“You fought well on the island,” Lloyd said, “and the boys listen to you.”
“Then I’ll keep doing that, Sir,” Foster answered, “but I don’t want the stripes.”
“Why is that?” Palmer had asked, genuinely intrigued as to why a man would turn down such an honour. Foster smiled.
“It’s not like there’s a pay bump, Sir,” he said, pushing the luck of his flippancy as far as he dared, “and if I’m a sergeant, I have to enforce the rules and make the lads scared of me. I can’t have a laugh to lift their spirits if I’m doing that.”
Lloyd thought about their last sergeant, the irritable, irascible and ever-grumpy Bill Hampton. He was like a father to the marines, always looking after them and making sure that they all had the right kit and that none of them went without, but that fatherly attitude harked back to a time when the whip was still an acceptably used tool for facilitating learning. He could be harsh, very harsh on the men if they let him down, and that was the aspect of the role that Foster was trying to refuse to undertake.
“Thank you, marine, you may go now,” Lloyd had said to him, returning the parade ground crisp salute, which he felt was for Palmer’s benefit, a display to maintain the high standards and expectations of his corps.
“I rather suspect, Christopher,” Palmer drawled, “that the man has a point. My advice, if you need any at all, which I highly doubt is the case, is to encourage him to promote the morale of the men without forcing the rank on him.”
Palmer looked up, checking to see whether his conversational advice was being taken as such and not interpreted as an order.
“Your unit is, sadly, smaller now and the men look directly to you for leadership. I say keep him close and mentor the man; bring him into command discussions and see how he thinks.”
“You’re probably right, Julian,” Lloyd answered, knowing that the shrewd-minded young man was indeed entirely accurate.
In the front of the truck, Lloyd also smiled as he finally understood Foster’s point. He could not have reproved his sergeant that way, nor could he expect to tolerate the quips that the man made which required the reprimands he found himself giving out. But the balance was perfect. Foster worked hard and played hard, the men looked to him for their lead and despite his humorous comments, the unit was cohesive.
As the trucks set off down the gentle slope in the undulating land, Lloyd tucked his cold chin into the scarf around his neck and kept his eyes resolutely ahead on their target.
~
It took a little over three hours for the small village to be cleared, which was far faster than they had been when they’d first trialled their new tactics. The plan was simple; SAS team go in and do reconnaissance, clear out any small elements of hostile forces, then withdraw. After that, the main body of troops would move in, seal off the village and systematically empty each building of everything useful to be brought back to the large estate they occupied. Anything too large for the trucks would be safely stockpiled and returned for, and any return trip would be conducted with strong numbers because, as they had learned all too often, the situation could change from shit to deadly in an instant when dealing with an unthinking and unpredictable enemy.
Downes had sent his driver, Smiffy, to the furthest end of the village in the truck with Mac so that he could keep Dezzy close to him and wait for the man to speak about what had phased him so badly. He didn’t push him as they sat on a low roof in the cold air covering the closest end of the village’s approach road, but simply waited for him to speak.
Dez sat still and quiet, wanting to strip and clean the shotgun for no other reason than to purge the barely-coked barrel of the weapon of the evidence that he had fired it, as though somehow that would clean away the memory of what he had done. He had done the right thing, but he was a mature enough and experienced enough soldier to know that a person didn’t know what would affect them until it had already affected them. He was tough, he was switched-on, but he also knew that he had been affected by the suddenness of the attack. He knew that he had been affected by his instant, and correct, reaction to open fire.
He considered the other ways it could have played out.
He could have baulked, not taken the shot, and he could have been infected. Downes could have been infected. Mac. Smiffy.
In a world where ‘us or them’ held even fewer moral obligations than before, what he had done made perfect sense, both morally and tactically, but he had still pulled the trigger and violently decapitated three young kids with a brutal and evil storm of lead. He knew they weren’t children, not really, not anymore, but he would forever be left with the images of their small skulls breaking apart under his onslaught.
“You okay?” Downes asked softly, wanting to move things on more quickly than they were occurring naturally. Dez took a breath, held it, and blew it out with puffed cheeks before responding.
“Yeah, Boss,” he said as he strapped the shotgun back onto his pack, “I’m fine.”
“Good lad,” Downes said quietly, his eyes narrowing as he diverted some of his attention away from the stilted conversation and towards the distant countryside. Dez saw his look, followed his eyeline and scrabbled with a belt pouch to retrieve the small binoculars which he raised to his eyes and asked, “Where?”
“My eleven o’clock,” Downes said, not having to explain to the seasoned soldier beside him that he had detected movement, “Stone wall, west towards the higher ground. Gateway.”
Dez followed the instructions he had been issued with as effectively as possible in such few words. They had become expert at this, so in tune with one another after the months they had spent in Afghanistan, where they were more likely than not to be fired upon by the side they were unofficially there to help than by any Soviet conscripts. Then, just as now, only in a very different way, failure to detect the enemy’s movement could easily result in death.
“Got it,” Dez said, his face contorted as he squinted into the eyepiece of the futuristic-looking binoculars, “Screecher. Can’t seem to figure out the gate. Here.”
