Читать книгу: «The Long Walk Back»

To my husband Peter, who never reads my books, but inspires them anyway.

Thank you for putting up with me.

PROLOGUE

That day. The 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? Not your average day. An average day is going to work, coming home, parking your fat arse on the couch in front of the TV, a takeaway perched on your knee while you piss and moan to yourself about how skint you are, how the country is going to the dogs, how much you hate your job. That is 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. That was never going to be me, and my choices in life led me to this day, what looked like my last day. Karma is a bitch, I hear you on that one.

An hour earlier, I was doing a routine sweep of the area with my unit. Of my thirty-one years on the earth, I had spent fifteen of them in the army. We were out in Iraq, pushing back the terrorists that threatened the small villages we were camped near to. Many of the villagers wanted us here, and the tensions were rising.

It’s not like on the news. You think it all looks the same. Desert, broken buildings, busted vehicles, shattered people. 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. I have seen photos on walls, gardens lovingly tended, children loved and cared for. The actions of few cause 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 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, and when the shots had started firing, I knew why. They had been gearing up to take us down, and as prepared as we 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 homes, food still 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 car. Hunching down, I looked 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 escape. Another barrage of shots rang out, and Travis jerked. He had 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, the source of the shots but they fired back. Hunching down again, I shouted at Travis to get a move on, grabbing my radio and running towards them.

‘Hightower, can you see him?’ I screamed into the radio. My sniper on the roof, Bradley, was my ace in the hole.

‘Nearly, the slippery bastard is hidden well. He has a child up there with him, using him as a human 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.

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. ‘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. 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.

I struggled to breathe, and my mouth was coated with a new layer of dust every time I managed to pull in a ragged breath. I could hear 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. I could hear my friends, my comrades in arms, running towards me, firing shots off, barking orders at each other. There was no white light, no images of me running around in short trousers, nothing. I could see nothing but dust, flashes of weaponry, and the smell of panic and desperation in the air. I felt bone tired, and a little voice inside of me told me to sleep. I tried to shake my head, keep myself awake, but the warm feeling spread through me. 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 boy, no doubt dead now on the rooftop. I wondered if he had parents around to grieve for him, people who would mourn his death. And that’s the last thing I remember.

CHAPTER ONE

Kate was pulling 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 who had been running behind her.

‘Mummy has to go now, sweet pea, 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?’ 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 her colleague’s face, it was bad. She blew a kiss at her son. Jamie rolled his eyes but blew one back.

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

Kate laughed. ‘No deal kiddo. I will 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, but she couldn’t miss the opportunity. ‘Love you too Mummy,’ he said, and his face disappeared from view as the call ended. She knew he would understand when he was older. She hoped that he would be proud that his mother went out there, 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. 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. He was her world, but she still wanted the moon and the stars. Men could have that and no one batted an eyelid. A woman wanted to do the same? Judgement would follow. 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.

Kate threw the phone into her bag, grabbed her scrubs after throwing her clothes onto her cot bed and got herself ready in record time. Grabbing her kit, she raced to follow Trevor to the hospital tent nearby. She covered her eyes as best she could from the dust that the incoming helicopter kicked up in the sandy dirt that their medical camp was perched on.

Doing a three-month stint with the Red Cross as a trauma surgeon was not for the faint-hearted, but Kate Harper loved every bloody minute of it. She had two weeks left, and although she missed her boy dearly, she knew that going home to her usual hospital job would be an adjustment. Not as much as it would be going home to Neil, her husband of seven years. She had to admit to herself, the distance between them lately mounted up to more than miles, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it. The thought of seeing him again filled her with anxiety. She knew that this trip had changed something between them, it had stretched the elastic of their relationship thin. She wasn’t sure it could spring back this time. Did she even want it to?

