Regan squeezed the trigger of his rifle, taking up the backlash in the mechanism. ‘Shoot!’
The crack of the two rifles merged into one, as they fired within a heartbeat of each other, sending their bullets across the seventeen hundred yards of sand.
Regan’s target was standing with his back to him; the bullet slammed into the man’s neck, just below his skull. His spinal cord severed, the Iraqi guard dropped where he stood, dead before he hit the ground, blood surging from the exit hole in his throat. In the same instant, the other Iraqi soldier staggered and fell as Morgan’s bullet hit just beneath his left arm, shattering ribs and taking out heart and both lungs before punching out another rib as it exited his right side.
Spent cases had been ejected and fresh rounds chambered before their guns sought out their secondary targets. On hearing the crack of rifle fire and seeing the two men at the barricade collapse, the Iraqi soldier behind the wheel of the Landcruiser swung his feet down and scrambled from the Toyota. Regan’s bullet was low, passing through the car door before hitting him. Fragments of the door and window ripped into the soldier and he collapsed, bleeding out. Morgan’s bullet passed through the windscreen and tore into the neck of the man sleeping in the shotgun seat. The bullet severed his jugular, jetting blood all over the interior of the driver’s compartment.
Irvine had taken advantage of the covering fire to arm himself. His passenger crouched behind the quadbike while he scouted the area to make sure there weren’t any more nasty surprises. Regan gave him a mental thumbs-up for staying vigilant.
It took a couple of minutes for Irvine to ease the general back onto the quadbike and steer carefully around the roadblock. It didn’t take them long to reach the sand dune hideout on the far side of the junction.
***
23:05
It was decided back at headquarters that the general would be airlifted out that evening by the RAF Chinook that normally ferried the sniper teams in and out of Iraq. As Clapham had significantly more traffic than the section of road being observed by Morgan and his partner, Morgan was ordered to remain on station with Regan, while Irvine ferried the general to their extraction point. Morgan didn’t particularly mind this plan update. It beat a boring drive back to his usual hide and the company of his usual boring sniper-one.
‘It would be nice,’ Irvine muttered, helping the general back onto his feet, ‘if they could’ve decided this before I’d driven back over here.’
Regan grunted agreement as they loaded the groggy man onto the quad. ‘Do they not realise he’s hurt?’
‘Told them a few times,’ Morgan said, adjusting the bandage holding the gauze against the man’s gashed temple. Lucky fucking pilot—it was nothing really serious, but looked nasty and impressive. The kind of wound he’d beg for to get out of the fucking marines with honours. Morgan finished re-fastening the bandage and shrugged. ‘Sorry, that’s the best I can do. And for what it’s worth, I tried to arrange an extraction here, but I don’t think Pincher really sold the urgency of the situation to Errington.’
‘Fuckin’ Pincher,’ Regan scowled. ‘You could tell him that someone’s had their legs blown off, and he’ll suggest giving them an aspirin and calling the doctor in the morning if the pain’s still there, that twat will try anything, just to get out of doing something.’
The general sunk slightly in his seat and Morgan grabbed him, holding him upright. ‘Whoa, there. Jim, I’ll keep him in place while you tie.’
‘Cheers.’ Regan looped cargo straps around both Irvine and his passenger and buckled them together so the general wouldn’t just tip off the quad into the sand if he passed out. ‘Sorry fellas, I know that can’t be comfortable for either of you.’
‘Fuckin’ understatement,’ Trev said, grunting. ‘Alright, we’re sorted. Coast still clear, Rodge?’
‘Not yet.’ Morgan scanned all four roads heading into the junction. The Iraqi military police had loaded up the Toyota and gathered the bodies, and they were on their way back towards Baghdad in a small convoy. The only man that remained was a tall, thin officer, prowling around the junction, investigating what had happened at the scene of the shooting. He bent to pick something up, then shoved it into his pocket. No plastic bag in evidence. They didn’t seem to go in for forensics much, out here. Morgan watched the officer climb back into his truck and follow the convoy away. ‘Alright Trev, you’re good to go. Just keep your speed low for the first mile. Let them get a bit of distance on you.’
