TWO

ASSAULT AT FIRST light.

That turned everything – everything – on its head. The RUF must have issued some impossible ultimatum – the freeing of all prisoners taken by the Sierra Leone army, for example.

The patrol had moved through the remaining jungle as fast as humanly possible. They were very close to the camp now and Alex recognised the random discharges as being those of British-issued SLRs. The sound was a good sign. Unless the RUF were fighting among themselves it meant that they were in party mood, emptying their 7.62 rounds into the river and the surrounding jungle out of a kind of stoned machismo. And perhaps, Alex thought, in anticipation of the killing of the news crew at midday.

‘Left a bit,’ murmured Don Hammond behind him.

Alex raised a hand in thanks. As lead scout, he was the only member of the team not responsible for navigation – all his concentration went into watching and listening: for the unexplained movement, the shadow that wasn’t a shadow, the tiny suck of a boot in clay, the oily straining of a cocking lever.

Listening was becoming harder. In addition to the rifle fire, there was the faint thump and whisper of music. Straining his ears, Alex recognised one of Sierra Leone’s big summer tunes – a favourite of the RUF, the SLA and the militias alike – called ‘Titti Shaggah’.

Had they posted sentries, he wondered, stilling the five men behind him with a hand gesture. For two minutes the patrol crouched unmoving in the animal track, but there was no sound that shouldn’t have been there. They moved on and the ridge line began its gradual descent towards the Rokel river. Step by silent step, Alex negotiated the gradient. The rain was still holding off, but splashing rivulets streaked the treacherous clay incline. They were five hundred yards away from the camp now and through the dense foliage below them Alex could see the yellowish flickering of electric lights. Surely, he thought, they must at least have some bloke on stag.

They had and Alex almost missed him. All he saw, in fact, was the tiny swing of a cigarette coal at the side of the track twenty yards ahead. Stilling the patrol again and deliberately steadying his breathing as the adrenalin flooded his system, Alex moved silently down the skiddy clay, feeling with his feet for the rocks and tree roots that would noiselessly support his weight. One squelch, he thought – one snapped branch or kicked stone – and we’re buggered.

Ten yards now and he could see in the moonlight that the sentry was leaning against the other side of a tree trunk. A tree trunk whose thickness was approximately that of a man’s chest. Once again, the arm swung sideways. The hand held a ganja spliff, not a cigarette.

Quietly, Alex drew a short Mauser stabbing knife from his belt webbing. It took him three agonised heart-thudding minutes to cover the last sodden yards of the descent and then finally he was behind the trunk, his nose and eyes full of drifting ganja smoke but his feet secure on the slippery twisting tree roots. Like a striking snake, as his right hand reached across with the knife, Alex’s left hand clapped across the sentry’s mouth. At the last moment, though, with a desperate outrush of breath, the SAS officer checked his blade. The face beneath his hands was smooth, the neck slender, the struggling body pitifully small. The sentry was a kid – might even have been a girl – couldn’t have been more than ten, and almost immediately went limp with terror in his arms. The spliff fell to the ground and went out with a tiny hiss.

Keeping a hand firmly across his captive’s mouth, Alex gestured to Don Hammond to join him. The sergeant quickly gagged the child with a sweat rag, tied the slender wrists and ankles with a length of para cord from his belt kit, and concealed the immobilised figure beneath a dense bush in the darkness to one side of the track.

The patrol proceeded warily with the descent. They encountered no more sentries and, as they neared the lights and the music, the ground began to level out until they found themselves close to the edge of the tree line. In front of them a parapet of knotted roots supported a thick tangle of rotting vegetation, beneath which was a drop of about six feet. Beneath this, either drunk or stoned but unquestionably asleep, lay two RUF soldiers. One was wearing a white nylon wedding dress, the other threadbare tracksuit trousers and a combat smock hung with plastic dolls’ heads.

Ricky Sutton, keen as ever, drew his commando knife. ‘Shall I do ’em?’ he mouthed, but Alex shook his head. If the bodies were found the whole camp would go to a state of alert, jeopardising any potential rescue mission. As Ricky sheathed his blade, Alex scanned the area with his binoculars.

