Docherty looked up at the twisted rocks, the alien landscape. He had wanted to believe that this was a foreign war, a throwback, but somewhere deep inside himself he had always known otherwise. This was a war that came from the heart of what the world had become.
He climbed wearily back aboard the lorry, and nodded for Razor to resume their journey down to the sea.
Epilogue
They arrived in Split early in the evening, with the sun hanging low over the sea like a tourist postcard. The children were passed over to the care of the town’s hospital, and hopes were high that all would recover. Where they would end up seemed to be anybody’s guess. Once fit, Docherty guessed, they would just become one more group begging a home from a reluctant rest of Europe.
The SAS men were made to wait almost thirty-six hours, without explanation, for a flight home to the UK. After enduring an irritatingly lengthy stopover in Germany, they arrived at RAF Brize Norton shortly after nine in the morning. Rain was falling from a dull sky as they walked across the tarmac.
Barney Davies was there to meet them, along with an MoD man in civilian dress named Lavington. Before the tired returnees knew what was happening they found themselves being corralled into a small office. A tray had been set out with cups and a percolator full of coffee.
Docherty dropped his bergen on the floor. ‘I’m going to ring my wife,’ he said, and started back for the door.
‘Can you do that afterwards, please?’ the MoD man asked coldly.
Docherty stopped, turned and stared at him.
‘She has already been informed that you’re all right,’ Lavington said.
‘I want to hear her voice,’ Docherty said quietly, and walked out of the office.
Lavington watched him go, a thoughtful look on his face, then turned his attention to Hajrija. Having apparently satisfied himself that she wasn’t a member of the SAS, he asked the others who she was and what she was doing there.
‘She wanted to see if England really was full of pricks like you,’ Razor told him, at which point Barney Davies suggested they all have some coffee.
Out in the building’s foyer Docherty was listening to the phone ring in Liam McCall’s Glasgow house. ‘Hello?’ a voice answered in the familiar husky accent.
‘Isabel,’ he said.
‘Jamie,’ she said back, remembering how she’d felt when Barney Davies rang her two evenings before. Then she’d just uttered the two words ‘dios gracias’ and almost collapsed with relief. ‘Where are you?’ she said now, her voice so happy it made him want to sing.
‘Brize Norton. I’ll be home tonight. Somehow or other.’
‘I can’t wait,’ she said.
A few minutes later he was walking back to the office, wondering if it was worth even being polite. Probably, he thought. The others had careers to think about.
He found everyone drinking coffee in strained silence. After pouring himself a cup he sat down opposite Lavington. ‘Let’s get on with it, then,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ the MoD man said stiffly. ‘This is only a preliminary debriefing, of course. First, where is John Reeve? Your orders were clear – to bring him home.’
‘He didn’t want to come,’ Docherty said. ‘And there was no way we could have brought him against his will, even if I had thought that doing so was in anyone’s best interests. Which I did not.’
Lavington pointed out that they were paid to obey the Crown, not formulate policy on their own. Docherty told him that in the SAS they tended to believe that the man on the spot was usually the man best placed to take decisions. ‘John Reeve is looking after his children,’ he added, ‘as any father would.’
‘If you could get out with a lorryload of children,’ Lavington insisted, ‘then so could he.’
‘He also has a wife and her parents to worry about…’
‘And a private army to lead.’
‘He has no such thing,’ Docherty lied. ‘He may have given them some advice in the early days, but that’s all. And I might add that we didn’t all get out with the children. One of my men is still on the plane, in a coffin.’
Lavington looked at him. He could see they were all tired, he said. The debriefing would have to be postponed. After telling Barney Davies that he would call the next day the MoD man made his exit.
‘Is that who sent us?’ Razor asked disgustedly.
‘No, I sent you,’ Davies said. ‘His masters sent the message you received in Zavik. I’m sorry about that, but the MoD and the politicians were adamant, and there was nothing I could do.’ He gave them a wintry smile. ‘I assumed you would ignore the part about Reeve, unless he really did need putting in a strait-jacket.’
‘He’s one of the sanest men in Bosnia,’ Docherty said, ‘though that’s not saying very much.’
‘And is he running an efficient private army?’ Davies asked.
Docherty grinned at him. ‘What do you think?’
Three days later Docherty was back in Hereford for Corporal Damien Robson’s memorial service. Many of the men who had served with him were in attendance, including Chris and Razor. Joss Wynwood, who had led the patrol out of Colombia four years earlier, flew back from Hong Kong to be there.
An appreciable number of family members had also driven down from Sunderland, and after the service they were given a guided tour of the Stirling Lines barracks by Docherty and Barney Davies. Most walked around with a sort of wide-eyed wonder, as if they couldn’t believe that their relation really had lived and worked there for the past seven years. From the conversations he had with several of them, Docherty got the impression that the Dame, though undoubtedly much loved, had been even more of a mystery to his family than he had been to his comrades in the SAS.
The day after the service Chris Martinson drove down through Hay-on-Wye and up into the Black Mountains. He had binoculars and book with him, but on this day his heart wasn’t in it. Even the sudden appearance of a merlin only produced a brief burst of enthusiasm.
