Walking Wounded

by Lee Rowan

  “Guilty? Hell, Johnny, didn’t one of the officers in the NATO command blow his brains out over that mess? A colonel, I think.”

  “Yeah, but that didn’t seem to matter. Everyone else in hospital at least had something physical wrong with them. It was the usual sort of self-doubt—sissy boy, cut finger, too weak to pull my weight. They’d already diagnosed me as PTSD, but I just—” He shook his head. “My brain was offline. They’d given me sleeping pills. When the doctor asked if I was feeling suicidal, I said no. I didn’t realize what a temptation that whole bottle would be. I can’t believe I was so bloody stupid, but at the time it seemed reasonable. I just wanted to stop hurting.”

  Kevin bit his lip so hard he thought it would bleed. But he didn’t think Johnny wanted any response, and he certainly didn’t need recriminations.

  John shrugged. “Apparently I wasn’t quite ready to quit. I passed out, then woke up and wandered out into the car park in my pajamas and collapsed again. Someone found me.”

  “Thank God.”

  “After I got out of hospital, got back home, I had to learn that it’s a balancing act. I had to start looking after myself instead of going to the base medic. Eventually I found out that for me—it doesn’t work for everybody—but for me, getting enough exercise keeps away depression and anxiety. Changes the metabolism. You know I’ve never been one for pills—now I don’t need ’em.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say, but John seemed to be waiting. “That makes sense.”

  “So when I moved out here to go back to school, I put the car in storage and bought a used bike. Mostly I walk. I manage pretty well, actually. Living on a disability pension’s been interesting, learning what I really need. It’s less than I’d expected. I’m busy enough with classes that I wouldn’t have time to waste even if I did have the money. But the big food shops are outside town, so that takes a little more planning.”

  “I think an expedition’s in order, then,” Kevin said. “I left my car in a park down near the Quay.”

  “Should be safe enough there. I like this season. The weather’s sloppy, but it’s quiet. Not like summer. Nothing doing until the big Christmas rush.”

  They turned a corner and there, suddenly, was the sea. Kevin had grown used to being away from it, but there was always that tug, that feeling of coming home, in the wind that blew down the Channel. A few square-riggers, floating museums, sat placidly in their berths, dwarfed in comparison to the modern steel-hulled ships. He wondered how much the old place had really changed since men first sailed out in those wooden vessels, out of reach of their homes, all the lives under their command depending on their captain’s skill and good judgment… and his luck. And of the luck to be had, there was always more bad than good, disaster’s always waiting for that one mistake….

  “Kev? I said it’s just down this way, near the Sally Port.”

  He blinked at John’s voice so near his ear, and brought himself back to the present. “Yes. Fine.” A few more steps, and his own story started to spill out. “We had an assignment,” he said. “Guard four prisoners, suspected terrorists, until someone turned up to transport them. It shouldn’t have been any big deal, except that we were originally supposed to release them to military personnel.

  “The people who came for them weren’t real soldiers—they were some kind of damned no-name mercenaries, the sort of bully-boys who were probably rejects from the real Army. They had the verbal codes, but that was all—and that wasn’t enough. I contacted my CO, and he said absolutely not, wait for further orders. So we told the mercenaries to tell their people to call our people. They left—and they came back shooting. That convinced us that they were not legitimate, so we returned fire. I was hit, two of my men were killed.”

  John touched him on the shoulder, very lightly, as though making sure he was still there. “Was that when you got this?”

  “Yeah. And they got our prisoners. Shot one, right there. Another was found a few days later, tortured to death. The other two just disappeared.”

  “But what else happened, Kev? From what I’ve heard, that whole area is out of control. Why did they go after you?”

  “Everything went wrong all at once,” Kevin said. “After the medics got there, and my CO, we had a visitor—another damned mercenary, but a real officer type. I don’t know who he was, but he was important. And it turned out—or they decided to put out the story—that there’d been a communication problem. The mercenaries were supposedly sent by someone who had the authority to take custody. My guess is it was someone who wanted those prisoners killed but didn’t want official responsibility. There’s a lot of that going on.”

  “But—all right, I see how that would be a problem, but—”

  “No, you don’t see all of it,” Kevin said. “That didn’t develop until later. The real problem was the reason they wanted it kept quiet in the first place. One of the prisoners, the one who was killed on the spot, was the son of one of the local officials—very important people in the area. And the family had already come out to the site. They got hold of the body, so there was no way it could be shuffled out of sight. Even worse, some of the family are British citizens. The prisoner’s sister is married to a professor of Middle East studies at a university here, and since her brother had been in our custody, they took it to court—sued the Army for failing to protect him. By the time the mess hit the news, the mercenary black-ops team had somehow vanished from the records, so it looked as though my team was either incompetent or criminal.”

  He stopped again, looking at all the vessels resting so peacefully at anchor in the harbor. The appearance meant nothing. Any one of them could have terrorists aboard. Any of them could hold an intelligence team with long-range sound pickups, monitoring every word he was saying right now. And if so—well, let them listen and be damned. He was saying nothing that had not come out in the inquiry; John’s ignorance was an incredible fluke. “Unfortunately, someone, somewhere, decided that the best way to deal with the situation was to let the Army take all the blame. Specifically, to let one officer take the blame and resign.”

