Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

Luke pointed at the Serb lying on the floor. ‘All yours, boss,’ he said. And then: ‘Sean and Marty are dead.’

A dark look crossed Andersen’s face, and Luke could tell he was feeling equally murderous. They had their orders, though. Ivanovic was to stay alive. The Hague wanted their trophy conviction, no matter what had happened here tonight.

Minutes later Luke was back outside in the snow. He watched Chet being stretchered into one of the waiting Pumas, then stood with a frown as the Paras carried the two bodies up into the chopper.

Ivanovic came next, held under the arms by a couple of Paras who made no attempt to spare him any of the agony caused by dragging his splintered shins across the ground. Amid his shouts of pain, he took a second to cast a hateful look at Luke, who returned it. The bastard didn’t know how lucky he was Luke hadn’t given him one behind the ear.

And then Andersen was there again. ‘Let’s go,’ he ordered, and the two of them boarded the Puma that was carrying Chet and their fallen comrades.

As the heli lifted up into the air, Luke crouched down by Chet’s stretcher, steadying himself by gripping the webbing that covered the inside of the aircraft. His mate’s face was covered with an oxygen mask and he had a new drip in each arm. A blood pressure and pulse monitor beeped next to him. His face looked as white as death.

Luke stared at the man who’d saved his life.

Suddenly Chet’s eyes flickered open.

‘Fuck me, buddy,’ Luke burst out. ‘What does it take to put you down?’

‘Don’t… bullshit… me…’ Chet could barely get the words out, and Luke struggled to hear them over the roar of the chopper. ‘Am I going to make it?’

Luke looked him up and down. He saw the damaged leg and the tubes sticking out of his body. He saw the medics, their faces severe.

He fixed his expression in what he hoped looked like reassurance.

‘Course you are, mate,’ he said, as he felt the Puma struggling against the elements. ‘Course you are. That’s a promise.’

He turned away so that Chet couldn’t see his face any more.

Luke Mercer wasn’t a religious man, but as the Puma struggled through the blizzard and the dark night of Eastern Europe, he found himself muttering a silent prayer — to God and all the fucking angels on high — that this was a promise he’d be able to keep.

January 2003, two months before the coalition invasion of Iraq.

London.

‘ It’s six o’clock on Monday, 7 January. This is the news. ’

In a small ground-floor flat just off Seven Sisters Road, a man stared at his reflection in the mirror while the radio babbled in the background.

‘ UN weapons inspectors have reported that there is no indication that Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction. The chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, however, has stated that, while Iraq has cooperated on a practical level, it has not demonstrated a genuine acceptance of the need to disarm unilaterally. This follows claims by the United States that Saddam Hussein has ordered the death of any scientist who speaks to the inspectors in private, and it is expected that… ’

The man switched off the radio and went back to staring in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His right eye was hooded, the result of an old injury. Just below his left eye there was a two-inch scar, bright pink and crooked. When he smiled the scar made his face look more damaged. Not that he smiled much these days. Today — his birthday, as it happened — he was more than usually aware of how fucked up he looked. He scowled and glanced around the tiny bathroom. Thirty-four years old, and this piece-of-shit flat in one of the scummiest bits of London was all he had to show for his life so far.

Chet Freeman looked down to see the prosthetic limb strapped to the stump of his right leg. It always hurt — especially when he put pressure on it, which he did every time he stood up. The remnants of his shattered knee bone were forever breaking down; his skin was often bleeding and sore. When people saw an amputee, they only ever saw the prosthetic limb, never the damaged flesh that sat in it. The limb itself was hi-tech and well cushioned, but the flesh was human and it ached 24/7.

Yet in a weird way his prosthesis reminded him how lucky he was. For Chet, life was divided into ‘before Serbia’ and ‘after Serbia’. When things started to get him down, he just reminded himself that the ‘after Serbia’ bit could easily never have happened.

He had no memory of the blast. No memory of the evacuation or amputation. One minute he was in a room with Luke, a kid’s cot and a hobby horse; the next he was back in the UK at Selly Oak Hospital, his home for a year. He lost count of the times the doctors sliced wafers of skin from his back to graft over his wounds, all the while telling him that by rights he should be dead. Then he’d been moved into rehab at Headley Court.

At Headley they taught him to walk again — a long, slow process. Nothing like a stint in that place to make you count your blessings, though. Chet’s amputation was below the knee. That at least gave him the movement of the knee joint. In rehab he met several double above-the-knee amputees, and even one basket case — a quadruple amputee whose life seemed to Chet to be barely worth living, though the guy seemed remarkably positive given his circumstances.

The Regiment had offered Chet a desk job back in Hereford, but he wasn’t the desk-job type and quit the military. His pay-off had been just enough to buy this tiny flat, and there was a small army pension; but it was barely enough to live on, and anyway he needed something to get him out of bed in the morning. To sit and brood would have been the death of him.

By the time he was dressed, Chet just looked like a regular guy. Some of the amputees he knew didn’t mind their prosthetic limbs being on show. Not him. He liked to cover up his leg — not out of shame, but because he didn’t want people treating him differently. His trousers successfully hid the limb. A specially made shoe hid the foot. There were the scars on his face, sure, but that was no different to any of the ex-army winos who staggered up and down Seven Sisters Road. At least he looked better than them. Just.

He limped into the kitchen just as the phone rang. Chet let the answering machine on the work surface click in. ‘ This is me. Leave a message. ’

‘Chet, mate, it’s Doug…’ Doug Hodgson, a leg amputee like himself thanks to an anti-personnel landmine in Kosovo. They’d gone through rehab together. He was a good lad, but his prosthesis wasn’t his only war wound. The poor guy was riddled with PTSD. He hid it well, but Chet knew it filled his nights with dreams and woke him early every morning. Hence the six a.m. call. ‘Happy birthday, yeah? So if you haven’t got plans to get your chin buttered tonight, how about meeting up for a few jars? Call me, right?’

Chet frowned. Doug had this image of Chet as a ladies’ man, but with one leg and a scarred face he was hardly catch of the day. A glance at the state of the kitchen showed that the place lacked a woman’s touch: peeling yellow wallpaper, a filthy hob, the only decoration a Blutacked poster of the London skyline that had come with the flat but Chet had never bothered to change.

The remnants of last night’s booze were still visible in the kitchen: half a bottle of Bell’s, a couple of empty tins of Asda’s strongest lager. The first thing the occupational therapists had told him at Headley Court had been to lay off the sauce, but they weren’t the ones who had to put up with the discomfort, or the embarrassment, or the frustration. Still, he didn’t like to be reminded the morning after of how much he’d knocked back, so he pressed the empty cans into the already overflowing bin and stowed the whisky bottle in a cupboard, before taking a loaf of bread from its packet and hacking off a hunk with the only sharp knife in the kitchen. As he ate the dry bread, he picked up a piece of paper from the side, stained with a ring from the bottom of a coffee mug.