The Gone-Away World

Chapter Five

GREY-BROWN EARTH and green mountainsides; misty air. In the distance one of the lakes of Addeh is giving up its moisture to the heat. When the wind comes from that direction, there’s a smell of water, and diesel. When it flicks listlessly round, it comes off the Katir mountains, and carries pine and some kind of flower. Whatever direction it blows from, it doesn’t make my tent any cooler or any less isolated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by other tents and men and women just as lonely.

This is Freeman ibn Solomon’s homeland, and the gun-mountain he was so unhapppy about has turned out to be a volcano. The country is no longer even known as Addeh Katir; mostly people call it the Elective Theatre, which suggests in some way that there is a clear decision-making process behind what is happening here. That suggestion is extremely debatable.

In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You—the King—pointed at the next-door country and said, “I want me one of those!” Your vassals—stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain—said, “Yes, my liege,” or sometimes, “What’s in it for me?” but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat.

Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floe. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.

The first rumbling of un-war was nearly a year ago, when I was back in Project Albumen learning how to kill a car. Erwin Mohander Kumar, priapic president of Addeh Katir and stooge to the international financial system, defaulted on his obligations regarding the nation’s debt. Rumour has it that he spent the last hundred million in Addeh Katir’s bank account to obtain the services of every employee of a noted Dutch sex establishment for a three-year period. Almost everyone in the world now acknowledges that Erwin Kumar is unfit for dog ownership, let alone government. So much is obvious.

The difficulty is what happens next, which is that various nations and groups of nations who are notionally friendly to one another and here for identical, similar or compatible purposes get into disagreements. The good kind of disagreement comes to an end with harsh words and apologies, but disagreements between men and women trained to kill and armed with the best weapons available, who know that they are disagreeing with people who are similarly trained and equipped, are generally the other sort. Giving someone a jolly good talking-to becomes an exchange of warning shots and suddenly there’s a minor battle going on. Minor battles become international incidents; international incidents foster distrust; distrust fosters conflict.

As a consequence of several small disagreements, we are now at unwar with:

• the Joint Operational Task Force for Addeh Katir (which is supported by France, Vietnam and Italy, and commanded by Baptiste Vasille)

• the Addeh Defensive Initiative (which is run by a frosty woman from Salzburg named Ruth Kemner and distinguished by a membership so varied and changeful that not even she actually knows on whose behalf she is fighting)

• the United Nations (white hats, sidearms, slightly less scary than an Addeh sheepherder, maintaining an airfield upcountry for the inevitable humanitarian disaster to come)

• the Army of Addeh Katir (Supreme Generalissimo Emperor-President Erwin Kumar commanding, largely concerned with draining the last dregs of prosperity from the national cup)

• the Free Katiri Pirates (Zaher Bey’s collected thieves, patriots, arsonists and larcenists, who will steal anything from anyone at any time)

• the South Asian and Pan-African Strategic Fellowship (helluva nice people, actually, and fortunately camped so far away that we have only met them once since the initial misunderstanding and things are calming down a bit)

• and on several regrettable occasions also: ourselves, because accidents will happen.

It’s almost as if, now that this place exists as a war zone, everyone feels it would be rude not to use it.

WHEN I WAS studying with Master Wu, I learned that his grandmother believed in a truly enormous collection of hells. In her mind the netherworld was like a great vizier’s palace or hall of government, and every floor was given over to a different aspect of suffering. There was a Hell of Crawling Flies and a Hell of Scratchy Undergarments and a Hell of Lukewarm Soup and just about every hell, however vile or trivial, that you could imagine. There was a Hell of Standing in Line and a Hell of Loneliness and a Hell of Chattering Neighbours and a Hell of Silent Grief, all the way to a Hell of Boiling Pitch and a Hell of Smashed Fingers and other hells she declined to detail but delineated with significant noddings and rolling of eyes. These hells were arranged in no apparent order (except for a sequence of hells defined by their orderliness), presided over by guards of utmost probity and administered by sadists and reformers and all manner of intransigent folk, who absolutely would not be deterred from hauling or heaving or leading or shoving you into your appointed hell. There was even a Hell of Uncertain Anticipation where you simply sat around waiting to find out which hell you were eventually going to. For ever.

If there can be such a thing as the Hell of Not Getting Shot, I am in it. There is a war going on (or at least an un-war so much like a war as to be indistinguishable from the thing itself) and I am left out. I am in the thick of it, and yet I am not part of it. Men I know and men I do not are marching, patrolling, sometimes getting killed. I have trained and prepared for this, and still I am, as Ronnie Cheung would have it, a spare prick at an orgy. My moment has not come. I have been given subsidiary moments, auxiliary roles, because George Copsen does not waste resources, but these are sporadic and unsatisfying. Thus I wait and think about great and weighty matters. I am doing this now.

The walls of my tent are blue. It is possible for me, lying on my back on my bed, to reach up with my left big toe and snag a little silky thread which hangs from the roof liner and tug on it. My right foot is somehow just out of reach. I have concluded that this is owing to the angle of approach, and not to a disparity in leg lengths, although I know that my legs, like everyone else’s, are of slightly different lengths; it just seems more likely that it’s about angle. Yesterday I had reached the opposite conclusion. Then I changed my bed around so that the head end was the foot end, and now I’m sure it’s about angle. I have developed this discussion as a defence against boredom. It doesn’t work.

Some days I get sent on idiot missions to keep me sane. These missions impress upon me that this entire situation is irrational and incomprehensible, and that the only logical response to it is madness. I wonder how I will know when I go mad.

In half an hour I will get up and run to my station, where I will spend four hours attempting to stay alive and feeling guilty because I have not been shot.

In the meantime I read my letters. Two weeks ago, I wrote a little packet of letters home. I wrote to the Evangelist. I wrote to Ma Lubitsch and Old Man Lubitsch both at once, though I had to be very careful not to talk too much about Gonzo, who is doing something dangerous and secret which cannot be trusted to paper. I wrote to Dr. Fortismeer and I wrote short postcards to a lot of people I don’t really care about, in the hope that one of them will care about me. I did not write to Elisabeth Soames because I do not want her to see me here, doing this. She belongs to Cricklewood Cove, and while she’s there, so am I and so is Master Wu, and a little piece of my life before Jarndice will survive. Also, I am embarrassed about the “not getting shot” thing.

Old Man Lubitsch wrote back to tell me Ma Lubitsch has lost several pounds owing to worry, but she appended a denial in capital letters. She told me she has sent a food package, but it has not arrived. Dr. Fortismeer wrote, urging me to maintain good personal hygiene and stand tall in the face of adversity, and giving me news of home, which apparently is getting on jolly well without me. He enclosed a request from the university for money to build new facilities for the ladies’ water polo team, about which he is very enthusiastic, and appended a cheery postscript that I should look out for any interesting examples of foreign spice, which I take to be a request for Katiri pornography, if there is such a thing.

Elisabeth Soames sent me a note via local military post to tell me she is also out here in the Elective Theatre. She is working as a journalist, writing a human interest story about the UN mission at Corvid’s Field. She will be gone in a few days. She sent love. She did not suggest I visit, perhaps because I am a soldier or perhaps just because people in the Elective Theatre do not pay house calls.

The Evangelist wrote too, but only the date and the signature have survived the censor’s knife. The rest of her communication has been removed with a razor blade, leaving me holding a limp carcass of eviscerated notepaper. It is a little spooky. It is a zombie letter. In the middle of the night it will rise from the grave and eat the other letters, starting with the headings. Then it will crawl out into the camp and begin its rampage, and some of the scraps it leaves behind will also reanimate. The undead paper plague will spread until nothing can stop it . . . bwha-hahaha!

I put the zombie letter away and shake out my shoes.

The fact that I have not been shot is preying upon me like a personal failing. I imagine that, back home, cake-baking ladies of a certain age, monitoring the progress of the conflict, are sitting around tutting over this as if I had farted in church or made free with the barmaid at the Angler’s Arms. Missus Laraby and Miz Constance and Biddy Henschler and their friends, a fantasy bingo club of lorgnetted censure, are all sitting there, china cup and macaroon in hand, commiserating with one another and agreeing that I don’t know how these things are done. Men like me are the reason why we haven’t gotten home by Christmas. We lack the basic moral fibre which was so entirely a part of the men of their own generation that it was impossible for them to pass it on; they never knew how they did it or expressed in words that it must be done; rather, they were it and it was them and that is all anyone need say to convey the absolute failure which is me and all my ilk. And no, I will not be getting a care package full of cake, which was what they did for the real men of yesteryear, because in the first place I do not deserve it, and in the second because this war is taking place in a ludicrous far-off land where cakes go bad before the mail can deliver them (a consequence of the absence of fibre in postmen), and in the third place (no one ever needed a third place in the old days, two points of significant reason were enough back then, on account of the fibre) because the military machine had some bad experiences early on in this war with externally baked cakes, including cakes with messages on them which were not good for morale. There were cakes which said “I miss you” and “stupid war” and even, on one particularly radical gâteau, “Geopolitical cat’s paw for entrenched interests, rebel!,” a cake I personally saw with my own eyes when I was charged by George Copsen with its humane and most secret destruction in the name of discipline.

There were also cakes which contained instructions on how to fake sickness to avoid combat, and a vanishingly small but paranoia-inducing number of un-cakes which were sent by more unpleasant and violent disapprovers of the war effort, who sought to introduce poisons and even explosives into their baking, and thus strike a blow against the hegemonic cryptofascists. I have never seen any of these (cryptofascists, that is; botulinum poison cakes, alas, I can bear witness to) and don’t know anyone who would own up to being one. The problem, no doubt, is that the cryptofascists of yesteryear were a better sort of cryptofascist who went out and fought and colonised and were a bit less crypto about the whole thing and said what they meant, whereas modern cryptofascists have no standards.

