Killing for the Company

Some of the younger guys in camp had a habit of taking the piss out of Luke these days. To them, he was the old boy, with a flash of grey round his temples and a body scarred by a long career in the Regiment. Top brass had given him the opportunity to slow down a bit on any number of occasions. Take a training role. Move over to L Detachment as a PSI. Luke had resisted, preferring to mix it with the kids. To keep active. Plenty of the younger troopers thought he was nuts. Why wouldn’t you take the same pay for less aggro? Why wouldn’t you grab the chance not to have some extremist fuck using your arse for target practice?

Luke had his own reasons. Reasons he kept to himself, and which he probably couldn’t have wholly explained even if he’d wanted to. A sense he owed something. Whenever that thought crossed his mind, he would see Chet’s face. Scarred. Stony. The knowledge that his best friend was dead, killed in a tragic accident from which he couldn’t escape on account of an injury that should have been Luke’s. How often had he relived that night in Serbia so long ago? How often had he seen the fragmentation grenade rolling towards him, only to be kicked out of the way by Chet in one moment of selfless bravery?

And what right did Luke have to give up fighting, when the man who had saved his life would never fight again?

To keep fighting meant ensuring his Blade skills were sharper than sharp, his body in peak condition. So when the others were in the Hereford boozers drinking for England, Luke was gymning it or pounding the streets. And when his younger colleagues gave him the sarky comments, they did so knowingly. There wasn’t a man in Hereford who didn’t think Luke Mercer was the equal of anyone in the Regiment.

With the aid of a joystick, Luke was practising manoeuvring the sight mounted above the truck. Its accuracy and range were remarkable. On the screen in front of him, he could make out individual trees miles away in the distance. The THOR was intended to take out low-flying aircraft, but it also had ground-to-ground capability, and it was this that they were testing today.

‘Extra points,’ a voice behind him said, ‘if you can take out one of those fucking ramblers.’

Luke looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nigel Foster. Fozzie was a good lad. Luke had even forgiven him for getting his team compromised all those years ago in Iraq, when he and Finn had been forced to make a break for the Jordanian border. At least they’d all got out in one piece, which was more than he could say for the Mossad agent they’d picked up on the way. SIS had been quick to bury that one. Thanks, lads, for your help, now be terribly good boys, would you, and don’t mention Amit’s little personal firework display to another soul. Six months after he and Finn had made it over the border back into Jordan, Luke had made a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to locate Amit’s sister like he said he would. He’d drawn a blank, though, and there was no way he was going to use his contacts to dig a little deeper. That would have had the Firm sniffing round him like dogs round a bitch’s arse.

Luke had sometimes wondered what had happened to Abu Famir, the pain in the neck of an Iraqi do-gooder the coalition had been so eager to get their hands on, and for whose safety Amit had sacrificed himself. He had never seen or heard of the guy again, and sometimes he wondered what the point of the whole fucking escapade had been. Still, it wasn’t the first time the Regiment had been sent out to risk their lives on the whim of some bright spark in Whitehall. Wouldn’t be the last either.

Luke moved the joystick and the sights panned left. The image on the screen — gridded, and with a set of cross hairs at the centre — was amazingly clear given its distance: 7.3 klicks, at a bearing of 183 degrees. The Pinzgauer stood on a piece of high ground, so the line of sight over the Beacons was uninterrupted.

‘You finished admiring the scenery yet, mucker?’ Fozzie asked.

Luke didn’t reply. He panned slowly east, and just a few seconds later something caught his eye. He adjusted the instruments on the weapon’s control panel and the scene came more clearly into view. It was an old house. At least, it had been once. Now it was just a burned-out shell. A memory. And to Luke’s eyes, a tomb.

He stared at it for a few seconds, before sensing his mate looking over his shoulder. ‘We should lock on to the target, mucker,’ Fozzie said quietly.