Below them, contained within the dark curving sweep of the Rokel river, lay the camp. Roughly oval-shaped, it occupied an area slightly greater than a football pitch. At the nearer, lower end was a large bonfire on to which, at intervals, silhouetted figures heaped wet branches and tree roots, encouraging a thick column of grey-brown smoke. On the higher ground to the east, lit by strings of low-wattage bulbs, two windowless cinder-block huts stood at right angles to the river. Beyond them was a cluster of mud-walled outhouses. On the far side of the river the jungle rose steeply for a hundred metres or so to the ridge line.

Of the hundred and fifty-odd figures visible in the camp, perhaps a score were dancing and drinking around the bonfire, while at least twice that number were milling around the far end, near the huts. The remainder staggered about, singly and in large drunken groups, at the river’s edge. Most carried SLR 7.62 rifles, but there were a few AK 47s and RPGs in evidence too. Several of the men appeared to be so attached to their weapons that they were dancing with them.

The sheer numbers of the RUF made any assault of less than company strength hazardous. The cinder-block huts would provide cover for anything up to fifty soldiers each and if the hostages were in this camp they were probably situated close to or inside the huts. Bringing fire to bear on the RUF without injuring them would be difficult. The most positive factor, in Alex’s view, was the topography of the camp. Surrounded as they were on three sides by the vast grey-green bulk of the river, the RUF were like rats in a bag. If all of the SAS firepower was positioned along a single front in the tree line, the bag could be drawn shut. The difficult part was going to be finding, and then extracting, the hostages.

Another plus point was that despite the recent incursion into the Kissuna area by the West Side Boys militia, no serious attempt had been made to implement any form of camp security. The noise, for a start, was considerable. The crack of random discharges tore the air, as did the answering, echoing smack as these impacted in the surrounding jungle. No wonder no one wants to go out on stag, thought Alex, with all this random shooting you’d take your bloody life in your hands. From beneath the sound system, which continued to belt out ‘Titti Shaggah’ and other local hits, came the steady thump of a generator.

‘If I’d known it was a party,’ muttered Stan Clayton, ‘I’d ’ave worn my dancin’ trousers!’

Alex smiled and beckoned the men around him. ‘No sign of our people so far,’ he whispered, ‘but I want to take a closer look. Those huts up the end look promising for a start. Don, I want you to stay here with three of the guys and count heads and weapons. Stan, I want you to come with me. We’re going for a swim.’

The cockney grinned, grasping the plan immediately. Quickly the two men stripped off their webbing, leaving their kit in two neat piles. Then, creeping past the unconscious RUF soldiers, they lowered themselves down the tree roots to ground level.

In front of them, bordered by the river, was the camp. To their right were the black-shadowed margins of the jungle. Ahead of them, and falling away behind them into the jungle, was a rough, mud-churned road. Swiftly the two men turned right, paced off twenty yards into the swampy foliage, turned through ninety degrees, took bearings from their wrist compasses and set off through the darkness on a fast-paced eastbound course parallel to the road. Ten minutes later they exited the jungle. The dark sweep of the river was now at their feet and they were well upstream of the camp.

‘We’ll ’ave to tuck in tight,’ murmured Clayton thoughtfully.

Alex nodded. Close up, the Rokel was a vast and terrifying force of nature. The flash floods that accompanied the early days of the rainy season had torn its winter banks away and the normally placid river was now an angry torrent hundreds of yards wide. If Alex and Stan strayed out of the side eddies they could be hurtled miles downstream or drowned outright. Hard in to the bank, however, the risk of detection was much greater. The whole undertaking was very much more dangerous than it had first appeared, but it represented the SAS team’s only chance of locating the hostages.

‘Let’s find ourselves a raft,’ whispered Alex.

Soundlessly, they waded into the warm, soupy water, where a regular procession of tree limbs, bushes and other vegetation uprooted by the floods was washing past them in the current. Within a couple of minutes they had secured the perfect vehicle – a twenty-foot branch hung with decomposing foliage.

‘Ready?’ asked Alex.

‘Sure.’ Clayton nodded. ‘I can always use a few dozen more leeches round my bollocks!’

Carefully they steered the branch a short distance away from the bank and began the smooth, inexorable drift towards the camp. Only their heads showed above water and behind the festoon of rotting weeds they were effectively invisible to the guards on the riverside. Slowly they rounded the bend past the camp’s first outposts. It was shallower here and Alex could feel his feet dragging on the river’s muddy bed.