I put on my shirt. It is too hot. It is better than sunburn. I have a flak jacket too, in case I get shot. I have not been shot.

While I have not been shot (Shame! Boo, hiss!) that is not to say I have not been injured. Addeh Katir breeds injury. For an earthly paradise, the whole place is shockingly inimical. The fruit is beautiful and juicy and will, given a window of opportunity, lead a commando raid into your intestine which results in total evacuation. A local rodent has developed a taste for the rubber soles of our boots, and a variety of fire ant has taken to laying its eggs in the seams of servicemen’s standard-issue trousers. All this before we contemplate the un-war which is going on all around and is possessed of an irrational and powerful volition all its own.

The oddness of it all seems to provoke oddnesses in us; the brutality calls out to our anger. The logic of un-war is strong. Certain actions demand certain responses, of which the simplest is “Shot at? Shoot back.”

Of all the groups operating here, only one seems to be able to avoid those reactions—or maybe they are simply more perverse, more determinedly and convolutedly insane than everyone else; Zaher Bey’s pirates for the most part do not shoot back. They elude, taunt and tease. They also steal as a way of counting coup—they will steal anything just to demonstrate that they can. They steal the traffic cones which we use to mark out our roads, and the little shining lights which sit on top of them. They hijack truckloads of boots and steal every single right foot, leaving all the left ones. They stole a consignment of flags and a lot of subversive cakes, and returned a solitary Battenberg with a note to the effect that it was rather dry. They penetrate defence-in-depth as if it was cling film. They mince through minefields and cut razor wire for no better reason than to stencil pornographic cartoons on our tanks and pinch our booze. This gives everyone the willies, because one day they may get serious and that would be bad. All the area commanders of all the forces in the region are united in wanting to demonstrate that no one steals from them with impunity. The first person to do this will gain an infinitesimal but possibly decisive measure of kudos.

A month ago a whole load of useful stuff—fencing, tyres, fuel, tent-age and antibiotics—vanished from one of our supply dumps, so General Copsen packed me off with some soldiers to get our stuff back (I couldn’t shake the image of myself knocking on a neighbour’s door and asking for a miskicked football from the wreckage of their conservatory), and I chased the transponder signal from a beacon in the medical supplies pack for several miles across rough country. The trail led us to the outskirts of an abandoned industrial site five kilometres from the dump. The transponder was marching up and down a wall, trying to mate with everything it saw and kill anything which turned it down—or rather it was attached to the collar of a huge feral cat which was doing these things. I discovered this when I, intrepid detective, led my guys around the corner and ordered the cat to put its hands in the air and throw down its weapons, whereupon it jumped on my head and tried to rip my scalp off under the impression that I was a chew toy or a huge, armoured mouse. When this failed and it (thank God) did not find me physically attractive, it pissed on me and ran away.

The cat-bomb incident is important only in so far as it was the mechanism by which I met Tobemory Trent for the first time, as he sewed me up. This meeting caused me to mention, unwisely, that I thought Trent’s job was admirable, and General Copsen immediately seconded me to him for a week. Tobemory Trent is a stretcherman.

Stretchermen are the doorkeepers of a hidden kingdom, a soft place where there are nurses. This makes them popular, of course, but at the same time they’re gloomy people to think about, because the only way they’ll let you into their kingdom is if you’re in agony. No one wants to imagine they will ever make that spasmodic face and clutch at a spurting limb, or worse yet do the weird, happy thing people do when they’re truly fucked and run around showing bits of bone to their friends and talking about how odd it is to have a hole in them until they bleed out.

My clock goes beep. That means I have to go and do this thing. I put on my flak jacket and go and do it.

THIS IS ME as a stretcherman, dismounting from a hot smelly medevac transport (that’s a jeep with a cover on it) with a bunch of guys who have done this before. I have not been trained, particularly. I have just been given a medic’s armband and told to take the back end because the front is the more skilled position. Being the front-end man requires that you:

1) know how to run with a man’s head hitting your legs from behind,

2) be able to support the weight of a man behind your own back, and

3) can navigate the battlefield while doing 1) and 2) and being shot at.

I am sweating, partly because it’s what everyone else is doing and I don’t want to be left out. Like Tobemory Trent, I have left my shirt on. The idea is that you sweat and keep the moisture covered, so you only have to sweat once, as it were, and you don’t carry on losing water. All I know about that is that I have a puddle around the waistband of my trousers and down my arse and I hope I do not get photographed with patches of damp around the buttocks by some overeager shutterbug hoping to “convey the moment.” Becoming the posterchild for wet trousers has no appeal.

Away to the west, Green Sector is quiet and safe and there are probably guys getting bored and wondering what to do with the afternoon. They’re likely doing the same at Red Gate, although we came through there a while back, and the soldiers gave me to understand they were not happy. Apparently the local commander is an idiot. I will have to remember to tell George Copsen about this when I get back. It’s the kind of thing he likes to know.

Over to my right, in one of the contested zones, something huge is on fire, or more probably something quite small is hugely on fire. Smoke pours up and out and hides the blue sky and makes a shadow on the land below. Quite clearly it is Mordor, and there are orcs and monsters there, and the burning thing is Mount Doom. It actually looks pretty cool, in a bad way. It also looks a long way off. Tobemory Trent, the Sage of the Field Dressing Station, ordered us dropped here a few moments ago, and is now tasting the air and (more important) paying heed to some secret testicle signal known only to front-end stretchermen. No one speaks. I, at least, have nothing to say. The back-end stretcherman’s code is simple: obedience to the man at the front. In my case, this is Trent himself. He reaches a decision and moves towards the smoke in a narrow ellipse which will bring us around to it from the north and the higher ground.

I follow Trent down in the direction of Mount Doom, wondering which hobbit I am, and it seems to me that we cannot possibly get anywhere near the fighting. I can hear the gunshots and even, when the wind is right, smell them. I can hear and see explosions and so on, but they are all tinny and fake. Trent has deployed too early and in the wrong place. He picks up speed, and so, perforce, do I. The noises get louder. An armoured personnel carrier passes us at great speed, shiny and new and a bit urgent. I make a note to myself to request patrol duty when next General Copsen asks me if I feel I’m pulling my weight.

“Getting there,” says Trent. He must be deeply moved to be so verbose. I do not know how he can tell. I suspect we will be running for quite a while, and wonder whether we might get the APC to pick us up and give us a lift.

When Trent demanded that the transport leave us here in the middle of nowhere, the other back-end guy seemed on the brink of committing a grave sin. He had the expression of someone about to ask a question. By this sign, I know that he is also new. The lieutenant in the transport, a man with exactly no hair and apparently made of ivory and parchment, just leaned over and threw him out of the door. Trent and the other front-end guy shared a look like “and this is the shit we have to work with nowadays,” and we tumbled out into the sand. The transport roared away, and everything was calm. It mostly still is, although amid the (fairly) distant banging there’s now a strange, domestic noise, a noise of pets. It goes pitter patter babubudda-boom (but that’s not pets, that’s small explosive munitions). Lollop lollop. Quite a lot of pets (boom, that one was a bit closer) and they are running all around, and just maybe they are carrying bits of change in their pockets or wearing bells, because there’s just a whisper of clinktinkle. The pets should not be here. This is a dangerous place. I should not be here either.

I carry the stretcher. I follow Tobemory Trent.

We run around a corner, come over a rise and everything is much, much louder. We run into a small town where a lot of men are killing each other in a fairly energetic and random way. The smoke is suddenly not just nearby but all around us. Things scream past me which I realise are bullets and I completely forget to duck (Ma Lubitsch would be furious) but do not get shot. Tobemory Trent also does not get shot, although why this is I have no idea because he has not as much forgotten to duck as decided that since he doesn’t know where the bullets are, moving his head is a lottery he can’t be bothered to play. The pitter patter all around us turns out to be the sound, not of several thousand kittens entering a litter tray, but of masonry falling in chips and blocks from walls peppered with gunfire. The whole town is built out of egg timers, shedding sand from the top half into the bottom, and when the top half is empty the town will basically be a floor shorter than it was and much of it will fall over, probably in about eight minutes or so.

Trent leads the way along a small road which smells of latrines and leather and cooked meat and burning rubber and something else which isn’t any of those things and which my animal instincts aren’t at all happy about. For no especially good reason, no one is using this road as a shooting gallery, so aside from occasional through-and-throughs, it’s about as safe as this town currently gets. The houses are pretty in a doomed way: sandstone or cement, and modern but with a traditional feeling to them which says yeah, sure, we used a crane and some prefabs to make this, but it’s still the same kind of house we were making when the main construction material was mud. Every now and again there’s a big boxy thing which must be a factory or a hotel or an apartment block which is made of the same stuff and seems to be leaning over the houses and muttering like a gawky teen about how this place is old and tiny and nothing cool ever happens here and why oh why isn’t there a mall? A couple of these even have billboards on them advertising things, but I have no idea what, and this leads me to reflect that quite a lot of signage back home is also lousy with non-relevant noise and useless without text, and then some idiot starts bombing the town.

I know this because my legs feel like jelly and the buildings ripple and one of the billboards comes off on one side and half a smiling face rips through the roof of a dwelling place and exposes an empty kitchen with blood on the wall. And then there is a very loud noise, and Trent suggests we stop for a moment to consider our position and find out what the holy heck is going on, because the enemy here should not have artillery and any bombs falling on this town ought to be ours and they clearly ought not to be falling on it while we’re in it. An old lady, or a dangerous insurgent dressed as an old lady, but probably just a middle-aged lady in rags who needs a bath and a few months spent in a place which is not a war zone, is waving pathetically at us to bugger off.

