 
## THE SONS OF DEATH:

## VIKINGS DAWN

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2014
The Sons of Death: Vikings Dawn

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

Events in this work are based loosely on real events, but have been changed and compiled to create a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents have been changed and are used in a purely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 1

Tommy Atkins. Let's call him that. That's not his real name. His real name might be Geoff, but it doesn't matter. He was born not long after the end of the Second World War in the upstairs, back-bedroom of a 1920s-built north London council house, whilst a few feet away downstairs his grandfather, Ernie, paced anxiously up and down the garden with tears in his eyes.

His arrival, although an important event at least to him and his immediate family, passed unnoticed among the wider public as indeed one would expect with the simple numerical addition of one to the existing hoi polloi. That's Greek, by the way. It means the common people, the herd, useful for taxing, tilling fields, lining factory assembly lines, buying goods that they don't need, or filling the ranks when the nation calls for sacrifices to be made on its behalf.

His childhood, such as it was, was brief, blighted by poverty, ignorance and an absent father. Later in life when there were enough years between him and that childhood, when he came to think about it he realised that the most enduring impression and the overriding memory was one of fear, fear of the other boys all of whom seemed more confident and tougher than him, but far worse than that was a deep, underlying insecurity rooted in, he knew not what, but which was to be the engine that drove him for much of his life and which increased rather than decreased as the years went by.

By the time he reached his teens, he was a restless rebel without a cause. He had no idea what to do with himself and no idea what he wanted. At another time and in another place, he would have been an ideal recruit for some cause or other regardless of what it might have been, or perhaps he could have been a convert to some new faith, anything to immerse himself in and to give him some sense of direction, some reason for living.

Alas, for our Tommy, no bugle called, no voice spoke to him and no great cause offered itself to him as a means of escape, escape from his life and background and escape from himself. He longed to be released, to be swept along by events more powerful than he, but nothing came to save him. As he grew older, it slowly began to dawn on him that he was going to have to make some sort of decision himself. He considered the options.

This was easier said than done. To make an informed decision, it helps if you are aware of what the options might be. He was not well informed. He lived in an English, working-class ghetto and the extent of his awareness about anything was determined by the limits of understanding the customs, habits and taboos of the world he inhabited. As a result, his choices or options were inevitably limited.

The other source of deep disquiet and intense longing in his life was the female sex. When he had been very young, girls were just a sort of irritating auxiliary boy who could be relied upon to ruin a decent game.

'Go into the garden and play,' might be the parental direction on visiting a neighbour. Girls were just about acceptable playmates, but from an early age demonstrated an ominous tendency to want their own way. Their own way consisted of busily organising all the boys to play 'Mums and Dads'.

'Right, let's play Mums and Dad,' they would announce briskly. 'We'll stay at home and look after the house and you must go to work.'

Had Tommy been intelligent enough to grasp it, there was an ominous portent in those words. Alas, he was an inexperienced, little boy and therefore blind to the signs.

As he grew older and as girls became more and more objects of desire, he had a lurking suspicion that it was a desire which, if satisfied, carried a consequence which might broadly be described as playing 'Mums and Dads', but this time for real. Without knowing why, he knew that this was not for him.

What was for him? He had no idea. It was the question that dominated his thoughts whilst he washed bottles at the farm dairy where he earned a few shillings working an indeterminate number of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Basically, you worked until all the milk was bottled and ready for Monday and the dairy had been scrubbed and hosed down. Then the farmer, a morose individual with a shock of sandy hair and hands with fingers like Cumberland sausages, paid you with whatever loose change he had in his pocket. One week you might get seven shillings, the next perhaps fourteen shillings. Giddy wealth!

His other job, Mondays to Saturdays inclusive, was a four mile walk or bike ride away at a flower nursery where he started at 8:00 am and finished at 5:00 pm with half an hour for lunch for seventeen shillings and sixpence a day. There were no deductions from the pay because the man who owned and ran the nursery didn't pay National Insurance for his employees, all of whom were teenagers gathered from the local Employment Exchange, and underpaid, but off the books like much of the rest of his business.

It was there, one day, that Tommy met Ron, a grinning youth with a lopsided smile, long sideburns and with the tops of his wellington boots turned down like reverse turn-ups.

Tommy had vaguely known him at school and after exchanging the obligatory, tribal greetings almost wholly unintelligible to the uninitiated, they resumed friendly relations. Ron related as they mixed soil together by the simple but strenuous expedient of barrowing it back and forth between heaps, that he had joined the Merchant Navy since leaving school. Ron was a fireman, that is to say he shovelled the coal into the furnaces that drove the old steamship of which there were still a good many in the merchant marine. Tommy had been impressed. Ron, it appeared, had seen the world.

'Na, not much mate,' had been the emphatic reply to this suggestion. 'When you are down below you don't see nuffing, and when you are on deck all you see is the bleedin' sea!'

'But what about in harbour?' Tommy had asked.

'Yes, well, if you get some shore leave you get as far as the nearest boozer and end up with some tart.'

'Really?' Tommy had said, his interest aroused.

'Don't get too excited,' Ron said calmly. 'Most of 'em are bloody ugly. It's just that when you have been at sea for months and are pissed, you 'ave a go at anything.'

Tommy was deeply impressed by the worldliness and the self-assurance of Ron and looked at him admiringly as he stood there leaning on his shovel whilst rolling himself a cigarette, an operation which, when carried out with soil-covered hands, produced a spindly, chocolate-coloured fag which required enormous efforts on Ron's part to draw life into it when lit.

'So, what you doing here then?' Tommy asked suddenly thinking it strange that Ron should be working at the nursery rather than at sea.

'Just fancied a change,' said Ron simply. 'Come home to see the old lady, brought her a few bob, dug her garden for her. Thought I'd take a break from the sea for a bit.'

By his 'old lady', Tommy knew that Ron meant his mother, a widow who had worked as a cook at the local school.

The sudden appearance of Dick, the nursery manager, put an end to the conversation as they resumed the mixing of soil which made talking difficult, particularly in Ron's case with a fag held firmly in his lips. Nevertheless, he did manage to grunt, 'That bastard must have been a slave driver in a past life.'

That, Tommy thought, was fair comment. Dick was always creeping up on them trying to catch them not working which, in his and Ron's case, was not necessary, since they were both grafters. The irony was that one lad who also worked there called Tel, a lean, greasy-looking youth with slicked back, black hair was a real lead swinger, but Dick could never catch him out.

Tel, pronounced like 'bell', had raised idleness to an art form. The secret, he once confided in Tommy, was to always be moving, however slowly, so that whoever was spying on you never actually caught you doing nothing. Working with him Tommy found exhausting. He found it harder trying to work at Tel's geriatric speed than to actually get on and do the work which, by nature, he preferred to do.

He had had a similar experience once when, to fill in between jobs, he had worked as a road sweeper at Barnet. At first he had thought the job would be a doddle, just pushing a broom along the gutter of whichever street you happened to be sweeping. The reality, however, was very different. Try as he might, he could not go as slowly as his companion pushing a broom on the other side of the road who, red-faced, overweight and puffing, managed to give the impression that he was exerting every fibre and reserve of his being, but without that having any obvious effect on the progress of the broom along the gutter he was supposed to be sweeping. Tel reminded him a lot of this old boy and momentarily wondered if they were perhaps related. He dismissed the thought as unlikely, but plainly they were two of a type and absolute masters of their craft.

Tommy thought no more of the conversation with Ron, but then a couple of weeks later he happened to find himself walking along a back alleyway which passed the rear of Ron's mum's house. He had no thought of calling in, but a sudden attack by a couple of street dogs encouraged him to leap the garden fence, which he managed successfully without the dogs managing to sink their teeth into him. Once in the garden, sitting amongst the vegetables, he found himself face-to-face with Ron's mum, a stout lady with her hair in curlers and the whole covered by a headscarf tried under her chin.

'Get off my cabbages,' she said calmly as Tommy picked himself up and brushed himself down.

'Sorry,' said Tommy. 'Those dogs nearly had me.'

Ron's mum either was not impressed by his narrow escape or preoccupied with other more important things on her mind. Indeed so it proved for whilst Tommy was making his way towards the alleyway that led to the front of the house and what he hoped would be a dog-free street, she suddenly said, 'Ron's been nicked for robbery.'

He was shocked. He didn't know what to say. It was a bit embarrassing really. He wanted to get on home and what Ron had or hadn't done didn't really concern him. Having started, though, Ron's mum was determined to continue and before he knew it, he was seated at her kitchen table drinking tea with a dash of rum in it. Apparently, this was the way Ron liked it.

He sat there sipping the tea and to cover his sense of embarrassment carefully inspected the top of the circular table with the Formica top decorated with pictures of bowls overflowing with exotic fruit of the kind that he had little doubt would in reality never have graced the table top.

She told him all about it, the little she knew, that is. She related what she had been told had happened. Ron, wearing a stocking over his head, had gone into the Co-operative shop in the High Street on Saturday evening just before closing time and pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the manager and demanded the day's takings. So far, so good, but it didn't seem to have occurred to Ron just how conspicuous he would appear, clearly visible through the shop window with a stocking over his head. Hardly had he stepped out of the shop clutching a bag containing the day's takings and an assortment of Green Shield stamps, when plod appeared and he was caught red-handed. Fortunately, perhaps for him and certainly fortunately for the local constabulary, his gun was unloaded. Still, it was armed robbery nonetheless and he was looking at a long stretch inside.

Tommy was secretly impressed, but judged it better not to say so. He made sympathetic noises.

'Poor old Ron,' he mumbled.

'Poor old Ron!' his mother exploded. 'That silly sod has got himself banged up for nothing, nothing at all,' she shouted suddenly sounding hysterical. 'He'll get five years,' she sobbed, anger and hysteria metamorphosing into grief. She sat at the table with her head in her hands quietly sobbing. A photo of Ron grinning looked at her from the window ledge with a jam jar full of dead wasps on one side and an old Bovril tin on the other with some flowers from the garden stuffed into it.

Tommy wanted to go. He didn't know what to say to the grieving woman in front of him. He rose to his feet hesitantly and made must-go noises. She clutched his hand and pressed a piece of paper into it.

'You're his mate,' she said urgently. 'Go and see him inside, will you? I've got this pass, but I can't bring myself to go. I couldn't bear to see him in prison.'

Tommy looked at the paper in his hand. It was a visitor's pass for Brixton Prison.

'Alright,' he replied, not knowing how to say no. Satisfied apparently, she let him leave.

Released from her sadness, he had half a mind not to go, but then on impulse he decided to go and see Ron, although what good it would do Ron or Ron's mum, he didn't know.

CHAPTER 2

Brixton Prison is only one of a number of prisons in London, all stuffed full of errant humanity, most of it protesting its innocence. Ron probably would have been no exception to this general rule as unvarying as a rule of nature, had the circumstances of his arrest not have been so clear-cut. He was, as they say, 'bang to rights' and there was little he could do, save put a brave face on it.

Tommy went to see him on a grey, drizzly day which somehow seemed appropriate and to fit both his mood and the grim surroundings. As he walked along the path towards the prison gate, he stretched his neck backwards to look up at the impossibly high walls towering above him. It looked grim indeed. An endless mountain of bricks. Once at the gate, an enormous, studded door, he knocked on the postern gate, a smaller gate set into the large one. The grill slid back to enable the person inside to inspect the person requiring admittance. If satisfied, the postern gate would be opened and the visitor admitted, who might be a solicitor's clerk, a probation officer or, like Tommy, just a visitor. Tommy apparently passed muster for the gate was opened.

Having been signed in and the pass inspected, Tommy was directed to a room in the gatehouse which was already full of the sweepings of humanity's nearest and dearest; wives with struggling children refusing to behave themselves, pregnant girlfriends with sad, tear-stained faces, gullible fools who persisted in their belief that the deadbeat who had knocked them up and got himself banged up was anything less than a modern Dick Turpin. Then, of course, there was Tommy who, too, had allowed himself to be impressed by the reckless folly of just such an individual.

At last a prison officer called his name and he was able to escape the confines of the packed waiting room. Following the officer across the prison yard, he saw groups of men in uniforms with yellow patches sewn on their trousers. These, he knew, were the special-watch prisoners, the ones it was necessary to watch closely. Ron, too, when he saw him in the small interview room had yellow patches sewn on to his brown uniform.

'Got any fags?' asked Ron as Tommy went through the door.

Tommy was surprised at the matter of fact way in which Ron had spoken. Ron, in fact, seemed quite relaxed and at ease as he looked at him across the table in the middle of the tiny, airless room where the stale air was already rank with the smell of cigarettes.

'Sure,' said Tommy tossing a packet of fags and a box of matches on to the table. Ron grinned and they both sat down on the two chairs provided, the only other furniture in the room. Ron immediately lit up, then leant back in the chair and grinned.

'Where's the old lady?' he asked.

'She was too upset to come and see you Ron – she asked me to come instead.'

Ron said nothing for a bit. Then he said, 'You know the only reason I did it was to get a bit of money for her. I was going off to sea again and I'm brassic, so I thought I'd leave her a bit to help her along.'

Tommy was not entirely convinced by this. There had been a number of robberies over the previous few months, usually of sub-post offices.

'Yeah?' he said looking at Ron doubtfully. Ron looked at him as if weighing him up and then learned forward and spoke in a whisper.

'Listen,' he said confidentially. 'I have already put a bit by for the old mother. If I tell you where it is, will you see she gets it? I don't reckon I'll be getting out of here any time soon. Even with time off for good behaviour, I won't see the outside for at least three years.'

Tommy considered it. Why not, he thought. He had no intention of hanging around. He was tired of using a shovel and intended moving on.

'Well, I'm leaving soon,' he said without answering Ron's question.

'Yeah? Where you goin'?'

'Dunno,' answered Tommy honestly.

'Got any money?' Ron enquired.

'Na.'

'Good plan,' said Ron, 'about as bleedin' good as mine was.' He grinned again and then said, 'Listen, I've got an idea. I tell you where my, er, savings are and you can have a bit of the money, enough at least to get you somewhere, and you give the rest to me mum.'

'How do you know you can trust me not to nick the lot?'

'I trust you Tommo. We're mates and you won't let me down. Besides,' he added, 'I won't be locked up that long and if you let me down I'll find you!' He said this with a smile, but Tommy knew he meant it.

Tommy grinned back at him and said, 'Keep yer hair on Ron, I'll see your old lady alright.'

There was a pause whilst Ron, lost in thought, dragged on his cigarette. Was he thinking about his old ma, Tommy wondered? If he was, he decided that that was a subject best changed and so he asked, 'Wot's it like in 'ere?'

Ron shrugged. 'Depends on who you are banged up with. I'm alright. The two geezers in with me are fine. One smokes a lot and the other farts a lot, but that's no different to being at sea except then there's three other smelly bastards instead of two.'

'How's that?' asked Tommy.

'Well,' Ron explained, 'I'm a fireman and four of us form a watch so there's three others you spend not just your work, but pretty much your life with on or off watch. You work together, mess together, sleep in the same cabin together. It's a bit like being in a cell. If you don't get on, there's nowhere to go.'

'That doesn't sound too much fun,' observed Tommy.

'Na!' insisted Ron. 'You'd be alright, mate. You get used to it and it's better than being stuck in some factory or bored out of your brain at home.'

To Tommy it seemed a bit like Hobson's choice. Neither prospect outlined by Ron seemed very attractive. There was a further pause. Then Ron exclaimed, 'Tell you what, Tommo,' with the air of a man who has had a sudden eureka moment, 'Even better! Why don't you take my seaman's cards and passport and go to sea?'

'What?'

'Yes, listen. It's simple. You'll have to change the photo in the passport, but the seaman's book doesn't have one. No-one will know you are not me.'

'Yeah?' said Tommy doubtfully. 'I don't know anything about boats.'

'You don't have to, mate!' said Ron enthusiastically. 'Look, I'm a fireman. I shovel coal. That's all you have to do. You sign up with a ship and before you know it, you are off.'

'Where to?'

'Anywhere! Wherever the bloody ship is going. Look, it's hard work, but at least you see a bit of the world and if you don't like it, you can always skip out in some port or other that takes your fancy!'

Tommy thought quickly. The more he thought, the more he liked the idea. What was to keep him where he was? Ron was right. He was bored out of his brain. He needed a change. Furthermore, he was no stranger to shovels.

'Ron,' he said firmly, 'you've got a deal, mate.'

'Good boy,' said Ron. 'Got any more fags?'
CHAPTER 3

Ron had revealed to Tommy that his savings, as he called them, were buried in the greenhouse in his mum's garden in an old potato sack. That's why he spent so much time gardening, thought Tommy as he felt around in the loose soil underneath the tomato plants he had lifted to get at the loot. His hands felt a sack and he pulled it out and opened it. Sure enough, inside there were three wads of money in elastic bands in a plastic bag. Without counting any of it, he stuck one wad in his pocket, put one on one side for Ron's mum and quickly reburied the other and restored the tomato plants to their previous positions. They needed a bit of water, but they should be alright unless Ron's mum neglected to look after them, he thought. Then he knocked on the kitchen door. After an interval, Ron's mum opened it in her nightdress and dressing down.

'What you doin' here so early?' she asked blinking at him and the morning sun alternately.

'I went to see Ron and he asked me to tell you he's alright and that he hopes you will go up to see him when you are ready to. He wants you to send him some comics to read.'

'Oh yeah,' interrupted his mum. 'He's keen on Batman and Superman comics – always got his head stuck in one,' smiled Ron's mum.

Tommy nodded sympathetically and continued, 'Oh and he asked me give you this,' he added holding out the wad of money.

'What?' said Ron's mum. 'Where on earth did he get all that from?'

Tommy assumed an earnest expression and leaned towards her as if taking her into his confidence. 'He told me it's his savings from his trips abroad which he had been putting by for you. Now he wants you to have it since,' he paused and then took the plunge, 'since he won't be around for a while.'

Ron's mum swallowed that alright, so he added hastily, 'And if you get stuck, he's got some more he can lay his hands on.'

Ron's mum's eyes filled with tears as she took the money and clasped it to her bosom like a little doll.

'Thank you,' she said and made as if to close the door.

'There's just one other thing,' said Tommy hastily. 'He wants me to get his passport and seaman's book from his bedroom drawer. Do you mind if I take them now, please?'

Ron's mum didn't mind. She was still dazed at her son's generosity and her good fortune. The money was no substitute for her son, but it would certainly make like easier for her. She went and found the passport and seaman's book and handed them to Tommy.

'Thanks,' said Tommy simply and turned to go, saying as he did so, 'Look after yourself and don't worry. He'll be back eventually and,' he added in a feeble attempt at humour, 'at least you'll know where he is!'

With that parting shot, he left, the documents in his hand, in effect his passport to a new life.

He wasted no time in substituting a passport photograph he had had taken of himself for Ron's photograph, and from that moment on he became Ron Wilkins, merchant seaman. As he walked along the streets of the new town council estate he lived in, so devoid of any beauty or inspiration, he suddenly felt cheerful. He decided that it was time he engaged with what people were calling the swinging sixties and turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Quite how to do that presented less of a problem now. What he needed was a boat.
CHAPTER 4

Ron had explained to him the way you found a boat. You went to the offices of the Shipping Federation in Whitechapel next to the London Docks and there you looked for a ship that needed a fireman, for that was his new profession. A fireman was a stoker whose job was to feed the furnaces with the coal that powered the boat. Instead of shovelling earth, he would now be shovelling coal.