He and Regan watched in silence as Irvine eased the quad down the slope and away.
‘You did well back there,’ Regan said suddenly. ‘Class-A markmanship.’
‘Cheers.’ Morgan grinned, recognising the silent apology within the compliment. ‘Still got it, it seems.’
‘You’ve always been good at… what you do.’
The silent ‘but’ hung in the air like a heat mirage. But you’d do better if you didn’t bloody drink. He smarted, but took it on the chin. Best not to start an argument about how often he did or didn’t hit the bottle.
‘You all right, Rodge?’ Regan prompted.
‘Yeah, yeah I’m good. Shall I take first watch while you lapse into your usual coma?’
Regan chuckled as he slid down into the fox hole. ‘You trying to say something about my alertness, mate?’
‘Would I?’ Morgan gave him a grin of faux-innocence but settled himself down on the ground by his rifle. The wind had dropped. The scopes would need readjusting. He spent a few moments on his sights and then on Jim’s, and when he looked round, Regan had already dropped off. Lucky bastard.
He reached for his bottle and sloshed the clear liquid around, wondering whether he could chance a quick snifter or not.
Regan snored.
Just one. Fine, two long swallows, and that’s it. You’ve got a bad reputation to ditch, here. Don’t fuck things up for yourself just after your sergeant’s given you a pat on the back.
Two swallows turned into four, but he wrenched the bottle from his lips after the fifth, screwed the cap back on. No discipline. None at all. He decided, as soon as he got home, he’d find an AA group. His brain buzzing pleasantly, he stretched, wondering vaguely what music his mother had chosen for Erin’s service. Deciding that his family’s activities were too depressing to contemplate, he stared out into the desert for an hour or so, trying to ‘see’ shapes in the dunes.
He’d nearly lulled himself off to sleep when he heard a faint clink of metal against metal. He instantly came awake, but had the presence of mind to feign sleep. as he sensed someone ease themselves under the netting down behind him and into their foxhole.
Morgan slowly curled his hand around the neck of the bottle.
***
Regan’s subconscious heard a noise like someone clearing their throat. His eyes snapped open and it took a moment to understand the scene that confronted him.
Sitting on the ground in the opposite corner of the hide was the Iraqi officer who’d been in charge of the investigation of the shooting. Regan shifted his gaze and homed in on Morgan, who was asleep with a half-empty bottle of booze nestled into the sand next to him. His hand was loosely curled round the neck of it.
Fuck.
‘Ah good, at least one of you is awake,’ the Iraqi officer said in impeccable Oxford English. He glanced over his shoulder and chuckled. ‘It appears your friend doesn’t take the night watch responsibility as seriously.’
Morgan, you fucking tosser!
The officer levelled a pistol—a Tariq—in Regan’s face. ‘Would you be kind enough to place your hands on your head where I can see them, please?’
Regan rolled himself into a kneeling position and complied.
‘I am arresting you and your sleepy friend for the murder of four members of the Republican Guard, yesterday evening.’
Regan said nothing, working on building his supply of adrenaline to knock the pistol from the officer’s hand.
‘You may indeed choose to re
main silent, or say whatever you like, but it will not help your defence. President Saddam has given strict orders that any captured enemy forces in Iraq are to be tried as criminals and executed. You and your friend will hang, just as soon as you have told me all I want to know.’
‘I’m telling you nothing.’
The officer rolled his eyes, the movements of the whites clear in the darkness. ‘Yes, bravo. I’m sure you’ll stay silent, but I don’t know about your friend. After a few lashes from a Ducati chain across the soles of his feet, he might be happy to tell us where the other hides are. ’
Regan dug his toes into the sand to propel himself up onto his feet, and suddenly everything happened at once.
