Rain Read online

  Barney Campbell

  * * *

  RAIN

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Follow Penguin

  To Mum, Dad, Poppy and Rosie

  I have made for you a song,

  And it may be right or wrong,

  But only you can tell me if it’s true.

  I have tried for to explain

  Both your pleasure and your pain,

  And, Thomas, here’s my best respects to you!

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘To Thomas Atkins’

  Prologue

  ‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today; if I forget you, do not forget me.’

  Every morning, in a hundred deserts, his mantra, his ritual. Everyone has one. Irrational, pathetic, but a blanket. If he says it, things will be all right. Over and over he whispers it, blind in the bitter darkness, and reaches down his chest and kisses the St Christopher.

  ‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today. If I forget you, do not forget me.’

  He still has five minutes before reveille, five minutes to meditate on creeping out of the safety of night and heading north into the light, floating in and out of sleep and barely minding the icy condensation dripping onto his sleeping bag, the breaths and snores. In his cocoon, in his trance he buries himself from the outside world but can still not escape his stomach’s terror. On the spectrum of human emotions, when you are stuck on that left edge, the fear and hopelessness of knowing that this day you will risk destroying everything dearest to you, that is a lonely place. Golgotha. He remembers a poem to himself.

  Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

  Where hushed awakenings are dear …

  Hushed awakenings …

  ‘Boss, boss. Reveille. 4.30. Let’s get ready. It’s fucking freezing.’

  Lance Corporal Miller shakes his shoulder and he grunts assent. His brain starts to shed the fog. Struggling out of the sleeping bag, he gets out of the little canvas shelter at the side of the Scimitar. Pitch black, biting wind. He can hear the murmur and stumbling of the rest of the boys getting up. He joins Miller and Davenport and they fumble with the tent, packing it all away on the side of the wagon. Davenport checks her over – track, running gear, oil levels – and starts the engine. Miller jumps in the turret and fires up the radios.

  He leaves to go and check on the rest of the compound. An officerly check on the troops, in fact a cry for company, a scream for help. He needs someone to talk to, who will tell him it will be all right.

  Please can everything be all right?

  He comes to Corporal Jesmond’s wagon. The two crews were leaguered together that night with their Scimitars while his other two car commanders, Sergeant Trueman and Corporal Thompson, were in another compound, ready for their part in the day.

  ‘Morning, boss! It’s gonna kick off big time today, I reckon. We’re good to go, hundred per cent. Cocked, locked, ready to rock. Sleep well?’

  Relief, his crutch. Chatting with Jesmond amid the boys getting themselves and the wagons ready, he is dragged from the left of the spectrum. 0500. Thirty minutes to H-Hour. He steals up to a camp bed next to a crumbling wall.

  ‘Clive?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Morning, mate; it’s five. Another day in paradise.’

  ‘Hmmm. Thanks, bud. Any news?’

  ‘Nothing, mate, quiet as the grave. The boys push up in half an hour.’

  ‘One day we’ll remember this with fondness, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah, mate. What a farce. What the fuck are we doing here?’

  What are we doing here?

  Moving on. The first weak light, just a film of it, starts to halo the hills to the east. It would be on them soon, sunlight searing across the globe, valley by valley. Where was it now? It would have passed Tibet, have eaten the Wakhan Corridor and would now be nibbling Kabul before vomiting that out into day. Please delay. Please leave us. Light meant action. He struggles up a rickety ladder to the rooftop, and finds the infantry sniper eyeing the gloom to the north through his night sight.

  ‘Morning. You OK?’

  ‘Not bad, sir, not bad. Just looking forward to it kicking off, to be honest. Morning, Talibs. My name’s Dr 7.62 mm, and today I’m going to give you a lecture about bullet wounds – to the face!’

  With deft, blind ease, the sniper’s own ritual begins. He unloads his rifle, thumbs the rounds from the magazine onto a rag and oils up the breech.

  ‘You’ll be OK though, boss, in those Scimitars of yours. Safe as houses, them.’ He grins sarcastically.

  ‘Yeah, cheers. I’d rather be in a baked bean tin; that’d be more use when you’re about to drive through a medium-density minefield.’