The Shipping Federation offices had the air of having seen better days, as indeed they had, their heyday now long past. The introduction of container ships into the mercantile trade which the old London Docks could not accommodate had necessitated a move downriver to Tilbury. This was a change so drastic that it turned London's docklands into a virtual wasteland of deserted docks and warehouses, finishing the job that Hitler's Luftwaffe had started. The move, though, had been recent and the occasional tramp-steamer still found its way into the heart of what had once been the world-famous and mighty Pool of London.

Tommy was in luck. One such old rust-bucket was moored in the East India dock and was looking for two firemen to work in the stokehold, a fireman and a trimmer. Tramp-steamers of this particular type normally had three boilers and each one was fed by a fireman. The other man on the watch with them below in the stokehold was the trimmer. He was a sort of apprentice fireman. He worked in the coal hole behind the fireman and ensured that they had enough coal to feed the insatiable boiler. It was hard work working in the coal hole for four hours at a stretch, not just shovelling coal, but smashing up the really big lumps with a sledgehammer provided for the purpose.

The boat was heading for Bordeaux to pick up cargo and then travelling to the West Indies and Florida. To Tommy, a youth who had never been anywhere more exotic than Ramsgate, the destinations sounded appealing, so he said he would take it and set off for the dock where the ship was berthed.

When he caught sight of it, forlorn and alone, tied-up alongside the dock, he nearly turned around and went home again. It was not only that the boat seemed so isolated, but that it was because it looked so decrepit that he couldn't understand how the Monarch of Bermuda, as she was called, still floated. It was about 300 to 400 feet long and resembled an old tin can daubed from one end to the other with orange rust. It looked for all the world as appealing as a floating coffin. How on earth did this clapped-out, heap of metal manage to stay afloat in the dock, let alone on the high seas, he wondered?

He stood there dumbstruck for a while and then shrugged his shoulders thinking 'in for a penny, in for a pound'. He might as well give it a go.

A gangplank led from the dock to the boat moving up and down slightly with the motion of the open sewer that was the river. He went aboard. On the deck he met a villainous-looking individual wiping his grease-smeared hands on a rag already sodden with grease and oil. To judge by his appearance, it was not difficult to conclude that this was a greaser, a man whose work consisted of oiling and greasing the engine pistons. It was difficult to tell if there was more grease on the rag or the man's hands and clothes, a pair of torn and ragged old dungarees.

'I'm looking for the captain,' Tommy said trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing whereas nothing could have been further from the truth. He was winging it all the way and he knew it.

'He's up there,' the man replied indicating the captain's general location by a nod of his head in the approximate direction of the bridge. Tommy grunted a thank you and climbed a metal ladder to what he assumed and hoped would lead to the captain who was as yet unseen. At the top of the ladder, he found himself facing a door upon which he knocked nervously. A voice within said something unintelligible which he decided indicated that he should enter, and he pulled the heavy, metal door open which protested its disapproval with a teeth-tingling screech as he did so.

He stepped into the cabin which, when his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he saw contained a man with a beard who he presumed was the captain sitting behind a small table. He wore a dirty, white cap on his head with a bit of grubby yellow braid on it. This, Tommy assumed, was some sort of symbol of authority.

The captain, for it was indeed Dimitri Kritikos, the Greek captain of the ship, was not alone. With him was a very tall, black man who was standing by the table with a pen in his hand. It appeared that he must just have signed on. The captain looked at Tommy, now, of course, Ronald Wilkins.

'Yes?' he said enquiringly.

'I'm the new fireman, captain,' said Ron handing the captain his seaman's book which the captain looked at only briefly. What Ron didn't know at that stage was that the captain's command of both spoken and written English was very limited. What the captain did know, however, was that he had just signed on a fireman and the other vacancy was for a trimmer. Ron, as he now reminded himself he was, was quite happy to work as a trimmer. Not so much would be expected of him and he could learn the ropes better that way, he thought.

Without further ado, the captain signed Ron on and in a matter of minutes he found himself out of the cabin and on the deck with the black bloke, whose name it turned out was Winston and who had just pipped him at the post and signed up as a fireman.

As new boys, they already had a certain bond and so as they stood there taking in their surroundings, they exchanged a little information about themselves. Winston was a Jamaican who had lived and worked in London and who was an experienced seaman. Ron thought that that might come in handy, since he was a novice and a mate to guide him would come in handy. Ron limited the information about himself to his name and when asked by Winston where he lived, he just said 'London'.

They made their way together to the crew's quarters that they had been assigned to and which held the men of the watch of which they were to be a part. The crew's quarters were forward on the boat with the dozen or so fireman of the three watches occupying the starboard-side accommodation. The seamen, that is the ordinary and able seamen, the deck hands, occupied the accommodation on the port-side of the boat. When they reached the cabin occupied by the watch of which they were to be a part, they were not pleasantly surprised.

The quarters were cramped in the extreme and already smelt of bodies badly in need of a wash. This was a foretaste of things to come, namely an abundance of water around them on their voyage, but very little available in which to wash.

There were several men already in the quarters seated around a small table set in the middle of the cabin. They were playing cards. They stopped playing as Ron and Winston came in and looked at them in surprise. Ron was the first to break the silence.

'Evening all, I'm Ron and this here,' he said pointing at his companion with his thumb, 'this here's Winston. We're the new fireman and trimmer.'

The men around the table said nothing, but exchanged glances with one another and then, finally, one of them put his cards down and quite literally put his cards on the table.

'Are you blokes wet behind the ears?' he asked.

'What do you mean?' said Ron, thinking surely it couldn't be that obvious. Then, one of the other men spoke.

'Don't you know that you don't mix black and white on a merchant ship? At least,' he said,' it's all black below and white on deck or vice versa?'

There was no point in lying, so Ron said, 'No, I didn't know that.'

'Well, it's not you that's got a problem, it's Winston here.' The seaman continued, 'Not only will some people on this boat take a dim view of this, but to make it worse he's the only nigger on board.'

Winston, who had been silent until then, said simply, 'I've met plenty of people who didn't like blacks already. I'll just have to live with it.'

'That,' said the third man at the table, 'is your problem. There are some really hard bastards on this boat and it may come down to whether you live or not.'

Having dealt with the pleasantries and essential preliminaries, the men then introduced themselves as Phil and Lofty. Phil and Lofty were members of the same watch and Joe, the third man there, was a mate from one of the other watches there on a purely social visit. To Ron, they seemed prepared, albeit reluctantly, to accept Winston, at least on the face of it. The fact that Winston was taller than all of them and built like a prize fighter probably helped to decide them in his favour. He didn't look worried by what had been said. On the contrary, his face bore an expression of resignation rather than anything else.

When they had dumped their few belongings on the couple of unoccupied bunks in the cabin, Ron and Winston went back on deck for a smoke. After they lit up and whilst they were leaning on the ship's rail looking at the river gurgling creamily around the rusty hull of the boat and between the slimy green timbers of the dock, Ron asked out of curiosity, 'You must be awful keen to get out of London if you don't mind being cooped up for weeks on a boat full of men who are probably going to make life difficult for you.'

'I'm used to it, man,' said Winston quietly. 'I came here from Jamaica to join the RAF.' He laughed. 'No chance of that, so I did any old job that came along, but I'm sick of it now. I want to go home.'

'Is it really that bad here?' asked Ron.

'Haven't you seen the signs in the lodging house windows – no blacks, no Irish, no dogs?'

Ron hadn't. In fact, he hadn't seen many black men. Where he had grown up, you were regarded as different if you were Scots or Irish and there were not many of them.

'Hang on though,' he said, 'You are not going home or at least you won't be able to stay there. You are signed on to go out and come back again to London.'

Winston smiled. 'We'll see about that, man,' he said tossing the end of his cigarette in the river.
CHAPTER 5

The next day, the boat left on the morning tide and Ron had his first taste of the stokehold, since his watch were on the 8:00 am to 12:00 noon stint. Instead of standing on the deck watching London slowly slip behind them as he had fondly imagined, instead he found himself in a dimly lit, black hole balanced precariously on tons of coal which it was his job to shovel on to the chutes for the port and starboard boilers and the fireman sweating away in front of them. It was hard and dirty work and there was no place for a shirker. The other men of the watch were not going to do your job for you and would be sure to make their feelings plain if you didn't pull your weight. Ron realised this, but had no problem with working hard. In fact, he enjoyed it. It gave him a considerable sense of satisfaction to feel his body's muscles flexing and moving in response to the demands of the job. He could handle it.

Winston, too, was a worker, a fact which quickly registered with Phil and Lofty, and by the end of the watch all four men were closer, almost friendly even, which was a good thing given how much time they were going to spend in close proximity to one another.

As the days went by and the old boat laboured slowly but steadily along the busy sea lanes of the English Channel, the men of Ron's watch all got to know each other better. It was difficult not to, since they spent most minutes of most days in each other's company. They worked together, ate together, slept and relaxed between watches together, so it was inevitable that by degrees they learned more about each other's lives and backgrounds.

Lofty was a tall, lean Geordie in his twenties, so a bit older than Ron who was still in his late teens. Lofty had gone to sea as a fifteen year old. He hadn't fancied shipbuilding or going down the pit which were pretty much the only other possibilities that had presented themselves to him. Either that or the army, but he hadn't fancied that either. It would have meant getting his hair cut short and he was inordinately proud of his teddy-boy's haircut with hair over his collar and a great blow-wave of blond hair falling forward over his forehead. He was a bit behind the times now, but he still stuck to what he liked and spent ages carefully trimming his sideburns in front of a small piece of cracked mirror nailed rather oddly, Ron thought, to the side of the cabin. That was where, twisting from side to side and preening himself in the tiny mirror, Lofty did his Elvis impressions. Ron found the painful transition of Lofty's thick Geordie accent into mid-west American a joy to hear. There were some words, he noticed, the pronunciation of which caused a Geordie to almost swallow his tonsils. 'Gate' and 'eight' are examples, so for Lofty to say 'great man' involved facial contortions that it was painful to behold.

Phil, by contrast, looked as if his hair had been cut with a pair of garden shears, but he couldn't care less. He had the unkempt appearance and the pinched face, even in his twenties, of a street urchin or slum child. Indeed, that, it turned out, is exactly what he was, growing up more or less in the gutter in London's east end. He hadn't spent much time at school. He was always playing hooky and doing odd jobs or stealing. As a result, he couldn't read or write, but he had an agile mind. He worked as a young boy as a bookie's runner, that is he had taken bets for people and placed them with the bookie who carried out his illegal business on street corners. Phil was one of the bookie's runners, an ability to run fast being a prerequisite for the job so as to be able to leave at speed if the police appeared.

Although he couldn't read or write, he had a very quick head for figures. In between watches when they weren't working, the men had to occupy themselves somehow. One of the ways they did so was by laying odds on dog or horse races. Phil could always work out the odds much quicker than the rest of them and he was always right no matter how hard they tried to make it for him. Farfetched that it may seem, in another place and at another time, Phil the bookie's runner might have been a good maths teacher at the very least. Now was not that time, however, and Phil, his skin stained with coal dust and his hands hard and horny from hours of shovelling, looked exactly what he was, a tough, mean, working-class bastard who would as soon belt you with his shovel as have a drink with you.

Winston was no different. The only visible difference was that he was black. He had grown up, it's true, with no shoes to wear and living in a hut in the jungle, but that was no different to the way that Ron and Phil and Lofty had grown up. They may have had shoes, but their life experience and the world they had inhabited was exactly the same. Poverty, like sport, is a great equaliser.

Ron told them a bit about himself. His family were typically working-class, conservative with a small 'c', fiercely patriotic, had answered their country's call time and again and paid the price in deaths and wounds of both kinds, those you can see and those you can't and naturally, of course, they hadn't got a pot to piss in. All that separated them from need was the weekly wage packet that the old man brought home. At least, his wife hoped he brought it home rather than blow it in the pub or the betting shop as some feckless individuals would want to do on Friday night. The extent of the suffering that these men caused as a result of their weakness and irresponsibility is difficult to exaggerate. None of them needed him to enlarge upon that. It was part of their common birth right. Their life experiences were to all intents and purposes identical and interchangeable. Only their accents were different.

When they sailed, they had not, of course, sailed alone and took with them a host of little friends, particularly cockroaches. These came out at night time, but mercifully were not so active in cold, northern climes. So, to begin with, they presented no particular problem. More visible, however, were the rats that also came out at night, but were too large not to see. Tommy would lie in his bunk trying to sleep and if unable to do so, would see them fluttering along the various pipes and conduits that ran around the walls like a blown leaf in the wind, the pipes now serving as rat super highways.

One evening, he raised the subject with the others as they sat at their table playing cards.

'How do they get on board?' he asked. Lofty shrugged.

'Christ knows,' he said indifferently. As far as he was concerned, rats were simply a fact of life. If you went to sea, rats were passengers.

'They run up the mooring ropes when we are tied up in dock,' suggested Phil.

'But there's a circular thing to prevent that,' said Lofty. 'What's it called?' not able to remember the name of the circular contraption that rats were supposed not to be able to clamber over, although some athletic individuals plainly could

'I don't remember,' said Phil bored with the subject and trying to concentrate on his cards. 'It's just a doins,' he said vaguely using the word he always employed if memory of an object's name ever failed him.

Lofty was persistent. 'It's a French sounding name, I think,' he continued sounding doubtful.

'Le doins,' said Phil emphatically adding, 'are we playing this bloody game or not?'
CHAPTER 6

Winston's presence did not go unnoticed, of course. By and large the deck crew were content to shout the odd remark or insult in a joking but nonetheless intended way. Shouted remarks like, 'Bloody 'ell, that man's covered in soot,' as they emerged from the stokehold after a watch were pretty much the daily norm.

These remarks Winston shrugged off. As the days went by, his stoical indifference to the insults that he had to bear actually won him allies. After a short time had passed, as far as his watch were concerned, Winston was one of them.

It was a different story with the other firemen, though. One watch in particular, four Scousers from Liverpool, were venomous in their hatred of Winston. The men of Ron's watch would return to find turds on their bunks, sometimes steaming still. The insults hurled at them were not limited to Winston. The rest of them were 'nigger lovers' and worse to the sons of Liverpool who should have known better for they were of Irish extraction and were thus Irish bastards and subjected to just the sort of behaviour they were subjecting Winston to. That, of course, might even have been the reason why they were so vindictive and determined.

As Ron found out one day, that, at least for him, was not the worst of it. He had been to the galley to collect their scoff as they called it, a greasy stew called Scouse, liberally salted by the sweat of the galley cook, when, in the corridor leading to the mess-room, he saw Connolly, one of the Liverpudlians, looking at him. He stopped and looked back. As he did so, Connolly winked at him and blew him a kiss.

Oh shit, he thought, a fucking poof. What was worse was that the poof apparently fancied him. He continued to the mess-room where he told the others what had happened.

'You had better watch yourself, Ron boy,' said Phil stating the bleeding obvious, Ron thought.

'You'd better watch your back, canny lad,' observed Lofty at which they all fell about laughing. Winston, however, wore a serious expression and did not join in the jollity.

'I wouldn't mind betting that the rest of that watch are bum-bandits,' he said emphatically. 'I've been watching them and if I am any judge they are a collection of Scouse poofs.'

The room fell silent as they pondered the implications of the possibility that the Scouser watch, as they called it, were men of oriental habits and tastes.

'It's alright as long as they keep it to themselves,' said Phil at length.

'Aye,' added Lofty. 'It just means less of a queue at Monica's place in Limehouse when we get back.'

'You dirty bastard,' said Phil punching him playfully, and with that the mood in the room lightened and they swallowed the greasy, meagre food they had been served up with.

'Salty, innit?' said Phil. They all preferred not speculate on why that might be the case.

Connolly was the product of one of the drunken, random couplings of his Irish seaman father. His father, on returning from a trip to sea, would be on the booze until the money ran out, and it was during one of these binges that Connolly had been conceived, his father having little or no recollection of the act thinking when he woke up that he had had a wet dream. His poor mother did her best with him and the gaggle of other children she had hanging around her skirts, but it was too much for her. Before he reached the age of five, he and his siblings were removed from the children-infested Liverpool tenement they called home and placed, since they were Catholics, in institutions run by the church.

Here, over the years, young Connolly was buggered so often by the gentlemen of the cloth that by the time he was fourteen he had an arse like a volcano and regarded sodomy as the natural order of things. Then he had gone to sea. Over the years, he had had many encounters all over the globe, loveless groping and physical relief wherever he could find it. When he saw Ron, he experienced something akin to love, or more probably a sense of deep infatuation since he was incapable of love and certainly incapable of tenderness. His need for human contact and his desperate desire for revenge made him a vicious and merciless opponent. He was a man with no scruples, strong and determined to have his way. Now he had formed a fancy for Ron. He dreamed about him and schemed about how he might get inside his trousers. He longed to have him so much that it was almost unbearable.
CHAPTER 7

They had an uneventful trip to Bordeaux where the cargo was loaded over two long working days. Whatever it was, it was sealed in large, wooden crates piled on wooden pallets and secured by metal bands. The captain didn't allow any shore leave, but they hadn't been long enough at sea for this to bother any of them. The fireman rested, grateful for a couple of days of light duties, and the deck hands scraped rust and painted.

After they left Bordeaux, they ran into some bad weather with heavy seas as they plodded across the Bay of Biscay. Fully laden, they were, or so it seemed to Ron, quite low in the water and there were times when it seemed to him that they hardly made any way at all. Up until then, he had not suffered from any sea-sickness, but now as the ship rose at one moment to seemingly giddy heights, only to descend dramatically the next until they were surrounded by walls of green water, he began to feel decidedly queasy. The mere mention of food was enough to send him running to the side of the ship and the smell and sight of the greasy fare that was their daily lot was more than he could bear. Work helped. He found that if you were shovelling hard, it somehow eased the discomfort. It was when he was in his bunk that he found it the worst as the boat rose and sank and rolled. He tried bracing himself with his feet and head against the sides of the bunk, but it was no use. He just had to grit his teeth and bear it.

Eventually, about a week out of Bordeaux, the weather eased and the boat resumed its previous more regular and gentle gait. As the seas subsided, life returned more or less to normal, but it was still a while before he could face anything more than a mug of strong, dark tea.

Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, events took a turn for the worse. They had just come off watch and Ron was washing himself down with the bucket of water provided for the purpose in a little room forward of the mess-room. He had stripped to his underpants and he was trying with the single, solid bar of soap that the captain had thoughtfully provided to make some impression on the coal dust that he had accumulated during the watch. The others had finished and left the room as he continued to struggle to clean himself up. Whilst he was trying to lever a particularly obstinate lump of soot from his left ear, the door of the room opened and in came Connolly and shut the door behind him.

Ron was perfectly aware that this meant trouble of one kind or another, but he was still taken by surprise when Connolly, without a word, punched him hard in the stomach causing him to double over clutching his middle. The pain from the punch he found extraordinary and he was quite unable to do anything except to lie on the floor clutching his stomach and fighting for breath. Connolly then sat on him and pulled his underpants down and it dawned on him that the man was going to rape him. Both fear and anger gave him strength and he wriggled hard until he was on his back with Connolly still on top of him pinning him down.

'Lie still, you little bastard,' he hissed. That was the last thing that Ron was going to do, but there wasn't much he could do apart from wriggle. Then Connolly lost his temper and started to batter him about the face and head. Ron was powerless to fight back. His arms were pinned down. He was at Connolly's mercy and as he was thumped hard again and again, he felt himself losing consciousness.

