Michael Dobbs - Whispers of betrayal

A man who now values his life as no greater than a discarded cigarette butt.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Scully.

They'd betrayed him, too.

One minute he had been sitting in a bar off a cobbled backstreet in Osnabruck, having a last drink before being sent out to Kosovo, the next he'd been spewing his mince and tatties into his partner's hands, his leg and his career shattered by a coffee-jar bomb. Kids' stuff, those bombs. A simple affair, nothing more than a glass jar filled with scrapyard confetti and a compression detonator, and the top screwed on. The coffee jar had been thrown from the back of a motor scooter which disappeared into the night even before the coffee jar had hit the floor. The one brief sighting of the bombers suggested they were teenagers. Truly kids' stuff. When the glass broke less than a dick-length away from Scully's right foot, the detonator had decompressed and exploded, and the confetti – sharp, murderous chunks of metal with razor teeth – had chewed a path halfway through his leg. All in a day's work for a Para keeping the peace on the streets of Djakovice or Pristina, perhaps, but not in a backstreet bar in Germany, not when he was off duty. Which is why, when they decided they had no further use for a soldier with only one leg, they offered him their very best wishes but no compensation beyond a meagre disability payment. They argued that Osnabruck wasn't a war zone, the sort of place where you budget for a heavy cripple count. Hell, he was off duty. Drinking! Couldn't expect the Treasury to pay for every last damned scratch. It was unfortunate, of course, and unexpected, but that's what goes with being a soldier. Have to expect the unexpected. Of course, the two youths on the scooter might have been members of the pro-Serbian Prince Lazar terrorist group that was chucking bombs all over the place. That was entirely possible, but not provable. So, sorry, Skulls. Now, if you'd actually reached Kosovo, that would've been different, and Northern Ireland, too. Part of the home country. Sensitive. Soldiers weren't supposed to get blown up and butchered on home turf, so if Scully had copped it there he'd have got a thousand pounds a stitch.

But Osnabruck wasn't the Bogside. Scully hadn't been an innocent victim. He'd simply been… well, unlucky. Wrong place, wrong life. A trooper with a bad break. And only one leg. As if he'd fallen down stairs on a Friday night. And if they paid out to every soldier on the basis of bad luck, where would the System be?

So Scully's career had disappeared, and with it his wife. Then Scully, too, shortly after that.

Until tonight.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Amadeus was about to launch himself after the RSM, but now his wife was at his side, dragging him back, as always she dragged him back. Anyway, Amadeus knew there was little point in pursuit; if Scully didn't wish to be found then he would not be found.

Suddenly Amadeus found himself overcome by a feeling he could only describe as envy. Envy of Scully, of this man in the gutter. Of his freedom, his ability simply to be able to disappear and leave the whole miserable mess behind him. God's bollocks, it had come down to that. He was jealous of a fucking tramp.

His wife was summoning him, demanding he find a taxi. The call of duty. At one point in the Gulf War, during his tour with the SAS, Amadeus had been leading a Scud hunting patrol and in the darkness of the desert night had stumbled across a recce company of Iraqis. They shouldn't have been there, according to the oxymorons at Army Intelligence, and even if they were they shouldn't have offered any resistance, certainly not a firefight. With only seven men Amadeus had captured forty-three Iraqi regulars – forty-nine if you counted the body bags. Stopped an entire Iraqi company. For that they'd given him the Military Cross. Now all he did was stop taxis. Two young women brushed by, arm in arm, their young faces full of life. They were laughing – not with him, not even at him, they simply hadn't noticed he existed. To them he was just another anonymous, middle-aged man stuck in a crowd. A cold, sodden cloak of self-loathing suddenly wrapped itself around Amadeus's shoulders. He found himself reaching for another cigarette, his hand shaking, the cigarettes all but tumbling from the packet.

Then the loathing overwhelmed him. His hand clenched tight and, with all the strength he could find, he crushed the pack of cigarettes as once, when his rifle jammed, he had crushed the neck of an Iraqi conscript until the terrified eyes had begun to bleed in their sockets. All in the service of his country. A country that no longer wanted him, and thousands of others like him, like Scully. A country whose leaders had betrayed those who had served them most loyally.

He spilled the offending cigarettes into the gutter, slamming his heel down and grinding them to pulp underfoot. He didn't want them any more. What he wanted, what he truly bloody wanted out of this mess, for himself, for Scully and all the others, was… what? Not their careers back, not even justice, it was surely too late for that. But perhaps an apology, an acknowledgement that they had been treated wrongfully, that all this cut and slash had gone too far. Belated recognition that they were men. Of valour, and of value. Not to be discarded like some cigarette pack in the rain.

It wasn't much to ask for, an apology, but to men of honour even a small sign of contrition can heal so many festering wounds. Amadeus stood in the rain, at one of those turning points that mark a man's life and throw his future unto the hazard, looking up and down this foreign-infested street, and decided upon his course. It was time for action, in the tradition of any wronged British soldier.

He would write a letter. To the Daily Telegraph.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Less than half a mile away from the cracked paving stone on which Amadeus stood resolving to change the world, Thomas Goodfellowe was entering upon a personal crisis of his own. The rain had hesitated and he decided to avoid the scramble for taxis in New Palace Yard after the House had adjourned. With a wary eye cast at the low clouds swooping overhead, the Honourable Member for Marshwood unlocked the chain securing his bicycle – it wasn't safe nowadays, even left in Speaker's Court – and resolved to risk the ten-minute ride back to his apartment in Chinatown.

He needed the fresh air. The last two hours had been spent in the manner of a small schoolboy on detention duty, wriggling in discomfort on his seat while he endured a debate about the war against drugs. The war was going exceedingly well, according to the Minister, a former car assembly worker by the name of Prosser who had MUM tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and DAD on the other, a diminutive man who kept rising and falling on the tips of his toes as though peering over the top of a trench under enemy fire. Drug seizures had declined sharply in the last year – proof positive, in the Minister's view, that the smugglers and cartels no longer saw Britain as a soft touch, scared away by sniffer dogs and the force of his own Napoleonic will. His new shoes squeaked in acclamation.

Trouble was, this was the self-same Minister who, a year previously, had bobbed up and down at the Despatch Box to claim credit for a sharp increase in drug seizures, 'unambiguous evidence,' he had claimed at the time, of his 'commitment in the war against these weeds of evil'.

Fair enough, Goodfellowe had concluded, consistency in politics was usually nothing more than evidence of a closed mind, but in Prosser's case it seemed scarcely a mind at all. The man hadn't the wit to appreciate the absurdity of his logic, nor the grace to laugh it off when it was brought to his attention. Goodfellowe had done so, brought it to his attention, intervened in jovial fashion to remind the House of the words the Minister seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.