“Oh, lighten up, for Christ’s sake! It’s an exercise, Sarge! Seriously, how the holy hell did you actually manage to get through the obstacle course during basic with that stick jammed up your arse?”
“Daft bastard wants to be a Rupert, don’t ya, sweetheart? Trouble is, he couldn’t make the cut at Sandhurst.”
“Fuck off, Jonno.”
“That true then, Sarge?”
“Bollocks.”
“So that’s a yes, then?”
“Go fuck yourself!”
Gary Cox giggled. “Is that an order, sir? Because I know for a fact there’s a steaming hot little redhead in the pub we passed about half an hour ago. Just want to make sure I keep my pecker up for Queen and country, sah!” Cox ripped off a salute and the rest of the unit chuckled.
Mick Jones glowered at the gloomy hump he presumed was Private Gary Cox. “You know who’s playing the enemy, Cox? Those mad fuckers from Hereford. They’d probably take great delight in relieving you of your pecker and presenting it to Brenda as a trophy! I promise you son, they don’t know the meaning of the words down time.”
“Nor do you, you uptight twat.” The muttered comment came out of the darkness.
“Go fuck yourself with a cactus or something, Armstrong!”
Jones could practically hear Phil Armstrong’s eyes rolling in the dark, and wasn’t in the least surprised when the college-educated twat started getting all pedantic. “Cacti, you ignoramus. And cacti are not indigenous to Wiltshire. I could try go fucking myself with a stick of rhubarb or summat, if that would make you feel better about life in general?”
“Actually, you know Phil, as much as it pains me to say, he was correct. Cactus is the singular of cacti. Theoretically, you’d only need one cactus to go fuck yourself, not several.”
“How much rhubarb would you need?”
“Wait, what? What is wrong with you people?” Jones now had to get a particularly unpleasant mental image involving rhubarb out of his mind’s eye.
“A whole fucking crumble’s worth, mate. Goes limp quickly, see?” Jonno giggled like a schoolgirl.
“Just like Jonesy.” Cox’s reply was predictably caustic.
“Fuck off, Cox. And seriously? You’re weird, Jonno.”
“I’m not the one comparing rhubarb and cacti as sex toys. Now that’s weird.”
Jones lost his shit. “For the love of fuck will you lot belt up! Eyes open, mouths shut!”
An uneasy silence descended over the Unit. In the privacy of the darkness, Mick Jones glowered at the crouched figures, waiting for one of the smart-mouthed bastards to start up again. They were a bloody disgrace to the uniform. This wasn’t his first time out on the Plain leading a unit of wet-behind-the-ears rookies, but it was crystal that these little bastards had bugger-all respect for him or for the situation they were in. These weren’t serious soldiers. These were fuck-abouts. Why the hell they hadn’t joined the Territorials instead of the regulars, he’d never know.
Salisbury Plain could be a weird old place. You could get mazed out here. Turned around. The official term was ‘royally fucked up’.
The huge open sky could feel like it was pressing down on you, crushing the life out of your body and the air out of your lungs. The way the wind howled around the Stones sounded like children crying. The massive slabs seemed to tower three times higher at night, and there were rumours that the closer you got to the Stones, the more likely it was that your equipment would start going haywire. You needed to stay sharp. Alert. Focused.
Mick felt alienated.
Alone.
Angry.
So bloody angry.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to have been. He had wanted to follow his dad into the Paras ever since he was a nipper. Now he was here, and determined to do the memory of his dad proud. His old man had copped a bullet in Belfast just two days before the withdrawal. Dumb luck shot for the IRA bastard pulling the trigger. Shit out of luck for his dad. That had brought it home to him. This wasn’t a fuck-about job for numbnuts. People died. This was a job for professionals. And this bunch of pillocks were making a mockery of everything he believed in.
The anger frothed in his brain, setting his heart pounding and his teeth on edge. Just at the limit of his senses, he could almost hear his dad’s voice whispering: “They’re laughing at you, son. At me. At the Regiment…”
Anger. So much anger. Choking, vomit-inducing anger.
A boiling, churning rage that turned his guts into knots and made his throat tighten. An anger so utterly consuming it made him want to let loose a primal scream, tear his clothes from his body and bludgeon every one of those pathetic dick-cheeses who had the bloody nerve to call themselves his ‘oppos’ to death with his bare hands.
It was the same kind of anger he’d felt when he’d walked into a pock-marked mud-brick building in Helmund and found it littered with the bodies of dead children. All girls. The local schoolteacher had had the audacity to teach little girls to read. The Taliban had disagreed with that policy. They didn’t make particularly good school governors. And they’d disagreed by using AK47s on the helpless children and their teachers. They’d spared the boys.
Jones had felt his heart break as he listened to the tortured wailing of children, terrified and alone. Vomit on the floor, shit and piss everywhere. They’d got the all clear to go in after an ATO had dealt with an IED strapped to the doorframe. Finally, they’d managed to get the little boys out, but it was too late for the eleven girls. A pile of bodies lay in a lake of blood. But then, a tiny, filthy finger had twitched, causing three fully-grown and battle-hardened men to jump out of their skins. They’d scrabbled to dig the child out from underneath the bodies of the dead, but as Jones had scooped her up in his arms, she’d gasped a final death rattle and fallen limp in his arms. That rasping, final breath had echoed in Jones’ mind for months afterwards.
That was an understandable trigger for that eyeball-aching rage that descended. But why was the flippancy of a few newbies causing him to feel the same way? Was it because they were belittling the seriousness of what was out there? Or had he brought some of the war back home with him?
Now it seemed the little girl’s death rattle was surrounding him on Salisbury Plain, as if the ghost of that child had followed him thousands of miles from that sad little grave in Helmund Province.
He looked up again at the Stones. They seemed to shimmer, resonating that gasping, rasping noise of a dying child’s last breath back at him, but intensifying and amplifying it a thousand-fold.
Briefly he tried to get back control. For a split second he knew that he was having the mother of all flashbacks. No. Not now. Not fucking now! He was on night manoeuvres with those nutjobs from Hereford after them, babysitting a bunch of newbies who didn’t know their arses from their elbows. Not fucking now, for Christ’s sake! Not now! He needed to focus. Jones shook his head, trying to clear the fog of the flashback; getting the images of dead children out of his mind. These little shits might be newbies, but the last thing they needed was their UC going fruitloops on them in the middle of a night exercise.
But every time he looked at the Stones, the rage seemed to intensify. He stared at them, mesmerised. They filled his world with a white-hot fury that flooded his brain with adrenaline. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. The confusion of images started to thin out and his focus turned to Gary Cox.
His smirking face.
His smart-arse one liners.