  ‘Bet you’re looking forward to unleashing that 30 mil.’

  ‘Honestly, I’ll be delighted if bugger all happens. Keep an eye on us anyway. What’s the phrase? Rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. Get my drift?’

  ‘No probs, boss. I got your back. Any fucker comes into this scope while you fellas are in contact they’re getting it. ’

  The halo grows bigger and the undersides of the cirrus, way up high, start to reflect the light in flames of red and yellow. Rosy-fingered dawn again. Pure epic.

  Was this epic?

  Twenty past five. Not long now. He picks his way back to the Scimitar. The pitch blanket has slowly been drawn back, and the sky is rich purple. As he passes the infantry, all around is a hive of battle preparation. Rifles being oiled, grenade pins checked. New batteries on radios, spares checked for power. Crucifixes kissed. One rifleman reads a passage from his Bible to his mates. They all listen. Last gulps of water slugged, biscuits crammed down. Nervous smiles, black humour. Extra tourniquets handed around by the medics and stuffed into pockets. A corporal checks all his section’s morphine syringes are in their left thigh pockets, with secondaries behind their body armour in case their legs are blown off. Vallon metal detectors ‘sing’ as their users test them on the metal eyeholes on their boots. Endless belts of machine-gun rounds are piled into rucksacks, draped around necks. Some young soldiers are carrying so much weight they have to be lifted to their feet by their sergeant and then left to stand there, panting, bent double. They can barely see from beneath their helmets, eighteen-year-old boys ripped from their mothers and today off to kill other mothers’ sons. A sardonic crow watching all this from a wall cackles. What are these men doing?

  He climbs onto the turret next to Miller. ‘All right, Stardust, how are we? Radios?’

  ‘Dropped in, boss, and radio checks done with Three One. Sights are up and running, laser’s gleaming, ECM’s all in.’

  ‘Good lad! Dav, engine?’

  ‘No dramas, boss. She’s held up OK.’

  ‘Thanks, lads. Top work. Dusty, let’s load her up.’

  They drop inside the turret to load the Rarden. In a wordless drill Miller elevates the barrel to give him more room as he draws up a clip of three rounds from the centre rack and slams them into the feed tray. He winds the loading handle on.

  Dunk, dunk … gaDUNK. The first round clunks in the breech and he slams another clip into the feed tray. The familiarity of the drill and the sleek shells embolden him and help get some blood flowing around freezing hands. He loads and cocks the machine gun.

  ‘Awesome, Dusty. We’re looking good.’

  Scrabbling out of the turret, he looks at Jesmond behind them, who gives him the thumbs up. He’s been good to go for ages. His gunner, GV, next to him in the turret, wags his trigger finger with a grin. He can’t wait. The best gunner in the squadron, he will be busy today.

  Slowly, slowly, he leaves the left of the spectrum.

  Through the gloom the night starts to spill its
secrets. Fast Pace lies to the north in bland, poker-faced silence. How many IEDs does it hold? The Farad gardens, which they fought through two days ago, lie to the south behind them. Their tall pines and cypresses tower over the poorer families’ crops.

  The radio bursts into life; it’s the commanding officer, needing to know if the Scimitars are ready to go. ‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, this is Minuteman Zero Alpha. Callsigns leaving my location now. Confirm you are ready to move north to support when they are engaged. Over.’

  He seizes up. He is lost, frozen.

  ‘Um … Hello … er … Minuteman Zero Alpha, this is Tomahawk … er … Three Zero. Yeah … er … roger … er … Wait.’

  Snap back.

  Come on!

  ‘Tomahawk Three Zero, roger my callsign. Complete at immediate notice to move and will push north once Vixen are in contact. Your intent understood. Over.’

  That’s better.

  ‘Hmm. Bit of a crowbag there, wasn’t I, Dusty?’

  ‘Don’t worry, boss; the lads will have loved that!’

  Nothing. They wait. Over the radio come sitreps from Vixen, pushing up with the ANA to Fast Pace. When they come into contact the Scimitars will storm up to support them. The radio gives encouraging news: progress is good, all quiet, no Taliban. No IEDs found so far. He starts to shiver in the turret. Stamping his feet on the seat, he cocks, unloads and then loads again his pistol. Cock, unload, load. Cock, unload, load. Miller hums to himself as the purple turns ever bluer.