Being here was a very different kind of working away. Their phone calls were always snatched seconds. When she did get time to call, the signal often dropped, leaving them to play frustrated phone tag with each other. When he was away for work at conferences, they could chat leisurely. Him from his safe snug hotel room at the side of some motorway. Her from their bed, with their son sleeping soundly nearby. Their conversations consisted of errands to run, Jamie’s school day, their work days. The logistics of their married life together. Here, the calls were clipped, short. Checking in. Are you and Jamie okay? Is it bad there? She couldn’t talk about her day. What would she tell him, about the lives she saved? The ones she lost? She didn’t want to think about them, let alone try to form words, to explain them to a man who worked in a safe office all day, watching the clock for meeting times, not for giving time of death. It narrowed their conversations. She couldn’t help but feel mad if he moaned about his day, about things that Kate had already realised didn’t matter in the grand scheme. Neil got mad that she was so closed off and cagey about her life there. Other times she could feel the resentment in his voice, as though she were away on a girly holiday and he had been left holding the pre-teen. They could fill a book with everything they couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember the last time she had told him she loved him. She pushed it to the back of her mind, she had to work now. Some puzzles were easier to solve than others. Long distance relationships weren’t easy. They both knew that, but it wasn’t forever.

The chopper landed, the metal glinting in the early morning scorch of the sun. Kate grabbed her hair, pulling it tighter into her ponytail, and raced to meet the stretcher. She snapped a pair of gloves on as she ran, though she wasn’t sure how sterile they would be given the sand flying around. Her colleagues at home would balk at some of the makeshift operations set up in these tents. The medicine was the key though, patching people up, getting them home. The rest was done as best they could under the circumstances. It wasn’t all pretty and clean here. In this environment, fighting death was bloody, messy and fast. Split second decisions were crucial.

‘What do we have?’ she asked the army medic pulling the patient out on the gurney, keeping his head dipped below the spinning chopper blades.

‘One dead in the field, two injured. This one is Captain Thomas Cooper, his unit was ambushed. Multiple injuries, IED, left leg. Flatlined twice on the way here, his vitals are shot. He has shrapnel injuries to his leg and torso, he hasn’t been conscious since impact.’ The medic glanced across at her. ‘We need to move fast.’ Kate nodded, running alongside the trolley as they raced for the trauma tent.

‘What meds has he had?’

‘We started him on a course of strong antibiotics and 10mg of morphine. We had no time for anything else, we had to get him out of there.’

It didn’t look good. Cooper’s eyes fluttered, and Kate noticed what a beautiful shade of green they were, the contrast made all the starker against his deathly pale skin and blood splattered face. They raced into the tent, transferring him from the stretcher to one of the hospital treatment tables. He never made a murmur. Kate grabbed a pair of scissors from her kit and cut away the remnants of his trousers, showing torn black boxers underneath. His left leg was a bloody mess. They had to stop the bleeding, or he would lose his life too. Looking at his right leg, she saw shrapnel protruding from his bloody wounds. These were comparatively superficial wounds; had he not been running flat out, she surmised that both legs would have hit the homemade bomb and been in the same state. The only reason this soldier had any leg at all was the position of his running body as the blast hit. She got to work, barking out orders to the staff running around the bed next to her. The whole tent was a hive of activity, and Kate blocked the noises out. On her first week here, she had been useless. She was no stranger to traumatic injuries, but the relative silence of the wards and operating rooms back home was a world apart from the sounds that surrounded her on a daily basis now. Strapping grown men, screaming, calling for their mothers, their wives, their gods, helicopters and booming sounds of bombs nearby, gunfire in the distance. All of these sounds had taken some adjustment, but now she tuned them out, was able to concentrate on what her colleagues were saying, the heart sounds she listened to in damaged chests, the gurgles and moans from the bodies she tended to. Kate ran over to Trevor.

‘The Captain’s not looking good. We need to stop the bleeders in his chest and right leg too. He’s lost a lot of blood.’

Trevor nodded, working on another patient as he listened to his colleague and one-time student.

‘You have this Kate.’ As she turned to run back, he shouted after her.

‘Kate, save him if you can. He saved two others in the field, his troop only made it out because of his actions. Only one died, and he will be angry enough about that when he comes to. We owe it to him.’

Kate ignored the slab of thick tension that nestled in her throat. ‘Roger that.’

‘They used a kid as a human shield Kate, the sniper had to take them both out to save our men. An innocent kid. No one else gets to die today.’ Kate ran back to Cooper. She thought of her earlier phone call with her son. Worrying about him missing football practice, whether he had eaten breakfast. A world away from being used as a weapon in a war he didn’t cause or belong in. A mother had lost her child today.