Close up, the scene was very much more threatening than at a distance. On the bank, less than ten yards away, a crowd of drunken soldiery staggered around, clutching rifles, machetes and beakers of palm wine. Even over the muddy tang of the river the SAS men could smell the cloying reek of the home-made spirit. From the speakers the RUF anthem ‘No Living Thing’ punched out, bouncing from the cliffs opposite with a thudding reverberation. Along the shore the glazed-eyed soldiers screamed the choruses.

His face inches from the corporal’s, Alex was conscious of Stan Clayton’s attempts to still his breathing, to remain absolutely motionless behind the branch. If they see us, thought Alex – if the branch catches on something and swings around – we’re dead. They’ll hack us to pieces in seconds. Stan’s wife will be a widow, his son will be without a dad and it will all be my fault. My fault for turning an important search mission into a juvenile, hairy-arsed, straight-to-video personal fucking adventure.

The random shooting continued. One man, standing on the bank no more than eight feet from them, casually loosed off a couple of rounds from his SLR as he urinated into the river, and the SAS men flickered an expressionless glance at each other as the 7.62 rounds passed inches over their heads and tore into the far bank. A few yards further on a woman with her dress pulled up over her back crouched listlessly in the mud as a bearded soldier drove into her from behind. Around her, a surly and impatient knot of men watched and waited, and masturbated to make themselves hard for when their own turns came.

This hellish scene was repeated at intervals along the bank and more than once Alex caught himself – or so it seemed – staring mesmerised into the eyes of an RUF warrior. His heart appeared to be beating hard enough to disturb the greasy surface of the water. It seemed impossible that he had not been seen.

But the soldiers, it turned out, were less interested in driftwood than in the slopping palm wine buckets from which, at intervals, they refilled their half-gourds and plastic beakers. Those and the half-dozen wretchedly prostrate women on the shore – refugees, Alex guessed, displaced by the fighting.

The current, perceptibly faster now, swept them past the outhouses. The first, Alex guessed from the rhythmic chugging sound, housed the generator. In a second, from which the buckets were being carried, he supposed that they had some kind of distillery. The third, a mud-walled dwelling whose palm-frond roof had collapsed inwards, was anyone’s guess, but as they drifted past it the palm wine stink was joined by that of shit.

And then, for no more than five seconds, Alex saw them: three pale-skinned figures, their heads bowed, their hands tied behind them, kneeling in the narrow passage between the two cinder-block huts. They were being guarded by a single uniformed soldier carrying an SLR, smoking a joint and wearing a pink bubble-cut wig.

Alex’s eyes widened and he turned to Stan Clayton, saw that the other man had clocked the guard and the captives too. Then they were passing the speakers, and taking the full thumping force and screaming distortion of ‘No Living Thing’.

‘I think I prefer the Martine McCutcheon version,’ murmured Clayton thoughtfully, as an RUF man heaved a wet tree root on to the bonfire and a shower of bright-orange sparks whirled skywards. They were only eight or nine yards from the nearest whooping, rifle-waving soldiers now, but the amplification from the sound system was such that the corporal could probably have yelled at the top of his voice without being heard.

And then, as the firelight dimmed and a column of dense brown smoke replaced the flames, Alex felt the current take sudden hold, swinging the branch and themselves into deeper water. The two men silently struggled to remain concealed and to keep the branch parallel to the shore. They were clearing the camp fast now – the bonfire was already well behind them – but they were moving inexorably towards the Rokel’s racing central channel.

‘We’re going to have to let go,’ gasped Alex and heard Clayton’s grunt of agreement beside him.

‘On three, underwater and kick for the side. One, two …’

Alex released the branch, dived, and felt himself lifted by the current and swung with doll-like helplessness through the dark, churning water. There was a roar at his ears, a sense of vast and indifferent force, then a rock or a boot exploded in a vicious flash of light against the side of his head.

Somehow, even as he briefly lost consciousness, he managed to keep his mouth shut. Hours or maybe seconds later, desperate to breathe, he clawed his way to what he thought was the surface, struck mud and felt himself dragged downwards again by a hand at his collar. For some reason, there seemed to be air at the bottom of the river. He tried to inhale, gagged and found that a mud-tasting hand was clamped over his mouth. Water streamed from his nose. He could breathe again. He opened his eyes.

