Michael Dobbs: Whispers of betrayal

'Bugger London.'

Peter Amadeus swore softly to himself as he stepped out from beneath the shelter of the theatre doorway and into the semi-darkness. Shaftesbury Avenue was under assault from the rain and was on the point of surrendering. Gutters ran with garbage and puddles like oil slicks were collecting on the cracked pavement. Even here, in the heart of the West End, it seemed that London was falling apart. Its streets echoed to the constant noise of nothing, while strangers huddled inside their cars, cutting corners so they could be the first to arrive at the next traffic jam, sounding their horns in impatience as they splashed down life's muddy road. No one gave a damn about anyone else. That's what life in the city was all about.

He lit a cigarette, drawing deep on nicotine and dank night air. The evening lights reflected from the damp roadway, forming a chorus line of red-and-yellow neon that danced around the soaked shoes of two figures beside a taxi. They were coming close to blows. One door handle, two hands. Raised voices. A dispute over occupation rights. Wars had been started for less, Amadeus supposed, but only by politicians.

Beyond the battle, on the other side of the Avenue, Amadeus searched for signs of his country, the homeland for which he had fought and on more than one occasion almost died. He found a Turkish restaurant, a Balti house, a pizzeria and three Chinese wok shops brushing up against a branch of his own bank that recently had been taken over by the French. There may be some small corner which was forever England, but it wasn't here.

He'd been right first time. Bugger London.

Black fingers of rain began to burrow their way behind Amadeus's collar. He shrugged, welcoming them like old friends, stamping impatiently as he waited for his wife. Marriage, he had long since concluded, was much like an examination of his prostate, something that left him wanting to be on his own for a while. She was still inside the foyer where he had left her, cheeks flushed, voice trilling as though in the heat of sexual excitement, launching opinions on a tide of gin-and-diet-tonic about a performance that had pitted two notorious thespian queens against each other, locked in a battle for inclusion in the Birthday Honours List. The only sort of combat they were fit for. And as close as she'd got to an orgasm in years. Unless, of course, she'd been…

Suddenly he felt the blood drain from his cheeks, overwhelmed by one of those fleeting moments of honesty that left him feeling physically sick. Who the hell was he to sneer at others? Amadeus was nothing but a paper warrior, whose weapons were bulldog clips. Whose battlefield was a bursar's desk at some inconsequential fee-paying school in the suburbs, whose only recent victories were against misdirected invoices, and whose Commanding Officer was a woman intent on exacting exquisite revenge for the years she'd spent following in the dust of his career. A once-and-would-be man who now smoked too much and swore too little, who over-tightened his belt and whose bed was as cold as an Arctic foxhole. Who found himself lingering outside playhouses like some cuckold in the rain.

He needed more narcotic. He lit another cigarette. He wasn't to know that it was a cigarette that would change the course of his life.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Life disgusts Amadeus – no, it's worse than that. He disgusts himself or, more precisely, is disgusted at what he's become.

His mind wanders. He's no longer on the steps of the theatre but back behind his desk in the office at Aldershot where he commands 3 Para. He distrusts this desk, indeed any desk, and despises the fact that so much of modern soldiering is fought from behind barricades of paper. It's one of the reasons why he leads from the front, hoping to leave much of the paperwork scattered in his wake. This is also why his battalion will follow him anywhere, for Amadeus is a soldier's soldier.

Yet some pieces of paper refuse to be ignored.

After months of deliberation, the Defence Council has reached its judgement. The Army has been weighed in the scales that balance political convenience against the many bad cheques signed by politicians at election time, and it has lost. An Army that once ruled a quarter of the globe and refused to bow to Thug or Zulu or Hun is to be brought to its knees by a mixture of recession and the awesome incompetence of its political masters, who have ordained that an entire third – the legs, one arm and both balls – is to be hacked off. Discarded. The letters of redundancy have just arrived by courier. They are sitting on Amadeus's desk, accompanied by details of the appeals procedure and glossy brochures about how to survive in the life ever after. More worthless paper.

It is Thursday. The letters are to be locked away in the regimental safe waiting for distribution to the miserable wretches concerned on Monday. Amadeus, of course, has been told that he is entirely bombproof, that his exceptional military record stretching from the battlefields of Goose Green to Bosnia and the Bogside means that his position is beyond question. They can't touch him.

So why is his own name on one of the envelopes?

– =OO=OOO=OO-= They'd avoided him after that, all his colleagues and fellow officers who had any part of the decision and who might have been able to tell him why.

Why? Why me?

In fact, it was true, Amadeus had been bombproof, right up until the very last moment. The computers of the Directorate of Manning had whirred and identified the targets for redundancy by age and by rank, and Amadeus only just crept into the zone. When the Army Establishments Committee had sat in deliberation, they'd even asked Amadeus to give evidence.

Perhaps his evidence had something to do with it. The five members of the committee had sat like hooded crows in Historic Room 27 on the third floor of the Ministry of Defence, beneath chandeliers that hung from a magnificent stucco ceiling and lit walls crowded with oils in gilded frames. They were here to discuss economies. Cuts. Surrender. The chairman was a brigadier with a reputation for soaking up whisky in much the same manner as a teabag soaks up hot water, a process that afterwards left them in much the same condition. The only traces of colour in his face were the red rims of his eyes and the reflection of last night's decanter that still clung stubbornly around his cheeks.

'I'm still not sure, Colonel Amadeus, why you insist that an air mobile brigade couldn't be commanded by another cap badge. Perhaps a Royal Marine, say, rather than by a Para officer.'

'I would have no problem with that.'

'Really? But I thought you'd just been telling us at some length and with considerable vehemence why putting a Royal Marine in charge of a parachute unit would be tantamount to disaster.'

'But the Parachute Regiment is not an air mobile unit, Brigadier. We're air-borne, part of the airborne brigade. The sort of rapid deployment unit that took the Rhine crossings and Goose Green and-'

'Yes, yes! A slip of the tongue, Colonel, you know what I mean!'

'You ask me how we might make economies in the Parachute Regiment without undermining its effectiveness. I tell you it's not possible. Our political masters cut the Army by a third in the 1990s, yet they kept tasking us to do more. Not just in Northern Ireland but Cyprus and Bosnia and Kosovo and Timor and Angola. And now they want to cut another third? It's madness. Madness! They'll be able to fit the entire British Army inside Wembley Stadium and still leave plenty of room for the other team's supporters. Although come to think of it, we might have to leave the tank outside.'

'No need for impertinence, Colonel.'

'My apologies, sir. Must have been a slip of the tongue.'