nightmare out there, but I just… I just don't share Dom's passion any more.'

'And the new passion is drugs? That's the crusade?'

He leant forward to get his face closer to mine. 'He's so fixated he even had me secret-filming in Dublin a couple of weeks ago…' He slumped back and stared up at the ornate ceiling. 'But I'm checking out now. Maybe I'll do the odd wildlife documentary. Just as long as I can know what my schedule is far enough in advance not to risk missing another of Ruby's birthdays…' His eyes narrowed. 'You got family, Nick?'

'I did have, once.' I got a sudden rush of pins and needles in my legs, a sensation I hadn't experienced for a long, long time. 'A little girl who was a lot like your Ruby, as a matter of fact. Her parents were killed, I was her guardian.' I was vaguely aware that sweat was now leaking more heavily down my face and tried to wipe it away. 'I never really got the birthday thing right… In the end I had to ask someone more reliable to take over.'

My memory stick was set to locked, and that was the way I liked it. Somebody once told me I lived life with the lid on, and I guessed they were right. It was the way it had to be. How was I supposed to function if I spent all my time clicking thumbnails of a teenager dead on a King's Cross bed? The image I tried to cling to was of her bright and sparkly at the one birthday I did manage to get right, at the replica of the Golden Hind on the Thames.

I was spared having to go there, and poor Pete was spared having to listen. One of the rifle-company lads appeared and stood next to me, but it was Pete he was after. He had a blue Helly Hansen T-shirt on under his armour, and a brand-new tattoo of barbed wire curling round his right arm. Here and there a few scabs still clung to the ink — but not as many as there were on the zits he'd popped on his face.

Pete looked up at him with a big smile. 'Hello, mate. What can I do you for?'

The young lad smiled back. 'I heard you was a tankie. My dad was, too — Jim Duggan, you know him?'

Pete moved his head from side to side in thought mode. 'No, mate, sorry, don't ring any bells. He still in?'

The lad was Welsh, and flushed with pride for his dad. 'No, he's here, in Iraq, working for one of the security companies.'

Duggan… The name suddenly rang a bell with me. He was the boy who needed bigging up. I held out a hand. 'I'm Nick, that's Pete. You number one on the door tonight?'

He got even prouder. 'Terry. Yeah, first time. The platoon swaps round the entry teams.'

'Good luck, mate. You know, until about four years ago only special forces would be doing that shit.'

His eyes widened and he kept shaking my hand, and Pete just kept looking at him, deep in thought.

'Yeah?'

'That's right, mate. Big day. Good luck.'

One of the RMP girls walked past and Terry's eyes swivelled. Pete laid down his iBook, stood up and wrapped a fatherly arm round him. 'You do good tonight, my son, and she'll be all over you like a rash.'

Terry might have been about to get the party gear on and make entry into a house packed with guys wanting to kill him, but he was maybe nineteen at a push. The RMP would have had him soft-boiled for breakfast.