Clayton’s worried grin was inches away. ‘You all right, Alex?’

They were in deep, eddying water beneath the bank. The music and din of the camp were still loud, but no longer deafening. Stan Clayton had one elbow under Alex’s chin, the other anchored to a solid-looking mangrove root.

‘Are you OK?’ The whisper more urgent now.

Alex tried to nod and then, retching, vomited foul-tasting water. There was blood in his eyes and his head hurt like hell. Somehow he found a root of his own and passed an unsteady hand over his face. ‘Yeah … thanks, Stan. Lost it there for a moment. Thanks.’

I was seconds away from drowning there, he told himself. Seconds away from death.

‘I think we’re more or less clear of the camp,’ continued Clayton. ‘The other blokes can’t be far, but I’m a bit worried about them fuckers we ’ad to duck round on our way here. Bride of Frankenstein an’ his mate.’

‘Let me have a look,’ said Alex and with Clayton’s help hauled himself up so that his eyes were level with the bank. They were less than twenty yards from where they had descended the tree roots, but of the sleeping RUF soldiers there was no sign. Instead, Don Hammond was leopard-crawling towards him through the shadows, grabbing him under the arms, dragging him by sheer brute force up the slick clay face of the bank.

‘I reckoned it was either you guys or a hippo wallowing around out there,’ said the sergeant. ‘Come on, Stan, grab hold.’

When Clayton was on the bank too the three of them moved back from the river and into cover, and Alex swiftly brought the sergeant up to date concerning the ITN team.

‘How did they look?’ asked Hammond.

‘Alive,’ replied Clayton tersely.

‘Where are the other guys?’ asked Alex.

The sergeant inclined his head towards the bush. ‘Just moving the two guards that were here away from the path. We reckoned you’d be coming out about here.’

‘Did you kill them?’

‘Yeah, course we did.’ He looked at Alex doubtfully. ‘Are you OK? You look as if you’ve got some kind of head wound.’

‘Took a whack in the river on something. Stan dragged me in by the collar.’

‘Well, that’ll have saved us all some paperwork. Dead officers we don’t need. Are you OK to tab back to Millwall, or do you want me to go?’

‘I’m fine to go, Don.’

‘You sure? What’s eight nines?’

Alex hesitated. The question seemed strangely unanswerable.

‘And the motto of the Parachute Regiment?’

Again, Alex was silent. He’d begun his military career with the Paras but couldn’t for the life of him …

Hammond nodded and glanced at Clayton. ‘I’d say you’re a bit concussed. I’ll tab back to Millwall with Lance and pick up the home-bound chopper. You stay here and set up the assault.’

Alex nodded. The sergeant was right. A single navigation error between here and Millwall – more than an hour’s night march through thick jungle – could cost the captives their lives.

‘Put it this way, Alex.’ Stan Clayton grinned. ‘At least if you stay ’ere you’re guaranteed to be here for the fireworks. Go back wiv a leakin’ ’ead and Ross’ll just send some other fucker.’

‘OK, guys, OK. I hear you,’ said Alex, raising his hands in mock surrender. ‘Don, have you managed to draw a map of the camp?’

Hammond nodded, and pulled out a sheet of waterproof paper marked up with outlines and coordinates.

‘Right,’ said Alex. ‘The ITN people, when I saw them, were being held in the passage between these two cinder-block buildings here, which you’ve called Hut One and Hut Two. Was that how you saw it, Stan?’

‘Yeah, it was.’

‘And from what I could see they looked very tired. Their morale was poor. Each or any of them might be hurt, possibly badly. But I’d say that all three were definitely alive.’

‘Guarded?’

‘One guy. Pink curly wig.’

Hammond looked at Clayton, who nodded in confirmation.

‘Weapons?’ asked Hammond, still looking at Clayton.

‘My guess would be that there are about a hundred and fifty SLRs in the camp – one for each man. I saw a few AKs and RPGs, too, and there could be anything in those huts.’

‘Fields of fire?’

