And yet, intra-cranial pressure remained too high, and blood pressure was the same. He began to fear the neurosurgeon’s nightmare. If there had been catastrophic and diffuse axonal injury inflicted by those kicks, it would not show up, even on the scan. But if the brain stem or cortex was damaged beyond self-repair, the man would remain in a permanent vegetative state until the life-support system was switched off, or he would simply die. He resolved to do brain-stem tests after the weekend. Meanwhile, his wife was much looking forward to the lunch party in Oxfordshire with the people they had met in Corfu and she was waiting downstairs in the car. He looked down at his patient once again and left.
The adoo were coming out of the dead ground near the old stone fort and there were scores of them. He had seen them before on his tour with B Squadron in this bitter and secret war, but they had been distant figures against the dun brown hills and appearing in ones and twos. This was a full-scale mass attack and the fanatical bastards were swarming everywhere.
There were only ten of them, him and his mates; plus about fifty mixed askaris from the north, local gendarmes and some levies, the untrained and wild-firing firgas. Among his mob there were two ‘Ruperts’, two sergeants, a lance corporal and five troopers. He put the adoo already at over 200 and they were coming from all sides.
Lying flat on the roof of the Batthouse, he squinted down the sights of his SLR and slotted three adoo before they even knew where the fire was coming from. Not surprising, the roar of mortars and shells, the chatter of small arms was unremitting.
Had it not been for that single shot as the rebs swept over the outpost at Jebel Ali an hour earlier, they would have been finished already. The alert had given them a few minutes to take position before the first wave of attackers swept towards the wire. As it was, sheer numbers were moving the situation from piss-poor to desperate.
Down below, he could see the body of an askari face down on the muddy track that passed for Main Street. Captain Mike was still trying to cover the 400 yards to where Corporal Labalaba, the fiercely brave Fijian wit
h half his jaw shot away, was firing the obsolete 25-pounder field gun over open sites at point-blank range into the oncoming waves of tribesmen.
Two keffiyeh-covered heads came out from behind the DG fort to his right, so he blew them both off. Three more came over the low ridge to his left. They were trying to drop the ducking and dodging captain in the open ground. He gave them the rest of his magazine, slotted one and discouraged the other two.
He rolled over to change magazines and a bloody great rocket from a Carl Gustav screamed over his head. Ten inches lower and he would have been hamburger steak. Below the rafters on which he lay, he could hear his own ‘Rupert’ on the radio to base, asking for a Strikemaster hit and to hell with the low cloud. With a new magazine, he caught another couple of adoo in the open and dropped them both before they could get Captain Mike, who had just disappeared into the gunpit with Medical Orderly Tobin to try to help the two Fijians.
He could not know then, but would learn later, that the fearless Labalaba had just taken a second bullet, this time through the forehead and was dead; nor that Tobin was mortally wounded just after patching up Trooper Ti, who had taken three bullets but would still somehow live. By luck, he saw the terrorist who was manning the Carl Gustav that had nearly killed him. The adoo was between two hummocks of sand just by the torn and sagging perimeter wire. With precision, he put a nice cupro-nickel-jacketed 7.62 NATO round straight through his throat. The Carl Gustav went silent, but the numbing blasts from the mortars and one remaining 75mm recoilless rifle the adoo were using went on.
At last, somehow, the Strikemasters came, racing in off the sea below cloud no more than 100 feet up. Bombs and strafing finally broke the will of the adoo to carry on. The attack wavered and then fell apart. They began to run, carrying their wounded and most of their dead with them. Later he would learn that he and his mates had fought off between 300 and 400 of them, and sent about a 100 to paradise.
Lying on his roof as the firing died, he began to laugh with relief and wondered what Auntie May would think of him now.
In the ICU unit of the Royal London, the limping man was still far, far away.
DAY SIX – SUNDAY
Jack Burns was a man of simple pleasures and one of them was his Sunday morning lie-in. That day he did not get it. The phone rang at seven fifteen. It was the desk sergeant at Dover nick.
‘There’s a man just come in here who takes his dog for a walk early in the morning,’ said the sergeant.
Burns wondered blearily just how long, if he really put his mind to it, it would take to strangle the sergeant.
‘He’s clutching a wallet,’ said the sergeant. ‘Says his dog found it on waste ground, about half a mile from the housing estate.’
Burns came awake fast. ‘Cheap, plastic, black?’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Keep him there. Do not let him leave. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
The dog-walker was a pensioner, Mr Robert Whittaker, upright and neat, nursing a cup of tea in one of the interview rooms.
Mr Whittaker gave and signed his statement, then left. Burns called the POLSA team and asked the grumpy team leader for an inch-by-inch search of the half-acre of waste ground. He wanted his report by sundown. It had not rained for four days but the sky looked heavy and grey; he did not want any wallet contents degraded by a good soaking.
Finally he studied the wallet. He could see slight indentations made by the dog’s teeth, a slick of canine saliva. But what else might it yield? With tweezers, he lifted it into a plastic evidence bag and called Fingerprints. Yes, I know it is a Sunday, he said again, but this is a rush job.
During the day the searchers filled eight binliners of rubbish from the patch of waste ground and sere grass alongside Mandela Road and the examination of it lasted into the night.
But nothing turned up that could have come from the wallet which, as Mr Whittaker had stated and Burns had confirmed, was completely empty.
DAY SEVEN – MONDAY
He lay huddled and fearful in the near darkness, a single flickering night light at the end of the room casting strange moving shadows towards the ceiling. Down the length of the orphanage dormitory he could hear the other boys murmuring in sleep and occasionally a whimper from a bad dream. He did not know where he would go, what he would become, now that Mum and Dad were gone. He only knew that he was alone and frightened in this new environment.
He might have dozed but he came awake again when the door opened, and there was an oblong of light from the passage outside. Then she was bending over him, gentle hands tucking the sheet and blankets tighter round him, soothing his sweat-damp hair back from his face.
‘Now, now, lad. Not asleep yet? Now, you go to sleep like a good boy, and God and all his angels will look after you until Auntie May comes back in the morning.’