Suddenly, the door flew open and Winston rushed in. Without a word, he kneed Connolly hard in the side of the head which caused him to fall sideways and away from Ron. To Ron it was a blessed release, but he still lay there unable to get up and covered in blood. Winston was angry and he proceeded to teach Connolly a lesson, methodically pummelling his kidneys and his balls. It was better, he explained later to Ron. That way, there were not so many visible marks so the ship's officers would not be put on notice of any trouble.

'You black bastard! You'll pay for this!' Connolly said at one point trying to protect his battered balls with his hands. If Winston heard him, he gave no sign of having done so, but perhaps considering that he had meted out enough punishment to Connolly, he stopped and turned to Ron who was still on the floor but leaning with his back against the wall seated in the mucky water now turning the floor into a slippery, black skating rink, the bucket having long since been knocked over and its contents spilled everywhere.

Stooping down, Winston grabbed hold of Ron and pulled him to his feet. Then he pulled up his pants that until then had been keeping his ankles warm, grabbed his other clothes and pulled him out of the room leaving Connolly to sort himself out as best he could.

As they went out of the door, Connolly repeated his threat. Winston just smiled and said to Ron, 'He's got a better chance of getting a fish up his arse.'

'Don't give him any more ideas,' offered Ron in an effort to make light of things.

Back in the cabin, the rest of the watch fussed over him like a clutch of mother hens. They inspected his bruises and cuts and did their best to administer such rough doctoring as they could, pressing together the edges of split skin and liberally coating him with the only ointment that they had, a tin of ointment Lofty carried with him in case his eczema flared up. Whether it would do any good or not was immaterial. Everybody thought that something constructive was being done, so whether it actually helped or not was neither here nor there. It had a placebo effect, not only on Ron, but also on the others who felt better for having administered it.

Ron enjoyed the care and attention whilst it lasted, which was not long. When their next watch came around and he ventured to suggest he might give it a miss, the response was his hobnailed boots being hurled at him. The message was clear. He got up.
CHAPTER 8

There were no immediate repercussions arising out of what had happened in the wash room. Both Ron and Connolly bore the discomfort of their respective wounds stoically. There wasn't much else to do, imprisoned as they were on a small island of rusty metal moving slowly across the surface of the sea. The first mate looked rather quizzically at Ron, no doubt having noticed the swelling and bruising which appeared on his face, but he said nothing. Either he wasn't interested or had learned that there are times when it is better not to notice and to ask no questions.

The first mate was a man called McCallister who hailed from Greenock. He had never been able to qualify for his Master's Ticket and was a disappointed, morose individual who was, however, ingratiating with his superiors and aggressive to those under him. He had a quick temper and when his chestnut eyes clouded over with anger, he was a man to fear. Anybody that he felt was slacking or not pulling their weight was in trouble.

'Hey you!' he would yell, his voice echoing around the ship as he visited his ire upon some hapless seaman. 'I've been watching you, pal! You've not been pulling your weight, you idle bastard!'

Many officers at sea might have chosen their wards more carefully. It only took a moment to whack somebody over the head and to drop their body over the side without anybody being the wiser. Prudence, however, was not in his makeup.

Ron quickly realised that apart from keeping out of his way, the key to a quiet life was to simply keep your head down and to get on with your job. Ron did his work. That was all that mattered.

In fact, discipline in that respect was more likely to be imposed by the other men on the watch because if one of their number was unwell and unable to work, then their workload went up dramatically. A man would have to have broken legs at the very least or be near death before he would be allowed to remain in his bunk. There was, of course, no doctor on board. The captain might administer some rough-and-ready doctoring where necessary, but pity the man for whom it was necessary.

Dimitri Kritikos had been born and grew up on Halki, a tiny island near Rhodes in the Dodecanese. His family had been very poor, but at first he had been completely unaware of that, since almost everybody else on the island was poor too. He had had some schooling, but not much. He preferred to be out on the bare, sun-blasted, limestone hills with his grandfather's goats and he made himself so useful to his grandfather, with whom he lived, that the grandfather was deaf to the pleas and entreaties of the village school teacher to let him attend school. His parents, whom he rarely saw, had gone when he was a toddler to live and work in Athens. They had intended, of course, that he should join them, but although they worked hard, they had never earned enough to rent a big enough flat to accommodate Dimitri as well, who had he but been given the choice would have unhesitatingly chosen his grandfather's little, stone house just outside the village rather than some teeming tenement in Athens.

Dimitri's parents had not been the only ones to leave. Once Halki, like many Greek islands, had supported much bigger populations at the end of the nineteenth century and again in the early twentieth century. Large numbers had left the islands to find work and a new life in America and Australia. Had Dimitri's parents, like many others, chosen to go further afield than Athens, then Dimitri's story would have been different. Dimitri knew none of this as a child, but when he reached his teens, one day his grandfather had said to him quietly when they were on the summit of Profitis Ilias and had regained their breath after the hard walk to the top, 'Tell me what you see around you Dimitri.'

Dimitri looked around him. He slowly turned 360 degrees and looked at the shattered, limestone rocks whose sharp-angled edges made walking so difficult. He looked at the ruined castle below the valley where the ravens croaked, he looked at the palio xorio – the remains of the old village near the castle - and then at the modern village clustered around the island's harbour, far below which was the one settlement on the island, and then at the encircling azure sea.

'Yes grandfather?' he asked questioningly. What, he wondered, was the old boy on about? He had seen all this many, many times before. He knew it so well that he felt sure that if he was taken a thousand miles away, he would still be able to see it just as clearly in his mind's eye as he could standing there at that moment.

His grandfather explained. 'Up until now, Dimitri, what you can see has been the limit of your world, but you are getting older and it is time to think seriously about what you are going to do with your life.'

'What do you mean?' asked Dimitri mystified.

'How are you going to earn your living? You will want to marry and have a family one day and for that you need an income. For an income you need a job and not just any old job, but a job that pays enough money for these things.'

Dimitri was silent. He found all this talk about jobs and income rather unsettling. He was quite happy with his life exactly as it was. He said so. His grandfather smiled weakly.

'Yes, my boy, at the moment, but the time will come when it is not enough for you and the sooner you start to think about it, the better.'

There the conversation ended, but the campaign had begun. It didn't matter how much resistance Dimitri put up or objections he raised, his grandfather gently and persistently continued to nudge him towards the end of the branch like a young bird being encouraged by its parents to fly.

Dimitri did not find the transition from boyhood to manhood easy, but eventually his grandfather had his way and, with the help of a cousin in Piraeus, he eventually found his way into the merchant service. This was a natural choice for an islander and it was also the profession his grandfather had pursued many years before.
CHAPTER 9

That was now many years ago. He had now spent a lifetime at sea. Somehow, he had never married and settled down. The grandfather, who had long since died, had left him his small house on Halki where, from time to time, Dimitri returned. He didn't go back often. He had only memories to return to and ghosts. With the passage of time, he had become a wanderer, a peripatetic traveller on the seas of the world, an Odysseus with no Ithaca and no Penelope to return to. He was happy enough. Occasionally, when he felt low or sorry for himself, he took comfort in drink, the seaman's friend.

Hitherto it had been his strict rule not to indulge whilst at sea. He tolerated no drunkenness or ill discipline among his crews whilst at sea and he was as strict with himself. On this occasion, however, there was an added temptation because he knew that the ship's cargo, bound for the West Indies and Florida, was French champagne. In ordinary circumstances, his favourite drink was Greek brandy for which he had developed the same degree of tolerance as the oak casks in which it was cured. As the voyage slowly progressed, he began to wonder whether or not champagne compared favourably with brandy and, one lonely evening in his cabin, he decided that the only way to find out was to try it.

As luck would have it, the first mate had already taken the precaution of storing a damaged crate in the captain's cabin. The crate had been dropped whilst being loaded, whether deliberately or not was open to speculation. A good many trades linked to the sea and the transit of goods developed systems of rewards which, when honoured by long usage, became regarded as lawful perks. In tea warehouses, for example, if a tea chest was damaged so that the tea cascaded out, this had come to be regarded as spillage. Tea warehouseman often had long bags inside their trousers in which to carry the loose tea after a spillage had occurred which apparently occurred so frequently as to be predictable. It was, of course, theft, but only if you were caught.

Seamen for their part simply stole from the cargo. This form of theft was dignified by the description 'broaching the cargo'.

Whether or not the crate in the captain's cabin was the result of a genuine accident or broaching the cargo was academic. It was there and it contained several dozen bottles of champagne. He had been using the crate as a table. It had a white sheet over it and he took his meals at it.

When the captain woke up the morning after his trial of the relative merits of brandy and champagne, he concluded that in his judgement it fell short in his estimation of the best Greek brandy, but nonetheless it was an acceptable drink.

Thereafter, he indulged increasingly until by the time the boat was a week or so off Jamaica, he was drunk most of the time.

The captain's condition had not escaped the notice of the crew. The first mate, too, had joined the on-board wine society and indulged liberally. His excuse was that it was June, and after all had it not been on a day in June that Robert the Bruce had beaten the Sassenach army at Bannockburn? Admittedly, that had been hundreds of years before, but was it not a date worth remembering? And celebrating?

His Caledonian counterpart in the engine room, the chief engineer, called somewhat unimaginatively, 'Scotty', needed no such excuse to indulge. It was almost unbearably hot in the engine room and he used a part at least of the precious cargo to cool himself, lifting up his engineer's cap and pouring a bottle over his head and partly vest-clad body.

The unfortunate thing as far as the crew were concerned was that drink rendered Scotty not aggressive, but maudlin. Lying on the deck, they would groan as the sounds of some Caledonian lament would drift up in the fetid air from the engine room. That was until after some cockney wag chose to join in. So, as from the depths, Scotty's quavering voice told the tale of the lovely Annie Laurie singing, 'Maxwell ton's braces are bonnie for early falls the dew...'

Up on deck a drunker seaman yelled back, 'Stick a sock in it, Jock!'

Fortunately for the seamen on deck, Scotty's condition was such that even if the ship had been torpedoed he was quite incapable of climbing the ladder up and out of the engine room. So, Scotty contented himself with grinding his teeth, muttering grimly to himself, 'pearls before swine,' and adding viciously, 'English swine!'

With those examples before them, what else were the crew to do but join in? It was now hot, very hot. The ship moved forward at the same slow, monotonous pace in a calm sea which, however, reflected the sun rays on to the already hot, metal superstructure of the rusty, old tramp-steamer as she wallowed sluggishly westwards. Down in the stokehole, the men worked in their underpants, the sweat streaming from their naked, coal-soot covered bodies. On deck, the seamen who were off watch lay around in the sun drinking champagne as if it were beer. This included the Scousers.

The captain and the first mate were nowhere to be seen. It was so hot, even at night, that the cockroaches came out from the crevasses in which they usually resided. There were so many of them that as a man moved along the deck, countless insect victims crackled and popped under his heavy sea boots like popcorn. The galley walls were covered in them. It was even hotter in the galley where the cook now worked clad only in a jock-strap, perspiring heavily over his culinary creations which, if distasteful to the crew, nonetheless had an enormous attraction for the cockroaches. Many of the insects found their way, of course, into his dishes, but he eased his conscience in this regard with the thought that they probably added protein to the men's diet, and since it was largely Scouse, they would be unlikely to notice anyway.

It was so hot in the stokehold that, to relieve his feelings, Lofty had, in a reckless, unthinking moment, laid a large turd on his shovel which he then carried to the furnace, opened the door and placed it steaming aromatically on to the steel plate just inside the door, from which position the aroma was wafted gently for'ard along the ship by the very slight breeze from the stern. Even men whose sense of smell was accustomed to and numbed by the revolting smells which often surrounded them winced as the aroma of Lofty's turd struck their nostrils. This, they felt, really exceeded the boundaries of polite behaviour. They were not pleased and knew from experience not only where the smell emanated from, but, by a simple process of deduction, who was responsible. Irritated and drunk, they awaited the appearance of Ron's watch.

An ominous air of expectation hung over the ship just as aggressive as the heat. When the men from Ron's watch emerged on deck at 12 noon, they were very hot and tired and, as a consequence, short-tempered. Those on deck were likewise in an ill humour. When one of the Scousers, it may have been Connolly, made yet another remark as they passed them, it was the spark that lit the fuse and led to the explosion which then occurred. Looking back, Ron had no idea who hit whom first, but in an instant it seemed as if they were all fighting.

At first, neither side had an advantage, but then the drunken state of the Scousers' watch counted against them and they received a good beating. The toughest one was Connolly and long after the others lay still, whether from the blows they received or the drink they had consumed, he continued to struggle. Ron's watch were already tired. Now they were exhausted, so they took it in turns to thump Connolly whilst the others rested for a bit sitting around on the deck hatch covers. Connolly had a lot to answer for. They had put up with him for weeks and now he was getting his just deserts. Eventually, even he was silenced and Ron, Winston, Phil and Lofty dragged themselves to the washroom to try to clean themselves up.

The fight, which had seemed to Ron to go on forever, only lasted about ten minutes, during which time the seaman on watch continued to steer the boat and the lookout had tried to wake the captain to report what was going on, but in vain. The first mate, too, could not be raised and so the perplexed seaman simply went back to his post and lookout and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. The fight seemed to have ended anyway. It had, for the moment.

It was now late afternoon. An expectant void hung over the ship. Something had to fill it. That something was again provided by Connolly, or at least the bloodied and beaten, half-crazed apparition that was Connolly. This he did by sliding into the captain's cabin and searching for and finding the captain's revolver in a drawer by his bunk. The floor of the captain's cabin was full of empty and part-filled bottles of the finest champagne. The champagne itself sloshed gently back and forth with the motion of the ship inside the captain's body whilst more oozed out of his sweat glands as he lay in his vest and underpants, comatose on the bunk. The bottles rattled and clattered as Connolly staggered through them, but this noise, loud enough to wake the dead, failed to wake the captain from his torpor.

Connolly checked that the revolver was loaded and then staggered, intent on revenge, towards the fireman's mess where even now Ron, Winston, Lofty and Phil were considering whether or not to risk eating the filth on the table before them that came under the generic term of 'food'.

Fortunately for them, Connolly, on descending a short ladder which led from the fore deck to where the mess room was situated, slipped and he fell the last few feet landing with a clatter on the deck. The jolt of the fall caused his grip on the revolver to tighten and he involuntarily squeezed the trigger which exploded into action, firing a bullet into the clammy air.

Connolly dragged himself up with his hand on the rail and at that moment Ron's watch, alarmed by the noise of the shot, burst out of the mess room to find Connolly now leaning against the rail with a gun in his hand. Ron was in front and stopped dead in his tracks, not knowing what to do. Winston, on the other hand, sprang past him and lunged at Connolly pushing the arm of the hand that held the gun to one side. There was a second explosion of sound as the gun fired again, this time intentionally. If Winston had not acted as he did, somebody would, without question, have been shot, in all probability him.

The shots had at last brought the whole crew to life. Even the captain had managed to drag himself to the door of his cabin from which elevated position he had a grandstand view of what was going on. He started to shout in Greek and began to wave his arms, but was so unsteady on his feet that he had to rapidly abandon that and return to clinging on to his cabin door. All around there was the sound of running feet and the shouts of the other seamen, both alarmed and excited at the same time.

Whether or not Winston was aware of any of this was not clear. His world had shrunk to a small space containing himself and Connolly whose face was twisted with hate and who was somehow consumed by the desire to kill Winston. He tried to raise the gun again. Winston grabbed the metal Marlin spike from the ship's rail and stabbed the sharp end into Connolly's lower abdomen. Connolly collapsed with a loud cry and was carried, bleeding profusely, to his bunk where within a few minutes he bled to death, his heart having pumped the blood out of his punctured body with every beat it took. The marlin spike must have severed an artery.

At the same time as Connolly was carried away, the rest of the crew fell on Winston who disappeared beneath a heap of struggling men. Ron and the two others tried unsuccessfully to pull them off, but it was no use. They were pushed back into the mess room, and the bloody pulp that was now Winston was dragged off for'ard to be thrown into the chain locker.

The chain locker was in the prow of the ship and contained the anchor chain. Since the door, like all doors on the ship, could be locked from the outside by spinning a wheel-like handle, it made an effective cell, should the need arise. That need had now arisen in the opinion of the captain, and it was into the dank recesses of this locker room, from which escape uninjured or even alive was not guaranteed if for any reason the ship suddenly ran out its anchor. This would result in the coils and heaps of heavy, metal chain couplets roaring and twisting around the locker room as if alive like some gigantic, metal python. For anyone caught in that chain, it meant almost certain death. Here, into this hole, Winston was thrown to bleed and lie unconscious in the dark.
CHAPTER 10

The captain, Dimitri Kritikos, had regained control of his ship, but now had a number of problems on his hands. The first was how to explain to the relevant authorities how it was that he had a dead seaman on his ship. The next problem, similar in nature, was how to explain the same thing to the ship's owners, who could probably be counted upon to take a dim view of what would undoubtedly be an interruption to their boat's journey resulting in a loss of money. The fact that the owners were Greek, and that so too was he, provided no comfort to Dimitri. At the end of the day, he knew that business was business.

His third and final problem was that he had a rapidly decomposing corpse on his ship and was still a couple of days from the nearest port. By the morning after the stabbing, only a coffin fly would have taken pleasure in Connolly's company. By midday, the stench hanging around the ship like a cloud was overpowering and made the men gag, even wearing scarves and kerchiefs tied around their faces. It was hot. There was no wind and the boat moved slowly. To keep the cockroaches off the body, they had placed it on a table, but since cockroaches can climb, they placed each leg of the table in a bucket of water, the surface of which would have to be regularly skimmed by a seaman to remove the corpses of dead cockroaches and prevent them from forming a bridge over which their fellows might reach the table legs and then the body. This unpleasant task had to be carried out every morning, since the cockroaches came out at night.

This was an unpleasant task. Nobody could hold their breath long enough to carry it out without breathing. There was no point in asking for volunteers. The men drew lots.

The lot fell to Ron on one occasion. He carried out his task diligently, but was unable to speak afterwards. He was reluctant to open his mouth. The smell of Connolly's rotting corpse hung on his clothes, his hair, his upper lip, just as tobacco smoke somehow invisibly attaches itself to those who smoke or who are in the proximity of smokers.

Slowly, the boat drew nearer to land. This was Jamaica, the island from which Winston had originally come. It was an odd homecoming for him to the land of his birth.

Nobody knew how he was. Ron plucked up his courage and asked the captain if he could take him some water. Reluctantly the captain agreed, but only because he realised that two dead men might be even more difficult to explain. He allowed it on condition that he stood at the door, loaded revolver at the ready.

Ron filled a bucket with tepid water, stuffed a sponge into one pocket and some bread and cheese into the other and went to the chain locker door. The captain was waiting for him.

'None of that,' he said quietly taking the bread and cheese from Ron's pocket and throwing it over the side. 'Let the bastard starve for a bit.'

Then he motioned to Ron to open the door. Ron turned the handle and pulled open the heavy, metal door, the smell of barnacle and seaweed-encrusted metal met his nostrils mixed with the strong smell of sweat. Since Winston was the only occupant, this last odour plainly belonged to him. Ron could not see Winston at first, since there was no light and it was dark inside, the only natural light coming in from the doorway and just a glimmer from the port where the chain exited and was connected to the ship's anchor.

'Can't see the black bastard in the dark,' growled the captain adding, 'Come on! Smile, you bastard!' and then cackling at his foray into the world of humour.