***

Hours later, the tent was quieter, calmer. The gunfire in the far distance had abated somewhat, and the silence was almost eerie. Kate was exhausted, covered in dirt and grime that had mixed with the sweat of her frantic exertion to save lives in the middle of a warzone. They needed to be ready at a moment’s notice, but the adrenaline of the last few hours had kicked in now and she knew if she went to bed, she would just lay awake looking at the ceiling of the tent, so she stayed. Sarah Fielding, a combat medic assigned to this unit, was at a nearby desk sorting through personal effects ready to bag and tag. They tried to save what they could, to either give back to the soldiers, or send back to their families. Kate went to the small kitchen area and grabbed a strong coffee, sitting down on a chair near the desk.

‘Hi Sarah, you okay?’ Kate asked tentatively, sipping at the strong hot drink. She felt the jolt of caffeine lick through her limbs.

‘Yeah, I just hate this job,’ Sarah replied, frowning. Kate noticed a familiar piece of clothing.

‘That the Captain’s trousers? Mind if I look?’

She shrugged. ‘No, bag it up for me would you, when you’re done? I still have a pile to get through and I need to get my head down.’ Sarah looked across at her, smiling weakly. ‘You should too.’

Kate nodded, taking the possessions from her colleague. ‘I will, I can’t settle yet. You go.’

Sarah placed a hand on her shoulder as she passed, squeezing it in appreciation. ‘Night Kate.’

‘Night Sarah,’ Kate said over her shoulder. The Captain was still unconscious, whether from the sedation or his injuries remained to be seen. They had stopped the bleeding, and he was stable. For now. Glugging at her coffee, she set it down on the desk and started to go through her patient’s belongings. He had the usual field stuff in his pockets, along with a wallet. It had escaped the blast. His mobile phone was shattered, so she itemised it and put it into the bag. Opening the wallet, she looked through, feeling guilty for going through his personal possessions, but it needed to be done. Sometimes, all families got back were the contents of their loved one’s pockets and bags, and even a half-eaten packet of mints was a comfort to a grieving mother. Photos and letters were the gold though. Looking through the wallet, she found amongst the cards and money a little stack of snaps. She frowned as she thumbed through them. They were all of him and his friends, in various barracks and war zones. No family pictures, no smiling mother and father, no rosy cheeked children cuddled by a proud wife. She noticed how handsome he was, smiling into the camera, laughing into another. His playful side showed, a man goofing around with his buddies in a rare peaceful moment. She wondered whether anyone would be trying to ring his phone. Worrying about why he didn’t answer.

Trevor came into the room then, unnoticed by Kate till he took a sip of her now lukewarm coffee.

‘Hey,’ she said teasingly. ‘Get your own!’

Trevor winked and drained the cup. ‘You should be in bed. Want a fresh one?’

Kate nodded, already back to being absorbed in the images in her hands. ‘Do you know the Captain?’

‘Thomas Cooper, one of the good ones,’ Trevor replied. How’s he doing?’

Kate looked at Trevor, a frown on her tired face. ‘Stable. For now. His leg doesn’t look good. We’re watching him for signs of sepsis.’

‘He won’t be happy if he can’t go back into full service. Keep me updated. Has he woken up yet?’

Kate shook her head. Trevor’s gaze dropped.

‘Has he got any family?’ Kate asked. ‘There are only his army buddies in these photos.’

Trevor shook his head. ‘Nope, Cooper is army born and bred. No family to speak of, as far as I know. He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest.’

Kate put the photos back, finishing her task and tying the bag up to go with the others. He was alone here then, like her. I suppose, really, they were all out here alone, which made it all the more important to have each other’s backs. Except she had people, waiting for her, counting on her to return to them. She looked at the ward entrance, partitioned off by canvas doors.

Trevor went off to get more coffee, but when he came back, Kate was nowhere to be seen. He carried the cups through to the main ward tent, sure that a nurse would be grateful for the hot drink. Walking through, something made him slow his heavy step. At the end of the ward, next to Captain Cooper’s bed, Kate lay in a chair, sleeping, one hand over Cooper’s as they both slept. Trevor smiled to himself, going to find a tired nurse to caffeinate. That was Kate all over, all heart.