There is a flash up ahead, not a big one. It is a shell going off, clearly, between a hotel called Rick’s American Casablanca (which is probably some kind of confused trademark infringement, but enough rights are being infringed here already that I’m not going to get worked up over intellectual property) and what appears to be a toyshop. Both of them have huge glass frontages which had not, until this moment, turned to sand. The flash is very bright and it stops me in my tracks, sort of fascinated, and the glass frontages bow and then collapse.

Trent hits me from one side and we fall together into the wall of a dismembered Laundromat. He counts. One. Two. Three . . . and a cloud of razors whispers by, a mist of broken glass which rakes the ground and tinkles off the awning struts and rips the fabric apart without slowing down, and the deflected splinters, some the size of fishfood and some like sideplates, drop around us from above.

“Close one,” Trent mouths, or perhaps he is shouting and I am deaf. He jumps up and picks up the stretcher, and moves on into the main square, temporarily also the Hell of Shattered Men. Aline (irrelevant Aline, of the welcoming hips and the uncertain courage, whom I miss desperately at this moment but who mysteriously turns into Elisabeth Soames the last time I saw her, back in Cricklewood Cove, before she is occluded by a dying soldier from Paxton) would be annoyed by this description, because some of the corpses and near-corpses and dear Christ ought-to-be corpses here are female. The old lady/insurgent/average woman who wanted us to go has been transformed into a dead thing made of rags and bone.

There’s a burning smell, and a creaking, and I realise there’s a truck on fire—no, two, but one of them is already a furnace. A big guy brushes past me, some journo who has surprisingly dropped his camera and is making for the flames. There’s screaming from that direction, but then there’s screaming everywhere. The journo is yelling at his crew to give a hand here, you arseholes, and suddenly they get the idea, and there’s a kind of news strike while they risk their lives for someone else’s instead of for hard copy. Most of them look scared and a bit embarrassed about this, and finally the big guy has to be hauled away because the trucks are about to explode. They explode, but hardly anyone pays any attention. The journos all stand and stare at the people they have saved from death, completely unsure about what to do with them now.

Tobemory Trent weaves through Golgotha not like someone who has just been almost blown up, but like a man come home to a terrible but familiar monstrosity. He whips open his pack and does something brutal and necessary and a man shrieks and then says “Thank you,” but then he can’t stop saying it and it becomes a long burble thankyou-thankyou-thankoo-ankooankooankoo. Trent hits him in the head to knock him out, because drugs are precious and the guy’s head isn’t in any danger.

Somehow there are other stretchermen here among the pools of human juice, all long-limbed and grave and carrying, as we are, packs of bandages and basic splints and other things unmentionable to dispense relief. One of them is down, must have arrived just before us, a kid named Bobby Shank. I’ve seen him eating a few times, kinda waved, gotten a nod in return. Bobby Shank has a hole in the front of his head, but there is very little blood and he is still alive. That happens. On TV, if you get shot in the head, you die. Out here, sometimes you survive. Sometimes you even have a life afterwards. Bobby Shank is on his own stretcher, and his front man is strapping up a guy with a minor head wound so he can take Bobby’s place at the back and carry him out. I look away. Bobby Shank will escape, but he will not be okay. Not unless a miracle happens, and the reason they’re called miracles is that they don’t. I glance over at Trent, who sees what I see and shakes his head to tell me I am right. And then he tells me to stop being a fucking tourist, and concentrate. He does not say it like he hates me, but more as if I’ve passed a test.

Somehow, the stretchermen collectively and individually knew that this was a place where they would be needed, and they split up and came here by a variety of avenues so as to minimise their own casualties and maximise their per capita efficacy. It is not relevant to any of them—nor even to me, because I’m here and we are doing this thing and we aren’t leaving until it is done—that some tomfool a few kilometres away behind our fortifications has started bombarding this place while we are still in it. They will deal with that arsehole in due time and full measure. His sheets will be sewn with burrowing mites and his trousers seeded with fire ants. Unto him shall be dealt schoolboy pranks and humiliating revenges, and he shall count his hours a curse until such time as we relent, and by these signs the officers and men of this army of fools shall know this gospel: Do not meddle with the stretchermen, for they are mad, and shall serve you according to a madman’s lights.

We give aid without hesitation, and do not discriminate. Everyone in this un-war treats all wounded. This has been agreed for ages, so sometimes I am working on men who scream in Xhosa or Russian. I put my fingers into a set of surgical gloves and then into a second set on Trent’s instructions (“Some of these bastards have diseases other germs are scared of, man”) and then I put my fingers into new and strange artificial orifices and chase rubbery arterial tissue down inside men’s limbs and drag it back while Trent sutures and shouts that he isn’t a fucking doctor, he’s just a medic and we need to carry this guy out and we can’t because there’s no time; carry one out, lose four more, triage and triage again. We have dispensed relief for an hour, and I have aged one quarter of a lifetime, when thunder opens up and everything goes not white or black or even grey but blue: a dark, oceanic blue, and I do not get shot, but something else instead.

THUS to hospital, and smells of the Evangelist’s study and the cellar at the Lubitsch house. Detergent and linen and elastic and powder and bleach and women working. Less convivial, also blood and sickness and effluvia unnamed but familiar and bad. None of these, currently, leaking from me. I open one eye and survey the dismal situation, and find it fairly good, and then very good, as a mechanical angel above me (almost enough to renew the faith I lost to the Evangelist’s wood-beamed ceiling, this) pumps morphine into my veins. Gosh. Morphine is way cool.

My medical chart is something of a legend. The patient history is very nearly funny. The first person to be assailed by trouser-dwelling fire ants was me. The first person to discover that the gentle waters of the River Kanneh were home to a peculiarly belligerent kind of stinging weed was me. I was, by sheer misfortune, also the first person to be infected with an influenza imported from home on a bundle of letters. From there it got positively comedic: the rabid cat incident. I am a byword for misadventure and bizarre injury.

My present ills are a consequence of having been blown up, sadly by my own side. I say “sadly” because the friendly-fire aspect of the injury means that it cannot be fast-tracked or treated or even properly acknowledged, and there will be no citations, no promotions and emphatically no compassionate leave, because all this would involve the attribution of blame and the acceptance that what happened was erroneous and not in some way gloriously and brilliantly brave and strategically sound. Since our side has just blown up not only me, but also a supply train and half of a friendly local township, this cannot be permitted, and I am officially here owing to an accidental weapons discharge, which is usually code for “Idiot shot himself in the arse while cleaning his gun.” In my case, of course, the piece of shrapnel in my arm argues that it was some other idiot who accidentally discharged his gun, several miles away, but no one is able to acknowledge that or they’ll get fired, or (unlikely but seemingly not unthinkable) fired upon.

On the upside, the shell which exploded down the road from me was not made of uranium, and therefore the small raggedy chunk of it currently occupying space between my bicep and the bone of my upper arm is neither toxic (beyond being coated in airborne viruses and soil and dust and all the other crap it picked up between the point of detonation and its arrival in me) nor radioactive to any apppreciable degree.

Thus, while I have now visited the Hell of Friendly Shrapnel, I have not been shunted into the Hell of Heavy Metal Poisoning or the Hell of Internal Burns or the Slow Hell of Military-Grade Carcinoma That No One Will Talk About. I can expect to live and return to service in the Elective Theatre, where I will no doubt experience further time in the compounded, fractal hells which are the state of being there, namely the hells of Grit Up My Arse, Sandmite Bites, Endless Boredom and Constant Fear, We Have No Idea What We’re Doing Here and Baked Bean Muesli for Breakfast, this last being the inexplicable gift of the hell wardens known as Supply. Given that this is me we’re talking about, I will not get shot, but I will get diseases, snakebites, sunstroke, skin-bloating due to rain, skin-cracking due to sun, toxic shock due to overapplication of skin remedies leading to bowel disorders, rashes and infected blisters. War is not hell. War is a chocolate box selection, an after-Christmas Best of compilation of hells. It occurs to me as I reach the end of this line of reasoning that morphine is wonderful stuff and I would like some more, and I press the little clicker which I know from previous adventures sometimes dispenses it, but nothing happens. Apparently my injury is not serious, or perhaps accidental discharge victims are treated with a sternness appropriate to their stupidity. It’s not as if I’ve been (headshaking and tutting from the ladies of the cake bake) shot.

There is a woman at my bedside. She appears to be a nurse of some description. Her badge—which is clean and white like everything else about her—reveals that her name is Leah. She is beautiful. She misses the vein three times. Normally she would go to the other arm at this point, but it is by the nature of my injury not available. I forbear from telling her that there are seventeen people of my close acquaintance in this war who would have hit the thing dead on first time, so often have they injected into themselves the freely available heroin to which about one in three of the rank and file is addicted, although “addiction” suggests that there’s something else they should be doing, and that is often far from clear. Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else? If you have not, since you took up heroin, had an occasion where it has interfered with your life? Or are you just fucked out of your mind and waiting to see what comes?

Despite being lousy with a needle (and this ought to be a hell all its own, but somehow isn’t) she is beautiful. I would let her stick pins in me almost anywhere, at any time.

“I would let you stick pins in me almost anywhere, at any time,” I assure her when she apologises. It comes out less sophisticated than I had hoped.

“Likewise,” she says distractedly, making another hole in my un-bandaged arm. I suspect it is starting to look like a bit of pointillisme, and this recalls to my mind the fact that monetary notes of various nations are often or possibly always created by pointillistes, for reasons I do not know, and I have the urge to go and find out.

“You’d let me poke you with a needle? That’s very nice. Only I don’t have a needle,” I respond helpfully, and she blushes and it occurs to me that our conversation could have a rather obvious sexual subtext.