The captain was not noted for his sense of humour and he was not in any event trying to be funny. The more he thought about what had happened and its implications for himself, the more irritable and angry he felt.

Whilst the captain stood gloomily at the doorway peering in, Ron went further in. As his eyes got used to the dark, he could just make out Winston slumped against the chain, his head pillowed on his arms.

'Winston,' he said urgently giving him a gentle shake. 'Winston! Wake up! It's me, Ron. I've come to give you some water and to clean you up a bit.' This last remark he whispered lest the captain should decide that Winston was not going to be cleaned up.

Ron didn't wait, but started to sponge Winston's face which he sensed rather than saw was swollen and lumpy. He also quickly sponged his neck and chest, and as Winston groaned and moved a little, he held a beaker of water to his mouth. Winston began to drink.

'Winston, listen to me. We are not far from Jamaica. We should be there in a little under a day.' Then he paused. 'Can you hear me, man?' he asked uncertain as to whether or not Winston was actually conscious.

'Hear you Ron,' whispered Winston. 'Where am I?'

'You're in the chain locker,' replied Ron sponging Winston for all he was worth. He glanced over his shoulder. The captain's form was not as previously framed by the door. Perhaps he had been distracted or called away, he wondered. Seizing the moment, he said as quietly as he could with his mouth up close to Winston's ear, 'I'll come back tonight with some grub and anything else I can get hold of. Keep your chin up, mate.'

Winston grunted. The captain reappeared at the doorway. He was now smoking a cigar which he clenched firmly between his teeth as he growled, 'That's enough! Out!'

Ron did as he was told and, giving Winston a quick pat on the shoulder, he left the chain locker and slammed the door shut behind him. Then he went back to his cabin where Phil and Lofty were waiting for him. He gave them a brief summary of what had happened.

'What's going to happen now?' asked Lofty.

'Dunno, mate,' said Ron. 'I guess Winston will be put ashore in Jamaica and handed over to the police there.'

That, of course, is what ordinarily should have happened, but another possibility was beginning to take shape in the captain's mind. What if there were to be an accident, he wondered?

The idea had come to him as he stood in the doorway of the chain locker looking in and seeing Winston lying on the chains. It didn't take too much imagination to work out what would happen if he gave the order to drop anchor. The chain would go out with an unstoppable velocity and in all probability Winston would go out with it. His exit would be akin to a runner bean being pushed through a slicer. There would be nothing left of him, and what there was, the sharks would clean up. With Winston gone, he could, he reckoned, get away with burying Connolly at sea. A possibility he thought of as Connolly's body reminded him of its presence by wafting the smell of rotting flesh gently across his nostrils.

He need not then get tied up with the police and red tape in Jamaica. He could telegraph a carefully worded report to the owners and that, he felt sure, would be that. Nobody was going to be concerned about the loss of two merchant seamen. Accidents were commonplace at sea. Connolly could be buried at sea as was the practice, sewn up in a sheet with a lump of iron inside and then slung over the side with the minimum of ceremony, the iron ensuring a swift descent into the depths. No bodies. No red tape. Just a vacancy for a couple of firemen that would be easy to fill at the next port they reached.

The idea appealed to him and he determined to put it into effect. How could he drop anchor? He couldn't do it at sea and he wasn't wanting to go into the harbour. Then he had an idea. He would anchor 'in the stream' as it was called. They often did that before going into a harbour to be off-loaded. That night he mentioned to the mate that he had radioed ahead and been told to anchor in the stream until the authorities were ready to deal with them.

The mate accepted that without question. That seemed perfectly normal. He left the bridge and, on being asked by one of the deckhands how close to land they were, he answered that they were a few hours sailing off Jamaica and that on arrival they would be anchoring in the stream until further notice.

The word of this went around the ship like wildfire and reached the ears of Ron's watch working now on the 8:00 am to 12:00 pm watch. It was hard work because they were one man down. They received the news without comment. It wouldn't help them much. They reckoned that that would be in about the middle of not the next watch, but the watch after that in the night, so their workload would not ease in the meantime. It was only whilst they were gathered together like witches around a cauldron, around the bucket and soap provided for their ablutions after the watch had finished, that Lofty, the most experienced seaman among them, suddenly exclaimed, 'Bloody hell!' and grew very agitated.

'Are you thinking what I am?' he asked Phil.

'Wodja mean?' enquired Phil in a tired voice.

'Listen man, we are going to anchor in the stream, right?'

'Yeah, so what?'

Lofty assumed the air of one explaining something very simple to somebody very thick. 'When you anchor, you do what?' he asked assuming an air of exaggerated patience.

'You drop anchor,' said Phil.

'Correct, and who canny lad is in the fucking chain locker?'

'Winston.'

'Correct, and what is likely to happen to him?'

Phil looked at him with a sudden realisation of the implications for Winston. 'But surely the captain will move him first?' he said.

'Yeah right, well he might, but just say that he 'forgot'? You remember what happened to those Chinese stowaways on a steamer out of Canton?' he asked reminding Phil of an incident that they had heard about from mates who had been in the crew of that ship at the time.

Phil remembered. As related to them, a number of Chinese stowaways who had crept aboard in Canton had been discovered when they were at sea and then placed out of the way in the chain locker where they had stayed fed, but confined, throughout the voyage. When the ship reached New Orleans, the captain who, on seeing the approach of the coast guard, had decided that rather than become embroiled in the red tape that their discovery would guarantee, to anchor in the stream and did so, the unfortunate Chinese exiting the ship with the anchor chain.

This was explained to Ron who said simply, 'We have to get him out of there then.'

'And what then?' said Lofty. 'Even if he gets ashore in one piece, he's looking at a murder charge.'

'It was self-defence,' said Phil.

'Would you put your faith in any legal system to see you fair and square?' asked Ron. The answer to that one was easy and a unanimous 'no'. Not that they said anything. It wasn't necessary. They all had an instinctive understanding of the essential unfairness of life. No legal system yet invented was capable of putting that right.

'What's to be done then?' asked Phil breaking the silence. Lofty, the most experienced seaman, again had the answer.

'He'll have to skin out and take his chances.'

'What?' said Ron. 'You mean jump ship?'

'That's exactly what I mean,' said Lofty, 'but first we've got to get him out of the chain locker.'

'But we'll be about a mile off land,' protested Phil. 'That's a bloody long swim!'

'True,' pondered Lofty, 'and there might be sharks about. Don't they feed at night?' he asked enquiringly of the others.

'I don't bloody know!' said Ron irritably, 'and quite honestly I'd rather not think about it.'

'I know,' piped up Phil. 'we could put a life raft over the side and Winston could swim to it. He'd have a better chance then.'

They all nodded in agreement. Then Lofty said, 'Whoever lets him out of the chain locker had better go too, otherwise,' he paused, 'I suggest there may well be another unfortunate accident.'

'Alright,' said Ron decisively. 'That's me then. I'll do it and I'll skin out with Winston.'

The afternoon passed slowly. Ron lay on his bunk and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. Now that he had decided to jump ship with Winston, his mind was filled with doubts which he grappled with mentally, whilst a long line of yet more doubts formed an orderly queue whilst patiently waiting their turn to assail him. Would he be able to get Winston over the side, he wondered. What if Winston was unconscious or so unwell that if he did get him over the side he simply drowned? What if they couldn't find the life raft? What if there were any bloody sharks about? He spent an unpleasant few hours speculating on the unthinkable. Eventually darkness came. Phil gave him a mug of tea. They all shared a fag without speaking, then Lofty thumped him on the shoulder and said, 'Away lads, if we are going to do this we had best get cracking.' They knew they had little time.

At any moment they might reach a point that the captain would judge as suitable to drop anchor. So, whilst Phil went to the rear of the boat with Lofty to liberate one of the life rafts, Ron took a quick look around the cabin that had been his home since he left England and then made for the chain locker. He knew he would be seen. Not only would the lookout see him, but the helmsman and the captain or the mate too. He would be clearly visible for'ard even though it was night-time. That was why there was little future in him staying. They both had to go over the side together.

Putting all doubts behind him, he forced his brain into neutral and ran to the chain locker and quickly spun the handle to release the door. He hoped Winston had his wits about him. As he entered the compartment, he was dimly aware of a noise somewhere behind him.

'Winston,' he called urgently into the darkness, 'Quick man! We've got to go over the side now!'

He felt in the darkness and found Winston slumped against the chains. Winston groaned. Ron pulled him to his feet and, slinging one of Winston's arms over his shoulder and putting one of his own arms around Winston's waist, he half dragged Winston to the compartment door. As he dragged him through and on to the deck, he heard the captain cry, 'Stop you bastards! Stop or I'll shoot!'

These words seemed to inject new life into Winston who stood on his own two feet for the first time. Both men made for the rail.

'Come on, Winston, I'm going over!' called Ron. He looked over the rail at the inky-black unknown below marking who knows what? Then he jumped. A shot rang out. He hit the water and sank and sank. It seemed like an age before he felt his body begin to slowly rise as the air he had inhaled buoyed him up. Then his head broke the surface. He looked around. The ship was already a little distance away and slowly receding.

Christ, he thought, I'm in the middle of the bloody ocean in the middle of the bloody night! Help! He forced himself to be calm and called into the night, 'Winston.'

To his enormous relief, Winston answered. At least, he thought, he was not alone. Quickly, the two men joined each other and started to swim towards the life raft bobbing up and down on the waves a little distance from them. As they reached it and pulled themselves on board, Ron said a silent prayer of gratitude to Phil who had had the good sense to suggest slinging a life raft over the side. They would have had a problem without it, he realised. Apart from anything else, which way was the land?

When they had got their breath back, they sat up and looked around more carefully. There were no stars. The night was cloudy. No help there then. They could, however, dimly see the green and red port and starboard lights of their ship as it continued on its way and also, off the starboard bow, they could just make out some twinkling lights ashore on what they thought must be Jamaica. It was time to start paddling.

They paddled together steadily, but didn't seem to get anywhere. The lights came no closer. There was no discernible movement of the life raft which, as a square contraption, tended to move sideways as they paddled and appeared to wallow rather than move forward. Soon they were perspiring heavily. Eventually Ron, exhausted, said, 'Let's have a rest,' and without waiting for an answer lay flat on the raft. Winston said nothing, but stopped paddling too, and the pair of them lay there gazing up at a dark, cloudy sky where the stars should have been. They were hungry and thirsty and very tired. Suddenly, even the old rust-bucket that they had skinned out from seemed attractive, like home almost. At least what they imaged home might be like, had they got one which neither of them did.

Slowly, the sky grew lighter as dawn approached and they could see further. Ron had fallen asleep and was wakened by Winston roughly shaking him on the shoulder.

'Look man,' he said. Ron looked. He could see land now in the distance, but it still seemed to be a good way off. He groaned and fell back again. Winston shook him again saying, 'No, no, look there!'

Ron looked and in a different direction only a few hundred yards from them was a small fishing boat. Would they pick them up, he wondered. Winston did not pause to debate the point, but stood up and took his shirt off and waved and called. For a moment nothing happened, and then the small craft turned and came towards them, its engine chugging comfortingly louder and louder as it drew near. When it reached them, there were only two men aboard. They were fishermen from the island which they confirmed was indeed Jamaica.

Winston and Ron transferred to the battered, old boat and sat amongst the metal drums containing fish and crabs. The men asked no questions, but offered them rum, bread and hard boiled eggs. For a moment, Ron thought that he had died and gone to heaven. Winston seemed too excited to eat, but Ron did his best to make up for him as the little boat chugged slowly towards land. Then he fell asleep again.

When he awoke, it was to discover that they were on shore on a beach on which looked like a small hamlet or fishing village of some sort. Winston was nowhere to be see, but as he opened his eyes and rolled over the on the wet fishing nets he had been lying on, he saw that he had an audience in an assortment of little, black children of various shapes and sizes. He smiled at them and they smiled back at him. Just then, Winston turned up.

'Thought I had woken up in Brixton for a minute there, mate,' he grinned at Winston.

'Very funny! Come on, one of these men has a truck and is going to give us a lift to town where we can go to my grandmother's place.'

Soon they were standing at the gate of the fenced compound where Winston's grandmother lived. It was actually beyond the town and on the edge of a steep hill overlooking the sea and, to judge by the row from inside, protected from intruders by a pack of wild dogs. Even Winston did not hurry to open the gate and eventually a little girl appeared to see what all the fuss was about and called, 'Winston! Grandma, it's Winston!'

Grandma, too, then appeared on the veranda of the modest, wooden bungalow that occupied the centre of the compound. She, too, recognised Winston and bade the dogs be silent, an order they instantly obeyed. Winston and Ron then entered, although Ron kept Winston between himself and the dogs as far as possible. He was not, he reasoned, done up like a dog's dinner and had no intention therefore of being one.

The old lady welcomed them both in and Winston told her the tale of their adventures and how they came to be there, whilst the little girl, who turned out to be his niece, the daughter of a sister of his, sat in his lap and allowed herself to be cuddled.

Gran was a large, comfortable-looking lady whose waist had long given up any pretence of attempting to define the space between the ample expanses of her upper and lower body. To Ron she seemed more like a retired cook or housekeeper, and indeed in a sense she was, having had and raised six children, all of whom, like her, had had large appetites and kept her husband busy working and her cooking. For her, now listening to her grandson's adventures, she was just pleased to have him there regardless of how that had come to pass.

The upshot of it was that the grandmother insisted they should stay with her until they sorted out what to do next.

This was less of a problem for Winston who was a native of the place. He could slip back into his old life quite easily should he wish to do so. For Ron, however, it was rather different. He was not a local. He had no passport or papers of any kind. Ron's papers he had left on board, having surrendered them to the captain on signing on. He couldn't even rely on Ron's identity now. Unless he could come up with another set, he was effectively stateless. This did not trouble him as much as it troubled Winston at first until Ron pointed out to him that the police might be looking for Ronald Wilkins, a British seaman, and that as a result it was rather better that he shook off that identity rather like an old skin.

'But they will catch up with you sometime, man,' pointed out Winston earnestly. Ron smiled.

'If the authorities are looking for Ron Wilkins, that's fine by me. He's got the perfect alibi. He's doing five years right now in Pentonville.'

Then, briefly, he told Winston how he had come to join the ship and sail away from England's shores. Winston was impressed when he had finished the tale.

'So, what is your name?' he asked.

'Just call me Ron,' said Ron. 'I'm used to it now and as we are told Shakespeare said – what's in a name?!'
CHAPTER 11

Some months later, Ron found himself one sunny, summer morning trudging up a dirt road that led to a small lake deep in rural Minnesota. He'd hitched a lift from a lorry driver who had dropped him on the highway near a small boy selling bait for fishermen from an old drum. The kid, who was the only person around, looked up expectantly when Ron approached thinking that here might be a customer for some of his minnows. He was to be disappointed. All Ron wanted was directions, preferably directions to somewhere he might find work or lodgings or both.

Since he'd left Jamaica and been deposited one night illegally on the shores of the mighty United States of America, he had bummed his way north doing odd jobs of work anywhere he could find it for money, or a meal, or a bed for the night. He wasn't fussy. The insecurity and uncertainty of his life caused him no anxiety at all. On the contrary, he felt a strange new sense of freedom. He had been liberated, freed from the invisible bonds that tie a person to other persons or places. He didn't even have an identity. He was a man with no past from nowhere and had absolutely nothing apart from the clothes he wore. In that sense, the sense of actually having anything, he was in reality in no worse a position than a millionaire, a man who to himself and others has so much when, in reality, like Ron, all he has is this moment which is gone in an instant and immediately replaced by the next until it pleases God to remove him from this world. Seek and ye shall find. Ask and it shall be given. Ron never went hungry, at least not for long. He slept in railway wagons, barns, on benches in bus stations or in ditches as the need arose and opportunity presented itself. He had no plan, no aim and he took each day, indeed each moment, as it came and accepted it for what it was. He was alive. He was free and for the first time in his life, he was supremely happy.

The boy selling bait pointed him towards a timber yard which was nearby and where he said he might be able to find work. Ron trudged along the dusty track in the direction indicated. The sun was high and it was hot, but the road was shaded by trees along each side with pools of light here and there in which sometimes a snake would be lying looking as if it had swallowed a frog, which it probably had to judge by the cricket ball sized lump halfway down its body which it was now struggling to digest.

Old settler fences separated the road and ditch from the surrounding fields. These were trees lain one on top of each other without nails or supports of any kind, held up by the weight of the wood and the zigzag pattern in which they were constructed. Over the many years that had passed since they were erected, they had become hollow and were now the home for families of chipmunks who dashed excitedly back and forth as Ron passed.

As he rounded a bend by a small creek flowing sluggishly into the nearby lake, he saw ahead a small farm. Next to the farm was a timber yard that he guessed was the yard to which he had been directed. To get to the yard, he had to pass the entrance to the farm. There, in the middle of the road, lay a large dog. At least he thought it was a dog, but it looked more like a wolf. As he approached, the dog gave no sign of being aware of his presence, but when he was only a few feet away, it raised an ear and then slowly turned its head to look at him. Approaching it with a confidence he did not feel, he made to step across it. With a swift movement of its head, the dog snapped its jaws around his left ankle, but otherwise didn't move. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him as if to say, 'Your move, buster'. Ron tried to move, but in vain. The dog emitted a threatening, deep-throated growl and so he stood there like a nineteenth century poacher caught in a mantrap.

He was at a complete loss to know what to do, but then Susan stepped into his life, emerging from the farm gate talking not to him, but to the dog in a scolding but affectionate voice.

'Hey, Leo – see you're up to your favourite tricks,' she said as she stepped forward grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck and shaking it and yelling into its ear. 'Put him down!'

The dog obeyed and then slumped back down again as if exhausted by its exertions.

'Don't mind him,' she said, now addressing Ron. 'He's old and grumpy, but he wouldn't really hurt you.'

Ron was not so sure, but any discomfort or embarrassment he might otherwise have felt had been completely dispelled by the vision of loveliness before him. Susan was about his age, perhaps a little younger, slim and blond and had a fluted nose which turned up slightly at the end and made him go weak at the knees.

'Oh, er, think nothing of it,' he mumbled. She turned to go. He didn't want her to. He called after her.

'Er, I'm looking for work. Do you know where I might find some?'

'Try my uncle's place in the timber yard yonder,' she said pointing at the yard, but without looking back or stopping.

Ron watched her disappear into the farmhouse, cast a baleful glance at the dog who was now ignoring him, and went to the timber yard.

The yard, unsurprisingly, smelt of wood. There were great stacks of it everywhere and a good deal of sawdust too. Somewhere a mechanical saw was in operation, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Over in one corner of the yard was a small mountain of sawdust. There was something slightly odd about it and he walked over to have a closer look. The sawdust appeared lumpy as if it covered great blocks of granite, but when he rubbed some of the sawdust away, he saw that it was not stone, but ice.

'You want some ice?' said a voice behind him. He turned around and there stood a tough-looking man in his fifties. This, it turned out, was Alex Ferguson, the owner of the yard and the uncle of Jack Ferguson who owned the farm alongside.

'Odd, ain't it?' said Alex with a smile. 'Leastways if you ain't seen it before.'

'True,' said Ron adding, 'What do you use it for?'

Alex looked at him as if he had fallen from another plant. 'You mean you really don't know?'

'Nope,' said Ron. There was no point in pretending, he felt, and, anyway, what did it matter if you knew or not? He had found so far, even in his short life, that ignorance is no handicap since somebody who knows what you don't will generally be keen to tell you. So he encouraged Alex to tell him what it was all about by explaining that he was from England where such things did not exist.

