She had looked over at the briefing officer who had given a wry smile, shooting his eyebrows up in confirmation that this was no joke.
They had been briefed on their route through the air defence zones, radio frequencies, IFF codes and the tanker plan, where Nikki had kept an eye on her RIO, ensuring she was getting every detail down correctly and being reassured that this girl whom she had suspected the previous evening of being some kind of aviator groupie, seemed to have the competence she would have hoped for.
It had not been until after they had disconnected from a tanker 500 miles off the West Coast and Nikki had set a course for the tanker they would meet several hours hence that they could relax.
“So tell me lieutenant, how did that hot date go?” There had been a few seconds before a reply had been forthcoming.
“Begging your pardon ma’am, but that friend of yours is one sick puppy.”
It had taken her back a bit.
“Say what?”
“My momma didn’t bring me up to get butt naked with no cross-dresser with a shiv.” Nikki had been lost for words until Candice had explained.
“We sneaked back to his room and he went into the bathroom, so I got comfortable, if you know what I mean?”
Nikki had a fair idea.
“You got naked?”
“Yes’m…and then he came out the bathroom in a skirt…”
The scene, or how it must have been, jumped into Nikki’s mind.
“A kilt.”
“Whatever ma’am, but he had some dead animal hanging off the front of it….”
“A Sporran.”
“Okay, it looked like road kill, but if you say it was a dead Sporran, then that’s what it was. He had a knife too, a shiv, stuck in the top of one of his socks.”
“It’s called a Dirk, Lieutenant…Sandy was wearing traditional Highland dress.”
“Well I don’t know why their women folks put up with it. A man should be a man and not go dressing up in women’s things!”
Nikki killed the intercom and sat there with her shoulders shaking in helpless laughter for several minutes.
When she had gotten it out of her system she’d flicked the intercom back on.
“Hey, LaRue?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“They call you Candy or Candice?”
“I prefer Candice, Ma’am.”
“Okay, so do I, so from now on unless there’s brass or unfamiliar company about, then I’m just Nikki, okay?”
She had decided that this RIO would do but she had ensured the intercom was switched off before saying a final goodbye to her previous RIO.
Across the room Candice murmured something in her sleep that snapped Nikki out of her reflective mood and then she too closed her eyes and slept.
Despite the pounding head, throbbing shoulder and broken ribs that made each breath painful, Ray Tessler felt like a fraud as he sat amongst more seriously wounded men and women who waited for the Royal Air Force Tri-Star air ambulance to begin loading. He reasoned it out for himself in his head, frequently, that with broken fingers he couldn’t handle a weapon so he would be a liability on the firing line, but having told himself that he took one look at a seriously burned corporal from the Royal Tank Regiment, hooked up to saline drips on a gurney nearby, and felt like a fraud all over again.
The hospitals nearest the fighting were shedding themselves of those already in the beds, in order to cater for those that would soon require them. Ray was going back to the UK on a civilian aircraft pressed into service to evacuate those wounded who didn’t need the air ambulance facilities, but they shared the embarkation area, a large hangar that the heaters struggled to warm.
A door opened at the back of the hangar to admit more evacuees, and Ray saw a friendly face, that of the driver of the Warrior he’d been in when he’d been injured. Ray raised an arm to wave, and immediately regretted it, but the Guardsman saw him and made his way over, one arm heavily bandaged and limping as he went.
Ray had come to the battalion as a battlefield replacement, vacating a desk job at RHQ to join the unit just before it was relieved at Magdeburg, for its advance to contact towards the Soviet airborne drop zones. The Warriors driver on the other hand, had been with the battalion for three years and had seen every fight it had been in since the start of the war.
“How you doing, sir?”
“Not bad. I feel like I’ve been stuffed into a washing machine and put through a fast spin cycle, but otherwise I’m okay…how’s yourself?”
“They dug a half dozen bits of metal out of me, but apparently the grenade that did it was far enough away it’ll just leave some interesting scars I can blag a few free beers off of in the pub back home.”
Ray nodded.
“You going to St George’s too?”
The young Guardsman looked at the label tied though the buttonhole of a breast pocket on his combat jacket.
“Yes sir, looks that way but the doctor thinks it shouldn’t be long before I get a few days leave.”
Ray had been told something similar, and there was nothing he was looking forward to more than holding his wife and kids again. St Georges’ hospital in south London was only a few miles from the family’s married quarters, and if for some reason the doctors there kept him in then his wife could easily find her way there.
The line for the seriously wounded began to move as RAF personnel wheeled the patients out to the waiting aircraft, and an hour later it was their turn.
Ray managed to get himself seated beside the other Coldstreamer, over the objections of an Airman with a list attached to a clipboard. Ray switched on his Sergeant Major persona and the airman hurried away, amending the written seating plan with a biro as he went.
The flight into Gatwick airport passed swiftly, but they found they still had to go through Customs when they got there. Ray and the Guardsman had only the dirty and rather ragged combat gear they wore, but they still had to go through the ‘Nothing to declare’ channel and submit to a body search to ensure they didn’t have some lethal souvenir from the battlefields concealed about them before they joined the queue being checked off at the exit to the Customs hall.
It wasn’t as if anyone could have gone missing between Germany and Gatwick, but Forces Movement Control has their way of doing things, and that includes head counts at every opportunity, checking the face and the photo on the individuals I.D card, the MOD Form 90, matched the details on the clipboards.
Ray didn’t pay any attention to the military policemen stood near the exit until his name was checked off the list by a Staff Sergeant with the cartwheel emblem of Movements worn on an armband. The man looked over his shoulder at the nearest RMP.
“Got another one here, corporal.”
He had not returned Ray’s I.D card, but had stuck it under the spring clip of his clipboard instead.
Two RMP lance corporals started towards him, and Ray asked the Staff Sergeant what he had meant by ‘another one’.
“Just go with them when they get here, sarn’t major, sir.” The Staff Sergeant put up a hand to rest on Ray’s chest, preventing him from passing the checkpoint.
Bringing his good hand up to the restraining hand on his chest, Ray curled his fingers around the Staff Sergeants thumb and bent it backwards, just enough to elicit an “Ow!” from its owner.
“I said, what do you mean by ‘another one’, Staff?” He kept a hold on the thumb, adding a touch more pressure.
“Coldstreamers…fuck sake sarn’t major, leggo of my hand!”
Ray let go of the thumb and the Movements NCO tucked the clipboard under one arm in order to massage the offended digit. “The RMP are picking up all members of 1CG when they come back to the UK…I don’t know why and I don’t think they do either.”