For five minutes Hammond submitted the two men to a detailed debrief. Evidently suspicious of the accuracy of Alex’s recall, given the captain’s recent knock on the head, he made a point of verifying every fact with Clayton.

With the map filled in with as much detail as Alex and Stan Clayton could provide, Don Hammond radioed Zulu Three Five patrol who were observing the Arsenal camp ten kilometres away and reported that the hostages had been located. The patrol leader, a sergeant named Andy Maddocks, replied that he was pulling out immediately and estimated that he would reach Chelsea in about ninety minutes.

Alex then set off with Zulu Three Six patrol back up the track towards the Bergan cache. En route they checked the captive child-sentry, who was frightened but otherwise unharmed. Before the fighting started, Alex decided, he would release the poor little bugger into the jungle. Would that help him, or even save his life? Quite possibly not, he admitted to himself, but he couldn’t play God.

When they reached the clearing where the Bergans were cached, Don Hammond radioed in a sat-com report to David Ross and then kept on going. It was 0145, and he and Lance Wilford had three-quarters of an hour in which to reach the Puma landing zone at Millwall. All things being equal he would be back in Freetown by 0300. The assault – the killing time – would come an hour later at first light when, with a bit of luck, the RUF forces would be sunk in drunken, exhausted sleep.

It wouldn’t be a pushover, thought Alex, remembering the red-eyed fury with which the soldiers had roared out the words of ‘No Living Thing’. For all their gross indiscipline – for all their raping, mutilating, torture and murder – the RUF were well-armed and they were certainly no cowards. They would fight and they would fight hard. Many of them believed themselves to be impervious to pain, and given the volume of ganja and palm wine they got through of an evening, they were probably right.

What did they intend to do to Sally Roberts and her crew if their demands were not met? Impossible to say, although given the cruelty and contempt with which the soldiers treated the African women at their disposal – gang rape being the least of it – he could hazard a guess at the female reporter’s probable fate. The men would most likely be shot and dumped in the river.

But this, mused Alex, glancing at his wristwatch, was not going to happen. Instead, in just under two hours, Sally Roberts, Ben Mills and Gary Burge would be flown out of the camp code-named Chelsea in a Puma helicopter. And with any luck, they would be alive when it happened.

At the bottom of the slope, behind the tree roots, Zulu Three Six patrol sat tight. This time, as well as the sat-com and the 319 patrol radio, they’d brought their individual Motorola UHF sets with them from the Bergan cache. Precisely co-ordinated operations like this one tended to be very comms-heavy. There was a worrying amount of movement near the hostages, Alex noticed, and he found himself straining to watch as the distant figures came and went beneath the strings of yellow light bulbs.

Cool it, he told himself. For the moment – for just a few hours more until the deadline – the RUF need the news team alive.

At precisely 0230 Ricky Sutton set up the sat-com to receive Ross’s scheduled transmission from Freetown. The incoming message was brief and to the point: Don Hammond and Lance Wilford had been exfiltrated from Millwall and were on their way back to base. Assault time was estimated at 0400.

As the twenty-three-year-old trooper folded away the sat-com aerial, Alex divided his team in half and disposed them in the jungle line in positions commanding broad arcs of fire over the camp. He himself took the western position with Sutton; Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth moved to the east.

Attaching the earpieces and throat mikes of their UHF sets, the patrol worked out their individual targets. When the time came, the impression given to the RUF had to be one of devastating force – that they were under sustained attack from all sides. In truth, of course, the rebels would be heavily out-gunning the SAS, but they must never be allowed to know this.

The camp’s situation, Alex knew, would work against the rescue team. With the looping river at their backs the RUF had nowhere to flee to, and in the event of attack they would have no option but to face the jungle and the opposing fire team and shoot it out. Desperation would make them very dangerous, there would be a huge volume of fire directed towards the two RWW patrols and once the helicopters were on the ground it was going to be very difficult to return that fire. The hostages and the assault and rescue teams would be right in the thick of it. They’d agreed over the radio that the incoming ‘D’ Squadron soldiers would wear their bush-hats inside out with the orange band showing and not have any cam-cream on their faces, but it was still going to be very tricky knowing who was who – first light or no first light.