Alex enlightened him. The ice was cut from the lake when it froze in the winter, so thick that you could drive a car over it. Once cut, the ice was piled up and covered with sawdust to keep it cool and then sold to people in the summer. Quite literally, it was the ice for their ice boxes. Many of the cabins along the edge of the lake were weekend places and holiday homes. They often had no electricity and so an ice box served as a refrigerator, and a chemical lavatory outside, some distance from the cottage, served as a 'John'.

Having chatted for a while, Ron asked if there was any chance of some casual work. To his surprise, Alex said quite readily that he could use an extra pair of hands and took him on on the spot to help around the yard and, if need be, on his brother's farm. Ron was pleased. Now all he needed was somewhere to stay. Again, to his surprise, that proved to be unexpectedly easy. Alex was already ahead of him asking him at once if he had anywhere to say. On learning that Ron didn't, Alex told him he could sleep in the loft in the barn where there was a bunk and where it was dry and reasonably warm, at least in the summer.

'You don't want to be living rough around here,' he observed as they walked around the yard together, Alex showing Ron where things were. 'There's a lot of snakes around here, you have to watch yourself.'

It was true, over the coming weeks Ron would see snakes everywhere lying bloated with their latest meal digesting slowly inside them or slithering away in the long grass on the edge of the yard. There were snakes in the water too. One day Alex sent him to help Susan bring some cattle from the fields to an enclosure closer to the farm. To get to the animals they had to cross a shallow creek where, in deeper pools and eddies, Ron could see dozens of snakes, their bodies gently moving with the flow of the water. He hesitated on the edge. Not so Susan who slipped her shoes and socks off and splashed resolutely across the stream.

'Come on,' she called over her shoulder. Reluctantly Ron followed treading gingerly through the stream, his toes sinking in to the muddy bottom expecting at any moment to be bitten by some amphibious creature. Suddenly, Susan stopped and thrust both hands into the water out of which, thrashing and snapping, she pulled a turtle which she held aloft by its little tail projecting from under its shell.

'Look!' she cried. 'This little fella will take your toe off. Do you want to hold it?'

He could quite see why it was called a snapping turtle because that is what the creature was doing all the time, snapping its jaws open and shut, its neck and head straining to reach something more chewable than fresh air. All Ron wanted to do was to get out of the water as fast as possible. Not wishing to appear a complete wuss before his pretty companion, he was obliged to wait until she had finished her inspection of the by now irate turtle and returned it to the water a little distance away. Then they moved on to the far bank which they reached unscathed, Ron trying hard, but not quite succeeding, not to look relieved.

So the days and then weeks went past. Ron came to know and to like the Fergusons who were kind to him and treated him like one of the family. Even Leo seemed to accept him into the fold. Ron could now step over him with impunity, or almost. Leo would still occasionally, and probably for pure devilment, wait until Ron's leg was in the air as he strode over the dog and he would suddenly growl furiously causing Ron's heart to miss a beat, which was probably the intention. Apart from the growl, though, he didn't do anything, although Ron could have sworn he saw the dog afterwards shaking with silent laughter.

He would more often than not be invited to take an evening meal with them over at the farmhouse which was part of the same building as the barn which in winter housed the cattle, the cattle living at one end and the farmhouse at the other. The garden of the farmhouse ran down to the lake where there was a rickety, wooden jetty, to which a small boat with an outboard motor was moored. Sometimes, he would be sent into town to get supplies of one kind or another or running an errand for Jack and Freda Ferguson who ran the farm. It took about an hour to chug slowly along the lake through its clear, limpid waters to the end where a river running from the lake was controlled by lock gates. The boat would be moored near the locks which were right on the edge of the little town which was the nearest settlement of any size to where the Fergusons lived. Ron would carry out his errands, walking around the little town with the sun burning down on his shoulders, and the sidewalks so hot that to walk on them barefoot was uncomfortable. He only made that mistake once.

Ron liked it best of all when Susan came too. He loved being alone with her in the boat with the sunlight reflected on her hair creating a golden halo around her head. Sometimes she asked him about England. She had read a lot of English literature and in her mind's eye she had a vision of a green and pleasant land, quite different from the England that Ron had known. He liked her too much to disillusion her and reasoned that, anyway, there might be places of the kind that she had read about, an eternal England of green meadows, leafy woods and hedge-lined lanes peopled by the descendants of Saxon and Dane. Even from the distance of several thousand miles and viewed through the rosiest of rose-tinted glasses, the post-war council estate that had been home to him fell far short of Susan's vision. As for the English, he pondered the question. They were there still. He had grown up amongst them and had known no different until he left. He was English by definition, but now he came to think about it, he had no really clear idea what that meant.

These thoughts he kept to himself. He drove them from his mind. He wanted nothing to dispel the pleasure of the moments spent in Susan's company when her mere presence kept the world at bay and infused everything with a deeper significance. Ron didn't realise it at first, but he had fallen in love with Susan.

If Susan felt the same way, she didn't show it and, indeed, it was unlikely that she did for there came a time when Ron realised that she had a boyfriend, Brad. Brad had not been in evidence before because it turned out that he had spent some time studying in Europe and had only just returned when he turned up one day in his sports car at the Fergusons' farm.

Susan was pleased to see him, although his arrival was unexpected since she was wearing her ordinary, everyday clothes, a cotton-print skirt in which, ordinary as it was, Ron thought she looked delightful. To judge by the look on his face and the embrace that he gave her, Brad thought so too. Ron was aghast, witnessing the touching reunion from atop a pile of timber at the nearby yard.

He must have looked thunderstruck because he was suddenly aware of the presence of Alex Ferguson next to him who said nothing at first, but who then patted him gently on the shoulder and said quietly, 'Come on son, she's not for you,' and when at first Ron, rooted to the spot, failed to move, he added still gently, 'Come on Ron, we have got work to do.'

The rest of the work day seemed to Ron to last forever. Susan didn't come over to the yard as she usually did in the afternoon maybe with coffee and cookies. She was nowhere to be seen, but Brad's car remained parked right outside the farmhouse door.

After work, Ron went for a swim in the lake, partly because he needed a bath, since working in a timber yard was dirty work, and partly to try and clear his head. He felt downcast. From living in a happy bubble, oblivious to the outside world, he had landed suddenly in the real world with a bump and he was still feeling sorry for himself. Susan met him coming back from the lake and greeted him with her usual, friendly smile before inviting him 'to come on over to the house to have supper and to meet Brad.' Although still wishing to nurse his hurt feelings, he realised that it would be churlish to refuse and was, anyway, hungry enough to eat a horse. Unrequited love, he acknowledged to himself with some relief, did not, at least in his case, lead to loss of appetite.

Supper was the usual substantial meal cooked by Mrs Ferguson who devoted much of her time and energy to generating enormous meals for hungry men, only to see them disappear in a very short time. Ron noticed with a certain smug satisfaction as he speared another steak that Brad didn't seem very hungry. Brad was not in any competition for seconds. He had eyes only for Susan and was casting long, adoring glances at her across the table. None of this, of course, escaped the notice of Mr and Mrs Ferguson, her parents. Of course, they were unlikely to disapprove for, as Ron learned from Alex over at the wood-yard the next day, Brad, whom Ron had already grudgingly admitted, was not only very good looking, but his parents 'owned pretty much everything in these parts'. That at least was how he described it. A match made in heaven then, Ron realised, for Susan's parents at least.

Alex, who had grown to like the rather taciturn Englishman, took Ron into his confidence still further. Over coffee one morning, he mentioned that he owed a sizeable sum of money to Brad's father which he had borrowed some years previously to see him through a difficult period when, due to a disagreement he had had with one of the circular saws at the yard, he had been unable to work for many months. The saw had been operating when he had, by accident, fallen against it and although he had not lost his leg, it had been split from hip to knee and the bone shattered. He had been in plaster for months and it was a long time after that before he was able to get back to work. His brother, Jack, had enough to do with running the farm, and in order to stop from going bust, Alex had had to employ more men. This cost money which he had borrowed and which he was still paying back. It seemed that he hadn't made a great deal of progress and he was being pressed by Brad's father, who had secured the loan by way of a mortgage against the yard, to pay up and to pay up quick.

Ron realised that it wouldn't be such a bad thing for Alex either if Susan were to marry Brad. Brad's father would hardly be likely to take possession of his brother-in-law's brother's property. Who knows, the loan might even be written-off.

These, at least, were the thoughts that Alex expressed aloud, although why he was expressing them in front of Ron, a nineteen year old with no money and no prospects, was something that Ron couldn't explain. Maybe, he wondered, Alex needed to get it off his chest and he was a convenient ear?

Susan continued to be just as friendly towards him as she had been prior to Brad's arrival, but she now spent a lot of time in Brad's company and it was obvious that they were a couple, and a couple evidently sliding rapidly down the slope towards the altar. Then, one morning, Susan appeared in the yard and asked Ron to help her bring in some cattle from the fields. There was nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that her usually sunny, blond features looked troubled. Ron debated for a while whether or not to enquire what it was that was troubling her, but decided against it. He reasoned to himself that if she wanted to tell him, she would. And she did. After they had walked in silence to the cattle and began driving them towards the farm, she stopped suddenly and looked at Ron with tears in her eyes.

'Brad's been drafted,' she said. 'He's had his call-up papers.'

Then she burst into tears and Ron stepped forwards and put his arms around her. He'd never done that before, neither to her, nor indeed to any other girl. The closest he had come to hugging a female was the perfunctory hug that he had given his old gran before he had left to go to sea.

It was, he discovered, not unpleasant. Susan had buried her head in his chest and the scent of her lovely hair just under his nose he found quite intoxicating. She had lovely shoulders too which shook slightly as she sobbed and which, in order to comfort her, he felt obliged to pat and stroke. Although it hurt him to see her so distressed, he quickly realised that he was actually enjoying himself. This feeling he struggled to suppress as he tried to think of something to say.

'Is it really so terrible if he's got to do his military service?' There had once been National Service in England too, but that had ended before he was old enough to be called-up.

'Yes,' she sobbed. 'It is. The chances are he will be sent to Vietnam.'

Ron had only been vaguely aware that there was a war in Vietnam in which the USA had become increasingly embroiled. He didn't read newspapers, nor listen to the news. He wasn't interested and was more concerned with the immediacy of whatever situation he had found himself in. So what if there was a war somewhere? What did it have to do with him? Something told him that he was about to find out.
CHAPTER 12

Whether or not Brad was called-up and sent to Vietnam was something about which he felt absolutely indifferent, but he was far from indifferent to Susan's suffering. Neither he nor anybody else could fail to recognise how unhappy she had become. From being alight with joy at his arrival, she now seemed plunged into the depths of despair at his imminent departure. Hardly had he appeared in her life, he was about to leave it again, possibly forever.

Ron wasn't exactly brimming full of happiness and contentment himself. The happy bubble he had inhabited in this tranquil backwater had been burst and, he realised, would never be the same again. For a short time he suffered the pangs of unrequited love and when not working, mainly in the evenings, would go for melancholic strolls in the moonlight pondering in his imagination what might have been. He became in his imagination the hero in a film in which he starred, in some of which, after some impossibly heroic act on his part, he won the girl and in a variation of that theme he rode off into the sunset pausing only on the skyline to wave so that those watching his departure could take one last admiring look at his manly figure framed against the sun going down.

He was by nature, however, of a philosophical turn of mind and that, coupled with the persistent attentions of the myriads of mosquitoes around the verges of the lake, caused him to pull himself together after a relatively short interval.

He decided he would leave and the sooner the better, and one evening after work, he made his way up to the farmhouse to announce his intention. He felt a little sad, but had made his mind up. As he approached the farmhouse, he noticed more cars present than previously and as he knocked and entered the farm, he found out why. Not only was Brad there, together with the assembled Ferguson family, but so too was his father.

As he entered, the room fell silent and all turned to look at him. This unnerved him slightly, but he pressed on and said that he was intending to move on. There was a continuation of the silence which he sought to fill by mumbling about how much he had enjoyed working with them and how grateful he was for them treating him pretty much like a member of the family. All of this was true in any event.

As he looked at them all, he realised that he didn't want to leave at all, but whilst he wavered, old Alex came over to him and took him by the hand and said that they would miss him, but they wished him luck. Whether he meant it or not, Ron didn't know, but he felt it was a nice thing for them to have said. He was mostly interested in Susan's reaction, hoping that she might be sad of his going, but in this he was to be disappointed. She was still absorbed in her own drama which was focused on Brad, and looking at her he doubted if his leaving would have any impact on her at all.

He was offered coffee and he gratefully accepted, together with a plate of food in the kitchen pulled together swiftly by Mrs Ferguson from what was left of the meal they had all just consumed. Ron didn't mind. He was hungry and Mrs Ferguson was a good cook. He turned the film off in his head and parked being noble and hurt and concentrated on the plate before him piled high with food.

After he had cleared the plate of its contents and all but removed its pattern – ducks in a Chinese-looking swamp, he thought – he pushed the plate away and leaned back in the chair with a sigh of relief. The world, he suddenly felt, was not such a bad place after all. He poured himself a cup of coffee and as he did so the kitchen door opened and Brad's father entered the room.

'Feel better?' he said smiling at Ron.

'Sure do,' said Ron enthusiastically wondering what he wanted. Why, he wondered, was Brad's father suddenly taking an interest in his welfare?

'Why don't we step outside for a breath of air?' said Brad's father taking him by the arm and guiding him out on to the wooden porch that overlooked the garden leading down to the lake. It was early evening and there were still humming birds along the edge of the porch attracted by the bird food put out for them. Without knowing quite why, Ron allowed himself to be propelled down the steps from the porch and across the grass towards the lake. At the edge of the lake, Brad's father paused, patted his pockets and produced a couple of cigars.

'Smoke?' he enquired. Ron shook his head.

'No thanks,' he murmured. Where all this was going, he wondered. Why did a big-wig like Brad's dad want to speak to the hired-hand? There was a brief silence and then Brad's father began rather hesitantly, Ron thought, with the words, 'I expect you know that Brad and Susan are planning to get married?'

Ron said he didn't know that, but offered his less than heartfelt congratulations anyway. There was another pause before Brad's father continued.

'Yes, and although nobody but the family knows it yet, Brad's just had his draft papers through.'

'Oh yes?' answered Ron guardedly. Why was this of any concern to him, he wondered. Brad's father continued.

'You see, the thing is that he's got the chance to go to Europe for a few years to study for a PhD and we were kind of hoping that he and Susan might go together after they marry.'

That sounds jolly, Ron thought to himself bitterly. Nice if you can get it. He said nothing. Brad's father grasped the nettle and got to the point.

'Listen, son,' he said. 'I'm a rich man. Like all fathers, I want the best for my son.'

'Sure,' offered Ron. Now we were getting somewhere, he thought, but he still didn't know where exactly.

'I'll pay you $10,000 if you take my son's place in the draft,' said Brad's father suddenly. Ron was stunned, but only temporarily.

Hot diggity dog, he thought to himself! He had been intending to move on anyway. Now he would move on, get three meals a day into the bargain and have $10,000 more than he ever imagined possible. Things, he felt, were looking up. He didn't say so, though, but shrugged and said with as much disinterest as he could manage, 'Make it $20,000 and you have got a deal.'

'$15,000,' said Brad's father after taking a deep drag on his cigar.

'Done,' said Ron.

And so it was in due course that Bradley C Robinson Junior duly presented himself for duty in his country's service, and our Ron became Brad, a significant improvement, he felt, on a labourer, ship's stoker and sometime armed robber.

CHAPTER 13

It was hot, very hot and humid. Although Brad lay perfectly still, he could still feel the sweat building on his temples before trickling down the sides of his head and dripping unseen on to his bunk. His armpits were wet too and he sensed, rather than saw, a film of moisture over his entire body which had formed despite the lack of physical exertion on his part. Nothing blocked the entrance to the bunker which housed them, but no air circulated.

It was as if the air hung damp and stagnant within the sandbagged walls, impregnated with the smell of the disinfectant which some thoughtful individual had poured through the wooden cargo pallets that made up the floor. This was a futile attempt to discourage whatever vermin and other nasties that lurked there below their feet, their unseen neighbours and companions in the organised squalor of the temporary firebase that was currently home to his company of Marines who were on what was termed 'base security' as opposed to 'offensive field operations'.

Life on the base was perhaps safer, but was more boring than life in the field. Improvements, as they were termed, and repairs were ongoing, but each man was also involved in perimeter security and base defence. They each had been assigned a fighting position if the base was attacked and there was also the little matter of perimeter guard duty which, at night, meant peering into the darkness that surrounded the base. Occasionally, the darkness would be illuminated for a short while if a trip-flare was set off by some wondering animal and for the duration of the flare's life you could see a ghostly landscape, but for the most part you simply stared into the inkily liquid night and hoped that there was nothing out there. Worse than guard duty were the listening posts located some way out in the darkness which, when manned at night, were a nerve-racking experience for the men, ears straining to pick up the slightest sound of an enemy's approach.

Besides maintaining or building bunkers and stringing barbed wire, there were the usual household chores. The trash and crap had to be moved, the ammo unloaded and stored, food rations and other supplies humped, and water carried and whatever else the NCO required the men to do to ensure the continued functioning of the base.

Brad didn't mind the work. It required no thought and little imagination and was, in any event, preferable to lying on your back and thinking, particularly thinking about what might have happened on the last patrol or what might happen on the next.

The night time was the worst. During the day you could try to persuade yourself that you were glad of the chance to have another crack at Charlie, the all-encompassing nickname for the enemy. The platoon members would slap each other on the back and the more excitable among them might whoop a little at the news of a patrol, but as far as Brad was concerned his enthusiasm diminished in direct proportion to the approach of the patrol. Up to midnight wasn't too bad, but after midnight, the dread realisation that this was the day fear would find him and like a rat gnaw at his entrails. When dawn came and it was time to get moving, it was almost a relief.

His companions were a mixed bunch, which is hardly surprising if you pluck people at random from their disparate, civilian lives and deposit them with a group of strangers with whom they must now spend every minute of the day and upon whom they may have to rely for their very lives. Shared hardship creates bonds between people no matter how different or individual they may be, and to some extent that had happened with Brad's platoon with C Company.

His squad, however, appeared to contain all of the platoon misfits, including himself, at least in so far as the platoon sergeant's opinion was concerned.

The platoon sergeant was a regular soldier and typical of the breed. He was an aggressive Polack originally from a coal mining area of the Appalachians and built like a brick shit house. He was the gung-ho lunatic who persuaded the captain that it would be a good idea to paint and nail up a sign at the entrance to the firebase which bore the injunction, 'Kill a Commie for Christ'.

The sad thing about Kykarsky was that the bastard meant it just as he meant it when he pronounced his philosophy in life to the assembled platoon of conscripts and told them that, in his view, the most exciting words in the English language were 'fix bayonets'.

In time, the platoon had learned more about him from more sympathetic NCOs to whom he had opened up when off duty, on leave and in his cups. His family had emigrated to the States from Poland after the Second World War at a time when the displaced millions in Europe were desperately seeking some place to call home. His father, a teenager when the Russians and Germans had both decided to swallow Poland whole, hated them both, but if anything he loathed the Russians that little bit more. Whether that was for historical reasons because of the traditional enmity between Poles and Russians or more because they behaved with a bestiality that surpassed even that of the Germans, was probably a debate not worth having. One day in particular his father told him was that when the first Russian tank rolled into their village and the villagers had gone out to welcome them, mistakenly thinking that they were preferable to the Germans, the hatch of the tank had opened and a Russian emerged, looked at the village elder's wristwatch, pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the man's head saying, 'Dai mne chac' – give me the watch.