“Oh gosh, this conversation has a rather obvious sexual subtext. Did you know banknotes were designed by pointillistes? I mention it because you seem to have some talent in that direction.” Someone is talking, and he sounds a great deal like me, but I wouldn’t say something that crass unless I was medicated, which of course I am, because they are taking the friendly shrapnel out of my arm in an hour, and I am full to the gills with happy juice.

Leah gives a little howl of fury and then a cry of alarm and I pass out, which I understand later is because she has done something unhelpful with the needle. When I wake, she’s still there, but the nervousness has gone from her. And it has taken with it the pain, or the original pain, although a new, dull ache has appeared and I have a hangover.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I hadn’t slept for forty hours.”

And she kisses me. It is not a sexual kiss, in the sense that she does not fling herself flat upon me and press herself against me and ravish my mouth with her slender, fascinating lips. It is however unquestionably and utterly an erotic kiss, above and beyond that I have lacked female company for seven months and can now, when I am not in agony, get turned on by the elegant lines of wooden chair legs and the sound of a floorboard sighing. It is erotic in the sense also that it is a thing of love, or the promise of love, or the offer of the possibility of love, and I am not aware of having done anything to deserve this. It is wonderful. And then it stops. She surveys the impact zone and seems pleased. I boggle at her (suavely, of course, not like a gaffed salmon being given the kiss of life by a mermaid, not at all), and she turns smartly and walks out. I fall asleep smiling, for the first time since I came to Addeh Katir.

“FUCKING fuckeroo hubabababafishwit fuckit!”

When I heard the door open, I hoped it might be a prelude to more acts of random affection. I kept my eyes closed, therefore, and languished in what I hoped was a subtle blend of need, manliness and puppy-like adorability. I was considering a small whiffling noise when my ear was assaulted by the first volley from this unwelcome substitute. It has pretty much kept going solidly until now, “fuckerang fuck-dammit,” and so on, etc., etc. I never met a less imaginative vulgarist. After a while it just becomes noise. If he was saying “poot” instead—for example, “pootity pooting pootbuckets pooting papootipoot”—it would mean as much, and be worth greater consideration. Ah well.

I deduce from the sound of squeaking wheels and plastic sheeting that they have partitioned the room in the name of decency. Very flash this, in the Elective Theatre. Such niceties normally go out of the window, from which I further deduce that it is his decency and not mine which is at issue. Not that he seems to be a saintly sort of fellow, having used the F-word non-stop for eight minutes. Very coarse. I decide to imagine that he is, in fact, saying “poot.”

“Poot you, poot you, poot everypooting pooter pootpootpoot motherpoot pootity pootastic aaapoot!”

Much better. And the more often he shouts “poot” at the top of his voice, the less attractive he makes himself, no doubt, to a certain splendid, elusive woman with a weak spot for stoical men-at-arms. I fall asleep again, if not smiling, at least smug. It’s odd, though. He says these things without passion, as if he’s just sort of running through them like a shopping list. Sometimes they are loud and sometimes they are quiet. That’s all. I deduce that a bad thing has happened to this person, and I try not to get too close in case he is contagious.

They wheel him out in the morning, and he is still muttering. It is Bobby Shank. I feel like a total bastard. I also worry that there is a taxonomy of triage at work. Tomorrow they will bring in someone else, and he will scream, and then in the morning he will watch as they collect my still body and mark my chart with a big black X.

I worry about this until Nurse Leah comes back and smiles at me through the door, then steps through and blesses me with another brief, infuriating, mystifying kiss and slips away before I can call her to account.

LATER, a male nurse sits by my bed and explains that this is not common practice and that apparently I asked Leah to marry me in the recovery room and that whatever I said was so utterly brave and vulnerable that she wants very much to be asked out on a date. There is a merciless truth in anaesthesia, even more so than in wine. The nature of a man (or a woman) is exposed entirely by the astringent flood of Pentathol and its cousins. An actual date is probably impossible because we are in a war zone, and so she has written me a note, because she is aware that this will all sound silly, and is afraid to be there when I laugh at her or tell her I am already married. Would I like to have this note?

The nurse is called Egon Schlender. He is slim and disapproving and he comes from Gladdyston, and I do not know where that is and he does not tell me. He is protective and quite obviously he has been talked into this speech and he expects me to respond in a dishonourable way. I tell him I am not married. That there is no one waiting for me. That there is no lawful or social impediment to my making an honest woman of Nurse Leah, who is obviously his friend, but that I realise that the ravings of a post-operative idiot are not the basis for a sound marriage, which is a thing to be embarked upon solemnly and with due thought to the consequences and on the understanding that to love is an action, a verb, a thing of choice, and this can be promised and delivered where in love is a more tenuous and fragile thing which may come and go with the wind and the seasons.

I tell him that I really, really would like to take her out on a date, and that somehow it can be managed, and that yes, I would dearly love to see Nurse Leah’s note.

Egon Schlender’s face is very serious. He glances away behind me, thinking, and then he nods, and from his inner pocket he draws a small creamy envelope—by what arts this woman has stationery I do not know—and passes it to me. It smells of nothing so much as clean paper. There is no perfume on it, and I realise that this is because Nurse Leah wears none on the wards, even if she has any. She is constantly washing herself, constantly sterilising. The absence is her scent. Nurse Leah is the ambient smell of this place. But in the creases there must be a tiny whisper of her body, of the oils which are in her skin, of sweat. I snuffle it up, and just perhaps there is something there, a lingering mist of something floral, and of effort and care. Peach and latex.

The handwriting is small and neat. It is the handwriting of someone who does not consider themselves artistic, for whom clarity and purity of form are important. There are no frills, no extra strokes. The joins are fluid, but the letters are precisely separated by an instant’s hesitation. The ink is black. The pen was not a ballpoint, but a fountain pen, and it must be one which she keeps for correspondence with home, because it would never survive the harsh use of nursing, most especially not here, in the Elective Theatre.

You asked if I would marry you. I did not know then, and I do not know now, the answer to that question. I do not know you, which is one reason I want to go out on a date with you. Another is that I think if I don’t have some laughs I will probably stick a scalpel in the senior medical officer the next time he asks me to triage his patients for him. You should consider the risks involved, however; even the fact that I am writing this letter to a man I have never formally met, and who asked me to marry him with the drip still in his arm, would seem to imply that I have lost my grip on conventional behaviour. Since I am also fatigued, furious, insomniac and having fantasies of violence against a harmless old lecher who is only trying to do his best in an impossible situation, it seems possible that I may be developing a light stress-induced psychosis, which, though harmless in the long term, may make me an even worse romantic bet than a man who, according to his medical chart, has been burned, run over, repeatedly infected by local diseases, assaulted by a rabid cat and finally blown up by his own side.

With these minor reservations in mind, let me make it absolutely clear that if you ask me out I will say yes, which I hope will remove the element of self-doubt from your decision-making.

Leah

x

Egon Schlender watches my face throughout, his little, clever eyes reading me in turn. He only glances away to look over my head from time to time in what I take to be some kind of residual awareness that staring is either rude or faintly alarming. I do not put down the letter. I fold it along its pre-existing creases and put it back in the envelope, and Egon Schlender watches me for signs of what I will say and whether he is going to have to rip the drip from my vein and beat me to death with a blood rack in order to keep his friend’s heart unbroken. His tapered fingers are tapping a slow, steady rhythm on his knee. I do not have a breast pocket, because I am wearing a hospital gown and not a jacket, so I cannot put the envelope anywhere except next to my skin. It rubs gently, the crisp edges occasionally snagging a hair or an old scar, and I am able by concentrating on it very hard to avoid weeping openly. When I have gotten used to the feeling of having it there (and there it will remain, one way or another, for ever) I look up at Egon Schlender.

“Would you tell Leah, please, that I said yes? That I said yes, yes, yes? That this is the most beautiful thing—that she is—I have ever seen?”

Egon Schlender stands up silently, although there is a strong sense of approval in his face, and walks out. And behind me I hear the sound of her breathing, and I realise that she has stood at the head of my bed throughout, and now she moves to kneel on the floor beside me so that she can stare at me eye to eye, and we stay like that for some time, her two hands on my good one.

I have a date in a war zone.

That’s not bad going, actually, but now I need an Italian trattoria with check tablecloths and linen napkins. I need bruschetta (that’s “broo-SKET-uh,” not “brushetter,” a slender piece of ciabatta toasted and brushed with garlic and oil and covered in fresh tomato and basil—the chunks inevitably fall off the bread and the olive oil runs over your lips and down your chin. The whole thing is delicious, deeply physical and delightfully undignified, and a woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it’s messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn’t afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that) and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano (from the Cantine Innocenti, of course) and the view from the hills and all the trimmings. I need things which are in no way obtainable, and I need them so that the one good thing in the world will not go away. Fortunately, I have an edge, an old friend who has joined the hero club. If anyone can get me a bottle of plonk and a room with a view in a war zone, he will be it.

“WHO IS SHE?” Gonzo wants to know, as he sits at my bedside with his rugged health and his big bear shoulders rippling in his special forces jacket, and at that moment Leah appears to check my chart and tell him sternly not to wear me out, and to remind me that I am due for discharge tomorrow and not to screw it up. Gonzo’s eyes follow her and check her chart and his hands-off-respectful look is a bit wistful, and when she marches out again without sparing him a second glance he pronounces her good.

“You want me to talk to some guys about some things?” Gonzo asks. “There’s a place out past Red Sector which has an old castle. And a guy I know knows a guy who confiscated some silverware.”