Morgan spun around, his vodka bottle smashing against the officer’s nose and forehead. The Iraqi officer's pistol went off and Regan pitched backwards at the impact of a loosed bullet. He gasped at the burn in his shoulder and slapped his good hand around for his Browning side-arm. An Iraqi soldier appeared at the side of the camouflage netting and Regan fired. The bullet entered the soldier’s eye, smashed through the back of its socket, and ploughed into his brain. He dropped like a marionette with slashed strings, as Morgan leapfrogged over him and lunged out of the hide, his SA80 coming up to his shoulder as he saw the rest of the Iraqi troops.
Struggling to his feet, Regan emerged from the shelter in time to see Morgan spraying bullets from his assault rifle at three Iraqi military policemen congregated down below the foxhole. By sheer luck, the bullets found their mark and all of the Iraqis went down: one dead, two seriously injured and out of the fight. Regan sank to his knees, black spots dappling across his vision. The officer, with blood pouring from the lacerations in his face, pointed his Tariq up at Morgan, but Regan put a bullet into the officer’s head before he could squeeze the trigger.
Regan collapsed onto his side. He nearly passed out but was brought round sharply as his jacket was ripped open and something pressed down hard against his wound. The pain was intense. He wanted to be sick, and Morgan’s breath wasn’t helping.
‘How you doing, Jimbo?’
Regan looked at him, seeing him in rapid snapshot between blinks. He could barely breathe, yet Morgan was acting like he was dabbing a scraped knee. ‘You… fuckin’ nobber.’
‘Eh?’
Regan cried out as Morgan pressed hard against the hole in his chest. ‘You were… drunk and asleep at your post. You caused this!’
‘I’ve just saved your arse!’
‘And I saved yours, without using a f-fucking bottle!’
‘Jim, I had a snifter.’
‘There was hardly anything left!’
‘Yeah, and I brought hardly none of it with me.’
‘Why bring any at all?’ Regan met Morgan’s eyes, searching for the truth. The man’s gaze skittered all over the place. Regan sucked in air which seemed to get trapped. He couldn’t exhale and his head swam.
Morgan looked defeated. ‘I know I shouldn’t have brought the bottle with me at all, and I’m sorry, but seriously—I just had the one. Playing the drunk possum seemed the best way of dealing with the raghead officer. Honest.’
Regan coughed and tasted blood. ‘I can smell the alcohol in your sweat, Rodge. You didn’t just have one.’
‘Jim, we’ve been mates for years. You can’t—’
‘Stop,’ Regan wheezed. ‘We can’t… avoid a court martial. It’s out of my hands.’
A muscle jumped under Morgan’s left eye. ‘Look, I’d been flat out for nearly forty-eight hours straight, mate. Give me a break.’
Regan put his chin down and looked at the wound as Morgan lifted the heel of his hand off the bullet hole. Blood bubbled up. No wonder he could barely breathe. ‘I’ll tell ‘em… you killed the man who shot me. But there’s no… no chance we can hide what happened here.’
‘You can tell them I saved your arse! I took out those other three MPs as well, didn’t I?’
Regan’s pulse galloped and he lost feeling in his fingertips and feet. He was blacking out. ‘Pl…please…’
Morgan’s face lost its anger all of a sudden. It was like all the emotions had been scrubbed off his face. He removed the heel of his hand from the wound. Regan went rigid as Morgan leant right down over him so his lips almost brushed his ear. ‘I think I’ll create my own version of what happened here, thanks, Jim.’ He stuck two fingers into the wound and twisted them, opening it up.
Regan couldn’t even scream. He heard Irvine yelling, but then the sky seemed to rise up away from him as the back of his head thumped lightly into the sand.
* * *
‘Shit,’ Irvine yelled. ‘What’s going on?’
Morgan clamped his palm back over the hole in Regan’s chest and looked up at Irvine, wondering how much he’d seen or heard.
‘Morgan! What the fuck are you doing?’
‘He got shot, idiot. I’m trying to seal the wound. Grab the first-aid kit.’
‘Get away.’ Irvine grabbed the collar of Morgan’s jacket and hauled him backwards, putting his body between them as a barrier. He picked up Regan’s Browning from the ground and pointed it in Morgan’s face while reaching for Regan’s pulse. ‘Get away from Jim and keep your hands where I can see them.’
