War Torn (17 page)

‘Duh. I mean Second Lieutenant Weeks. He just couldn’t stop staring at you. And when you were chatting away to Ol’ Blue Eyes he was getting really agitated.’

‘Don’t talk daft!’

‘I swear it.’

‘What about you then? You kept looking at someone all through the meeting.’

‘Did I? Who?’

‘That soldier over by the door.’

Jean giggled.

‘
And
you gave him a sexy smile on the way out.
And
you were looking at him in the cookhouse the other night, too.’

‘Well . . . he’s nice to look at . . .’

‘Are you blushing? I reckon you are!’

‘I reckon I might be too . . .’

They did their best to look serious again when the officers climbed in beside them.

‘Well,’ Major Willingham said as the Vectors set off through the dust. ‘Do we trust them? Or are they just trying to use the British Army to fight some local feud against whoever lives in that compound?’

The engineer pulled a face.

‘Whatever their motive, it’s not greed. They’re not asking for the earth, just a school wall.’

‘But that elder son. He’s educated. He’s spent a few years in Saudi; he could so easily have come under the influence of . . .’

Boss Weeks nodded: ‘I think his history’s highly suspicious. I found that man highly suspicious. I mean, possibly dangerous.’ Then he coloured and added: ‘Although of course I’m not used to dealing with these people.’

‘Well let’s ask someone who is,’ the major said. ‘What did our interpreters make of them?’

Jean said: ‘If Asad was Saudi-educated he will have come back with new ideas. That may be good, because he can handle concepts like oil exploration. And it may be bad.’

‘There’s a danger,’ Asma continued, ‘that he’ll have come back
wahabi
– that is, with no respect for the old tribal customs. If you’re
wahabi
then you regard a lot of the local practices as no more than superstition. So when Arab fighters, and other insurgents, get here and stamp all over the local traditions and run amok with their weapons, he might think that’s cool. Or he might think he’s promoting Pashtun interests.’

‘Very interesting,’ Major Willingham said. ‘I saw you having a conversation with the son. How dangerous do you think he is?’

Jean watched her carefully. They all waited for Asma’s answer.

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘my instinct is quite strong on this one. I think we should trust this family.’

‘
YOU
’
VE GOT SOME CALLS TO MAKE.
’

Dave had been summoned over to the ops room.
Jenny
. . . His stomach lurched.
Something’s happened to her.

‘Is it my wife, sir?’

‘No, nothing like that. It’s about the two men you lost. Rifleman Jordan is doing well in Selly Oak but he’s made repeated requests to talk to you about the incident. And Rifleman Buckle . . .’

‘Yes?’ Was the 2 i/c preparing him for bad news? His enquiries about Steve had always met with the same noncommittal response. Now Dave felt his heart thump.

The 2 i/c said: ‘Rifleman Buckle would also like a word with you.’

‘So he’s well enough to talk now!’ Dave’s heart was still pumping hard but it was feeding relief to all the tiny, faraway capillaries that had drained as he braced himself for the worst.

He was handed the phone and, after being passed along a chain of medical personnel, he heard a voice he recognized.

‘Dave, is that you, mate?’

The voice was airless, as though its owner was wearing too tight a uniform. But it was unmistakably Steve Buckle.

‘Good to hear you, mate! I’ve been asking to speak to you every day but they wouldn’t let me.’

‘Not fucking surprised,’ Steve said. ‘They didn’t want your language upsetting me, you old heap of shit.’

Dave laughed not because it was funny but because no dying
man could speak that way and it meant Steve was going to live. Beneath his laugh, though, he felt uneasy. He’d been mates with Steve, but, even as a mate, Steve had never called his platoon sergeant a heap of shit.

‘How are you?’ Dave asked.

‘Terrible.’

‘All over?’

‘All over, mate. Broken a bunch of ribs and an arm and I’ve got a shitload of bruising and I’m every colour of the rainbow.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

Dave proceeded cautiously. ‘You’ve been lying there a long time for a bloke who’s only got bruising.’

‘Bit of shrapnel in the arm, broken rib . . . let’s see, was there something else?’

Dave felt his lungs tighten, then his gut.

‘How’s the leg?’ he asked.

‘My legs are all right, mate.’

‘Does your head hurt?’

‘Yep.’

So that was why no one had been allowed to speak to Steve.

‘Only because I need a beer,’ Steve added. ‘What sort of country is this, where no one can drink a beer?’

‘Well, what country is it?’ Dave asked. ‘Go on, you tell me.’

‘Can’t remember the name . . .’

‘Can you think straight?’

‘Since when could I think straight?’

‘Do you remember anything about the accident?’

‘The last thing I remember we had our stuff ready and we were getting in the Vector to go somewhere . . .’

Steve’s voice petered out.

‘Who was in the Vector with you?’

‘Everyone!’

‘Name them if you can, Steve. Go on. Name all the lads in 1 Section.’