  Gunfire to the north.

  ‘Hello, Minuteman Zero, this is Vixen Three Two. That’s us now in contact. Small arms, RPGs. Wait out.’

  We’re on.

  ‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, this is Minuteman Zero Alpha. Vixen callsigns in contact. Move now, move now. Acknowledge. Over.’

  ‘Tomahawk Three Zero moving now, making best speed. Out to you. Hello, all Tomahawk Three Zero callsigns, this is Tomahawk Three Zero. Move now, move now. Out.’

  Up north the crickets’ croak of automatic fire intensifies after the first, tentative fumblings. Tracer bounces off walls and arcs into the sky before fading like shooting stars.

  Where will the bullets land?

  ‘OK, Dav, let’s go.’

  The wagon complains through the gears. He looks back at Jesmond and gets another thumbs up. He reaches the gate.

  ‘Left … left stick … and again … You’re on now, Dav … Steady … steady … now right stick … Good lad … Now you’re clear … Foot down, pedal to metal, drive it like you stole it. Let’s fucking go for it.’

  The engine screams as Davenport floors the accelerator and they burst down the track towards the sun. The flame is just at the horizon now, and the east is bathed in gold. At the track’s end they turn north and plummet back into the dying twilight.

  Do not forget me.

  Do not forget me.

  Please don’t forget me.

  One

  * * *

  On a sunny morning in August the parade ground is full. Young men and women in dark blue stand nervously, fiddling with their belts and caps and swords, making sure there is no fluff or dust on them. ‘Right, brace up. Show the movement!’ barks a voice. All fiddling ceases, and caps are put on hurriedly as more and more butterflies make them nauseous. The academy sergeant major, with rapid screams that their bodies seem to hear before their ears, petrifies them from nervy fidgeting to poised, chest-out attention. Not long now. Two minutes to march onto the parade. Colour sergeants, who have spent every day of the last year breaking these men and women into military service, take a last inspection, going past the rows and making last adjustments, like tigers licking dirt off their cubs. One of them stops at a cadet with straw-coloured hair and whispers to him, ‘Well, Mr fuckin’ Chamberlain, who’d ha’ thought it? Next time I see ye I’m goin’ to have tae call you sir.’

  ‘That so, Colour Sergeant?’

  ‘Aye, but it don’t mean ah’m goin’ tae enjoy it. Or fuckin’ mean it, ye little wretch.’ He grins fondly and moves on. The cadet and his friends laugh but are quickly silenced by his mock-serious glare. Thirty seconds left.

  The academy sergeant major shouts, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in my regiment we have a motto: “Quis Separabit?” It means, for those ignorant pikeys of you unfortunate enough not to have had a classical education –’ he waits for the laughter to die before continuing ‘– it means, “Who shall separate us?” Just remember that. Every day of your lives. After this year no one, nothing, can separate you. Be you in Afghanistan or Iraq or Kosovo, or whichever next shithole it is that Her Majesty decrees that you go to in order that you might lead her men, if you live to be a hundred or if you die tomorrow no one can break the bond you have forged this year.’ He pauses to let it sink in. He sees them all thrust out their chests an extra inch. He loves military theatre. ‘Now, march to the beat of the drum, get on the heel, hold your heads high; today you are kings of all you survey.’ Pulses quicken, sweat trickles down necks. A band strikes up, and they march onto the parade ground.

  Fifteen minutes later they stand immaculate as the band plays the ‘Radetzky March’, and an elderly retired general totters around inspecting the rows of cadets, mere hours away from joining their regiments as fully fledged junior officers. The general looks at them with envy – for their youth, for their straight backs and lean faces – but with sadness as well. Some of these boys and girls will not be alive in a year. As he passes the ranks of puffed chests and neat, clipped hair he looks at them and thinks of his own friends who are no longer alive and remembers his own commissioning parade. He sighs with tiredness and regret as he completes his inspection and shuffles his way back to the dais to begin his address.