‘Why would I be trying to kill him?’
‘Stay there!’ Irvine roared, then bent over his friend, patting his face lightly. ‘Jim, can you hear me?’
To Morgan’s relief, Regan’s head just lolled in the sand, his lips grey and his skin waxy.
‘Jim?’ Irvine pulled the jacket to one side. ‘Fuck!’
‘I told you—he got shot!’
Ignoring him, Irvine put the Browning down, tipped Regan’s chin back, and rummaged in the thigh pocket of his DPM's for something. He pulled out a battlefield dressing ripped open the packet and started stuffing the bandage into the hole in Regans chest.‘It’s a sucking wound. Crawl over to the kit and get some micropore tape. Now.’
‘I was trying to stop him bleeding out.’
‘Well you chose a funny fuckin’ way of going about it.’
Morgan’s temper rose. Irvine’s usually friendly eyes were pinning him to the spot. There was no question that his hand had been seen in the wound, not on it. He moved over to the box as instructed, reaching for the tape. He tossed it over and sat numbly for a moment while Irvine made the seal over the bullet wound air-tight.
The moment Irvine bent over Regan’s head to do mouth-to-mouth, Morgan struck. In an instant, he’d pumped three shots into Irvine from the Iraqi's Tariq pistol. Irvine dropped to the ground next to Regan, twitching. Morgan waited for him to stop moving, then bent to feel both pulses. Regan’s had gone. Irvine’s was going.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Morgan spat, ‘now I got two of you wankers to get out of here.’
He packed the wounds in Irvine’s back with gauze to make it look as if he’d tried to save both his injured comrades, then turned towards the radio set. His lower body exploded with pain. He dropped to his knees, clutching his back. Blood ran over his fingertips from a hole about two inches to the left of his spine and about an inch above his pelvis. Once the initial shock wore off, he turned back to see Trevor Irvine’s hand drop back down to the sand, his eyes open but now sightless.
He did his best to pack his own wound and sat shaking madly for a few minutes while he got his head around what he’d just done.
They’d driven him to it.
Morgan wiped the tears from his eyes and flicked a foot out, kicking Regan viciously in the thigh. ‘You had to make this difficult, didn’t you? You could’ve just covered me, but no—you had to think the fucking worst. I wasn’t drunk!’
What now, though? He’d have to tell the brass that Trev had got him by accident while defending Regan, for starters. He closed his eyes and walked through a version of what had happened, adapting his story in order and detail until it fit the evidence. He ran over it a couple of times more, making sure he’d accounted for every angle.
; Finally, he crawled back over to the radio and called for an emergency cas-evac. He was resting back on the sand to let gravity press the dressing against his wound when he noticed the surreal red landscape in the distance towards Kuwait. The sun was just rising and he could see clouds of thick black smoke rising from dozens of oil well fires and geysers of flame jetting high up into the morning sky.
He hoped it didn’t take too long for the chopper to reach him. Funny thing though, it was the American Combat Rescue crew that had gotten him into this mess because they couldn't fly to rescue their general. But now it was the ACR coming to pick up him and the stiffs that were Jim Regan and Trev Irvine, because the Chinook was down for maintenance. Go figure. He closed his eyes and drifted off.
Some time later, he heard his name being called. He dragged his eyelids up and dimly saw a figure above him. Wind and sand whirled around him as he found himself floating into a dark, square hole. Then came noise and rocking motion, and his feet felt like they were floating up while his head started to sink. Through his delirium, he realised he was on a helicopter that was taking off. Morgan's head flopped to the side and he threw up.
Chapter 7
The morning dawned grey and sombre, matching Carla’s feelings exactly.
The week since James’ repatriation had drained her of tears. On autopilot, she brushed her blond hair into a ponytail. Blue eyes stared back at her from the mirror as she applied a little makeup, mainly to cover the dark circles beneath her her eyes. There wasn’t much she could do about the red rims. She fixed her hat and dropped the netted veil over her face.
Paddy appeared at the doorway. ‘D’you have to wear that, mum?’
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