The insects were silent, now, and the temperature finally falling. Around the shallow dugout that was Alex’s firing position hovered the scent of the Sierra Leone night – a pungent blend of wet clay, wood-smoke and rotting mangoes. To his left, manning the sat-com and the patrol’s 319 set, lay Ricky Sutton.

Alex had agreed with Don Hammond that the patrol would try a second swim past between 2.30 and 3 a.m. to determine whether the hostages had been moved inside for the night. Stan Clayton had volunteered to go again, knowing as he did where the currents were most treacherous, and at 2.45 his narrow form slipped away eastwards, upstream of the camp. As he did so, Dog Kenilworth made his shadowy way to the downstream exit point to drag him up the river’s sheer clay bank.

The next fifteen minutes passed slowly for Alex. The RUF posed no great danger to Stan – they were unlikely to be awake, sober and staring into the river at this hour – but Alex had felt the massive and wilful power of the Rokel river at first hand and hoped that the outspoken cockney would play it safe. Eventually, thankfully, the two loomed out of the darkness – Stan Clayton once again dripping with river water. The news was that the ITN team were still in the same place and still tied up, but apparently asleep. As was their guard, still wearing the Barbara Windsor wig.

Ricky Sutton unfurled the sat-com’s aerial and called up Freetown. The news that the hostages had not been moved would come as a relief to the ‘D’ Squadron team, who wouldn’t have to waste time searching for them while under fire – the camp would be a hornet’s nest by the time the team de-bussed from the Puma. No one had so far put it into words, but it was possible that the Regiment would take casualties. It was possible that the story would end, as so often before, at the modest graveyard of St Martin’s church outside Hereford.

A few minutes before 3 a.m. Andy Maddocks called Alex on his UHF set to report that he had arrived with Zulu Three Five patrol and was in position at the bottom of the approach slope. On Alex’s instructions the six newcomers worked their way into the tree line above and behind Alex’s patrol, and silently took up firing positions in pairs. As soon as they were established Alex briefed them by radio as to the location of the hostages.

One hour to go. In Freetown the ‘D’ Squadron assault and rescue team would be boarding the Pumas, loading magazines and checking kit. There would be nerves – they would be aware that they were hitting a hot landing zone.

How would it go, Alex wondered? Was there any way he could further ensure his men’s safety? Not really, he decided. The thing was risky, but it had to be done. There wasn’t a man here or at the squadron base who would rather be somewhere else – somewhere where there weren’t any bull-leeches, malarial mosquitoes or trigger-happy rebels. Without exception the men under his command subscribed to Don Hammond’s philosophy, that life was too short to spend it buying magnolia emulsion and ‘wanking over Gail Porter’.

Which was pretty much how Alex felt himself.

Would this, as he had assumed, be his last taste of active service? As an officer he was bloody lucky to be dug in here with a bandolier of grenades across his chest and ten fully loaded magazines in his pouch rather than sweating it out on others’ behalf in the briefing hut.

Not that he hadn’t been pleased to be sent to Sandhurst. Only two or three Regiment NCOs received a commission each year and it had been very gratifying to be singled out. In his ten previous years of SAS service he’d seen Ireland – a lot of Ireland – the Gulf, Columbia, Liberia, Bosnia (where they’d given him the Military Medal), Kosovo and now Sierra Leone. And the list was even longer if you included the deniables and the ‘black bag’ jobs like Somalia and Sri Lanka.

Why had he been chosen? Alex wondered. Because he’d watched his mouth over the years? Because he’d managed to survive a decade of SAS service without actually decking a superior? Something like that, probably. Whatever – it had made it worthwhile staying in the army for a full term of service. With a bit of luck he’d make major before too long. After that, if he played his cards right there was Staff College … But what the hell. All that lay in the future.

It had been weird, though, hanging out at Sandhurst aged thirty-four with all the teenaged officers-to-be with their sports cars and their nightclubs and their weekends in the country. There had been admin classes, report-writing classes and even an etiquette or ‘knife and fork’ course. Never in his life had Alex felt more like a fish out of water.

The others hadn’t all been rich, but plenty of them had been, especially the ones destined for the Brigade of Guards and the other outfits where an expensive social life came with the regimental silver. Alex, whose father ran a small garage and body-repair shop in Clacton-on-Sea, and who had joined the Paras as a private to impress a girlfriend (who had immediately dumped him – thanks, Stella!) found it impossible to imagine what it must be like to have money to spend on Savile Row suits and Curzon Street restaurants and Caribbean sailing holidays at that age.

