“Tell me, professor, what did the Americans say?”
The professor looked shocked and afraid, saying nothing.
“Oh, come, come, you really didn’t expect me to sit back and trust you. I know you went to them, what happened?”
“They wouldn’t pay for the continued development,” the professor said.
“So, you turned them down?”
“I had to. It’s my wife; she doesn’t ever want to live in America.”
“Why not?”
“Personal reasons, that’s why I’ve come to you. It was her idea.”
“To come to us?” he asked, surprise registering in his voice.
“Not specifically to you, but to seek another option, so to speak.”
“Good. Then I agree, it would seem appropriate for you to relocate, and I will undertake the funding for the project to continue. However, this cost will come out of the price we agreed upon.”
“I can’t agree to that!”
“Then, my friend, you have a problem.”
The professor rubbed his face, chewing his lip. The other man had him, and he knew it.
“If I can get it running with two months, will you offset that fee?”
“Perhaps.”
“Very well, I seem to have run out of options.”
“When do you need extraction?”
“It’ll take me a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know through the usual channel.”
“Goodbye, professor. I’ll see you in warmer climes.”
The audience was over, as the man stepped back into the shadows with a curious smile on his face. The man called the professor had no choice but to climb the stairs and walk out into the winter rain.
Chapter One
February 2005
Why does the phone always ring just when I’ve managed to lie comfortably in the bath?
I heard the answer-phone click in, idly wondering who’d be calling me at eleven o’clock at night. Ever since my mother died last September, the amount of calls I receive has dropped dramatically. I am more alone now than at any other time in my life.
Debbie divorced me several years ago. I should have been less surprised, but wasn’t. I thought things were fine between us. I suppose that’s what comes to being in the Regiment and popping overseas to ‘take care of business’ every now and again. I was hardly an ideal husband and father. Debbie simply got fed up of me not being there for her. Actually, in rather a sad sort of way, part of me was relieved, as it saved me dealing with what had been hidden since my teens.
My inner feelings had been so suppressed that I can honestly say they were never an issue. I’d known since I was very young that nature/God had played a nasty trick on me, but I decided quite early on that I wouldn’t let it interfere with my life. I’d read about others who had been so consumed with compulsions to be the opposite gender that they’d been driven to change or suicide.
With me, it was different. I learned to channel the compulsions into energetic activity requiring risk and danger. Hence, I left school at sixteen and joined the Junior Leaders, which led to being a regular soldier in the Parachute Regiment and later the SAS.
I see my son, Bruce, rarely. His stepfather, Adrian, is something in the city, so poor Bruce started boarding at a posh public school last autumn. He is a teenager now and I once felt that he was the only real casualty of our divorce. However, I have to admit, somewhat reluctantly and shamefully, that Adrian is actually better at providing for him than I ever was. He and Debbie have had two more children, both girls. Actually, young Bruce is more settled than I’d ever hoped. It makes me feel more of a failure as a father than ever, as I began to realise that I was the only one feeling sorry for myself.
Last month, I’d taken my son out for the day, or ‘leave out’ as his school called it. To my surprise, I found that we were strangers, existing with a bond of blood that meant little. He found it hard to call me ‘Dad’, and I found I didn’t really know him at all. Our conversation was stilted and prone to lengthy pregnant pauses. His attitudes and values had been altered by mixing with a different class of person, no doubt during the holidays as well as at school.
We parted with a degree of relief - on both sides, I suspect. I don’t think we’ll see each other too much in the future. I smiled sadly, as I could see that if he wanted to, he was on track to make Sandhurst and become an officer. That’d get them chuckling in the Sergeant’s Mess – old Curly Curtis’s kid a Rupert! However, I knew with about as much certainty as one can, that his mother would see hell freeze over before she allowed her son to join the mob.
I’m left with no family, no parents and sod all friends. I also had to leave the one thing I loved above all else, my job – The Regiment. I did have my flat in Ruislip and some money in the bank, but bugger all else. With my bad leg, the only time I am ever truly comfortable is when I’m in the bath. As for my compulsions, they’re still not an issue. I’ve neglected them for so long, that I’m well able to deal with them by ignoring them and never giving into them. Only now, I do find it more difficult, as I don’t have the same releases available to me. I’m a large, ugly, very masculine male, so the very thought of becoming my dream – an attractive female, is so laughable to me, that I don’t ever encourage the idea.
Feeling sorry for myself, I eased my bad knee, rubbing the joint. It has a spectacular scar running over the top of what is left of the patella. An Iraqi shot me in the right kneecap whilst in the Middle East. My captors had laughed as they shot me and then made the mistake of thinking I was useless and crippled.
I admit I’d played the game, wailing and moaning and lying in a heap in my own excrement for two days. All it took was one of them to come in close for a gloat.
I took him down and broke his neck. That gave me an AK 47 with a full magazine and a 9 mm Makarov SLP. He had been carrying two grenades, also Russian by the look of them. Using his head-scarf, I bound up my knee as tight as I could and managed to get up the steps to find daylight.
The Iraqis had invaded Kuwait a few days before, so I’d been out scouting for the Allies when an Iraqi patrol captured me. I’d been in a small village, simply trying to gauge the enemy strengths when the large patrol swept through and seized every able-bodied male in sight. I’d contemplated running for it, and that’s when they’d nabbed me.
They didn’t know I was British, as I spoke Arabic and was burned brown so looked sufficiently dirty and smelly to pass for a local. Believing me to be a Kuwaiti soldier, they simply shot me in the kneecap and left me to die in a hole of a basement.
I was now at street level. The building was some form of school, as there were some kids’ sized chairs in the corridor. I could hear someone talking in Arabic on a radio to my right, and a murmur of conversation in a room to my left. I could smell food cooking and my belly ached. It had been a long time since I’d last eaten.
Grimacing with pain, and biting my lip so as to avoid crying out, I approached the room on my right and took a quick peek through the door jam. Two men, one an officer and the other the radio operator, sat at a table and obviously were receiving orders. My knee ached terribly, and I knew it wasn’t going to hold me for long. I pulled the pin from one of the grenades and threw it into the room, pulling the door closed and sliding down to the floor.
There was a deafening explosion causing dust, debris and plaster to fall from the ceiling.