Page 1 of A Chance in a Million
Prologue
It was the silence that so often brought it back to her.
She was lying on her bed, gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. All sound disappeared and the only thing she could hear was the pounding of her own heart. She was awake enough to know she wasn’t quite asleep but her subconscious was yet again taking her down memory lane and she was powerless to stop it. The bedroom around her disappeared, to be replaced by bright sunshine and the all-too familiar vision of dust and devastation that had once been the quiet suburbs of Fallujah.
The events of that afternoon once more took shape in her head. She could actually feel her fingers returning to the shallow depression in the sandy earth that she had been painstakingly excavating, spoonful by spoonful, for what seemed like an age. Lying out here in the baking sun she was bathed in sweat, but she knew from experience she would have been sweating from the tension even if the ground below her had been frozen.
She inched her fingertips into the soft soil again until they landed on the unmistakable feel of electrical wires and confirmed that she had found what she had been looking for. Turning her head gingerly to the left, she called over to Mark who was dealing with an unexploded bomb in a crater twenty yards away from her.
‘I’ve got it, Mark. It’s definitely an IED.’ She tried to keep her voice as low as possible to avoid startling him.
She saw his face emerge from the crater, his cheeks bright red and running with sweat.
‘Need a hand?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m all right. Just thought you should know.’
‘Okey dokey.’
He didn’t wish her luck because that was something they never did. This was their job and, if they did it right, there would be no need for luck. That was what they had been taught and they respected the tradition, but both of them knew it wasn’t true. In this line of business, they needed all the luck they could get. He just gave her a smile and a little wave before ducking back down into the crater as she returned her attention to the landmine in front of her.
With infinite caution she continued to remove the earth, scoop by scoop, until the top of the device was clearly visible. As with so many improvised explosive devices, at first sight it looked mundane, little more than harmless builders’ refuse. But by now she knew that this sort of home-made landmine was anything but harmless. She had seen the horrific results so many times already here in war-torn Iraq as people struggled to rebuild their lives after the bitter fighting had finally moved away, while the menace of unexploded ordinance remained an ever-present threat beneath their feet.
Inching herself forward on her elbows, she took a good look at the IED. Drops of sweat ran down her face and dripped into the dust beneath her but she didn’t dare move her arm to wipe herself dry for fear of sparking a detonation. After blinking to clear her eyes, she saw that the cable had been stripped at one end and the positive and negative wires were fastened to two harmless-looking pieces of wood, while the other end disappeared into an ordinary five litre paint can, the trademark on the lid still clear to see. From experience born of months of active service, she felt sure that this was no longer filled with paint but with home-made explosive laced with lumps of shrapnel, capable of destroying everything and everybody in the vicinity if it went off – starting with her.
She lay there and studied the problem now facing her. Under normal circumstances she would simply have retreated with infinite caution and then detonated it remotely and harmlessly, but in this instance she knew that was impossible. First there was Mark and his unexploded bomb to her left, while less than three metres away to the right was the wall of one of the last functioning hospitals in Fallujah.
She knew she had two choices. One was to crawl slowly backwards away from the landmine and take shelter while Mark finished defusing his bomb. She could radio for help, hoping the vibrations of heavy trucks on the nearby road wouldn’t trigger an explosion while they waited for the rest of their team to arrive. The other was to attempt to defuse it right here and now with the limited resources at her disposal. However, a sideways glance at the wall of the hospital, behind which she knew were helpless people, confirmed the fact that she didn’t really have any choice at all.
Taking a deep breath and moving deliberately and carefully, she stretched out her right hand towards the uppermost of the pieces of wood. Red electrical tape showed where the contact had been strapped to this primitive trigger, only separated from the other piece of bare copper wire by a matter of millimetres. The slightest tremor on her part and the device could explode with devastating results. She lay there for a full minute, doing her best to calm herself, before her training kicked in and she could almost hear her instructor’s voice in her ear.
‘You know what you’ve got to do, so don’t take all day. Just do it, Reed.’
As delicately as she could, she caught hold of the piece of wood and lifted it up and away from the other half. She set it down very carefully and then, with her free hand, lifted the plastic lid off the paint can and saw the other end of the cable disappear into the amorphous beige mush that could cause so much carnage. Resolutely, she gritted her teeth and began to pull on the wire until she saw the detonator gradually emerge – an unremarkable little black package with an ordinary Duracell battery taped to the side of it. She disconnected the battery and tossed it away, laid the now disarmed detonator onto the ground alongside her and finally allowed herself to breathe again. She was just rolling over to give Mark the good news when she heard him scream, the sound now forever burned into her memory.
Almost simultaneously a massive explosion picked her up and threw her against the wall of the hospital, cracking her skull and spraying her with shrapnel. She found out later that this tore a vicious gouge across her right thigh, just missing the main artery. The blast also broke most of her ribs and punctured her lung. They told her that only the fact that the bomb had been buried in the crater had saved her from instant death.
Mark didn’t stand a chance. The dust slowly began to settle around her and she lay there, barely conscious, staring in disbelief at the huge hole in the ground where he had been only moments before. Her hands, rock-steady up to now, suddenly began to shake.
A car in the street outside her window hooted its horn and the noise broke the spell, tearing her away from her recurring nightmare, but as she opened her eyes her hands were still shaking. It took her a few moments to get her bearings and realise that she was no longer in Iraq, but safely back home in the UK.
It took much longer before the all-too familiar shaking stopped.
Chapter 1
‘Your name is Jane Reed, Captain Jane Victoria Reed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you are twenty-nine years old?’ Mr Gordon Russell, of Barnett and Russell Solicitors in Temple Chambers, London, rattled off the questions and she answered equally formally.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You used to be in the army?’
‘Yes, sir.’
For the first time he looked up from the file on his desk. ‘Captain Reed, you have an impressive CV. First degree in mechanical engineering, six years in the army, including two tours of active service. What regiment were you in?’