After that, the Russians had looted what little they all had in their houses and then formed an orderly queue outside one house where they took turns to rape the unfortunate girl inside who subsequently died.

It was not surprising in these circumstances that Kykarsky's father has passed on to him a sense of the cruelty of the world and the need to be tough to survive. That was why he had joined the Marines when he was old enough and why he armoured himself as densely as possible against any conceivable sympathetic sentiment which, to him, represented weakness and vulnerability. Happy men do not join armies. Kykarsky had volunteered.

Unfortunately, his zeal led him to frequently volunteer the platoon for whatever dirty job had to be done. This meant that they did more patrols than the other platoons in the company, and more often than not found themselves at the sharp end. In short, they paid the price for whatever fear drove him.

Kykarsky was already in Vietnam when the platoon met him for the first time. He had kept them standing in the heat with all their gear after they had emerged blinking from the helicopter that had brought them to the base, making them wait, standing to attention in full kit, wondering what kind of man he was. They had heard rumours from other Marines who, when told where they were going and who their platoon sergeant was to be, had winked and laughed knowingly and made less than helpful comments such as, 'Fuck your luck, buddy,'

As the minutes ticked by and no sergeant appeared, the men had begun to whisper to each other. 'Where the hell is he? Do you think maybe he's been hit or posted someplace else?'

This last suggestion from Jan Olsen, a conscript with a slow Missouri drawl, briefly raised all their hopes and there was an almost palpable sigh of relief from the assembled conscripts.

'Jeez yeah! Thank Christ for that!' they whispered, although not Jan Olsen. He would never have blasphemed for apart from being a good, old, country boy, he was also deeply religious. Then, just as the men, boys really, had begun to relax beneath their perspiration, sergeant Kykarsky stepped out from behind a vehicle holding a cup of coffee.

Although none of them had met Kykarsky before, there was something about the man and they all suddenly knew without the thought being communicated audibly that this was Kykarsky and their hearts collectively sank into their boots.

The sergeant didn't look their way. He sipped a little coffee and then, with an air of a man who has all the time in the world, which indeed, the Fates permitting, so he did, turned and again disappeared behind the vehicle. Only about half an hour later, by which time the platoon had been reduced by the heat to a couple of rows of melting candles, did he deign to come over to them.

He introduced himself briefly and then told them where they stood.

'I don't like niggers, yids, spicks or limeys or,' he paused and cast a baleful glance at Jimmie Twelvetrees, a full-blood Mescalero Apache from Arizona, and as if cross with himself for forgetting, he spat out the word, 'injuns.'

Whilst he listened to this soliloquy and wondering why limeys were among the sergeant's dislikes, it seemed to Brad as if the range of people with whom sergeant Kykarsky might enjoy a friendly relationship was narrowing rapidly.

Olsen, at first sight, appeared to fit the sergeant's strict criteria, but then everybody knew he was just an oakie from the Ozarks whose main interest in life, to judge by his choice of reading material, was raising hogs.

Ed Baker, also from Missouri and also deeply religious, ventured to ask a question. This was brave indeed and everybody held their breath as Ed asked quietly, 'Excuse me, sergeant, but where are religious services held?'

Kykarsky glared at him. Was this guy having him on? Ed's timid, bespectacled appearance did not suggest this, and so he bit his lip. Even an animal like Kykarsky realised that there were certain conventions that it was necessary to comply with in life, even him, even in Vietnam. In any event, he still hoped to achieve further promotion and so he answered him saying briefly, 'Check with the padre.'

Then, as if to cheer himself up, he alighted upon Ralph McGee, the only black man in the platoon, swooping upon him with relish.

'What's your name big fella?' he enquired.

'Ralph McGee,' answered Ralph.

'Ralph?!' the sergeant exclaimed comically contorting his face as if amazed. 'Ralph?!' he repeated. 'What kind of name is that for a nigger? What are you, a fucking film star?'

Ralph, like everybody else, knew that the question was asked in a purely rhetorical fashion. No answer was required. The sergeant continued, 'And McGee, ain't that an Irish name?' That seemed innocent enough. The Irish did not appear to fall within the sergeant's categories of proscribed ethnic groups, so Ralph answered simply, 'Yes, sergeant.'

Sergeant Kykarsky stepped back as if amazed, then burst out laughing and slapped his thighs with his hand saying, 'Well, don't that beat all! We got a black, Irish man,' adding with a touch of almost comical genius, 'we got us a fucking Lepracoon!'

This was actually quite amusing, Brad thought, but neither he nor anybody else laughed. They all liked Ralph, a good-humoured, patient man, the antithesis really of sergeant Kykarsky.

All good things come to an end. Eventually, the sergeant, tiring perhaps of baiting them, dismissed them and they slithered stickily to the bunkers assigned to them.

The point had been made. They may or may not be frightened of the VC, but the platoon were as sure as hell frightened of Sergeant Jan Kykarsky.
CHAPTER 14

Brad's squad had a bunker to themselves which seemed appropriate, given that they had now been clearly defined by the platoon sergeant as the misfits with a limey, a nigger, an Indian and even Olsen, who although superficially acceptable, was nonetheless a Bible-basher and thus inherently suspect, making up their number.

It was probably coincidental that they found themselves together, but like it not, they had 365 days to spend together and with the sergeant. A whole year starting from when they had left the States. The clock was running, but a full 365 days had to pass before the magical DEROS day, the Date of Estimated Return from Overseas, and the return to normal life. In the meantime, they had to get on with it.

The first evening in the bunker they did the necessary introductions. Brad felt sorry for McGee and said so.

'Don't feel sorry for me, man,' said McGee with a grin. 'I'm used to it, man – I don't give a shit for his kind.'

'Where you from, buddy?' asked Olsen.

'Mississippi Delta,' said McGee pulling his boots off, releasing a smell of sweaty feet that would turn an elephant over at twenty feet.

'Jesus!' said Jimmie. 'If you get lost in the jungle, just take your boots off, man, and we'll find you in no time!'

'Or maybe we won't,' said Brad. 'We'll run the other way!'

They all laughed. Olsen, noticing Brad's London accent, asked, 'You must be a limey?'

'Correct,' said Brad firmly.

'Bad news for you, buddy,' said McGee.

'Join the club,' said Jimmie.

McGee turned and looked at Olsen. 'You're normal, Olsen. You must be one unlucky son-of-a-bitch to end up with us.'

Olsen just grinned and said, 'We're all unlucky sons-of-bitches, Ralph. I guess we will just have to make the best of it.'

With that, he pulled out a squeeze-box and started to play as he sang 'I'm Just an Oakie from the Ozarks'. Not only was it obvious that he had a sense of humour, Brad realised, but boy could he play! Within seconds it seemed they were all on their feet dancing and whirling each other around as best they could in the confined space of the bunker. As an Englishman, Brad lacked the spontaneity of his comrades, but then even he joined in and, like the others, enjoyed the wild abandon of the moment.

That night he dreamed of Doris Day in Calamity Jane thinking, as he dozed off, what a decent bunch his new mates were.

Even when rotated and on official base defence, it was necessary to go out regularly on patrol. Sergeant Kykarsky's zeal for volunteering ensured that Brad's platoon more often than not were the most often selected for that particular duty.

When it came to patrols, Brad's squad were fortunate to have Jimmie Twelvetrees in their midst. Jimmie, whose Apache name he told them was 'Sans Peur', which means 'without fear', was a member of an unpronounceable band of Apache, the Nit'ahéndé band of Mescalero from the Colorado River Valley County, although he himself hailed from Arizona. When he was conscripted, he had been working on a dude ranch leading hunting trips in the wilderness, or at least what non-Native Americans might consider wilderness which had, however, been home for the Apaches for centuries.

Now what remained of the once proud race of Apache Indians, like other Native Americans, led lives very different from that of their ancestors. These days they had the same social problems as the whites in their cities with, in their case, booze playing a big part. In the reservation where Jimmie grew up, they even had social workers to help them with their problems. That was progress for you.

Fortunately for Jimmie, as a young boy he had been taught many of the old ways by his father who would take him into the wilderness for weeks at a time, teaching him how to hunt and track and teaching him how, without any maps or compass, to find his way, his father showing him what a landmark looked like from every direction so he would never get lost.

As a consequence by birth and by occupation, he was not only in tune with nature, but had all the skills of the Indian scout. A well-educated, but mainly silent man, he saw things which the rest of them didn't and they came to rely upon him to keep them out of trouble, or at least to give them some advance warning of trouble.

Trouble, in fact, did not usually find them on their patrols. The local Vietcong, indistinguishable from the local population, chose for the most part to keep out of their way, at least during the daytime, although the danger of booby traps was ever present. Night-time was different. At night the countryside largely belonged to the Vietcong. When the Marines withdrew to their base and night fell, the Vietcong, and increasingly the North Vietnamese Army, could move silently and unseen and create whatever mischief they had a mind to.

One particular VC had the unpleasant habit of waiting until night time and then, from high up in the surrounding hills, opening fire with an automatic weapon. He seldom hit anything or anybody, but sooner or later he might get lucky, and so one night after he had opened up and by luck put a few holes in the sandbags around the door of Kykarsky's bunker, he, or it might have been a she for all the Marines knew, reaped the whirlwind. Kykarsky went nuts. He flew into Lieutenant Peterson's bunker for the permission he needed to start World War III and within minutes rounds were being blasted into the darkness from 40 mm auto-cannons on an M42 anti-aircraft tank.

Brad watched fascinated as the anti-aircraft fire was followed by flares and a pair of M60 machine guns in guard towers began peppering the hillside, the machine guns' red tracer bullets describing red-hot pencil lines through the sky. To this already dramatic firework display were added the M42 tanks, 50 calibre machine guns that spewed bullets into the darkness. They sky was alight with flares and the red and white tracers from the thousands of rounds fired at the hillside.

Brad was stunned. All this to hit one sniper, he thought. It reminded him of what his largely absent father had once said to him about the Second World War when he had served on merchant ships. His father had told him that the British seamen were always delighted if they learned that they were to be escorted in convoy across the Atlantic by the Americans because, as his father had said, if there was any trouble at all, the Americans fired absolutely everything they had. He said it was terrific. They might not have hit anything, but it certainly made you feel better. Kykarsky, who was nearby, watched the pyrotechnics with satisfaction.

'That'll teach the bastard,' he said, 'and anyway, does the boys good to let off a little steam!'

Whether they had hit anything or not remained unclear, but it did make everyone feel better.

*

It quickly became apparent that unless they chose to pick a fight during the day, the enemy disappeared underground, literally underground. The ground below villages and even close to or even under American firebases was honeycombed by tunnels, sometimes hundreds of feet long, and could be a virtual city underground where food, weapons, ammunition and personal belongings could be stored and men take refuge. Once a tunnel entrance was found, then the tunnel complex had to be explored.

This was a particularly unpleasant task which involved a soldier squeezing himself, armed with a flashlight and a pistol, into a narrow tunnel along which he would worm his way through whatever insect life, reptiles, rats or other occupants happened to be in residence and through whatever human detritus and filth he found during his subterranean exploration.

There were also booby traps. Sometimes, a trip-wire would, if touched, activate a hand grenade, the wire pulling the pin out of the grenade which would explode after a few seconds delay. Were that to happen, there was nowhere to go. Even if the tunneller could take cover around a turn or sharp angle, the pressure caused by the explosion in the confined space would still wound or completely disable him.

In some ways, even more unpleasant and difficult to detect, would be a stake trap concealed by a mud-covered, woven mat. Bamboo stakes, perhaps smeared with excrement, could seriously injure a tunneller who would then be difficult to get out of the tunnel.

Since, on discovering a tunnel, tear gas was often pumped in, residual tear gas or smoke and fumes might be present still when the unfortunate soldier went in and, even wearing a gas mask, did not save his skin from the effects of the gas. Tunnel collapse was another danger that the tunnel rat, as they were called, had to contend with in the pitch black bowels of the earth with only a torch for company. If it did collapse on him or behind him, he would probably be trapped and the chances of him being extricated were slim.

All in all, to be a tunnel rat was a living nightmare for the unfortunate serviceman lumbered with this particular duty. In theory, it was optional, but the word 'optional' did not seem to figure in sergeant Kykarsky's vocabulary which, it had to be admitted, even by his admirers, was at best limited.

He did actually have one admirer. Every bully has a toady, and this particular bully had a fan in the unlikely shape of the platoon lieutenant, a former car salesman from Detroit called John Peterson who had somehow made it through officer school by the skin of his teeth and who was now the officer in charge of Brad's platoon. This guy was no Rommel. He was never going to write a book on infantry tactics. He might conceivably have written a guide entitled 'Whorehouses I Have Known' which, if successful, might be followed by a sequel entitled 'Whorehouses I Have Yet To Visit', both of which he was eminently qualified to write, since his brain was in his nob-end, or at least so Brad had rapidly concluded.

He relied totally on sergeant Kykarsky. He was happy to leave pretty much everything to him which suited Kykarsky just fine. Kykarsky paid lip service to his superior rank, but everybody in the platoon knew who ran the show. It was the hard-bitten regular, not the young officer with his mind on other things and whose principal interest in life was in getting his end away. Given that he hadn't had any leave for some time and had not been able to indulge in his favourite pastime, he was beginning to get noticeably twitchy and irritable.

Another young guy, Ed Baker, stood out in direct contrast to Peterson. He was a small-town, affable, young American who, before the draft notice had landed on his doormat, had had only one thought in his mind, to marry his pretty, young sweetheart and start a family. All of that smacked of the saccharine-sweet films emerging from America in the fifties and sixties, some of which Brad had had the misfortune to see with their tales of teenage love, girls in ponytails and an impossibly affluent society where some teenagers actually had cars.

This, he had found a bit difficult to imagine, standing in the rain at the bus stop in dreary, old England, waiting for the bus that didn't come, with a load of old dears heavily laden with their shopping, clucking away like disconsolate hens.

On the other hand, part of him was envious and jealous. What must it be like, he wondered, to not only be in love with someone, but that they should love you too? Ed was a type, decent, friendly, straightforward and as American as apple pie. As far as Brad could see, Ed's type was replicated not only throughout the rest of the platoon, but the company too.

Just their luck, he thought, to have a Kykarsky and Peterson, Batman and Robin, Lone Ranger and Tonto, in charge of them.
CHAPTER 15

Fear can impel a man to do something just as surely as prevent him. It was for this reason, when, with the rest of the squad, standing at the entrance to a tunnel that Jimmie Twelvetrees had just discovered, the sergeant had called for volunteers in his usual perfunctory way that Brad had stepped forward. The sergeant had been surprised. His calling for volunteers was a formality he performed perfunctorily without any expectation that anybody would do so. He would, in the absence of a volunteer, simply volunteer whoever he fancied or, in the case of Brad's squad, didn't fancy at all. He looked enquiringly at Brad when he said quietly, 'I'll go down, sergeant.'

Slightly nonplussed at first, he quickly recovered himself, nodded and said, 'Ok, but take Tonto here with you,' pointing to Jimmie. He had intended all the time for Jimmie to go down anyway.

They had no engineers with them and the sergeant was keen to get the tunnel explored quickly so the lieutenant, at his suggestion, dispensed with the usual preliminary flooding of the tunnel with tear gas to flush any occupants out. This took time and it then took even more time to clear the gas. Brad was actually quite grateful for that, since he had, like the rest of them, had a taste of tear gas during training and remembered just how unpleasant it was. He knew, as they all did by now, that it was one thing to flood a tunnel complex with gas, but quite another one to clear it all out before you went down. Even with a gas mask, any residual gas would play havoc with your skin. On balance, he preferred just to get on with it.

He quickly took off his helmet and stripped off his gear and clothes down to just his t-shirt and uniform trousers, and grabbing a torch and pistol, he dropped into the hole which was just wide enough to admit him. He had heard that a cat's whiskers acted as an indication to a cat of the space it could get through. In his case, it was the breadth of his shoulders which determined it for him, and as soon as he dropped in, he knew that this one was going to be tight.

He had been down tunnels before as one of Kykarsky's volunteers, but they had not been quite so narrow and also he had been the second man with the field telephone, able to shuffle and squirm along in the wake of the other who had invariably been Jimmie who, as it were, broke the trail for both of them. This time, he didn't have that umbrella. Jimmie was there, but behind him.

At the bottom of the shaft, which was about the height of a man, an American height, not Vietnamese, he paused, crouched down on his haunches and sniffed cautiously. So far, this one didn't smell too bad, just earthy so far. The first tunnel he had followed Jimmie into had smelt like a carnal house and, indeed, that is what it proved to be, holding the dead and decaying bodies of several Vietcong who, wounded, had taken shelter there and died in the darkness. It smelt even worse than the smell exuded by Connolly's corpse on the high seas. Brad had thought that was bad enough, but this was infinitely indescribably worse. Jimmie and Brad had got there before the worms, but not before the flies and it had been their task, at the insistence of sergeant Kykarsky, to bring out the maggoty bodies one by one by tugging them by the ankles as they wriggled backwards down the tunnel towards the tunnel entrance, gagging and retching all the way. Pulling the corpses by the legs had been like pulling rotten bananas, with at any moment the legs threatening to disconnect from the torso of the corpses.

Corners presented a particular difficulty and were the reason why they couldn't just tie a rope to the ankles of the bodies and pull them out. They had to be manhandled one at a time. Once one was removed, they had to return for the next, crawling over whatever unspeakable filth had been deposited in the tunnels in the process. Brad retched so hard and so often that he thought his guts would exit his mouth. All of this so that sergeant Kykarsky could claim the credit and raise the company's body count for killed VC. It was apparently academic that the platoon had not killed them. On that basis, it seemed to Brad, thinking about it later, that it might be more sensible not to fight the VC, but simply exhume the bodies of those already killed. If numbers alone kept the powers that be happy, then that should do the trick.

After that little jaunt, Jimmie and Brad were made to walk downwind and at a distance from the rest of the platoon and then thrown into the first ditch with sufficient water in it and kept there until the stench that surrounded them had abated somewhat, which even then did not go completely until they had been comprehensively deloused back at the firebase. Their clothing was burned.

That evening, the cooks had served up tined spam meat and French fries. For about week afterwards, Brad had been able to consume only hard biscuits and coffee without throwing up.

That had been a bad one. Other tunnel systems that they had explored had seemed strolls in the park by comparison, and even the smell of rotting vegetation and human excrement, which were invariably present, seemed unremarkable.

So far as the VC were concerned, the only live ones Brad had seen were the scrawny, little runts flushed out of the tunnels from time to time by their activities, those and the one or two who had changed their allegiance and who now acted as scouts for the army. These were called Kit Carson scouts, but so far Brad's platoon had had no direct dealings with these turncoats.

Brad was roused from the brief reverie into which he had sunk by Jimmie Twelvetrees landing on top of him.

'I thought you redskins all moved like shadows in the night,' muttered Brad.

'We're not all Geronimos, white eyes,' said Jimmie adding, 'if you had moved your ass up the tunnel, I wouldn't have landed on you.'

That was true enough. Brad had been dawdling. Now he checked the pistol safety-catch was off, turned the torch on and shone it down the tunnel hoping not to see anything and particularly hoping not to see any dead bodies.