Dave hoped his questions weren’t causing Steve anguish but he had to know. He had to know if the IED had blown away a piece of Steve Buckle’s mind.

‘Well. There’s you . . .’

‘I’m not in 1 Section, am I?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Not really. What do I do?’

‘Ummm . . . who am I talking to?’

Oh shit.

‘I’m Dave. Your sergeant. So you’d better look sharpish.’

‘Oh, yeah. Dave. Yeah.’

‘Now tell me what’s wrong with you apart from shrapnel in your arm and bruising.’

‘Um . . . I keep falling asleep.’

‘That’s the morphine.’

‘I’m falling asleep now. The doc’s here, want to speak to him?’

‘Yeah, all right, Steve. Listen, you need a lot of rest so just relax. That’s an order. Have you spoken to Leanne yet?’

But Steve wasn’t there any more.

Dave was aware that people in the ops room had been listening to him. Major Willingham was at a desk nearby and so was the 2 i/c. The OC’s laptop blinked and people seemed to be on the radio or working on documents or shuffling papers around but it was all a pretence. The note of alarm he could not edit from his voice had somehow placed the ops room on alert.

He avoided everyone’s eye. A new, crisp voice crackled on the phone now.

‘Rob Webb speaking. I’m the doctor monitoring Rifleman Buckle.’

‘Dave Henley, Buckle’s platoon sergeant. So is it the morphine or has he got head injuries?’

‘Probably still traumatized. It’s hard for us to do detailed assessments here: we just have to get him well enough to ship him off to England, but we’ve had a bit of trouble stabilizing him.’

‘He started off sounding like Steve . . . and then I realized he wasn’t really there.’

‘Sometimes he is. For brief periods. That’s why we’re still hoping his head injuries won’t cause a long-term problem.’

‘Does he actually know he’s lost a leg?’

The doctor’s reply, when it came, was careful. ‘Well, he has been told.’

‘Has he taken it in?’

‘His nervous system’s telling him it’s still there and it hurts a lot. He’s chosen not to look.’

‘Christ . . . Has he spoken to his wife?’

‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you. Now you’ve talked to him, what do you think?’

‘Well . . .’ Dave said. ‘I know Leanne’s desperate to be in touch. But if she hears him like that then it could make things worse. Has he asked to phone her?’

‘He hasn’t remembered he’s married yet. But he remembered you were his sergeant.’

‘Christ.’

‘That’s soldiers for you. He asked to speak to you by name. I heard him forget who you were towards the end of the conversation, but he certainly knew at the beginning.’

‘I don’t reckon he should speak to Leanne.’

‘He’s good for thirty seconds, maybe.’

‘But he’s not going to say any of the things Leanne will want to hear.’
When do any of us say the things they want to hear
?

‘OK, maybe we’ll wait a bit longer.’

‘I’ll tell her we’ve spoken but morphine got in the way. How’s his leg?’

The doctor paused again.

‘Well . . . it’s a bad injury and we’re still fighting to keep things under control. And if this call had taken place earlier in the day he’d have been a lot more lucid.’

When the call ended Dave sat staring into space. People were looking at him, waiting for him to say something, but he surrounded himself instead with a ring of silence.

‘Do I conclude,’ asked the OC eventually, ‘that Rifleman Buckle isn’t doing so well?’

Dave remembered how Steve Buckle was one of the quickest, funniest lads in the platoon. Just when Billy Finn thought he’d had the last word, Steve would always come back with a killer punch line.

‘He’s making a physical recovery. It’s just he doesn’t sound much like the Steve I used to know,’ Dave said quietly.

‘Early days,’ the major said.

Dave’s call to Jordan Nelson was a picnic by comparison. The machine-gunner could remember almost everything up until the moment of the blast.

‘Did you see me, Sarge? Did you watch me flying?’

‘Poetry in motion, mate,’ Dave assured him.

‘I haven’t looked in the mirror yet. I expect I look like Tutan-fucking-khamun. And they won’t take the bandages off for weeks.’

He paused. ‘How’s Steve?’

‘Stable,’ Dave heard himself saying.

The constant use of this word since Steve’s accident had pissed him off big-time, but now he understood. You could take refuge in the sheer dependability of a word like stable. Without really thinking what it might mean.

VICKY WENT TO NURSERY FOR TWO HOURS ON A WEDNESDAY AND
Jenny had a list as long as her arm of things to do in that two hours. But she had no sooner got home in the empty car and begun to tackle her chores than the doorbell rang.

She sighed. It might be Leanne, armed with a twin on each side, saying she needed to talk. She had to talk to someone, poor love, since they still hadn’t let her talk to Steve.

But it was Agnieszka. Luke was in his pushchair throwing his arms up and down in that strange way of his and Agnieszka stood there, white-faced, tight-jeaned, barely smiling. Jenny felt resentful until she reminded herself that, in the superstore, she had actually invited her.