James Deegan - Once A Pilgrim

Carr was diving back into Geordie’s room when the suicide vest detonated, and the force seemed to propel him even quicker.

Momentarily stunned, he came to a few moments later, lying in a heap in the floor, his ears ringing, covered in plaster and dust, and coughing and choking.

From outside, somewhere across the street, he could hear a voice shouting, ‘John! John!’

He sat up and looked around himself.

His hearing became clearer, and he realised that the shouting was coming from Geordie.

‘Jesus man,’ said Skelton, his own pain momentarily forgotten. ‘Fuck me. You okay?’

Carr patted himself down, and stood up. ‘Mother fucker ,’ he said. ‘That was close.’

He could feel the heat before he saw the flames.

‘Geordie,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got to get out. The place is on fire. I’m gonnae have to help you up. It’s going to hurt, bud.’

Skelton shot him a withering look. ‘Just get on with it,’ he said. ‘It’s not like I can fucking hang around, is it?’

Carr keyed his radio. ‘Steve, house clear. We’re coming out the front. Get some guys over here to pick up Wayne, he’s down at the back.’

He helped Geordie to his feet, and they made their way quickly down the stairs, the injured man hopping on his good leg and cursing as he went; the flames were confined to the top floor, close to where the guy had detonated, but still the heat drove them on.

Outside, the assault teams had cleared the grey villa, and they were now starting to regroup, ready to move out.

In the distance, one or two shadowy figures were flitting across the road – locals, roused by the firefight.

As yet they’d not been contacted.

But it was only a matter of time.

They needed to get moving.

Geordie was starting to falter, the adrenalin waning.

Carr laid him on the ground, as gently as he could.

‘Medic!’ he shouted. ‘Medic! Quick!’

One of the team medics rushed over and took in the situation.

‘Has he had morphine, John?’

‘No mate, nothing. The tourniquet’s only been on couple of minutes. Soon as you get a drip in him, get him back to the vehicles and call into the Ops room. Casualty requiring immediate surgery, get the medevac stood by at the FOB.’

For a moment, he’d considered bringing the medevac into Dora, but he didn’t think the injury was life-threatening, and he wasn’t going to risk a heli and its crew, even for his best mate.

With Geordie handed over, he looked at his watch: from the first explosion until now, only six minutes had elapsed.

He jogged over to the OC. Forrest was standing talking to the primary assault team leader, and Carr picked up the tail end of the conversation.

‘Definitely dead?’ Forrest was saying.

‘That’s right, boss.’

‘Fuck me. We’re going to be popular now.’ He looked at Carr. ‘Did you hear that? Joker’s dead.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carr. ‘Good news.’

‘It’s not fucking good news, John.’

‘Hey, boss,’ said Carr. ‘We’ve got Wayne down round the back there, and Geordie’s took a bad one to the leg. So you’re right, it’s not good that he’s dead. It’s fucking great. Now, we need to get the fuck back to the FOB.’

2.

SIX MONTHS LATER – nineteen years after he’d passed Selection and walked into Stirling Lines in Hereford for the first time as a young blade – it was all over.

Carr had spent the time since getting back from that last tour on gardening leave, getting ready to leave the Army.

It wasn’t easy – the military was all he’d known since his early adulthood – and his marriage was collapsing. Not many lasted in his line of work: the longest period he and Stella had spent together since he’d joined the Regiment was three weeks, and being thrown together – with all the comedown of a demanding trip to Iraq, and the emotion of leaving... They weren’t at daggers drawn, but she didn’t know him anymore, and he didn’t know her, and neither of them cared too much. She was talking about taking the kids back home to Bangor, the County Down town where they’d met and courted. He wasn’t too keen on that – his little girl, in particular, was happy and settled in a good little school near Hereford – but he wasn’t sure he had the strength to fight her.

At least he had a decent job lined up – security manager with an oil company in Southern Iraq. Eight hundred quid a day, month on, month off. He might finally buy himself a decent car.

He’d spent a fair while with Geordie – that round in Dora had shattered the SQMS’s femur, and after three operations and a lot of metalwork he’d been left with a nice limp and a good line in bitter, melodramatic asides. The SAS never medically discharges any man against his will – there’s always a desk job needs doing somewhere – but Skelton had put his own papers in. If he was never going to make sergeant major, and clearly he wasn’t now, then what was the point?

‘Probably for the best,’ Carr had said, deadpan, as he sat in his mate’s hospital room. ‘You’d only have ruined the Squadron, anyway.’

The last thing he’d done in uniform was to attend the funeral of Wayne Rooney. It always upset him to see a flag-draped coffin, adorned with a beige beret, and it was even worse when the guy in question was young.

Rooney had been just twenty-four, and engaged to his childhood sweetheart.

But Carr took comfort in the fact that the men who wore that beret accepted the risk that came with it.

He’d been very glad to know Paul – the dead man’s real Christian name – he told the young man’s mother and fiancée, as the wake got going.

Glad, too – he didn’t add – that his days of visiting grieving families were over.

And now here he was, sitting in front of the Commanding Officer in Hereford for his farewell chat.

It was a bittersweet moment.

Carr and Mark Topham had been around each other for almost every year of the Scot’s Special Forces career, and they liked and respected each other, despite coming from very different backgrounds.

Topham had been born into privilege – big house, expensive school, his father a High Court judge – whereas Carr had grown up sharing a bedroom with his brother in a council tenement in Niddrie, the grey, miserable, shitey, arse-end of Edinburgh.

A welder, his dad, and his mum a school cleaning lady. Hard-working, good and decent people – his mother, in particular, had been a regular at Craigmillar Park Church just across the way – but there’d never been much in the way of luxury. If his dad was scratching around for work, and he often was, then some weeks there’d not been much in the way of food, either.

Mark Topham’s school friends were all stockbrokers or lawyers or businessmen; off the top of his head, Carr could name half a dozen pals from his own early years who were dead from heroin, or booze, or from looking at the wrong guy in the wrong way in the wrong pub. His best pal from junior school, Kenny Shaw, was currently doing a twenty stretch in Saughton for killing a guy in some stupid gang feud, and Carr knew that he could very easily have ended up alongside him. The very day he’d gone down to the Armed Forces Careers Office in Edinburgh – a fresh-faced teenager, in love with the idea of soldiering – a local ne’er-do-well had collared him outside the chippy and offered him twenty quid to keep a shotgun under his bed for a couple of weeks.

He’d been tempted, as well: he’d never seen twenty quid in his life. But he’d walked away from it – partly because it just felt wrong, mostly not wanting to upset his mum – and every day he gave thanks for that. The Army had given him discipline and focus, and turned him into a man.