Page 1 of The Long Walk Back

PROLOGUE

That day will stay with me forever. It shaped me for every day that followed, that’s for certain. That day I learned an answer to one of mankind’s big questions: what do you see when your body is at the point of death? What do you feel when your body begins to stop fighting?

Not your average day. Or not the average day that civilians experienced, anyway. War tended to put a slightly different spin on things. Once the rose-tinted glasses came off, they just didn’t seem to fit the same way after.

An average day is going to work, coming home, parking on the couch in front of the TV, a takeaway perched on your knee while you moan to yourself about how skint you are, how the country is going to the dogs, how much you might hate your job. Your commute. Your neighbour who lets his dog pee on your front steps or bark into the early hours. That’s an average day, one that blends into countless others through the years, till you wake up in your fifties, bored, bald and fat, wondering at what point the dreams of your younger self went down the toilet. At least, that’s the way I saw things. That was never going to be me, I’d decided early in life. So I made different choices. Those choices led me to that day, what looked like my last day. Karma is a bitch; I hear you on that one. I can still remember every detail.

An hour earlier, I’d been carrying out a routine sweep of the area with my unit. Of my thirty-one years on the earth, I’d spent fifteen of them in the army. We were out in Iraq, pushing back the small group of terror cells that threatened the small villages we were camped near to. Many of the villagers wanted us here, but tensions were rising. You could feel it ratcheting up, like the daily heat when the sun broke over the horizon.

It’s not like on the news. You think it all looks the same. Desert, broken buildings, busted vehicles, shattered people. Aid trucks surrounded by soldiers and desperate people. That’s all there, but it’s far from everything else I’d seen on my tour. There is no beauty on the news, but it exists here. We fear what we don’t know, what we can’t control; but here, people live the same as us in many ways. The ways that mattered. I have seen family photos hung on walls, gardens lovingly tended, children loved and cared for. The actions of a few causes the outcome for many, and I saw it every day. I joined to serve, to have a purpose, but I also enlisted to find the family I never had. So now I fought for them too, with them by my side.

There had been a lot of unease the last few weeks, and you could feel the stress, the taut emotions of both the people and the enemy, even through the hot, dry air. I had had a bad feeling in the pit of my gut for days. When the shots had begun firing, I knew why. They had been gearing up to take us down, and as prepared as we thought we were, as prepared as I thought we were, we were still caught with our pants down that day.

‘Pull back!’ I boomed gruffly to my charges. ‘Come on, go, go, go!’ I started to run for the nearest building, the one we had just finished sweeping. It was abandoned, full of empty makeshift housing, food rotting on tables that would never host a family meal again. I kept looking over my shoulder, watching my guys take shelter one by one. A hail of shots whizzed past my ear, and I threw myself against the side of the nearest abandoned car. Hunching down, I scanned the landscape to where the shots were coming from. Two of my guys were still on the way to the shelter – one hunched over, not moving. The other, Travis, was dragging him to safety. Blood followed them like a trail of gunpowder as they desperately tried to get to cover. Another barrage of shots rang out, giving away their location, and Travis jerked. He’d been hit, but he kept going, pulling Smithy along with him, hung over his shoulder. They weren’t going to make it. I jumped up, firing a volley off at the top of the building, but the enemy fired back. Shit. Hunching down again, I shouted at Travis to get a move on, grabbing my radio and running towards them.

‘Hightower, can you see him yet?’ I shouted into the radio. Bradley, my sniper on the opposite set of flat roofs, was my ace in the hole. If he had a clear shot, he would already have executed it. ‘Got a shot?’

‘Nearly, the slippery bastard is hidden well. He has a kid up there with him, using him as a shield.’

I cursed under my breath. I reached Travis and grabbed Smithy from him. Travis was bleeding badly, but it looked like a shoulder wound. Through and through, judging from the blood he’d left in his wake.

We ran hell for leather towards the shelter, Hightower screaming into the radio.

‘He’s reloading Coop, get a move on!’

I was almost at the shelter, Travis was just ahead, racing to get ready to help Smithy, who was still out cold. My muscles burned from the effort of dragging him along with me, but I ignored the pain, pushing on.

‘Almost there,’ I shouted back into the receiver. ‘Is the kid armed?’

‘Negative,’ Hightower boomed back. ‘Human shield.’

‘Then we wait till it’s clear. No collateral. You copy?’ A difficult call when my men were taking hits, but that was the job. I had to make them, and hope to God the delay wouldn’t cost my men their lives.

‘Copy,’ Hightower confirmed.

‘Find a shot, and take him down!’