  “What?” Johnny looked as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Kevin didn’t blame him; that had been his own reaction.

  “The mercenaries, whoever they were—and we can both make a good guess where they came from—were sent by someone with friends in high places.”

  “But why were you—”

  “I was the officer in charge.”

  “But you lost two of your men—and you were shot—how did they explain that?”

  “I was allowed to say we had been attacked by unknown forces. And in retrospect, I had made mistakes. Until I was satisfied as to the identity of those mercenaries, I should have disarmed them and locked them up while we waited for better identification. In a hundred other situations, it would have been the sort of mistake I could have learned from. I did learn from it, actually, and if I had it to do again, I’d do some things differently, but that’s beside the point now.”

  John let out a huge sigh. “Still… you survived.”

  “Yes.” He met those deep brown eyes, saw no accusation. “Yes, I did.”

  They started down Broad Street, toward the Sally Port where the old Navy had once launched its boats, back when the deep-bottomed tall ships had to anchor far out in the harbor. The town had changed a lot since the last time Kevin had seen it—new brickwork, new posh row houses, and the Spinnaker building towering over the shore. He hadn’t decided yet whether he liked the thing; it was a little too modern for his taste and was yet another piece of the new century obscuring the past. But some things didn’t change: the squeaking cries of seabirds still pierced the background hum of engines and pedestrian traffic.

  At last John said, “If you hadn’t taken responsibility, your team would have been held responsible, wouldn’t they?”

  “Very likely. And if it had been terrorists come to rescue their own, instead of those fucking invisible black-ops, I’d be
wearing a medal.”

  “And instead, you’re the scapegoat. If they had any sense—”

  “‘If’ is a handful of dust, Johnny. The bottom line is, if the damned fool who thought we were too stupid to tell the difference between military uniforms and fancy-dress toy soldier suits had just sent the mercs in regular uniforms with forged insignia, we’d have released the prisoners without a second thought. If they’d waited fifteen minutes to have their chief send an all clear, none of it would have had to happen. But as far as taking the blame—there was an undeniable murder that happened on my watch. If I hadn’t agreed to the story they gave me, we might have been framed for murder. My whole team. I had less to lose—”

  “You lost your career!”

  The honest anger in John’s voice, outrage on his behalf instead of directed against him, was so unexpected it brought tears to his eyes and somehow stiffened his spine as well. There really was someone on his side; he’d forgotten Johnny’s fierce loyalty. “Yes, but—honestly, I made a serious mistake, and people died because of it. Granted, my decision was made with insufficient information—there was crucial data that I should have been given—but things could have been much worse. What I admitted to, what I really was guilty of, was nothing more than an error in judgment, and that’s not a criminal offense.” He shook his head. “It’s possible I just wasn’t cut out for the work, John. I look at the mistakes I made, and I still don’t believe they were necessarily mistakes. A lot of what went wrong on that mission was sheer bad luck.”

  “Beyond that, I would say.” John’s voice was neutral. “Beyond even our own Army, it sounds like. I would say criminal conduct on the part of persons unknown.”

  “Yes. But still, I should have been able to do something.”

  “Mm.” They walked on a little way, and then John said quietly, “You can have some of the guilt, Kev. But—did you ever actually disobey an order? Do anything that you should not have done?”

  “What?”

  “Or were you behaving in as sane a way as possible, under insane circumstances? Suppose you had decided to disarm the mercs—would they have let you do it?”

  “God knows. The bastards might have started a firefight at that point,” Kevin admitted.

  “So—” John said. “Chain of command, military protocol, you did everything possible. But you were facing an enemy that should have been an ally. You were betrayed. You can’t take the blame for that.”

  For one idiot moment, Kevin was about to argue that yes, he could. “I did.”

  “Of course you did, love. I can’t imagine you doing anything else. Well, here’s the place. Do you still feel like eating?”

  “Yes!” Surprisingly, that cold lump that he’d been carrying in his gut for the past six weeks—a presence that felt like hunger but never welcomed food—was now gone. He caught the door and held it open, smiling. “You’re good, Johnny.”

  “What?” John’s eyebrows went up as a motherly-looking woman walked over to greet them.

  “Nothing.” Kevin looked around. “You weren’t joking—this really is Auntie’s tea shop, isn’t it?” With its chintz curtains, old-fashioned little tables, and antique teapots sitting high on narrow shelves, it looked like the sort of place his grandparents might have visited.

  “Yes. But Auntie can cook, and I don’t believe this place even has a microwave in the kitchen.”

  Kevin felt slightly silly doing it, but habit compelled him to sit so he could watch the door, to “accidentally” drop his menu to the floor, and to check the underside of the table for electronics… and to survey the harmless tea shop for potential surprises. He had no reason to expect trouble, but the habit was not likely to extinguish itself easily, and given the uncertain times, he wasn’t sure he wanted it to.