Dez held out the binos to Downes, who took them wordlessly. It took him only a second to acquire the moving smudge on the horizon and magnify it into a filthy and ragged approximation of what it had once been.
Most of the right arm from just below the elbow was missing, and the right side of what seemed to have once been light blue denim dungarees was sheeted black with gore. The skin of the face, drawn back as though stretched by malnutrition from teeth which now seemed overly large, was far paler than even the other dead they had encountered. It moved sluggishly, drunkenly, as it bumped its small chest into the wooden bars of the gate, unable to comprehend why the way forward was closed to it. Downes watched closely, his own face screwed up just as Dezzy’s had been, as the thing stopped trying to weakly force its way through the obstacle and instead turned its nose up to the sky and seemed to sniff the air, tasting it like an animal would. It threw back its head, mouth open to emit that awful screeching noise that so aptly lent them the nickname given by the soldiers; but no sound reached them.
Major Downes had fought many enemies of Her Majesty over many years of conflict, but never, not even when low on ammunition and pinned down by superior forces, had he experienced a fear of an enemy as he did then. Unbelievably, impossibly, the thing seemed to slowly lower its head and cock it over to one side as it stared its sightless stare directly at Downes from nearly three hundred metres away. Despite himself, Downes shuddered.
“Smiffy could have it with his VAL,” Dez said gently, suggesting that the stolen Russian sniper rifle be brought back, along with its operator, to dispatch the creature.
“It’s too far off to cause us any bother,” Downes said, feigning a relaxed manner that he did not fully believe himself, “Just keep an eye on it and hope it doesn’t have friends around here.”
“Friends?” Dez asked, the binoculars pressed to his eyes once again, “It can barely move, let alone organise a search
party.”
And it couldn’t, Downes realised. It could barely walk. It couldn’t climb a simple wooden five-bar gate that any five-year-old could scale with ease. It also looked, he thought hopefully, like it was starving to death.
“See anything?” a voice called out from below them, startling both men, who had the presence of mind and body not to let it show.
“Just one of them,” Dez called down softly to the marines officer, “no bother to us.”
~
They didn’t make it back before the rain, but they did beat nightfall. Two very heavily loaded trucks grunted and chugged their way through the intricate defences cut into the ground now frozen solid and showing no signs of returning to the slippery mud it had been not long after creation. The grubby Toyota truck behind them, its own engine barely even breathing hard in comparison, rolled in behind as the men on duty replaced the heavy barricades of wood and wire over the one stretch of approach not cut by the hastily dug moat.
Downes sent his men back to their small corner of the big house, not needing to remind any of them about keeping their mouths shut about the contact they had made with other clandestine troops, and he went to find Palmer. Ordinarily, he would have relinquished his MP5 for one of his men to clean it while he talked officer stuff, but the thought of anyone being further away than the length of their arm to their weapon was utterly abhorrent.
“Ah, Major! Pleasure to see you, do come in,” Palmer exclaimed as soon as he entered the parlour-cum-office.
It wasn’t the Palmer he was expecting, however. In place of the competent and charismatic Captain, he found the entitled and spoilt younger version. The apple who had evidently rolled after it had fallen from the family tree.
“Second Lieutenant,” Major Downes greeted the boy coldly who was opening and closing cupboards and drawers with tuts of annoyance each time he came up empty. Downes guessed what the boy was after, and intentionally kept his hand still from wanting to reach for his back pocket and the small half-bottle of brandy tucked flat against his right buttock. It was rough stuff, clearly no expensive vintage and more of an access tool for a person to find that painless space where stresses and worries no longer affected them, but it didn’t matter much; he had taken it on a whim after seeing that Palmer, Captain Palmer, had run out.
“I suspect,” Lieutenant Palmer said theatrically in his nasal whine, “that you are after my older brother? Alas, he is not here, as you can see. Might I recommend you try the kitchens.”
“The kitchens?” Downes responded before he could stop himself and simply walk off and ignore the privileged whelp.
“Yes,” Palmer said with theatrical relish, “it seems he’s decided to forgo any further career soldiering and become a scullery maid.” Palmer junior invested all the scorn and mockery he could manage, which was a very significant amount as it turned out, into his distaste for the serving classes. The Major, well-bred from a respected family in his own right, ignored the sullen lack of manners as Palmer refused to acknowledge the officer’s superior rank. That kind of divide, that kind of overt disrespect, was likely to be a result of the combination of Palmer’s inherent feelings of superiority through birth right, and the bizarre stress they all felt, which broke down the normal bounds of military discipline. Despite the beliefs of the enlisted men, the officer classes still obeyed a set of strict rules when in their own company.
Without another word, Downes turned on his heel and propelled his tired body towards the kitchens with long strides.
There he found that the younger brother was partly correct, as the older brother was indeed rubbing shoulders with the common folk. And he seemed to be having the time of his life doing so.
The raucous laughter of women filled the room that Downes had walked into, and the Captain looked up, wearing a somewhat sheepish expression as his bare forearms, the sleeves of his uniform shirt rolled up above the elbows, were dusted with flour. His expression darkened slightly, as though the weight of responsibility and his leadership had found him and threatened to drag him back to the present, and he stopped what he was doing.