It turns out that between the loot secured in the course of liberating Addeh Katir from our fellow protectors, and the architecture of the cryptocommunist maharajas, I just might get a date after all, although Gonzo suggests I wait until the minefield is entirely laid out and the AA defences are properly entrenched, and then if there’s a bombing raid we will get fireworks after dinner. The only hiccough is that although the fighting has moved on, Red Sector is still classed as a combat zone (unlike, to take a random example, the town where I was blown up, which is supposed to be reasonably safe), so we have to be ordered there. But Gonzo knows ways and means here as well, is an old hand at securing stern injunctions to do as he will, and puts together a mission profile with zero risk which requires the presence of a small commando team (Gonzo and his SpecOps chef, a team of heavily armed and lethal waiters and a command and control unit with a stove), an upper-echelon presence (me and a table for two, napkins officially classed as “flag patches, white linen, surplus”) and a medical officer (Leah in a fetchingly close-cut paramedic jumpsuit with pockets in most intriguing places). Gonzo, as maître d’, is pleased to inform me that there is space in the grill room at seven-thirty.

. . .

RED SECTOR IS HILLY and cool, and there’s a small river which does not have anything unpleasant floating in it. Our light-armoured transport is basically a recreational vehicle pimped by Rambo. Leah sits on my knee, because there is no room for her elsewhere (Gonzo’s calculations regarding gear and manpower were precisely calibrated, possibly to achieve exactly this), and her hair smells of heat and of her. Her hand balances on my shoulder. This proximity is making me extremely horny, and it gets no better when she leans back and stretches because she is cramped (or possibly because she, better even than Gonzo, knows the value of casual contact and accidental rubbings and touches, and she is well aware that her rear sliding over my thighs and her pale neck right there in front of me are causing an involuntary, embarrassing and deeply enjoyable physical reaction in my groin, to wit, a boner of truly splendid solidity which would be visible if she turned so much as a quarter circle and looked down, which she does not do, even when a gorgeous rose light paints the hills on that side of the car and she has to crane her neck to see it).

Behind us a big guy named Jim is driving another monster RV, this one fitted with a fifty-calibre machine gun, and behind the fifty-cal is a beefy, muscle-bound woman called Annabel by Gonzo and Ox by everyone else, and she appears to be speaking or yelling into the teeth of the wind.

I had believed, until earlier today, that SpecOps was a man’s world, and no doubt it used to be, but Annabel/Ox is not alone in Gonzo’s unit: there is also a pretty, long-limbed woman with cold eyes who is known mostly as Sally and sometimes as Eagle and who wears a khaki name badge reading “Culpepper” and when she arrived was carrying a long rifle over one long shoulder. Sally/Eagle rides next to Gonzo and occasionally makes course corrections, but mostly she scans the area with a pair of big spyglasses and draws Annabel’s attention to little heat pockets which might need to be rapidly sprayed with fifty-cal shells whose velocity and spin is so incredible that a near miss will kill you as surely as a hit.

For “little heat pockets” read “people,” although actually most of them so far have been weary, nervous sheep. A war zone is a bad place to be a sheep. It’s not a good place to be anything, but sheep generally are a bit stupid and devoid of tactical acumen and individual reasoning, and they approach problem-solving in a trial-and-error kind of a way. Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines. After the first member of a flock is blown up, the rest of the sheep automatically scatter in order to confuse the predator, and this, naturally, takes more than one of them onto yet another mine and there’s another woolly BOOM-splatterpitterslee-eutch, which is the noise of an average-sized sheep being propelled into the air by an anti-personnel mine and partially dispersed, the largest single piece falling to Earth as a semi-liquidised blob. This sound or its concomitant reality upsets the remaining sheep even more, and not until quite a few of them have been showered over the neighbourhood do they get the notion that the only safe course is the reverse course. By this time, alas, they have forgotten where that is, and the whole thing begins again. BOOM.

The first corollary of this is that sheep are a nightmare if you’re trying to construct a perimeter defence, because they can end up cutting a path right through it and leaving themselves in pieces as markers showing the cleared route to all comers. For this reason, many military officers now order a mass execution of unsecured sheep when fortifying a position, incidentally incurring the deep displeasure of local shepherds and creating yet another group of grumpy, armed persons who will shoot at anything in a uniform. Knowing this, George Copsen has taken a pro-sheep position, in the vague hope that Baptiste Vasille or Ruth Kemner will begin the ovicide (which may or may not be the official word for a killing of sheep) and suffer the consequences. So far, it hasn’t happened, and a kind of steely cold war of livestock has developed in which we drive sheep towards the other forces in the hope of triggering a slaughter, and they drive them at us with very much the same in mind. An unofficial book is being made on which area commander will snap first, and the betting heavily favours Ruth Kemner, who is apparently something of a scary lady.

The second corollary, which is more interesting in an academic sense, but utterly irrelevant in the real world, is that sheep surviving for a prolonged period in a heavily mined area will gradually evolve, and left long enough would develop into more intelligent, combat-hardened sheep, possibly with sonar for probing the earth in front of them, extremely long legs for stepping over suspect objects and large flat feet to distribute pressure evenly and avoid activating the fuse. A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.

The sheep currently surrounding us have not yet had time to evolve physically, and in the meantime have evolved behaviours and coping strategies instead. They follow humans quite precisely, walk slowly and the flock unit has been replaced by a loose-knit affiliation of individual sheep carefully watching each other for signs of suddenly flying into the air and getting spread all over the place. Some have started walking in single file. Loud bangs no longer scare them, or possibly they have gone deaf, and there is a sharp, alert feeling about them which suggests they know exactly where they have just stepped and can retreat along their own hoofprints quite readily. The march of progress has reached even unto the sheep of Addeh Katir.

Just before Red Gate there is an actual Katiri village, or bazaar, or some muddled combination of the two. It is close enough to our emplacements to have fallen inside our defensive net, but far enough away that it has avoided becoming a target. Its name is Fudin, a name to be spoken tonally, carefully and reverently, in the rippling language of Addeh Katir. Fudin is more than a name, it’s a snatch of song.

Gonzo curls us into Fudin to pick up some extras for the feast, and also because the vaulted marketplace there is one of the few remaining things in the whole of Addeh Katir which points to what is buried in the ruins. It is striped like a Gothic cathedral, tiled like Babylon in rich blues and filled with pools and alcoves. It is also of course an outpost of the black market (possibly even a festerance), and Erwin Kumar and probably also our government would be jolly cross if they knew that it was here, operating under our protection. We have conquered this village (except that we haven’t, because we don’t, because we are at un-war and we don’t occupy, we just sort of live in and around and provide staff and police) but it belongs to Zaher Bey.

This is the closest Addeh Katir has to a neutral place, and we wander, ignored by the shoppers. I smell bacon and cooked meat, then fruit, then something pungent and exciting I cannot name. The market is lit with candles and oil lamps which hang from hooks set into the tiles. The lanterns look as if they have been here since before I was born. They probably have. (Leah’s shoulder fits perfectly under my arm. I can feel her against me, her fingers on my back. I stroke her hip very lightly, and she shivers.)

With a thunderous clapping of hands, a dark-eyed man in a glittering hat and a fine white shirt demands our attention. Having got it, he bounces forward and embraces us all at once, as if he has been waiting for us and only us for days, and where have we been? The shirt strains over his considerable belly and the nethermost button gives up the struggle. A slice of smooth brown skin is briefly revealed, startlingly naked. He smells of . . .

“Saffron! Yes! We have been saffron men since before the British!” he trumpets. “We were always saffron men. Our children are born with saffron hearts, our mothers sing the weights and measures to send us to sleep. There are no other true saffron men in Addeh Katir; Fudin is the place where saffron wants to be sold.” He leans close and grins. “If you throw a box of saffron up in the air anywhere in the whole of Asia (except maybe in bloody Russia, which is a crazy mad place full of the children of bears and wanton women from the ice), that saffron will blow in the wind until it falls like rain here in Fudin, and I, Rao Tsur, will be standing outside with a box to catch it in, and welcome it home. We know the secret whispers of saffron; we know how to love it and keep it, and we sell it only to the deserving, always at a fair price . . .” He peers at Gonzo, as if unsure, and then his eye lights on me, and on Leah, and he erupts again. “Saffron is for lovers! There! These two, they are lovers, yes? Hmm?”

And at this point, because our delighted humiliation is not complete, it appears that Rao Tsur has a wife. She is lean, and beautiful in a mournful way. She throws up long arms and spreads wide immense hands. Her elbows bend and straighten, and she looks like an angry heron.

“You are an oaf! Yes, Rao, yes, you are. I am married to a buffoon. May you be forgiven for your clumsiness, so that the shame does not grow too much for me and kill me stone dead where I stand. Yes, stone dead. Yes. My mother (bless her dead and departed soul) was an idiot when she promised me to you. Oh, she said, any child of my friend Seeta and my friend Li will be a fine man, because she is wise and he is beautiful and both are loyal. Oh yes, she said, it’s a fine thing I do now for my daughter. Bah! Do you hear me? Bah! And I, fool child, I looked at the broad-shouldered youth they showed me when it was time, and I saw the fire in his eyes and it lit me up like a tramp! Oh, yes, we were young then, and I thought of nothing but arching backs and sweat and the pumping, clenching ecstasy! I nodded, I agreed to my own doom, thinking with my crotch! Hah! But now look! He is fat! Fat, here and now, when the world is starving all around! How does he do it? Who knows? Not me, who have grown scrawny! Thin like a spider, a witch to fright the children, a stick woman to be broken by the wind. Oh, there was a time when I was fine, with a proud chest like a maharaja’s pillow, all covered in silk. A chest to drive frenzies of lust, to start fights and make women tear at their hair. Hah! But now look”—and here she thrusts out for our inspection an impressive bosom, little weathered by time or hard living, and the muscles in her neck pronounce her fit and strong—“I am a waif! A wreck! And all because of you!” she adds to Rao Tsur, who is admiring the presented cleavage with some interest. “And now, when you should be selling saffron to feed your family and maybe, just maybe, restore to your ailing wife her former strength and beauty, though God knows her looks have departed under your wastrel management and she is dowdy and no doubt you mean to put her aside like a torn waistcoat, now, I say, you are offending these good people, because a blind man could see they are not lovers, not yet, and you have embarrassed them and maybe now it will never be! You may well cringe, husband, like a lardy, corpulent dog with a mouthful of your master’s dinner! You have placed their love in jeopardy, idiot man, and what price saffron in a world where love is unsound? Eh? Eh? Bah!” And with that she collapses into a chair and scowls at him, drumming her fingertips together.

