Chris Ryan - Osama

‘I was with him.’

Immediately she was by his side, one arm around his shoulders.

‘How did it happen?’ she whispered.

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I just…’

‘Look, forget it. He’s not fucking here. He died. Just like every other fucker that goes out there.’

Silence. Caitlin kept her arm around his shoulder for a few more seconds, then awkwardly withdrew it. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

Joe nodded.

‘I spoke to your adjutant,’ Caitlin whispered. ‘He said you were… he said maybe… they were sending a doctor to talk to you… this afternoon…’

‘Tell them not to bother.’ Ricky was the one who’d needed a fucking doctor.

‘But Joe, if something’s wrong…’

She raised her hand to his face and gently forced him to look at her. All he saw were mascara-smudged eyes.

‘I’m sorry I gave you a hard time, Joe. I’m so sorry. I just—’

‘I need to sleep,’ Joe interrupted. He stood up suddenly, walked around the bed and closed the curtains. They had thick blackout linings, and blocked most of the light from the room.

‘I’ll leave you then,’ Caitlin said, standing up.

‘Right,’ said Joe.

He knew he was being a bastard, but somehow he couldn’t stop it. And by the time he was under the duvet, she had left the room.

It was a sleep of sorts, but troubled, broken and disturbed by dreams that were both vivid and sickening. Joe saw himself in Abbottabad. From his hiding place under the rubble, he watched first one body bag emerge from the house, and then the second. They were halfway across the courtyard when the first bag mysteriously split open. A body sat up: a thin man with a grey beard, wearing a bloodstained smock. He had a gruesome gun wound to the head that had turned one eye socket into a crater of bloody pap. But the good eye was blinking and looking directly at Joe. The mouth was moving. Joe couldn’t understand the sinister Arabic intonation. He didn’t want to understand it. He tried to block his ears, but it only made the noise louder. He felt for his pistol. The only way to stop it was to shoot the bastard again. Joe steadied his shaking hand and took aim… he was ready to fire…

Only he wasn’t looking at a corpse any more. He was looking at Ricky, sitting up from the body bag and giving Joe a perplexed look.

And then he was sitting up in bed, sweating, trembling. The bedside clock showed 11.58.

Joe swore at himself, before lying down again and closing his eyes, determined to rest.

But his dreams took him somewhere else. He was on all fours, pressed against the dusty desert earth with the sun beating down on his back. He heard a child’s voice: ‘Amer-ee-can motherfucker… Amer-ee-can motherfucker…’ He looked over his shoulder to see who was speaking. It wasn’t a kid. It was the same figure from his previous dream, with the same crater-like wound in his eye socket.

And then another explosion.

And another…

And another…

Joe was back in his bedroom at home. 13.02. The sheets were soaked. His breath came in short gasps. But the explosions – they weren’t in his head any more. They were real.

He jumped out of bed. A pair of jeans and a fresh shirt had been laid out for him while he slept. He pulled on the jeans as the explosions continued. He stormed out of the bedroom and onto the landing. Gunfire, short bursts from an automatic weapon. And it was coming from the direction of his son’s bedroom.

Joe didn’t hesitate. He burst through the door, which swung on its hinges and bashed against the wall.

Conor’s room hadn’t changed since he’d been away. The cabin bed was still neatly made; the encyclopedias he loved were lined up on his bookcase. Conor himself was sitting on a spotty beanbag in the middle of the room. He was facing a small television, with an Xbox controller in his hand. Joe looked to the screen. His son was playing one of the war games that were so popular with the younger men back in the Stan. From the point of view of a player with an assault rifle, Joe could see a realistic desert landscape, with an animated Chinook hovering in the distance. Two Taliban fighters, their heads wrapped in keffiyehs, approached. Conor was ignoring the game now, looking up at his father with frightened eyes. The animated Taliban drew knives. Now they were at the front of the screen. An instant later there was the sickening sound of metal puncturing flesh and a rattling death groan from the device.

Joe felt an unstoppable rage. He stepped into the centre of the room, grabbed the controller from Conor’s tiny hands and yanked the cords that connected them to the console. The Xbox flew forward, but the game played on. The virtual soldier was on the ground, virtual blood spilling onto the virtual sand. Joe stormed up to the TV and before he knew it he had yanked the screen off its little stand and sent it crashing to the ground.

At last there was silence.

Joe looked down at the smashed television, and then at Conor, whose lip was wobbling as he tried to hold back his tears. He tried to think of something to say. But he couldn’t. The explosions and gunfire were still in his head, like distant echoes, distracting his attention.

Footsteps up the stairs. Caitlin appeared in the doorway, taking in the scene with a single glance. She had swapped the halterneck for an altogether less glamorous black T-shirt. The three of them remained very still, in a triangle of silence, Conor and Caitlin staring at Joe like he was a stranger.

Ten seconds passed before Joe stormed out of the room, pushing past Caitlin and heading downstairs. ‘He shouldn’t be playing that shit all day anyway,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t he play fucking football?’

He could hear their voices through the thin ceiling as he walked into the front room, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He was angry with himself. What the hell had he been thinking? He stood at the bay window, looking out at the street. Some kid was sitting on the front garden wall of the house opposite. Almost as a reflex action, Joe found himself recording his features: dark skin; greasy black hair; yellow, rotten teeth; late teens, early twenties. He was twirling an empty bottle of Coke in his right hand. For an instant he thought the kid was looking straight through the window at him.

‘Tell me what’s wrong?’

Caitlin had entered the room without Joe hearing.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said.

‘Try me.’

Silence.

Caitlin approached him. Her face had softened, and for the first time in days he felt his defences lower. ‘I heard the noises from that fucking game,’ he said. ‘I thought they were real.’

He stared at Caitlin, as though daring her to laugh. ‘You’re home now,’ she whispered. ‘With us.’

From the corner of his eye he saw movement on the street. Another kid had approached his mate with the rotten teeth. They shared a few words and walked off down the street.

‘Go and talk to him,’ she said. ‘Properly, Joe. He’s been aching to see you.’

Conor was still in his room, but had moved from the beanbag to the raised bed, where he had wrapped himself in his duvet and had a sketch pad open in front of him, and next to that the small grey elephant that had been his since he was a baby. Joe could never work out how one minute he could be playing war games, the next running his finger over the worn fabric of a soft toy. He had his mother’s colouring: copper hair and pale freckles on his nose and cheeks. In fact, he was as unlike Joe in looks as he was in personality. Joe approached the bed and glanced down. Conor’s gaze was fixed on the drawing he was making, two figures, scrappy and childlike. He refused to look up at his dad.