  The cadet with straw-coloured hair cannot stop himself from smiling, breaking the pattern of stern arrogance on everyone else’s faces. He has freckles on his nose, and raises his chin so sharply that he seems three inches more than his five feet nine. He sees his mother in the crowd, wearing a hat so large that those behind her are hidden entirely from view, and his smile breaks into a grin, which he quickly suppresses.

  In the crowd he can also see a wheelchair, its occupant’s chest sparkling with medals hovering over a gap where legs should be. His mind suddenly moves away from the parade ground and far away to Afghanistan. The sweat that trickles down his neck now is not from heat. He glances back at his mother, almost to check that she is still there, and this time he doesn’t smile. A sadness comes over him.

  They begin the slow march past. As they wheel across the parade ground in unbroken line, he can feel the fragility of his friends’ flesh as they press against each other.

  He sighs. No turning back.

  Who is this boy, with his dancing eyes?

  Tom Chamberlain was born to fight in Afghanistan. That does not mean that he was a natural soldier, although he became a very good one; simply that the circumstances of his family history, birth and upbringing meant that for him joining the British Army was an absolute inevitability. Just as when a boy kicks a ball in a garden it is only going one place, smack bang through a window, so his mother acknowledged the moment he put on his father’s old army helmet aged four and started to march around his bedroom that he would end up, not just in the army but in a war with it.

  As a boy he was never happier than when playing soldiers. Gardens were the Burmese jungle, any beach was Omaha or Utah, any street Stalingrad or Caen. A simple stick would become a pistol, flame-thrower or bazooka. As a six-year-old in 1991 he ran downstairs every morning before school to watch coverage of the Gulf War. It looked amazing – Scud missiles shooting gold up through the pitch-black screen and tanks screaming through the desert – and he sat transfixed and square-eyed.

  However, while he idolized the army and anyone who had served with it, an unspoken fear gnawed away that if or when the time came and he found himself not just in a fight but with the responsibility of leading men in that fight, he would prove unequal to the task. He just didn’
t think he would ever be up to leading men. How could sergeants and corporals, veterans of past conflicts, ever look to him for guidance? Would he be a popular officer, trusted and liked by his soldiers, or would they take against him? Could he cope? Always these shadowy doubts lay beneath the outward bravado.

  The main shadow, the only shadow, cast over Tom’s childhood was the death of his father when he was eight. Leonard Chamberlain was a fine-looking man: tall, with a Roman nose and two uncapped chipped front teeth, giving him an oddly noble but friendly appearance. He was guilty of an aversion to hard work where charm and procrastination sufficed, and devoted himself to a blissful – if financially ruinous – life of Epicureanism. What he inherited when he was eighteen had by the time of his marriage to Constance dwindled to just enough cash to buy a farm cottage on the estate of an old army friend of his in Kent, near Chatham.

  People often described Leonard as a wasted talent, and correctly, but he was more complicated than that. The army friend – Tom’s godfather Sam Hockley – and he had joined the same regiment together when they were nineteen and just out of school, and had cavorted, gambled and drunk-driven their way through service in Germany, Belize and Cyprus via a succession of hair-raising and improbable escapades, the stories of which became all the better for their frequent and ever more baroque embellishments. But one day, as he explored the attic, six-year-old Tom came across an old photograph of his father on a Belfast street corner, more angular but unmistakably him, talking urgently into a radio while a dead soldier was carried away in a body bag. Tom kept the photo in the drawer of his bedside table and would often look at it long after he had been put to bed by his parents.

  A few months later Tom was helping Sam out on the farm and, as they put some cattle feed in a trough, asked him, ‘Godfather Sam, did you and Daddy ever have to fight baddies in the army?’

  Sam paused, ambushed, pondering whether to obfuscate or to tell the truth. Bugger it, the boy would have to learn sometime. ‘Well, you see, Tommy, and promise me not to tell your father I said this, will you?’ He waited until he received a solemn nod. ‘Your dad and I were together in a town called Belfast. And it wasn’t very nice. A lot of people were doing horrible things. And of all the people with me out there, I’d say that your dad was the bravest. He had some tough times out there, but all his men loved him, and he made sure that a lot of them got home.’