Rao Tsur looks at us, apologetic, and draws close.

“Acute embarrassment. I mingle my responsibilities. This ailing madwoman was placed in my care (curse my compassionate nature and my promise to my father always to succour the weak!) when I was a younger man, just starting in the world. She believed herself a hedgehog then, and spoke not a word. It was a simple thing to tend to her. A bowl of goat’s milk and a warm box of straw and she was quite content. Alas! I meddled, for she was of such surpassing beauty that I fancied God, divine and high above, could not intend her to be thus for evermore. No, I thought, surely this creature has a higher purpose, an angelic destiny. (Not that I fancied myself a part of it, you understand, no, no, for Rao is modest, you see. No, a mere conduit to greatness, a catalyst, is Rao.) Thus, I coaxed her to the schoolhouse and there educated her in simple language and science, what history and art I knew, along the way demonstrating the fallacy of the hedgehog conceit. She took to learning as if born to it, and I rejoiced, thinking I had played my role in God’s creation. Oh, yes, I was quite cock-a-hoop. But, alas for Rao! I unleashed a monster! She delights in the most foul-mouthed and lascivious pronouncements, and her delusions evolved along with her cognition! Her lusts now focus not on male hedgehogs, which are at least able to defend themselves, but on poor honest Rao! She believes herself my wife. And worse, she has acquired (through ceaseless acts of copulation with troglodytes and roadside peddlers) a brood of children more appalling even than herself! Unhappy Rao, fettered to a howling succubus and her demonic brats, forever punished for his presumption . . . and yet . . . in this rare instance one perceives she has uncovered a fragment of the truth, as a pig scratching in the earth uncovers, without comprehending, the cornerstone of a temple. You are not lovers! I have offended you! I have spoken out of turn (this hag’s infections of the mind are virulently contagious) and I would make amends . . . perhaps a reduced price, if you wished to purchase a large quantity?”

THE ROAD goes by slowly, miles of hill country giving way to forests. I drift, lulled by the soft, easy pressure of Leah’s rump against my lower body. She leans back onto me, perspiration diffusing through her clothes, a wicked, sexual marzipan smell, brushed with a sharp tar of hospital. She cannot fail to be aware that I am daydreaming of her, of her mouth and her buttocks. We are too close together now for such secrets. She lets her head rest against mine, and breathes out against my skin. There is a waft of this morning’s mint toothpaste, and then I can taste her lungs; intimate exhalation.

We round a corner and the road becomes a dirt track and it winds up a madly perfect woody hillside—maybe even a mountainside—to a temple-shaped sort of thing with minarets and a long jutting balcony facing west, and I realise that this is where I’m going. I’m having my date in Shangri-La. Leah gasps and yips, and Gonzo throws me a pure puppy grin like “Did I do you proud?” and I nod and laugh out loud at the sheer amazingness of it and smack him on the back, and we wind on up the snaky path.

We park in a forecourt strewn with actual gravel. Leah and I start trying to unload the gear and Gonzo sternly tells us to go get ready and if they’re still fixing the place up when we get back, we can stroll a bit. He actually says “stroll like lovers” and Leah and I look hurriedly away from each other in case one of us is thinking no or maybe in case we’re both thinking yes, because that would be too soon, too much, all crunched up before we’ve had a chance to enjoy courting. Leah nods at me and scurries off breathlessly to “get changed.” The SpecOps waiters abduct my command table and Sally “Eagle” Culpepper vanishes to the top of one of the minarets and unlimbers her long gun and seems to disappear against the stonework. Gonzo draws me off to one side and produces of all things a camouflaged suit-carrier, from which emerges a dark suit in approximately my size and a shirt not stained with dust or blood. He shows me to an empty, dry little room with a cracked mirror and an orchid growing in through the window.

When I return to the long balcony, Leah is standing at the very end in her jumpsuit and I feel a bit awkward in my knock-off Armani, until she turns and her eyes light up and she seems to be sizing me up in a most pleasing manner. Then she reaches for the zipper on her jumpsuit and pulls it all the way down, and it drops off her shoulders and she peels it down over her chest and reveals a shiny, rippling gown which tumbles in a lean curve from white shoulder to well-turned ankle, because from somewhere, no doubt by girl magic, she has located a silk dress. Gonzo, master of all things, obtained for me a civvy suit, but not even he could manage glamour. Without his help, using only the secret communications of women, Leah has contrived to look like an Oscar winner. She wriggles. The creases fall out, and she steps from her jumpsuit, barefoot, and kisses me, then breaks away and whoops into the gathering dusk. A whooping woman in an evening gown is a woman to delight in.

Candlelit dinner for two at Maison Gonzo lasts until one in the morning. It is not actual Italian cuisine, but rather a wild blend of Asia and southern European, moistened with a wine-like drink bought from a friend of Rao Tsur, who makes it out of mango. We look at one another across the table, and our fingers touch when I pass the water jug and it is almost unbearable, and then there is dancing. Annabel (known to me now as Annie) sings jazz and Gonzo accompanies her on paper and comb. Big Jim Hepsobah is percussion, and there’s a ring of steel around us, a one-hundred-metre hard cordon backed up by Eagle and her imaging gear and that scary gun—although Gonzo assures me, as he leads us to our accommodation for the night, that Sally’s night goggles will not be pointed our way from now on. This is private time. He throws wide the door to a prince’s chamber and hugs me, and departs to go do whatever reconnaissance he has promised in exchange for this date. There are two beds, but Leah has no time for my chivalrous notions and we tumble desperately into one. And that is all you need to know about that part. Sleep takes us sometime later, wrapped in rich musk and honeysuckle.

BOOTED FEET on stone, and clattering intensity. Gonzo, at speed and professional, and I wake because some part of me, even post-coital and even after a period of separation, knows the pattern of his urgency. I am standing by the time he reaches the bed, and he tosses me two bundles and Leah wakes smoothly too, because nurses know about crisis. I shake the bundles out as Gonzo vanishes again through the door, and realise that he was wearing a full moonsuit, and that we too are being put into biochem gear, and this means something very bad; it means that they or we have gone non-conventional, and since we don’t have biochem (we have more terrible things, as I know well) it can only be them, and they have made a very serious mistake and this theatre is about to be the testing ground for Professor Derek’s baby. That’s a horrible idea and I want to be appalled by it but that will have to wait, because right now I am zipping Leah into her moonsuit and taping the tag down and she is doing the same for me in turn, and we are trotting, shuffling, galloping out of paradise and back to the convoy, and the suit smells of other people’s armpits and latex and silicon and my own fear, and ever so slightly of Leah’s body and mine.

“Chemical,” Gonzo is saying, “sarin base, five kilometres. Wind?”

And Eagle says, “Thirty off,” which means the gas will probably blow past us, because the wind is thirty degrees off true, true being the line between the gas contact and us. And then some bastard says:

“Second contact!” and it’s Gonzo. The gas is on a broad front, and thirty degrees will clip us, test our moonsuit seals, and everyone checks their seams again and Jim Hepsobah in the other RV tosses some silicon to Annie and tells her to come inside, no one’s going to shoot at us right now and if they do we’re just gonna run like hell, and we career away down the road. Sally Culpepper is on the radio warning the units ahead of us and the rest of the SpecOps waiters are alert but basically pretty chilled out, because they maintain their own suits and they know there’s nothing wrong with them. Leah puts her hand in mine and she is shaking, just like me, and she rests her helmet against mine and stares into my eyes and I know, I know, that as long as we look at each other like that, everything will be fine.

Everything is fine.

Until we get to Red Gate and Captain-idiot Ben Carsville.

Captain Carsville is a fantasist who lives war as movies. He’s something between a running joke and a sucking chest wound. He made captain in peacetime, promoted over better soldiers because he looks good on a poster and he walks and talks the way a soldier should. He dodges and ducks under fire, scurries this way and that, panther-crawls and rolls and dummies. For the record, the best way not to get shot when you’re under fire is to run as fast as possible in a moderately straight line towards the nearest cover and stay there. If you have to advance, then you leapfrog one another, each man doing this until you get to the target. Unless you are very, very close indeed to the person shooting at you, zigging and zagging just tires you out and gives him the opportunity to shoot at you for longer.

Ben Carsville is preternaturally beautiful in a profoundly masculine way. Looking at him makes you want to listen, rapt, to his perfect voice and his perfect wisdom as it proceeds from his perfect mouth. Sadly, when he speaks, his perfect tones are the harbingers of the perfect screw-up. Carsville grew up on war porn: films made by guys who had never seen real war, comics about men with names like Private Grit and Big Roy Solid. He was a cadet, and then he was a lieutenant on a police action which never really kicked off beyond a few riots and a car bomb which didn’t go off. His only combat experience comes from some brief forays on the fringes of this war, “fact-finding” with visiting politicians. Ben Carsville thinks war is a sort of manly sport, and casualties are just what happens when you play.