Nothing was visible in the beam, just a narrow tunnel just about high enough to allow him to crawl along it with his shoulders brushing the sides. Slowly, he set off. Jimmie followed close behind with the field radio handset attached to a wire which he tugged slowly along behind him.

It was hot and the air unsurprisingly was stale. Brad could almost taste it, but thankfully his cautious sniffs did not suggest any carcases in the near proximity. Cautiously, he moved forward looking carefully at the floor, sides and even the roof of the tunnel for any signs of trouble. There was a lot of debris and detritus on the floor of the tunnel which made it difficult to see if there were any concealed pits. The prospect of being impaled on a shit-covered piece of bamboo did not appeal to him at all, so he ignored the filth and the insects on the floor, stuck the pistol in his belt with the safety-catch on and used his now free hand to cautiously sweep the floor ahead of him before moving forward.

They turned another corner and he heard Jimmie announce this quietly into the mouthpiece of the radio handset so those on the surface could try to plot their route and have even an approximate idea of where they might be. Still, there was nothing ahead in the beam of light prodding forward like a finger into the darkness. They paused to listen occasionally and to pant in the hot, humid air. They were now some distance from where they had entered and Brad found himself fighting a mounting sense of claustrophobia as the isolation and cramped confines of the position they were in began to oppress him more and more. It was now a long way to reverse backward and there was, as yet, no good reason for doing so.

They turned another corner. Still nothing, but were his eyes deceiving him or was there lightness ahead? They continued to move forward cautiously. Thank Christ for the light of the torch, he thought. Without that, it would be unbearable. Did the VC have torches, he wondered, or did they just feel their way along like blind moles? His respect for the people who had built these tunnels and who now lived much of their lives in this subterranean world was growing by the moment. Sitting in darkness underground waiting for the Americans to drop grenades or mine the tunnels without you being able to do anything at all about it required a rare courage in his view.

As they moved further along this stretch of the tunnel, they came to a bay or small room with palm fronds or something similar spread on the floor. This was obviously a place where several people might shelter. They didn't try it. It was empty and it may have been booby trapped, but the broadening out of space around them afforded him an enormous sense of relief. After the confines of the tunnel, even the tiny room seemed like a football field.

They reported the room to those above and continued. Then, to Brad's surprise, the faint light that he had seen proved to be an exit from the tunnel into a village well. When he poked his head out of the tunnel, he could see the sky above and water a metre or so below, and there, across the other side of the well, was the entrance to what looked like a continuation of the tunnel.

As he looked up at the sky above, he felt an enormous sense of relief. Here was somewhere from which, with a little assistance, they could escape the tunnel. It acted like a safety valve for him and he felt himself relax a little, glad now that he hadn't made a fool of himself by blurting out his fears back there in the tunnel.

Before exiting the tunnel, he gave Jimmie a whispered account of what lay before them. Jimmie asked, 'How deep is the well? Can you see the bottom?'

'No,' answered Brad peering down at the green, slime-covered water below.'

'When you get in the water, don't move across the well,' said Jimmie firmly. Brad was, by this time, climbing out of the tunnel, pulling at bits of wood projecting form the walls of the well. When out and spread-eagled on the side of the well, he looked at Jimmie and looked down at the water. How deep was it, he wondered?

'Ere we go,' he said cracking the old joke, 'as the earwig said when he fell off the cliff,' and with that he dropped into the water. To his relief, his feet touched solid ground, the water reaching only to his armpits.

For Jimmie, who was much shorter, it would be over his head. Brad looked at him and smiled.

'Come on in,' he said, 'the water's lovely,' adding, 'I'll give you a piggyback!'

Jimmie joined him and climbed on his back. Then, he hissed, 'Don't move! Booby trap!'

Brad looked at where he was pointing. There, at the end of the well where the water touched the wall, the end of a thread was just visible which disappeared behind a fern on the wall. Cautiously, Brad approached it with Jimmie on his back who lent over him and gently removed the fern to reveal a grenade in a can in a hole in the wall. The thread was attached to the grenade, the pin having been removed and the arming lever held down by the can. Had Brad crossed the well, his chest would have breasted the thread like an athlete going through the finishing tape, the grenade would have been pulled from the tin and in a matter of seconds the grenade would have exploded. It would have been their passport to eternity.

Without saying a word as they stood there, Brad quietly wetting himself, Jimmie inserted one of the spare arming pins he had with him for this very reason, rendering the grenade safe.

Brad breathed again. Jimmie seemed cool and unperturbed, living up, Brad thought, to his real name – 'Sans Peur', without fear. He had been aptly named. Then a thought struck him and he said to Jimmie, 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

'I am not a mind reader, Limey – tell me!' said Jimmie calmly.

'Look, the people in this village could hardly draw water from this well with a bloody booby trap in it could they?'

'No.'

'Well, don't you see? It must mean that when we arrived somebody set the booby trap probably as they went into the tunnel. It means that in all probability there are VC in there!'

Jimmie looked at him and said, 'Well, you had better get a move on then,' and added smiling, 'or do you want to wait for the cavalry?'

Brad climbed into the continuation of the tunnel, turned his torch on and took his pistol in his hand, safety catch off. Although the last thing he wanted to do was to fire it, at least he felt more confident holding it, and it might frighten the enemy. On the other hand, it might not.

The strain was beginning to play on his nerves and he began to feel quite giggly.

'What a fucking stupid way to spend your time!' he laughed, 'crawling around underground trying to find some poor bastards with their arses hanging out of their trousers who are probably as afraid of us as we are of them!'

'It's because they are the enemy, white man, just keep going. The sooner we finish, the sooner we get out of here,' answered Jimmie in a completely matter of act tone of voice.

Brad kept crawling. A few metres along the tunnel was a small chamber that he caught sight of in the torchlight. Then he had the shock of his life as the beam of light from the torch lit up the face of a young woman sitting in the chamber clutching her knees drawn up in front of her.

'Jesus!' said Brad and, in his surprise, jerked upwards and hit his head on something hard in the tunnel roof. 'Ow,' he yelled dropping the torch and fumbling for it.

'What's up, man?' enquired Jimmie calmly behind him.

'There's a fucking woman up here!' he called back excitedly.

'Yeah, and I'm a blond from Minnesota,' answered Jimmie disbelievingly. Brad doubted himself for a moment until his torch beam again picked out the young lady's face. She hadn't moved. He edged forward. She didn't appear to be armed. She looked so pathetic and frightened that he immediately felt sorry for her and was moved to say, 'It's alright, luv, we're the Marines.' Then he realised how stupid that sounded. Jimmie thought so too.

'Have you gone off your nut, white eyes?'

Brad ignored him and crawled up to the chamber. 'Do you speak English?' he asked. He sure as hell did not speak Vietnamese. At that moment, Jimmie joined him and for the first time in the few months that Brad had known him, he sounded surprised.

'Jesus!' he said simply.
CHAPTER 16

The young woman in the chamber was Thuy Van. She did indeed speak English as well as French fluently. She was the daughter of an aristocratic, Vietnamese woman and her French husband, who had been killed by the Vietminh when she was very little. His car had been ambushed and shot up. Nobody quite knew why. As the district doctor, he had been respected and liked. It was thought by the French authorities that it was a case of mistaken identity because he hadn't been driving his own car that day. Whatever the reason, he was killed and left a young widow and three small children. Her father's family had paid for her mother and the children to travel to France and there they had lived, with Thuy Van growing up in Paris.

She lived with her grandparents whom she grew to love. She was particularly fond of her grandfather who had himself lived and worked in French Indo China, later called Vietnam, and whose flat on the 6th floor of an apartment block behind the Champs Elysées was full of the Vietnamese antiques and objets d'art that he had collected during his time in the colonial service.

Thuy Van grew up loving France and her French relations, but when she went to study at the Sorbonne, she had fallen in with a crowd of left-wing activists and been radicalised, and thereafter her political sympathies were predictably left-wing and anti-colonialist.

By the time she left university in the early sixties, North and South Vietnam had been created as two independent countries, separated by a demilitarised zone at the 17th parallel.

She returned to Vietnam to work with the South Vietnamese army as an intelligence officer, but in reality as a mistress of a general, which was an ideal position for obtaining information and intelligence to pass to the North Vietnamese army for whom, in reality, she worked.

This was a role she successfully discharged and held until a high-ranking American officer met her at a joint army briefing, after which she changed pillows, but in all other respect her role was the same. Now she was able to provide information about the Americans too.

It was her misfortune to be attempting to make contact with the North Vietnamese army through a local Vietcong contact when the Americans had conducted a sweep of the very same area. She had no immediate reason for being there and so had hoped to avoid detection by taking refuge in the tunnel and which, almost as soon as she had done it, she realised she had made a mistake. Although she had set the booby trap, there was a good chance that if it went off she would be injured or killed too. She was terrified that the Americans might pump gas through the tunnel or simply explode it by placing a mine inside. All in all, as she huddled miserably in the darkness, she wished that she had taken her chances on the surface.

Then she had heard sounds of somebody or something approaching her and been paralysed, dazzled like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights, when Brad shone the torch at her. She could have tried to go further down the funnel, but she had no torch. She didn't know where it led and she had no idea if there was another exit. She was trapped. Then Brad had asked her if she spoke English.

'Yes I do,' she had replied.

This was a turn-up for the books. Both Brad and Jimmie were nonplussed. Bodies and booby traps they had expected, food supplies, maybe a weapon or two, but an educated Vietnamese lady in the recesses of a tunnel, they had not. Neither basic training, nor advanced training, nor anything they had experienced so far had equipped them for this. They were accustomed by now to being spoken to by NCOs and officers in words of one syllable, commands suited to the lowest common denominator. Education or even an ability to think for yourself was entirely superfluous. Jimmie broke the silence.

'What do we do now?'

'I suppose we take her prisoner,' said Brad after a moment's reflection, but without a great deal of conviction. Then he pulled himself together and said, 'Well, ok ma'am, we would like you please to accompany us to the surface,' adding as they began to reverse along the tunnel, 'come on!'

Thuy Van responded to the imperative to move and slithered slowly along the passage with the two men. She was highly apprehensive about what might happen now, particularly if her boyfriend, the general, learned, as it seemed inevitable that he would, that she had been found hiding with the enemy or at least in one of their tunnels.

Brad had announced their find to the men on the surface.

'A dame?' Kykarsky had said in disbelief, 'and she speaks English? Jeeze.'

Rather better than you, thought Brad uncharitably when he heard the sergeant's response.

They eventually surfaced, bedraggled and covered with all the usual rubbish that clings to people who crawl along underground tunnels. Kykarsky had for once referred matters to higher authority and the lieutenant was there too as they emerged from the depths and climbed over the wall of the well.

The men surveyed the petite, little woman who, despite the dirt that adhered to her, looked very attractive standing there shivering slightly, although not from the cold. Brad started to feel sorry for her. This was not the fearsome Vietcong of his imagination or the popular press. This was just a rather frightened, young woman surrounded by a bunch of very big, by her standards, tough-looking enemy soldiers.

'Cigarette?' he asked proffering a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes for want of anything better to say. The woman just looked at him with an expression that carried the merest trace of gratitude. This seemed to wake up the lieutenant who until then had behaved with his customary lack of decision and indecisiveness, although to be fair, it must have been as much of a surprise to him as it was for everybody else.

'I'll deal with this soldier,' he said firmly and, turning to Kykarsky, added, 'Take her into one of the huts and I'll be along directly to interrogate her.'

The sergeant did as he was bidden.

'Check out the rest of the village,' the lieutenant continued addressing no-one in particular as his gaze followed the figure of the retreating woman. Brad noticed the expression on the officer's face and felt a sense of unease. Was he mistaken or did the young officer look like the cat who had got the cream?

Ralph said, 'Come on guys,' and Brad, Jimmie and Olsen followed Ralph to a small enclosure by a hut where Ralph threw his pack down and announced his intention to 'take ten'!

Without further ado, he stretched out on the ground, pulled his helmet down over his face and went to sleep. A few hens wandered around disconsolately and a pig or two, much to Olsen's satisfaction, foraged busily through the leaf litter and animal manure on the floor. Crouching down, squatting on his haunches with notebook and pencil in hand, he fixed them with an autistic gaze and was soon lost in admiration for all things porky.

Jimmie and Brad both lit cigarettes and sat leaning against the back of a convenient tree stump. All around, the other men of the platoon went their various ways wandering aimlessly. Looking for Charlie, as the VC were known, was both a frustrating and a boring business enlivened occasionally by a bit of action. Today, though, didn't seem to be one of those days.

Brad's gaze kept returning to the closed door of the hut where the sergeant and the lieutenant had taken Thuy. It seemed odd to him. Why interrogate her behind closed doors? Why interrogate her here at all as opposed to back at base? As he sat locked in thought, his sense of unease became more acute. He didn't trust those two bastards, he thought. Then, in the next instant, he thought why the hell should that matter to him? Actually, he concluded it did matter and he jumped to his feet determined to do something. He wanted to check and see if the young woman was alright.

In the hut lieutenant Peterson had wasted no time at all in making his wishes known to Thuy. As far as he was concerned, she was the enemy and, as such, she was fair game. There was not even the pretence of any interrogation. Peterson simply tore her clothing open whilst Kykarsky, embarrassed, stood by the door.

Thuy had no intention of giving in without a fight. How dare this man, lusting after her like a dog on heat, behave in this way? As he grabbed her and tried to bite her neck, she kneed him hard in the balls and as he let go to grab the now painful testicles, she quite deliberately sank her fingers in his face like claws and dragged them down his face. Kykarsky leapt to his officer's rescue and knocked her to the ground.

Just then, there was a tap on the door which opened to reveal Private Bradley C Robinson Junior, who enquired politely, 'I heard a noise, sir, and wondered if you needed any assistance.'

Peterson and Kykarsky stared at him.

'What kind of dumb fuck are you?' screamed the sergeant at him.

Brad's quick glance around the hut took it all in in an instant. He couldn't let this happen, but he was hardly in a position to chuck his weight around. He was a nobody and knew it. He was just a number, a grunt and every bit as replaceable as all the other grunts out there. But, he persisted. Act dumb, he thought.

'Shall I bring a blanket for the lady, sir? She seems to have lost her clothes,' he said with as gormless a smile as he could manage. It occurred to him that there were some uncharitable people who knew him who might have suggested that such a smile should come easily to him.

Kykarsky came towards him, his face contorted with rage. Just then, fate took a hand and a mortar shell landed smack in the middle of the village killing two Marines instantly. That woke everybody up. Both the officer and Kykarsky tore out of the hut and started running around like headless chickens shouting, 'Where is the enemy?!'

Brad neither knew nor cared. He muttered a silent prayer of thanks to the fates, turned to Thuy who was looking at him from across the room, and motioned with his hand for her to disappear before he also went outside to join the others.

By the time he got outside, the rest of the platoon, apart from the bloody pulp that was all that remained of the two killed by the mortar fire, were nowhere to be seen. There was also Olsen who was distractedly trying to herd the few pigs, although neither they nor he had the slightest idea where they might go whilst at any moment another mortar bomb might land in their midst and convert them all into a Scouse stew reminiscent of the delicacy served on the old Monarch of Bermuda.

There was heavy small-arms fire coming in from a largely invisible enemy and to remain visible was to court certain death or injury. Brad, like the others, did his best to take cover, sliding into the edge of a paddy field whose grassy bank afforded some protection. As he lay there, he heard the officer and the sergeant calling to them all and from the sounds of the answering voices, he gained some idea of where the rest of the platoon was. The incoming fire relented a little, probably because there were no visible targets. What the hell did they do now, he wondered? It was then that the beast Kykarsky came into his own.

Brad heard him issuing instructions in rapid succession to the grenadiers to get some grenades going into that part of the jungle where the enemy might be concealed; to the radio operator to get on to base to whistle up support, artillery, helicopters, aircraft, anything to assist them to extricate themselves from a situation where they appeared to be being attacked in overwhelming force. The level of fire and the use of machine guns suggested that they were being attacked by elements of the North Vietnamese army and the only sensible course of action was to disengage, if possible, and get the hell out of there.

They did not appear to be surrounded, at least not yet. The fire was coming mainly from one direction which meant that, all things being equal, they might be able to withdraw in the general direction of the base, although whether they would reach it in one piece or not, given that it was some miles away, remained to be seen.

There was another platoon from C Company somewhere to the rear, but whether they were close enough to offer support was not clear and, anyway, that wasn't Brad's department. His department, as far as he was concerned, was to stay alive. He fervently hoped that the Fates didn't have different plans.

Olsen had given up trying to herd pigs, but was still anxious about them. Whether this helped take his mind off his own danger or just because he was fucking stupid was something about which Brad was neither clear nor concerned to investigate.

'For fuck's sake, Olsen,' he screamed at him. 'We are not in the fucking Ozarks. We are in Viet-fucking-nam! Get firing at the fucking enemy!'

Olsen seemed to wake up. At any rate he complied and soon the platoon from its various positions was returning the enemy fire.

Despite that, however, it was obvious even to a rookie private like Brad that they were heavily outnumbered and either they were to be supported or they needed to withdraw before they were overrun.

He tried to remember the words of The Lord's Prayer whilst he fired, but he couldn't remember all the words and it kept getting jumbled up. He fell back on practicality and prayed that either Kykarsky or the officer, groaning as he recalled what a dickhead the officer was, knew how to get them out of there.

Thirty minutes or so passed. There was no sign of the other platoon. What would Kykarsky do? Were they to stay or retreat? There didn't seem to be any firing coming from their obvious line of retreat back the way they had come. Was that not their route out?

On the other hand, the enemy might in fact be behind them. Were they simply leaving them an apparent bridge to retreat over only to ambush them if they took that option? Kykarsky obviously concluded that this was one of life's imponderables that it did not pay to dwell on for as more grenades arched through the air and exploded on impact, he yelled the order to, 'Get the fuck out of here!' whilst he and the nearest couple of squads to him and the lieutenant provided covering fire.

Nobody needed any second bidding, but as Brad rose to his feet Kykarsky remembered the prisoner and ordered him to fetch her, or at least that is approximately what he said. It was more like, 'Get the dame!', but Brad knew what he meant and, although that was the last thing he wanted to do, it was a direct order and so he obeyed, running back to the hut instead of away like the others.

Kykarsky, the officer and the remainder of the platoon were acting as a rearguard and firing everything that they had as he dashed, bent over, through the door. He didn't expect the woman still to be there. He gave a cursory glance around and saw nobody. He called from the hut.

'She ain't here, sergeant!'

Sergeant Kykarsky was not giving up so easily. 'Get around the back! There's some movement there!'

Brad groaned, but had no option but to obey. He went out the back and there, sure enough, was the woman shivering amongst a few goats. He saw her, looked at the woman's frightened face, then made his mind up and grabbed one of the goats by the rope around its neck and dragged it back through the hut releasing it as he got to the door and called, 'Only a goat, sergeant!'

The sergeant spat, but there was no time to do anything else as Brad had hoped. It was time for the remainder of the platoon to make themselves scarce whilst those who had left first provided covering fire in their turn. It was not a very orderly withdrawal. It was every man for himself. They were running in full view of the enemy, crossing open ground, and they did not all reach the rest of the platoon now located at the edge of a strip of jungle which Brad, gasping for air, reached unscathed. When he got his breath back, he was relieved to see that so too had Jimmie, Ralph and Olsen.

Looking back to the village they had just left, it was possible to see small figures darting among the buildings and heading their way. That didn't look too promising, Brad thought, as he searched the sky and strained his ears for any evidence of support from the base.

