Andy McNab: War torn

He remembered the way Steve's leg had sailed so gracefully through the air. It must only have taken a few seconds but he remembered it in slow motion, as though it had taken an hour. And at the end of the hour, two bodies lying in the street.

Jordan Nelson had recently joined 1 Platoon from another battalion. He was liked, but not yet fully integrated with his new section. He was unmarried but had talked about his family in Watford a lot. He was the oldest of three boys. Or was it four? Jordan talked about his younger brothers as though he was their father. Dave imagined the mother and brothers answering the doorbell, standing in a hallway full of muddy football boots and hooks piled with too many coats. He tried not to think about the silence in the hallway when the Families Officer told them the news.

A Families Officer would also be standing on Steve and Leanne's doorstep back in Wiltshire in a few hours. The other women in the street would be at the window; they'd see the Families Officer ring the bell and fear the worst. Dave's wife Jenny would be sure to see. Leanne and Steve lived right across the road. Sol's wife Adi was a few doors up but she would know, because she always knew everything. Jamie's wife, Agnieszka, who lived up a side street, would probably guess what was going on, even though her English wasn't that good. And like all the others, she'd cry. Both with sadness for Leanne and relief for herself because it wasn't her own husband who was maimed for life.

'You all right, Sarge?' Jamie Dermott asked quietly.

Dave was thinking how only the stoppage in his weapon had brought him down into the Vector just before the bomb had exploded. A few seconds earlier and it would have been him flying through the air to the left while his leg flew to the right. The stoppage had saved him. It had cost Steve his leg and maybe his life.

'Sarge?' said Jamie.

Dave's escape today had been the narrowest. It should have been him. And at this moment, thinking of Steve and Leanne and the twins, he wished it had been him. He shut his eyes.

He said: 'I'm fine.' His throat was so dry the words scratched their way out of his mouth. He imagined his home, in a quiet street in the quiet camp in England. It seemed nearer than Afghanistan. He knew that, in a few days, the madness of Helmand Province would be home and quiet Wiltshire would be some strange, faraway place.

The Vector proceeded to the Forward Operating Base in total silence.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAMIE BEING AROUND AND JAMIE NOT BEING around was that everything went wrong the minute he walked out of the door. The dishwasher had spluttered to a halt before his plane had even landed in Afghanistan. It had been the same with Iraq: the washing machine had stopped, the bathroom pipes had been blocked and the phone had gone kaput within three weeks of his departure.

Agnieszka could cope with the dishwasher because in Poland she had managed without one. But now it was the car. There was a clunk from deep within its bowels. It was the kind of noise you couldn't ignore, the kind which said the car would stop on the motorway just when she was taking Luke to the hospital tomorrow. It was the sort of clunk which said that Jamie had gone and nothing was going to be right until he came back.

So now she was on her way to the garage. She'd shovelled the big pushchair into the back. Luke was crying. And halfway there she realized she should have rung first. Which would have meant speaking on the phone. Which she hated because communicating in English over a phone line was about fifteen times harder than when she could see people pulling their faces into shapes which filled all the gaps in her understanding.

There was nowhere to park at the garage. There was nowhere to park in the road outside. She hovered, wondering what to do. A car hooted behind her.

She drove slowly around the block. Only one parking place, a whole street away. Luke was asleep now. She would wake him if she lifted him into the pushchair and then he would cry again. And she would arrive at the garage and they would say: 'Well, where's the car?' Then they would probably give her an appointment in two weeks.

Agnieszka put her head on the steering wheel and wept. When Jamie was at home, loving her, adoring Luke, taking him when he cried, holding him while he had a fit, fixing broken gutters and unblocking pipes, looking after them both, then life was good. But he never was at home. There had been Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya and now Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Just the word made her cry. It sounded like Pashtu for sadness.

Even after the sobbing stopped, the tears kept falling silently.

She finally managed to pat her face dry and check her makeup. Her mascara hadn't run because she had forgotten to put any on. Good. She reached into her bag, shook the tiny tube and rolled the brush under her eyelashes. She watched herself in the mirror. Despite the tears her eyes had retained their penetrating blue. Her long lashes curled around the mascara.

'You don't need that stuff,' Jamie had told her the first time he saw her putting on her makeup.

'I need for give me confidence,' she said.

She disentangled the feat of engineering that was Luke's pushchair, smoothed the sheepskin liner and lifted him into it very, very gently. At first she thought she had completed this manoeuvre without waking him but then he opened his eyes wide, stared at her and screwed his face into a tight ball. She braced herself. A second later, his roars of displeasure began. Tears burst out of his face like a sprinkler. She hoped he wouldn't have a fit.

She walked towards the garage. By the time she got there Luke was still shrieking. She knew any discussion about the car would be impossible so she kept on walking. She walked around the block. When she passed the plumbing supply shop, someone inside wolf-whistled. Perhaps she had imagined it. But then she glimpsed herself in the tile-shop window. Her legs looked very long today; it was amazing how they seemed to change length. So maybe the whistle had been for her. She flicked her hair back over her shoulders.

Back at the garage, Luke was still wailing so she decided to walk around the block again. This time, as she passed the plumbing supply shop, the whistle was unmistakable. It came during one of the pauses in Luke's cries. She kept right on walking as though she hadn't heard, murmuring a few words to Luke to show that she was oblivious to it.

By the time she reached the garage again, Luke was quiet. Should she go in now? What if his tears came in bursts like her own and he started up again? She decided to walk around a third time.

She glanced surreptitiously into the plumbing shop as she drew near. A young man, tall with a shaven head, grinned at her familiarly from behind the glass. As if he knew her. When all she had done was simply pass his shop a couple of times. She didn't smile back. She found herself blushing. Supposing he thought that she was walking past deliberately again and again?

This possibility was so shameful that she felt she owed a few Aves to the Holy Virgin. Muttering them under her breath she returned to the garage. Luke was fast asleep now.

Hesitantly she pushed him into the dark workshop. A car was raised high on a ramp. A man stood underneath it.

'Erm… I bring my car here because…' Her voice sounded small in this great cavern of a place. Someone in the corner was spinning tyres on a machine which sounded like a gun firing.

'You shouldn't be in here! Reception's around the side!' the man shouted. The machine-gun noise did not stop. Agnieszka did not understand. She hesitated.

The man gesticulated angrily. 'Round the side!'

She nodded, certain he was telling her to leave, uncertain where to go. Another small humiliation. Until she'd met Jamie, just going into a shop and asking for something was a humiliation. She emerged from almost any situation red-faced, struggling to understand English people and their language. Then along came Jamie and everything changed. When he wasn't away in Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya or Afghanistan.