Downes stared at him, and a smile crept over his face.
“I saw the women making their dough in Afghanistan,” he began, “and I rather think they put their backs into the task a damned sight harder than you are, Captain.”
Palmer smiled, laughing with the others at him being caught out. Instead of ruining his small moment of fun, Downes instead rolled up his own sleeves and washed his hands in the deep porcelain sink set into the thick wood of the kitchen worktop. He shook them dry, accepting an offered towel from a woman nearby, and dried his hands as he looked down at his dirty clothing. The kitchen was warm, perpetually warm in fact, which is why he suspected that the women and children had a tendency to gather there. It was usually occupied in one form or another, day and night. He stripped off the black smock he was wearing, exposing layers of clothing underneath, and he smiled sweetly at the woman who had taken back the towel.
“May I?” Downes asked as politely as he could, indicating the white, frill-edged pinafore adorning her ample frame. The women laughed even more now, Palmer joining in with them thinking that it was a joke. It wasn’t. Downes slipped the white top of the apron over his head and tied the waist straps with fast efficiency before joining Palmer at the worn butcher’s block he was working at.
“Now the key, I’m told,” Downes said as he took his own lump of dough and slapped it down onto the surface to dust it with flour, “is to work it hard and rapidly. Am I right, Mrs Maxwell?” he asked the woman beside Palmer.
“You’re very right, Major,” Denise Maxwell answered, “I never knew you secret-squirrel lot got taught the finer points of baking.”
“Join the British army and see the world,” Downes told her with a conspiratorial smile, “I think we both fell for that one, eh, Julian?”
“I do believe we did, Major,” Palmer said as he began to use the heel of his right hand under the stiff arm to dig his weight into the dough.
“What have you got there, Major?” Denise asked, pointing at the protrusion from his back pocket.
“Ah, yes, I almost forgot,” he said as he carefully retrieved the small bottle by the neck with forefinger and thumb, so as not to cover both himself and the bottle in flour, “Captain? I thought you might appreciate this.”
Palmer looked at the bottle, pretending not to show his mild horror at both the paltry size and the unknown maker of the brandy on offer.
“You have my thanks indeed, Major,” he said, “only I worry that the ladies will feel us to be somewhat misogynistic should we take a brandy in their domain, as such…”
“Oh, don’t you worry about us,” another woman chimed in, speaking slowly as she bumped her hip into Denise Maxwell’s and reached into the back of a kitchen cupboard, “we manage just fine, thank you very much,” she said as she produced a massive bottle of scotch and a handful of china mugs held expertly in her fingers.
They drank. They kneaded dough for the fresh bread they would enjoy the next morning, and in a frozen world of shit, they found a moment of happiness.
Chapter 10
“We need to go outside. We need to go into the city for supplies.”
Mike Xavier closed his eyes tightly and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had heard this from Jean-Pierre for the last week, after he had tried and failed to find another solution to their supply issue.
“For fuck’s sake, JP,” Xavier said, “we’ve been through this. Where can we go? What can we find? The city is full of them, they still wander up to the fence every day, we can’t ju…”
“They have not come for more than a week,” Jean-Pierre cut him off, “and when they do, they can barely walk. They are slow. We can make it.”
“Can we?” Xavier answered, “and if we don’t make it back, then who is looking after the others? They’ll fall apart without leadership, and I know we never asked for it, but it’s in our hands now. I say we stay here, si
t tight and ride out the bad weather.”
Jean-Pierre, tall and still heavily muscled despite the shortage of food, glowered at his captain on the very edge of insolence and disobedience, before he withdrew a step and shrunk away slightly as though he was endeavouring to power down the passionate anger he felt at the situation.
“I am sorry, Captain,” he said in a softer voice, yet one still edged with steel, “but we cannot do this. There is not enough food to go around as it is. We need more, or people will try to leave themselves. You forget what happened yesterday?”
Captain Xavier had not forgotten. He remembered only too well having to fight his way to the head of the crowd to beat people back from what remained of their meagre food stores. They had consolidated everything weeks before, keeping a central reserve of supplies which were issued on an equal basis, and that had taken up four of his crewmen to guard it day and night. An angry mob had formed late in the day, borne of desperation instead of malice or greed, and the stores had been broken into. One of his men had been knocked out cold, his scalp pouring blood from where the lump of wood had cracked him hard over the skull without warning. Xavier had led the charge to restore order, far too much noise being made in the process, and by the time he had pushed back the desperate raiders and laid into them, shouting, he turned to see that most of the food had gone. He threw his body into one thief, one cowardly raider who tried to scurry past him with an armful of items, and his body weight checked them hard off their feet into the metal walls of the container to ring a low, dull bell sound as they slumped to the ground. The hood and scarf fell back to reveal the dirty, terrified face of a woman who was clutching fearfully the can of tinned pears in her hand. Xavier, ashamed of himself and embarrassed about the actions of the thieves, couldn’t bring himself to punish the woman any further than he had and turned away from her.
Toy Soldiers 4: Adversity Page 8