For Alex, at eighteen, it had been rockfish and chips, Kestrel lager and a brown leather jacket (‘sixty-five quid mate, fully lined’) from the Pakistani guy who had the stall at the Saturday market. There hadn’t been any foreign holidays. ‘Why pay to go to the Seychelles,’ his father would ask, nodding towards Marine Parade with its icy spray and mournful winter winds, ‘when the sea’s right here on our bloody doorstep?’

It wasn’t meanness, it was just that Ray Temple didn’t hold with what he called ‘all that pina colada bollocks’. What he did hold with was motor sport and lots of it. Formula One at Brands Hatch, drag races at Santa Pod, stock cars at Belle Vue, bangers at King’s Lynn, night races at Snetterton – any occasion involving cigarette advertising, petrol vapour and deafening noise. The Temple family attended pretty much every event in the Castrol motor sport calendar. And went first class all the way, with enclosure tickets, steak dinners at the motel if it was an overnighter, souvenir T-shirts and the rest.

The old man had been broken-hearted when, inspired by a TV documentary series, Alex had gone for the Parachute Regiment rather than one of the mechanised units. ‘Don’t be a tosser, son,’ Ray Temple had begged him. ‘If God had meant us to walk, he wouldn’t have created fuel injection.’

But Alex had been adamant and stuck to his guns throughout the tough Para-selection course known as ‘P’ Company. He wasn’t particularly big and he certainly wasn’t the archetypal tattooed, scarred-knuckled Tom, but when it came to the specialised skills of the airborne infantryman he was a natural. He was a fast learner, excellent with weapons and always switched on in the field. His superiors marked him down as potential NCO material and posted him to his battalion’s Patrol Company.

Unexpectedly, like many a town-raised soldier before him, the young paratrooper developed a passion for the wild, remote terrain in which he and his unit trained. He enjoyed downing pints and trapping WRAC girls with his Patrol Company mates, but found that after only a few days in barracks he missed the freedom and the solitude offered by the mountains and the moors. Shortly after his twenty-third birthday he was made up to lance-corporal, but by then a part of him had begun to wonder if there might be more to army life than the culture of the Aldershot brotherhood, with its relentless cycles of drinking, brawling, mooning, curry-swilling, shagging and vomiting.

On impulse, he applied for SAS selection. By then, perhaps jealous of his promotion, some of his colleagues were beginning to regard him coolly. No one made any specific accusations but the word got around that he was a bit of a loner. There was an unconfirmed rumour that he had turned down the chance to join in a game of ‘freckle’ – a ritual in which a fresh turd was hammered between two beer mats on a pub table and the least bespattered paratrooper got to buy the next round.

If he had failed SAS selection, Alex would have had a very hard time living it down. But he didn’t fail. Along with Don Hammond, then a Royal Fusiliers corporal, and a dozen others of the forty or so who applied, he passed. Badged into the Regiment, he discovered a different sort of soldier – tough, self-sufficient young blokes like himself who knew how to have a good time but didn’t need to strike macho attitudes. The best friend he’d made in the Regiment was probably Hammond. As unmarried troopers they’d shared quarters in Hereford, along with a couple of clapped-out cars and – for three ill-tempered months – a Royal Army Dental Corps nurse named ‘Floss’ Docherty.

When it was announced that Alex was to be commissioned, no one could have been more pleased than Don Hammond. The two had an instinctive sympathy in the field and neither saw any reason why this should be affected by their differing ranks.

And here he was, a dozen years and a dozen dirty wars after signing up, a bloody officer! His father had laid down his plug spanner and laughed fit to piss himself when Alex had told him that he was going to Sandhurst. ‘You always were a canny bugger,’ he told Alex, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘but this beats the bloody bank.’ His mother, seeing him in his full-dress uniform for the first time alongside the public-school boys, had wept.

Well, he reflected wryly, flipping up the backsight on his M16 and taking a sip of tepid water from his canteen, he might as well enjoy it while it lasted. The system gave, but the system also took away, and took away faster than shit off a hot chrome shovel. At heart, Alex knew, he was not an Establishment man.