  “Will it bother you if I order sausages?” Johnny asked in an undertone.

  “No, not at all. I’ll have some myself. Sausages don’t look like meat, really. As long as I don’t know what’s in it.”

  “Best not to know, they always say. But you have to be careful taking an unfamiliar sausage from a stranger.”

  He met John’s eyes and saw sheer mischief, felt his own Irish complexion heat up. “God, I can’t take you anywhere!”

  “I brought you here!” Johnny said innocently.

  “Same difference!” He turned his deliberate attention to the menu and managed to maintain his composure while the waitress brought tea and took their orders.

  Once that was taken care of, John glanced around and asked quietly, “So what will you do now, Kev? What can you do?”

  He found it hard to answer, remembering the Colonel hovering around like a vulture, hinting that a resignation would appease the jackals, hinting that a man who came through for his regiment would be “looked after.” For some reason he had found that so disgusting that he’d nearly told him to take his offers and stuff them. But he’d held his temper; he could always walk away later, after he’d had time to cool down, think it over, and decide what he really wanted.

  “It’s not the problem you might think. Now I’m the fair-haired boy, with friends in high places. I’ve been offered a retainer as a ‘security advisor,’ which means—if I take it—I might be sent off now and then to do something I couldn’t discuss. I’ve been offered a book contract for fiction about our heroic SAS forces—even offered a ghostwriter if I don’t think I can express myself in plain English. I think that offer’s coming out of a propaganda budget somewhere—at the moment it would be good PR to raise sympathy amongst the general public. There’ve been hints I could even be offered a job in something less front-office….”

  “MI5?”

  Kevin wondered what the official policy was on gay partners as security risks. Something less than a wife, no doubt, and he was making a huge assumption about their future together, an assumption he had no right to make. He gave John a wry smile. “Couldn’t say. And probably couldn’t even if I took the job, which is why I’m not particularly interested. But it seems I never did a better day’s work than standing up in that damned court and falling on my sword. Pity all these helpful friends couldn’t have got me word of those mercenaries just a few minutes sooner.”

  “Writing fiction would take you right out of the loop.”

  “Yes, and that’s the most attractive aspect of it. If I can’t really be in the game, I might be better off completely out of it. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I might be able to go into security system design, translation, even law enforcement. The big decision, really, is whether to stay involved with the military or make a clean break, walk away.”

  John nodded. “That’s where I’ve been these past few years too. Trying to decide, retooling my skills. I couldn’t stay in military ops, even at a desk. With the way the world is going, I’m told there’ll be a need for postcombat counselors. The question is whether I can stand it, even at that remove.”

  Something tickled at the back of Kevin’s mind, but he could not pin it down. “If you can, you’ll be one of the best.” John looked down, shrugging. “I’m serious. What’s the one thing you always hear from men who come back from psych debriefing? ‘They weren’t there, they don’t understand.’ You were there, Johnny. Your presence as a counselor would show that there is something beyond the crisis—something they can reach for.”

  “Mm.” For a moment John’s eyes were focused a long way off, and then he was fully present again. “It’s better now, but I’m still not certain. Is there any one of your options that feels more attractive than another?”

  “Not really. Not yet. I decided to take a month’s holiday and just clear it all out. There is one other possibility: I might teach an academic subject at the training academy. I spent a year as an instructor before they put me in the field, and did pretty well at it.”

  “Language? Or engineering?”

  “Language, probably. Arabic’s a high-demand subject now, especially for teachers whose first language is English. I could even apply to civilia
n colleges. Wouldn’t need to keep up on the ‘specialty’ subjects for that.”

  “You would be a good teacher.”

  “I hope so.”

  “If you stayed with the military, you might stop someone making exactly the same mistakes you did. Or at least warn them about the sort of situation that won’t come up in their official briefings.”

  “That would be something.” He took a sip of his tea, finally cool enough to drink. “The single most frustrating—Johnny, when you’ve had enough of my running whinge, tell me to shut up, will you?”

  John just smiled.

  “The single worst thing is that there are mad, dangerous people out there—yes, some of it’s been blown up—” He grimaced, hearing what he’d just said. “Wrong choice of words. Some of it’s been… exaggerated by the media. But the danger’s still there, and it’s worse, much worse than I ever imagined. One assignment we had gave me nightmares—but we contained it, we kept the country safe. And now I’m out of the game.”

  “It meant a lot to you,” John said. “Still does.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know what to say….”

  “You don’t have to. You’re listening. That helps.” He sighed. “Going by my track record, I can hardly say it will all fall apart if I’m not involved. The game’s been played for centuries.”

  “Millennia. As long as countries have existed and fought one another.”

  “And I’ve lost my chance to make a difference.”

  “Maybe you’ve already made a difference, love. Maybe you’ve done your bit, and now you can have a normal life outside the team. You don’t have to carry it for the rest of your life.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to. But the decision to put it down….” He was startled by the sudden surge of anger that burst past his carefully constructed resignation. “That should have been mine.”

  John shrugged. “Or you could have died. I’m glad you didn’t.”