He also thinks this gas attack is some sort of ruse. Gonzo and his guys have been taken in by the Enemy. They have been fed false data somehow, and now they are being used to convince wise and mighty Captain Carsville to abandon his position so that the Enemy can simply wander in, whereupon the Enemy will have some sort of party in which they will throw soft-boiled eggs at pictures of Ben Carsville and mock him with their smiles. He has, in accordance with his moderately weird perception of the situation, not given the order to his soldiers to suit up, and has not told the Katiris in Fudin what is happening. Anticipating an assault on his position, he wants us to hang around to support his troops, and he intends, seriously, to send Gonzo & Co. back along our route to assess the threat. This does not put Gonzo in a cooperative and conciliatory mood. It puts him into a big, angry, SpecOps snit.

“Wind?” Gonzo demands.

“Twenty-five off,” Eagle tells him, which is worse than it was.

“Time to contact?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Calling it five hundred and forty seconds . . . mark.”

This means that there’s still plenty of time to get soldiers kitted up and even enough time to evacuate most of the Katiris, although they’ll have to drive very, very fast on some fairly nasty roads. Gonzo is counting as we go through ID checks, counting as we get confirmation, counting as we approach the captain’s position, counting as Ben Carsville still doesn’t issue the order and counting out loud as he storms into the command tent with his rank insignia in one hand and the gas detector badge from his reconnaissance in the other. Gonzo stood in a cloud of gas and watched the chemical film react to the stuff. He knows he has not been misled or hornswaggled. He has no time for this shit. In fact, he knows exactly how little time he has, because he is counting it down out loud.

“(Four hundred and twenty-five seconds), Carsville, you are a fucking arsewart, what the fuck do you think you are doing? Are you (four hundred and twenty) out of your miserable fucking mind? There is a major, for real, treaty-busting, huge goatfuck disaster of a gas attack and you are right in the middle of it and you are wearing your (four hundred and fifteen) forgodsakes dressing gown and where the fuck did you get that, you mad-crazy prick? (Four hundred and ten) you unbelievable idiot!”

Carsville doesn’t pay any attention to the language because Gonzo is special forces and Carsville knows he won’t get anywhere with arguing about a few curses, but he leans back photogenically and demands to know what those numbers are, soldier and what the hell do you know about it, and when Gonzo lunges forward to grab him by the ears and beat him sensible, Carsville pulls a pistol from his dressing gown and flicks his thumb across the safety to release it. The outcomes of close combat with a loaded handgun are also distressingly unpredictable. Not even Gonzo can dodge bullets and while Carsville may be an idiot he’s not a bad shot or even necessarily a bad fighter, so we all stand there like stalagmites while Gonzo mutters, “Four hundred oh oh, arsehole arsehole arsehole!”

Gonzo turns sharply on his heel as if Carsville has ceased to exist, walks out of the command tent and grabs the nearest grunt and tells him there’s a chemical shitstorm coming down and to sound the alarm and tell the Katiris to evac and that he has at best three hundred and fifty-five seconds before this pleasant spot turns into a field of the dead. And Carsville, who has followed him out, points his gun at his own sentry and tells him to belay that order, and here we are again, only this time he’s also telling Gonzo to get out of his moonsuit. Gonzo pulls the mask of the moonsuit up. Carsville shifts his aim and cocks the hammer, and everything is buggered up.

I step sideways, and say something like, “Gonzo, take the goddam suit off, man,” secure in the knowledge that Gonzo is not about to do anything of the kind, because getting shot is one kind of bad, but getting gassed is quite another. Carsville cannot see my eyes, or detect the smooth current of information passing between myself and my oldest friend. He cannot hear the dialogue we do not speak.

Gonzo yells at me to shut up. I call him some unpleasant names. He takes offence, gets in my face and, when I won’t give way, he shoves me. This puts me between him and Carsville, who lowers his gun slightly because I am on his side and he doesn’t want to shoot me. Alas, I am suddenly very clumsy—Oh, my stars and garters, what have I done? I stumble into the captain. He discharges his weapon at the ground and I (with more than moderate satisfaction) smack Captain Ben Carsville’s idiot mouth as hard as I can without breaking my hand, and crack his arm like a whip, so that it comes unstuck in some fundamental way and he drops the gun.

Carsville whimpers and the sentry goggles at me. My military career looks a bit rocky, because this does not even slightly qualify as a legitimate action, but if I am court-martialled I will go out saving a bunch of lives instead of ending them, and this has a certain charm. The military has dealt with this kind of court martial before. People get sternly reprimanded and thrown out with a promotion and a medal, and let that be a lesson! Leah is staring at me with wide eyes which have more than a little approval in them, and she hastens to reassemble Carsville’s arm in what I suspect may be an unnecessarily painful way, because he passes out and therefore cannot give countervailing orders to his men, who snap into action as Gonzo tells them to move out. His tone implies that, having broken one arm today, I may suddenly have developed a taste for arms in general, but also is so honestly urgent that the threat is unnecessary and perhaps even unnoticed. Ben Carsville is bundled into his own staff car and driven away at speed. We get back in our RVs and charge on to Fudin.

The sad truth is that Ben Carsville has probably wasted too much time. Even with the company from Red Gate with us, there’s no chance we can get them all out. It’s going to be first come, first saved, and the rest will shift as best they can. I can’t tell whether Leah has realised. Probably she has; she understands triage. Likely we will see a riot, a living mass of fear and anger composed of people no longer acting as individuals. We may have to shoot a few of them to save the rest. It’s arguable whether we should attempt a rescue at all, but Gonzo has no time for arguable, and the decision is his, and no one here would quibble anyway.

It’s possible that the people of Fudin will refuse our help. They may not believe us. They may choose to think we are lying when the alternative is cataclysm. We may have to leave again, abandon them to death because we are not credible, or the news we bring is too vast to be comprehensible in the time we have. We may fail without being allowed to try.

I’ve known this whole un-war business was stupid for a while. I’ve never liked it, but I haven’t hated it until now. I am wondering whether Rao Tsur and his wife will greet annihilation with the same wit they showed in the marketplace; whether Mrs. Tsur will beg Jim Hepsobah to take her youngest son on his lap when there is no more space; whether she will stand like a pillar and hold her children while we depart; whether she will fling herself on us in a rage, or watch us struggle to save who we can with the eerie, patient understanding of imminent death; whether Rao will seek to reach an accommodation for the safety of his family, or whether we will see something darker and more horrible as he abandons them. Perhaps his love is a weak thing. Perhaps he does mean to exchange her for a younger model, or perhaps he simply values his own life over hers. Perhaps he will default, demand passage for himself alone, even try to bribe us. I think, if he does that, that I will kill him.

All these things and more I am prepared for in Fudin. I am not prepared for a stock car rally. But that is what I get.

Jim Hepsobah spins the wheel and brings us around the last bend into Fudin, and there are forty particoloured street-racers in a neat grid pattern, with families piling into them: goats and suitcases and children being loaded onto roofracks, and slender Katiri wives and tubby patriarchs and serious teenagers climbing aboard without hesitation or mishap. As soon as each car is filled it takes off, from the front of the grid, as if this were a Swiss taxi rank. Fudin is almost empty, which means that over a hundred cars have already left.

Each motor is driven by an energetic young person in a very expensive, personalised version of the suits we are wearing. Expensive, because tailored and cut to fit, and therefore figure-hugging and distinctly stylish. Their crash helmets are fitted onto the necks of their suits, so they look like science-fiction heroes or very rich technobikers from Silicon Valley, but each of them has a different pattern painted onto his or her back; they are a forest of dragons and courtesans and pirates. The word zings around inside my head: piratespiratespirates. Although there is more to them than yo-ho-ho. There is a deliberateness and a quiet centre. Pirate-monks, maybe.

They carry bags for their passengers, hold open doors for older ladies, and run around and zoom away, and they are managing this magic, this impossibly competent evacuation, with music. They clap, sing and stamp. Humanitarianism in four four time. The people of Fudin move with the beat (it’s almost impossible not to) so no one trips and no one gets in anyone’s way. Load-the-roof two three four, get-in-the-car two three four, all-here? two three four, vavavoom two three four, and another row of rescue wagons roars off the grid and now there are only thirty-two.

Standing in the middle of all this smoothly functioning chaos is a little bearded geezer with a round head and a glinting, challenging smile which would stand him in good stead in a toothpaste commercial aimed at moderately wealthy, moderately devout (moderately scandalous in youth but now moderately reformed) Asian gentlemen of good family. He is dressed in a pair of linen trousers and an open-necked shirt, over which he wears a leather jerkin. Around his middle is a red sash or cummerbund, from which depends a small collection of utilities and two items I can describe only as cutlasses. He is oddly and acutely familiar, but as he is at one and the same time directing refugee traffic, conducting an impromptu rhythm collective and speaking waspishly with a village elder who has taken it into her head that she will remain here, and since while he manages these small matters he is also fighting off the efforts of a scrawny, nervous grand-vizier-looking bloke who’s trying to get him into a moonsuit, it’s not easy to compare him with other memories.

Finally, he turns to the scrawny cohort and shoos him away, grabs the matron by one bony hand and, in the face of her delighted protests, sweeps her bodily from her feet. This bundle of femininity impedes him not at all as he bolts (fifteen seconds remaining by Gonzo’s original count and at most sixty-five by the new one) for the hindmost car in the grid, which stands out from the others like a falcon among sparrows.

The car is not a street-racer. None of them, of course, started out that way, but this one even less so. Unlike its gaudy brethren, it is not a Honda Civic bursting with nitrous oxide systems and warranty-voiding gearbox enhancements or a roaring Focus tooled to go like a rocketship. It is not even a frog-green Subaru with a turbo and wide wheels like a sealion’s arse. It is a muted maroon colour, and it is as dignified as it is powerful. It looks distinctly bulletproof and the glass windows are smoked, but even so it’s possible to see that this car has curtains. It also has a silver angel on the front end and the kind of engine they used to put in small planes. Quite possibly it will catch up with the front runners before it has to change gear. It is unmistakably a Rolls-Royce, but it is a Rolls-Royce the way Koh-i-noor is a diamond.

