LITMIR.BIZ

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      The last slice of orange sun was disappearing into the western sea as the eight SAS men made their way across the deck of HMS Hermes toward the waiting Wessex helicopter. For the first time in many days the sky was clear and the ocean was not doing its best to tip the ship over. Maybe it was a good omen. But it was still bloody cold.

      Each man was wearing camouflage gear from head to toe, with the exposed areas of the face painted to match. Somewhere in the bergen rucksacks slung across their backs, among the 90 lb or so of weaponry, communications equipment, medical kit and rations, each man was carrying the tubes of ‘cam’ cream he would need to freshen his make-up when the need arose.

      They had split into pairs to check each other’s cosmetic efforts before the final load-up. One of the two patrol commanders, Major Jeremy Brookes, had received five point eight for technical merit but only a minus score for artistic impression. He smiled through his mask at the thought.

      Brookes’s patrol, all of them members of G Squadron’s Mountain Troop, were headed for the hills overlooking Port Howard on West Falkland, and none too pleased about it. ‘But all the fucking Argies are on East Falkland, boss,’ Trooper Kenny Laurel had observed, with all the mildness of an articulated lorry.

      ‘No, Hedge, they’re not,’ Brookes had explained, ‘just most of them. And that’s only as far as we know. The point of this exercise is to determine exactly where they are, every last one of them.’

      ‘And where they’re not,’ Trooper Davey Matthews had observed.

      ‘Thank you, Stanley. Besides which, someone had to draw the short straw, and it was us, OK?’

      ‘Yes, boss.’

      Admittedly, Brookes thought as he clambered aboard the Wessex, the straw no longer seemed quite so short. There might not be many Argies on West Falkland, but there was likely to be more than four of them. This was hardly a picnic they were embarking on. At the best it would probably consist of lying in a damp hole for days on end, bored out of their minds. He tried to remember who had said that a soldier’s life was ninety-nine per cent boredom, one per cent pure terror. Was it Wellington? No, it was somebody else, but he could not remember who.

      As they sat there waiting for the Wessex crew to appear – ‘Fucking Navy were even late for the Armada,’ someone observed – Brookes foolishly asked his seven co-travellers if any of them could remember.

      ‘Genghis Khan?’ a member of the other patrol offered.

      ‘Nah, he said it was ninety-nine per cent terror,’ someone corrected him.

      ‘Bruce Forsyth,’ Hedge suggested. ‘What do you think, Mozza?’

      Trooper David Moseley emerged from his reverie with a start. ‘What?’ he said.

      ‘His mind’s on other things,’ Stanley said.

      The little woman back home, I expect, Hedge thought. ‘It drains your strength, Mozza, even thinking about them.’

      ‘I was thinking about where we’re going,’ Mozza said, wondering guiltily whether not thinking about Lynsey at such a moment was something of a betrayal.

      ‘We’re all going to sunny West Falkland,’ Hedge told him, ‘where the beaches stretch golden into the distance and the hills are alive with the sound of sheep farting. We’re all going on a summer holiday,’ he sung, with a gusto Cliff Richard would have killed for.

      So would their pilot, who had just arrived with the other two members of the crew. ‘If you don’t stop that horrible row Falkland Sound will be alive with your cries for help,’ he said trenchantly.

      ‘If you dropped him into Falkland Sound,’ one of the other patrol noted, examining Hedge’s undoubted bulk, ‘it would probably drain it.’

      ‘Then there’d only be one island to argue about,’ someone else realized.

      Major Brookes listened to the banter with half his mind, knowing it for what it was, a giddy chorus of nerves and apprehension. He still could not remember the author of his quote, and as he checked through his memory, another, less amenable one came to mind. He had first heard it from the lips of a dying IRA terrorist the previous year. Lying there, blood flowing freely from a neck wound into sodden leaves in an Armagh lane, the man had looked at him, smiled and recited: ‘this is war, boys flung into a breach, like shovelled earth, and…’

      He had died then, and it had taken Brookes many months to find the rest of the verse, and its source. Finally, the wife of an old friend had recognized it as a poem by the American Amy Lowell. He had looked it up and found the rest: ‘and old men, broken, driving rapidly before crowds of people, in a glitter of silly decorations, behind the boys and the old men, life weeps and shreds her garments, to the blowing winds’.

      These are the boys, Brookes thought, looking round at them: Mozza with his fresh-faced innocence, ginger-haired Stanley with his sleazy grin, the overwhelming Hedge.

      At that moment the lights went out, the rotor blades reached a pitch which made conversation impossible, and the Wessex lifted up from the aircraft carrier’s deck and started moving south-westwards, low across the South Atlantic swell.

      Cecil Matheson poured himself a modest finger of malt whisky, took an appreciative sip and carried it across to the window. Through a gap between darkened buildings he could see light reflected on the Thames. In the street below he could see theatre and cinema-goers threading their way through the Saturday evening jam of taxis.

      The buzzer sounded on his phone, and he took three quick strides across the room to his desk.

      ‘Mr Lubanski is on the line,’ his secretary told him.

      ‘Mr Lubanski,’ Matheson said jovially, wondering, not for the

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