Hightower acknowledged and just as we reached the lip of the shelter, shots rang out again, this time with the ‘phut phut’ of the sniper rifle as Hightower followed orders. I was just wondering whether the poor child on the roof was okay, when a huge force pushed me straight off my feet, into the air. Teeth rattling in my skull, I reached out to tighten my grip on Smithy, but felt nothing but space. Hitting the ground, I struggled for breath, dust and debris raining down around me. Hightower was screaming down the air waves, mobilising the others in my unit.

I struggled to breathe, my mouth coated with a new layer of dust every time I managed to pull in a ragged breath. I could hear the commotion around me and moved my head to the side to look for Smithy. I could see him a few feet away, and I knew without a doubt he was dead. I turned away, already wanting to erase the memory of his crumpled form from my memory. I coughed, and felt a warm trickle run down my cheek. Not good¸ I thought to myself, even as the blood took some of the dust with it. I could hear my friends, my comrades in arms, running towards me, firing shots off, barking orders at each other. Pain. Pain was the thing I felt the most, but I couldn’t pinpoint where. It was everywhere. In every cell of my prone body. But that was it. Pain, noise, panic in the voices around me as they grew closer.

There was no white light, no images of me running around in short trousers playing in my head, nothing. I couldn’t see anything but dust, flashes of weaponry, and the smell of action and desperation in the air. I felt bone tired, a blanket of fatigue covering me from head to foot. A little voice inside, telling me to sleep. Time to rest now, soldier. I tried to shake my head, keep myself awake, but the warm feeling continued to spread through me. Numbing every place it touched. My body wasn’t responding. It was like slipping into a hot bath after a long, cold day. I could feel my muscles began to relax, and my throat filling up with liquid. I tried to spit, to turn my head, but my eyelids were already fluttering. I thought of the kid on the rooftop. I wondered if he had parents around, people who were searching for their child, missing him. I wondered who would miss me and came up empty. My hesitation had caused this. Not taking the quicker shot might have cost my team dearly and be the end of me. But if that child lived to see another sunrise over me, I could live with that. The cost of war had to be paid sometime. I hope my team gets out. And that’s the last thing I remember, laying there with blood gurgling in my throat. Hoping that my brothers in arms made it home. That the boy on the rooftop would have a better ending to his story. That was worth dying for.

1

Kate was pulling funny faces into the camera when the call came in to tell her casualties were en route. She turned around to face the opposite direction, shielding her son from the images of people running behind her.

‘Sorry, bud. Mummy has to go now, but I will call you back as soon as I can, yeah? Remind Dad to take you to football practice after school, okay?’ Her son rolled his eyes.

‘He never checks the calendar Mum, you know that. When are you coming home?’ Her colleague, Trevor tapped her on the arm, waving to her son’s image on the phone screen.

‘Hey Jamie, good luck at practice! Kate, we have to go,’ he said, frowning in apology. From the look on his face, it was bad. She held her easy smile in place, blew a kiss at her son. Jamie rolled his eyes but blew one back.

‘I’m eight, Mum. When I’m nine there are no more kisses, okay? It’s well embarrassing!’

Kate laughed. ‘No deal, kiddo. I will still be wanting kisses when you are all grown up. I have to go, see you soon. Love you.’

Jamie smiled weakly. She knew that this was hard for him too, being separated for so long, but she couldn’t miss the opportunity to do her job in the field. ‘Love you too, Mum,’ he said, and his face disappeared from view as the call ended. She knew he would understand better when he was older. When he knew more about the world, other than his relatively sheltered life back home. She hoped that he would be proud that his mother went out there to the places on the news, did what she could to help. Did something with her life; that he would remember that instead of the times she worked late, went away, was an absent parent. Mothers were a different breed to fathers. Fathers could have it all, but mothers were judged no matter what they did. Working, not working. She loved Jamie, but when she stood there in a messy house, with leaking breasts and a screaming newborn, she knew it would never be enough. Perhaps if her marriage had been a happier one, she might have felt more settled. Not that she blamed anyone for that. Sometimes circumstances didn’t add up. Not everything could be roses over the door. She wasn’t naïve enough to think it was as simple as all that. Life was messy and relying on another person for happiness never ended well. It had to come from within. She loved Jamie dearly. He was her world, but she still wanted the moon and the stars. Men could have all that and no one batted an eyelid. A woman wanting to do the same? Judgement would follow. She wanted to be there for him, and for herself. She wanted Jamie to grow up in a world where that particular glass ceiling was gone, replaced by open sky. If she could help smash it, all the better. She would make it up to him when she got back, she told herself. Forgetting entirely that she’d come here to escape other things, too. Like his father, and the dying embers of their marriage.

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