Into the unlikely evac vehicle goes the matron, hooting with laughter now at this scandalous chivalry, and a brief glimpse of the interior tells me that the car has an independent air supply. Once the hermetic door shuts, the passengers are safe and sound, and the vizier, who apparently doubles as driver, bundles himself aboard. With one last look to be sure the evacuation is complete, the bearded geezer glances at us and raises his hand to sign okay and possibly thank you, and dives into his car, which waits a heartbeat for the juiced-up Saab in front to make some space and then there’s a noise like the old bull shaking his head at the young one (“No, son, we’re not gonna run down and fuck one of those cows, we’re gonna walk and fuck ’em all”) and the Roller disappears from view in a cloud of its own dust. The convoy is moving like a gazelle herd, each individual weaving around the others, evasive, chaotic, purposive. Those immensely well-dressed personages have done Ronnie Cheung’s tactical automotive course, or rather they have done one very like it. An advanced one for people who are intending to spend serious time in cars getting into trouble.

Gonzo stares after the Rolls-Royce. He has heroismus interruptus. He was ready, right then, to coordinate four or five hundred terrified civvies, lay down his life, kill for them, make a legend of disinterested soldiering. It’s not that he resents what has happened, but he’s having trouble changing gear. He was expecting to take charge. Instead he is struggling to keep up with a sexagenarian Mystery Man with an Errol Flynn grin who commands a legion of pirate-monk rally drivers and sweeps formidable older women from their feet in a cloud of cologne and Asian-Monarchic style. Deep in Gonzo’s medula oblongata, the lizardy brainstem which manages the most basic functions of living, part of him knows that this technique would work with equal facility on younger and more charming women, and knows this because Eagle Sally Culpepper has caught her breath and even Annie the Ox, utterly uninterested in men per se, has not stopped looking after the departing machines. Leah, forever blessed, is grinning, but her hand has not slackened in my grip and her delight is for the impish theatre of it all. Gonzo’s inner reptile recognises a competitor. But, more important, he is now playing an unfamiliar game—follow-the-leader.

We rush headlong after the pirate convoy, and then—no doubt in obedience to some order from the enormous Rolls-Royce—the driver ahead of us makes a dogleg right across an area marked on our map as non-traversable. The whole cavalcade is streaming out into a snarl of underbrush and rubble and impassable ravines, the brightly coloured cars vanishing rapidly amid the crags. Their dust cloud whips away in the wind, the last Civic ducks down into a dip and they have disappeared entirely. I glance at the map. In that direction a few months ago lay a muddle of buildings, stony outcroppings and forest, a region part sparse conurbation and part mountain (“conruration?”), now riven through with burned, bombed-flat land and dried-out stream beds and air-dropped anti-personnel mines. If the road still exists, or the riverbed is solid, they might reach the mountains, or loop around to Lake Addeh and its islands. But whether that is what they will do, and whether we would be welcome if we tried to follow, we do not find out. Gonzo growls to Jim Hepsobah, and we let them go, following the road we know towards the uncertain safety of Command HQ.

PLASTIC HANDCUFF STRIPS and “Fall in two men, left right left right!” It is not quite the hero’s welcome, but nor is it an actual firing squad, and since I arrived in the Elective Theatre I have learned that very few people share our perceptions of when they should be grateful to us. Gonzo’s guys do not officially exist at all and therefore cannot be tried in a court martial without compromising national security. Leah is a civilian nurse, leaving only me for Carsville’s wrath, which is fine by him anyway because I’m the one who messed up his arm. The fact that I was right to do so, that a lethal gas attack was in fact taking place, probably makes it worse. And thus my tickertape parade takes the form of two large military policemen with sidearms and blank faces. But Carsville too must be feeling the bite of disappointment, because there’s a lack of enthusiasm about the MPs and they don’t mock me or rough me up; they just clap me in irons in a mildly apologetic way, and manage not to pat me on the back or give me a hug.

Ben Carsville is not well liked, and his attempt to force his unit to commit gas seppuku has not improved his position with the men. Also, while I was out of line, my rank status is blurry and Carsville was wrong. Thus, Copsen’s office not the stockade. General Copsen looks tense and distracted. There is a red phone on his desk and he has moved it to a convenient position, and this I take to mean that our considered response is right now being reconsidered. George Copsen is a man with a lot of other things to do, and this whole subplot involving one of his picked guys and some Ride of the Valkyries wannabe is ticking him off. There’s serious things happening. For any number of years, the doctrine has been the same: we answer weapons of mass destruction with payment in kind, and ours are bigger than yours, so watch it. To do this now could change the face of the world, because General George didn’t bother to bring any of the staples of unconventional war to this front. He left the deniable biologicals and the mislabelled chemicals and the acknowledged-but-downplayed nuclear deterrents at home, and brought his newest and his best: Professor Derek’s baby. But when he uses it, people are definitely going to go apeshit and get nervous, and activate missile defences all around the world, because making the bad guys vanish entirely is going to put the wind up our friends and enemies alike. The world will change, just as it did on 6th August 1945. It’s good to know he and his bosses are taking a couple of hours to chew it over, maybe even wondering whether it’s a good idea.

Copsen waves at me to sit. He waves at Carsville to sit. He does not need this right now. He does not want us here. He has nothing to do until the phone rings, but by the same token he needs to be composed. He is in a very big, very lofty, very cold chair.

“Tell me,” George Copsen says tiredly, “what you thought you were doing?”

I have no idea. I do not say anything. I stare back at him, voiceless. Gonzo would know what to say. Gonzo would be forthright. Gonzo would explain in manly tones and make it all okay with General George.

“I exercised my discretion as area commander,” says Ben Carsville in manly tones. George Copsen’s face goes quite opaque. He was not talking to Carsville. His anger was directed at me—at least for the moment. I have been irresponsible, and having shanghaied me and trained me and godfathered my admittance to the general staff, he is feeling betrayed and let down. He had it in mind to give me a paternal chewing-out before letting me go back to my tent to consider my faults. His game plan for this meeting was to let off some steam dressing me down and then accept Carsville’s apology for bad judgement and parlay that into a let-off for me. Carsville would have done better to stay shut up. The notion that he might actually be unrepentant had clearly not occurred to General George, and it does not sit well with him.

“I understand that you . . . elected to disregard a gas alert?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That seems like a curious decision, Captain Carsville.”

“I considered it probably a ruse, sir.”

George Copsen clambers to his feet and walks around his desk to get a clear view.

“A ruse.”

“Yes, sir.”

George Copsen has a certain look about him. It starts at his epicanthic folds and whispers down around his mouth. It invites clarification. It is familiar to me from a certain room with a particular piece of furniture. It is not a look you want to ignore or trifle with. But Ben Carsville, even now, does not explain. He lets his honesty shine through, and his earnestness and his loyalty. He has taken a decision as the man on the ground. His decision—and his reasoning—need no explanation. He is Ben Carsville. He is still wearing a silk dressing gown.

“You,” says George Copsen, with some emphasis, “are a fucking liability. Lieutenant.” And as Carsville boggles at him, General George makes a little flicking gesture, so to say “I’m done with you.”

Lieutenant Carsville departs, pursued by bears.

George Copsen collapses into his chair and broods, and ignores me. He is staring at the red phone, daring it to ring. Finally he looks over at me and sighs.

“Screw-up,” says George Copsen. I am uncertain whether he means the situation or me personally. It had not crossed my mind until this moment that I gave a damn for his opinion. It appears that I do. I feel wretched for ten seconds, which is how long it takes me to stand, shakily, and make my best salute. I stand there, offering my apology in the only way which is permitted. My arm aches, and while I am apologising to the man, I cannot actually think of anything I am sorry for. George Copsen looks into my eyes, measuring, and unlike Master Wu, unlike the Evangelist, he does not seem convinced by what he sees there. On the other hand, what he is looking for may not be a thing I wish him to find. We are standing like this, assessing one another and trying to figure out what we want from one another, when a shrill, old-fashioned bleating fills the room. George Copsen beckons me sharply, because being pissed off with me is a thing which belongs in the time before the phone rang, before the crisis went live again. He lifts the red telephone and says:

“Copsen.”

Someone on the other end speaks, firmly and simply. General George either grows older or grows colder; it happens to him from within like a tall building being demolished or flowers growing in fast motion, and I realise that he is making himself into the cog, rather than the man. The saving grace of hierarchy—of the Government Machine—is this: George Copsen will execute the orders of his country, and in doing so he will kill thousands, maybe more. But it will not be his choice. It will be the action of a nation, a huge complex animal of which he is the tiniest part, albeit at this moment a significant part. George Copsen retreats and General Copsen emerges to take his place and keep him from going mad given what he will now do. This is a good thing for George. It may also be a good thing for the general, to be unhampered by his civilian self. Whether it is a good thing for anyone else is less clear.

The general squares his shoulders and begins running through his checklist. He activates my commission. I am now an officer in this war—and, as of a few moments ago, it is incontestably a war—with all the duties, rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. I will do what I have been trained to do. That is a little bit scary. I am assigned to Operations, which means that right now I am to go to the bank of screens on the far wall, and observe, and target, and relay my information to General Copsen (who moves from his desk to a command chair in the middle of the room) and to Colonel Tench and Brevet-Major Purvis, thus improving and refining our firing solutions, so that our use of weapons of mass destruction is accurate and irreproachable.

Together, we will make the enemy Go Away.