Over the last week he had been turning several important things over in his mind, trying to arrange them in some sort of pattern which made sense of his life, both now and in the future. The Dame’s death had not shocked him – how could a soldier’s death ever be surprising? – but some of the things they had seen in Bosnia continued to haunt him. The Sarajevo hospital for one, and the faces of the children they had brought out of Zavik and left to an uncertain future in Split.
He was over thirty now, and more than half convinced that it was time to consider a change of career. He already possessed sufficient medical skills to be useful in much of the Third World, and he had written off for more information about how to turn these skills into whatever qualifications he might need.
Chris didn’t know how or why, but the time in Bosnia had tipped some balance in his mind. When it came down to it, he felt more comfortable helping children than he did killing evil men. He was not running away from the world as it was. He didn’t just want out. If anything, he wanted in.
He looked up at the grey clouds scudding across the Welsh sky and wondered about the bird life in India. Or Africa. Or anywhere he could feel needed.
Razor was also aware that his life had reached a crossroads, and a happy one at that. He could still hardly believe that Hajrija had come to England with him, or how much they had enjoyed each other in the days that had followed.
He guessed he had the long wait at Split to thank. If she hadn’t read all those English papers, and got so incensed at their reporting of the war in her native country, then she might not have come. ‘Why don’t you go back to journalism, then?’ Docherty had suggested. ‘Come back to England with us and start pestering them with the truth.’
Maybe she had just been waiting for the excuse, but she had come in any case, and they had enjoyed what felt like a four-day honeymoon in a Hereford hotel, emerging to eat and drink and ride round the wintry countryside, going back in to make love and talk and make love again.
Razor coul
dn’t remember ever feeling happier, and the only shadow on this happiness was a slight but persistent sense of guilt. How could something so good, he asked himself, have come out of something so bad?
A week or so later David Owen and Cyrus Vance came up with their peace plan for Bosnia, which involved breaking the country into ten semi-autonomous and ethnically based cantons. The central government, although remaining in existence, would have little in the way of real power.
John and Nena Reeve heard the news as they sat round the kitchen table listening to the World Service. ‘Maybe it means peace,’ Reeve said.
Nena disagreed, but she didn’t say so. Reeve had always had a child’s naïvety when it came to politics.
They were both living in her parents’ house, but despite parental disapproval were not sharing his bed. She had eventually told him the full story of what had happened to her, almost as much to hear herself tell it as for him to hear.
He had not disbelieved her, or accused her of not resisting; he had not behaved the way most of the Muslim women expected their men to behave. For that she supposed she was grateful, but she had expected nothing less, and rather hoped for more.
When it came down to it he didn’t know how to react. He wanted to help, but he didn’t know how to give himself, and that was all she wanted. He was still a child in more than politics, she reluctantly admitted to herself.
She looked across the table at him, and he grinned at her. This is the child who saved a town, she thought.
The trouble with being a soldier, Docherty thought to himself, was that you tended to see your comrades at their best and other people at their worst. Which, all in all, engendered a somewhat warped view of humanity.
He stared out at the islands and highlands silhouetted by the rising sun, and wondered whether humankind could claim any credit for its collective sense of what was beautiful.
The family was on its way back from a long weekend in Harris, where they had stayed with Docherty’s friend, the retired priest Liam McCall. They had been lucky to hit one of those rare calms in the Hebrides’ winter storm: the children had been able to run wild on the beach without being blown away to the mainland, and at night, while they slept the sort of sleep only fresh air exercise could induce, the three adults had been able to talk and work their way through a couple of bottles of malt whisky.
Docherty had so far been reluctant, without really knowing why, to tell his wife much of what had happened in Bosnia, but in Liam McCall’s cottage, with the two people he cared for most in the world ready to listen, he found himself going through the whole story.
‘The centre cannot hold…mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,’ Liam had murmured, quoting his beloved Yeats.
‘Aye,’ Docherty had agreed. ‘In Bosnia there was no sign of any centre that I could see.’ He had stared into the whisky glass and said, surprising himself: ‘And I think I’ve lost my own, at least for a while.’
‘I lost mine a long time ago,’ Isabel had said softly. ‘But you can live without one. You can even love without one.’
For a second he had felt almost terrified, catching a dreadful glimpse of a world in which there was nothing to hang on to. And then his eyes had met Isabel’s in a sharing that seemed infinitely sad.
Here now, on the deck of the ferry, with the sunlight dancing across the waves, the love of his life by his side, and their children running riot somewhere else on the ship, that world seemed far away.
But then the light was always brighter, coming out of the dark.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES
Behind Iraqi Lines
Mission to Argentina
Sniper Fire in Belfast
Desert Raiders
Samarkand Hijack
Embassy Siege
Guerrillas in the Jungle
Secret War in Arabia
Colombian Cocaine War
Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Heroes of the South Atlantic
Counter-insurgency in Aden
Gambian Bluff
Night Fighters in France
Death on Gibraltar
Into Vietnam
For King and Country
Kashmir Rescue
Guatemala – Journey into Evil
Headhunters of Borneo
Kidnap the Emperor!
War on the Streets
Bandit Country
Days of the Dead
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Bosnian Inferno Page 24