'Where's the bloody cavalry?' he murmured more to himself than anything, but Ralph heard him and grunted.

'Looks like we are going to have to fight our way out of here, man.' That remark, in Brad's view, made Ralph a master of understatement.

A few of the men who had reached the trees were wounded, but they could still move and they were sent off first in a direction indicated by the lieutenant who had himself now been on the radio, although what was said Brad had no idea. He and his companions had been concentrating on firing at the black-bereted figures working their way gradually towards them.

Then it was their turn to move and off they ran dodging between the trees and following the rest of the platoon. They caught them up as they reached a small clearing which they needed to cross, which they then proceeded to do with the men in extended order. This was fortunate because when they were in the open, a machine gun opened fire from a slight rise to their left.

'Run for it, men!' shouted the officer. Wrong, thought Brad, as he dived to the ground. Jimmie and Ralph had done the same thing. Jimmie and Brad looked at each other.

'Lob a couple of grenades up there!' Brad said to Ralph who rose to his feet and did just that.

Without any discussion, Brad and Jimmie moved fast, Brad to the left and Jimmie to the right, so as to be able to get the machine gun in a crossfire. As they ran, Ralph fired. Breathing hard, Brad hit the ground again hoping that the damp feeling between his legs didn't mean that he had pissed himself again. He opened fire and Jimmie, now a little distance away, did the same. The fire from the machine gun ceased. Brad forced himself to do the very last thing that he wanted to do and got up and ran towards the position where the gun was located, firing as he did so. Jimmie did the same and between them they killed the two men struggling to remove the corpse of the dead machine gunner who had been killed in their crossfire. Ralph joined them.

'Let's beat it!' said Ralph.

'Hold on,' said Brad. 'Let's take a look up here,' pointing to the hill above them.

'What the hell for?' said Ralph.

'Look,' said Brad, 'if there are anymore up there, they will be able to get us as we go to join the others.'

'That's true, my man,' said Jimmie.

'Come on,' and with that he picked up the machine gun and between him and Ralph they lugged it to the crest of the hill, fortunately only 20 to 30 yards above them.

No sooner had they reached the crest and set the weapon down, when across the bald head of the hill which now confronted them, they saw what must have been seventy or more North Vietnamese soldiers walking towards them. Brad couldn't believe it. The men were virtually shoulder to shoulder and walking rather than running. They plainly did not realise that just ahead of them were three Marines armed and, moreover, equipped with a machine gun. Together, they opened fire with Ralph firing the machine gun and, within a few minutes, all the men who had been coming towards them were dead or dying on the ground. Some of them had tried to surrender, but man's inhumanity to man and the desperate circumstances in which Brad and his companions found themselves meant that pity had no place and they were shot down.

In the silence that followed the gunfire, the three Marines panted and perspired as if they had just run up the hill. They surveyed the twitching heap of dead and dying humanity on the ground in front of them. Brad tried to speak, but his throat was too dry and all that came out was a croak. He groped for his water bottle and drank some before saying to the others, 'Come on. Let's get away from this place.'

'What about the machine gun?' asked Ralph.

'Disable it and we'll leave it,' said Brad now on his feet and keen to leave behind the dead and the dying.

They descended the hill together. What had happened to the rest of the platoon was not clear, nor were any North Vietnamese army (NVA) in evidence. There wasn't even the sound of firing. After the mayhem of the previous hour or two, the lull was unnerving, although welcome. They looked nervously around. Here and there they came across a body or two, sometimes American, sometimes NVA.

'I remember this guy,' said Jimmie turning over the body of one of their platoon who was face down in a pool of water. The other two glanced briefly at the body, but didn't stop. The man was plainly dead and they were not in a position to recover bodies for the folks back home. They were quite keen not to end up in a body bag themselves and hurried on in the direction of where they thought the others had gone. Their supposition was confirmed to them by the occasional bodies they stumbled across on their path. Instead of following the breadcrumbs like in some children's fairy tale, it was follow the bodies until they came across the remnants of the platoon, half a dozen men, most of them wounded, in a shallow depression in the ground. Brad was relieved to see Olsen there too. He was one of the few so far unharmed.

Kykarsky was there struggling with his teeth to pull a bandage around his arm. The lieutenant was there with a bandage around his head, laying still, his eyes closed. The other four were in various stages of pain and distress. Nobody looked as if they could move any distance. At least, Brad thought, he and Jimmie and Ralph and Olsen were alright, so far at least. They were turning out to be the lucky ones.

'What took you so long?' growled Kykarsky ungraciously as they jumped into the hollow.

Brad told him briefly what had happened to delay them. Kykarsky made no comment. What he might have gone on to say will always be a matter of pure speculation because at that moment two things occurred. The first was the sound of helicopters approaching, and the second was a resumption of firing. Quite where the NVA had come from was a mystery, but suddenly they were there and keen to finish them off. The worst part of it was that they seemed to be all around them.

Fortunately for them, they were in a hollow and Kykarsky quickly arranged them in an all-round fire position from which they commenced to return fire.

'I'm getting real low on ammo,' said Jimmie.

'Me too!' called Brad.

It was going to be a race against time. Whether they would have enough time or ammo to get to the helicopters when they landed, or whether they would be able to get to them at all, remained to be seen.

The NVA became aware of the approaching helicopters, three in all. This was bad news for them, of course, because of their firepower and the damage they could and would inflict on them from their vantage point in the sky.

The sergeant took charge of the situation as, indeed, he already had. He was giving the orders. There was no doubt about that. The officer was out of it in any event. First, he let off a flare to confirm their position to the helicopter crews, then he ordered Ralph to fire grenades into the NVA positions to help identify them. The crews in the helicopters knew their job and began strafing the NVA positions with a withering fire whilst one helicopter landed a short distance away on a small ribbon of grassland. Without hesitation, Kykarsky ordered them all to make for the helicopter whilst he provided covering fire. Ralph and Jimmie were ordered to carry the officer. The other men could get along sufficiently well, spurred on by the sight of the helicopter and the unpleasant prospect that awaited them if they remained. They found it in themselves to sprint. Brad's role was to deal with any of the enemy they encountered, which fortunately, since he only had a few rounds left, was none.

Then, as the men who had reached the helicopter were clambering aboard, Ralph and Jimmie were jumped by half a dozen NVA men who emerged firing from the undergrowth. Ralph was killed at once, and Jimmie and the officer fell to the ground.

Brad, on seeing this and before he had time to think, found himself racing back, bayonet fixed in best Kykarsky fashion. Before he had the chance to feel scared, he was there firing, stabbing, clubbing and yelling as if the thin veneer of civilisation had been dissolved from him to reveal the primeval killing machine that he had become. Somehow, something or someone inside him was watching him coolly from afar, but the berserker that had been released lived only for those moments of insane violence.

Suddenly, there were no opponents left standing. Jimmie had picked up the officer's unconscious body, placing his right arm through his legs as he pulled him upright with his left arm and then shuffling the body across his shoulders, and staggered towards the helicopter, now hovering a couple of feet off the ground ready to go. Jimmie had said Ralph had been hit and Brad found him lying on his back with his arms outstretched as if gazing at the sky. He knelt beside him and said, 'Ralph?' but it was apparent that Ralph was dead. He squeezed his shoulder in silent farewell and followed Jimmie, covering him from behind retreating with gun and bloodied bayonet held at the ready, almost wishing for more of the enemy to appear.

Kykarsky did not follow them. They threw the officer aboard the helicopter and clambered on. They took a last look behind them. No Kykarsky. The machine guns on the helicopter were jammering again and the crew were yelling that they had to leave. It rose steadily and from a height they were able to see men running about below and to hear the sound of firing. Of Kykarsky there was no sign, but there were a lot of bodies lying around the hollow in the ground where they had last seen him alive.

Kykarsky hadn't tried to leave. He made his peace with the God he didn't believe in and met his end bravely, firing until his position was overrun.

*

_Fate is a funny thing_ , thought Brad, as he lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling. He ran through the events of the recent patrol in his mind and marvelled that somehow he had survived, whereas other had not. How come, he wondered? McGee gets killed and I don't. Not only McGee, but all the other guys who were killed or wounded, only to be finished off, as they had heard subsequently, by the NVA before being stripped of their possessions and anything that had a use for the enemy. This they had learned after the Marines had moved in in force to recover the dead and wounded, only there had been no wounded to recover, only the bodies of men who appeared to have been finished off with pistol shots, and left as bodies rifled of food and money. They had found a lot of dead Vietnamese too. It appeared that the enemy had taken a lot of casualties before withdrawing. Where Kykarsky had remained and acted as a rearguard, they found the bodies of about 60 NVA soldiers stacked up in front of where he made his last stand. What was left of Kykarsky they had shovelled into a body bag and brought back along with all the other bodies they were able to retrieve. Out by Boeing and back by body bag, Brad had thought. It was a hell of a sobering thought.

Although not given to what he regarded as morbid introspection, he was in any event still very young, and he took the opportunity one evening of talking things over with Olsen when they were in the bunker. Olsen was reading his Bible, so it seemed a good moment.

'You get a lot of comfort from that?' he ventured by way of a starter.

'Sure,' said Olsen and carried on reading. Brad got to the point.

'Why?' he asked simply.

Olsen looked at him and recognised the need in Brad's face. He had felt that way himself once, but the Grace of God had visited him one sunny morning when he had been sitting in the shack he lived in with his mother back home in the hills.

He had been brought up as a Christian. His parents, like all their neighbours, were regular churchgoers, but somehow he hadn't given it much thought. It was just something that you did. It was as familiar as the view he gazed upon every day from the porch of their cabin. It was a given part of the fabric of life.

Every morning before he went out to see to the animals, he would make himself a hot, sweet cup of coffee and just quietly drink it collecting his thoughts before going outside. To set a foot outside was to send the hogs into a frenzy of anticipation and not only could he not bear to keep them waiting, but he liked to hang on to and to savour the peace of the morning for as long as he could. So, he would first drink his coffee inside before purposefully treading out on to the porch to begin the day.

One day, he had been sitting in his chair just looking at the morning sun streaming through the window. He wasn't thinking about anything in particular, but suddenly, as he sat there, he felt a warmth that seemed to flow through him until it flooded his entire body and, as it did so, he was filled with a sense of happiness that he had never known before. It was difficult to describe. Words seemed inadequate, but it was as if he was so full of happiness that it was almost unbearable. He knew at that moment that absolutely nothing mattered. All that mattered was that he was at one with creation and Almighty God.

Since that time, he had had faith, faith in the existence of a Creator and, given that he had been brought up in the Christian tradition, he had been content to channel his new-found belief through that religion. He knew as surely as he knew that he was alive that this life was but a step down the road to eternity.

This he explained briefly to Brad. Brad listened and understood, but did not grasp what he was being told. Olsen was neither surprised, nor disappointed. He understood that for an individual to acquire faith he had to reach a certain level of awareness. He felt that he had been lucky. He didn't know why. All he knew was that he had experienced the peace of God which passeth all understanding. Brad, he hoped, might get lucky too.

Talking, or rather listening, to Olsen, Brad was impressed, but what he had to say raised more questions in his mind than answers. He envied him, but in the end took refuge in the needs of the body saying when there was a suitable pause, 'Thanks – come on, let's get some chow.'
CHAPTER 17

After a brief spell guarding a USAF base close to the coast, C Company and the rest of the battalion, the gaps filled by fresh drafts from the States or by men pulled from other units, were told they were going back to the firebase because of heavy enemy activity in that area.

Although only a few months separated them in terms of time from the vicious, little action in which Kykarsky and all the others had been killed, Brad viewed the newcomers, particularly the new draftees from the States, with the tired eyes of the veteran. He and Jimmie and Olsen had been through the mill together and were now different. They were fused together by the life and death experiences they had had. They didn't discuss it. It's just the way that it was.

It would take some time before any new guy would fit into that, even after they too had endured their baptism by fire. The platoon had a new lieutenant replacing Peterson who, now bemedalled, was stateside again and able to indulge in his favourite pastime with an admiring stable of girls cloaked under the mantel of a hero, although the hero had, of course, been Kykarsky. They also had a new sergeant to replace Kykarsky who, like Peterson, was also bemedalled and stateside, but what left of him was pushing up the daisies in some cemetery some place. Brad wondered if there had been many people at the funeral. Still, he reflected, at least he had had one, which was more than could be said for the guys who were missing and whose bodies would probably never be found. Not great for them, he thought, but terrible for their loved ones who must always harbour a lingering hope that perhaps after all they had survived and maybe were a prisoner somewhere.

The platoon's new sergeant was a man called Bond and so naturally was nicknamed '007' after the James Bond of the Bond movies. Whereas Kykarsky had been an out-and-out toughie, Bond, in contrast, was a quiet, reflective sort of man, although his physical appearance was every bit as rugged as you would expect of a sergeant in the Marine Corp.

Life at the firebase settled into the familiar routine of patrols in the surrounding countryside and the mundane but necessary tasks on the base. Most patrols passed off without incident. Occasionally, they would turn up yet another tunnel, and every so often they would flush out a few Vietcong, but given what they had been told about the need to return, things seemed strangely quiet when, after a couple of weeks, nothing particularly untoward had happened, they all relaxed a bit and right at that time they were caught in an ambush by the North Vietnamese army.

C Company had mounted a company strong patrol to recce a hill with no name on the map, just a number. All of the hills, it seemed to Brad, had simply a number to identify them, and as far as he could see that was about the only thing that distinguished one from the other. This time it was hill 531 that had some special interest for the powers that be, and so it was towards that hill that C Company made its way one misty, moist morning in November. Companies A and B were not too far away and thus fortified, and completely unaware of the existence of an aggressive, but as yet hidden NVA regiment that awaited them.

Before ascending the hill, the Company began to descend a long slope towards the bottom of the hill. It was when the lead platoon was near the bottom of that slope and about to begin the climb up that the NVA opened fire. Within minutes the lead platoon was cut to pieces. The only reason Brad's platoon was not was because in the post-Kykarsky era they didn't always draw the short straw and today they chanced to be in the last in line. This meant that they heard the ambush before they walked into it, but they would have had to have been deaf and blind not to have heard and seen it.

Brad's platoon and the remnants of the other platoons formed a defensive perimeter and then faced an immediate human wave charge by the NVA. Brad was hit in the left thigh by a bullet which passed through his leg, but somehow missed the bone. It bled profusely until Jimmie, who was nearby, stuffed a rolled up bandage into the gaping wound and tied a bandage around the leg as tightly as he could, but not so tight as to act as a tourniquet.

Jimmie carried him to the aid station which had been set up at the company command post to get his leg seen to. Brad wanted to get back to lend a hand, since it seemed that they were in real danger of being overrun. At least, he told himself, he ought to get back. The firing was intense and after Jimmie had literally dropped him off, ignoring Brad's curses and yells of pain, and turning without a word to go back to the fighting.

Brad lay there feeling very sorry for himself and very vulnerable. A medic stuck a needle in him and the pain in his leg eased a little and he felt a secret sense of relief when the medic told him to stay where he was since the wound was still bleeding. Good, he thought, someone has made the decision for me and now I don't have to feel guilty about lying here and letting the others get on with it.

He lay there for a while trying not to look at the blood-soaked rags that were the wounded men carpeting the ground around. As a vision of hell, it took some beating, he thought, and largely to tear himself away from that gaping abyss rather than any sense of heroism on his part, he forced himself to crawl back to lend a hand. He remembered what had happened to the wounded guys after the patrol when Kykarsky and Ralph had been killed and was not just going to lie there and wait until somebody put a bullet into him. So, he dragged himself slowly along the ground until he was able to add his meagre efforts to that of the others. The initial intensity of firing had waned a little. The enemy too had paid the butcher's bill and it had been a heavy price. It was one thing to fire from a concealed position, a bunker or a trench of some kind, but quite another to stand up and rush the enemy. Perhaps, he thought, they had assumed that most of the Americans would be killed by their initial fire or that they would be too surprised to be able to resist? In this they were mistaken on both counts, and they had also overlooked the fact that these men were Marines. As a consequence, they had been cut down in their turn and they now resorted to firing from their carefully hidden positions.

The fighting continued sporadically for the rest of the day. What the other companies in the battalion were doing was anybody's guess, but probably they were having just as much trouble as C Company.

Sometime during the night there was an air strike. Not before time, Brad thought, until by accident one of the USAF F-100s dropped a 500 lb bomb on the command post which was by this time choked with wounded. The bomb killed over 30 men from C Company, along with all the medics. Brad's crawl had not taken him that far from the vicinity of the command post and the blast threw him about 40 feet from where he had been lying. He heard no explosion, but felt himself going up in the air and then knew nothing until he regained consciousness some time later to discover that his other leg was split open from knee to ankle.

It should have hurt like hell, but he had been concussed by the explosion and so felt no pain. He actually felt quite comfortable, as if wrapped up in a warm blanket, as he lay there more or less oblivious to what was going on around him. The pain would come later when the shock and concussion had worn off somewhat. As he lay there, he became aware of a figure crawling towards him.

'Brad,' said Jimmie who had come to find him. 'Are you ok?'

'Sure,' he said. 'I'm fine,' but had no idea who he was talking to.

Jimmie lifted his head and pressed a water bottle to his mouth saying, 'Drink,' and then asking doubtfully, 'Do you know who I am?'

'Nope,' said Brad equably, 'but I'm sure glad for the drink, buddie.'

None of this exchange registered with Brad who, in later months looking back, only remembered snapshots of events. He remembered later being dragged somewhere and then nothing until somebody gave him another drink.

Jimmie had filled in some of the gaps for him and took great pleasure in telling the part about how Brad hadn't known him.

Later, much later, as he slowly regained an awareness of where he was, his brain felt like a wet sponge that had been hurled at a concrete wall. For a long time he scarcely trusted himself to move his head because as he did so his bruised and battered brain protested too much. It was a mercy, in fact, when he was unconscious.

The army were trying to get helicopters in, but the firing was so heavy that it was not possible and half a dozen or more were shot down trying, trailing smoke before crashing and exploding into flames.

Finally, just before nightfall on the second day, a chopper landed and Brad was one of those carried to it as it hovered just off the ground. There had been men far more seriously wounded than him, but the bomb the previous night had significantly reduced the queue of those awaiting 'medevac'.

Jimmie was one of those carrying him, holding his legs whilst with the other guy holding him under the arms they ran like a couple of football forwards with a ball towards the copter whilst Brad yelled at them, his curses drowned by the sound of the helicopter engines.

Just as they reached the chopper and other hands grabbed him to get him inside, a sniper put a bullet in his back which went into his stomach and the guy who had helped Jimmie carry him was shot through the head.

Somehow the helicopter made it out of there with its load of wounded without being shot down, although by that time Brad was in a morphine-induced, dream-like state and almost past caring.

The pain and terror he had felt abated as day followed day in a field hospital in Vietnam and then on to another hospital before fetching up in Japan where he greeted the sun coming up for the first time with a smile and where he only occasionally twitched nervously if someone came into the room suddenly.

Only later did he learn that the whole battalion had lost over a 100 men killed and 300 more wounded with about a dozen missing. How many Vietnamese casualties there were, he never learned.

If he hadn't realised before, he knew full well now that being in the infantry was murder. It was like being one of the dumb beasts corralled in a stock yard outside some mid-west slaughter house. It was only a matter of time before it was your turn.
CHAPTER 18

He was now a sergeant. He'd served his time and it was time to move on, but somehow he hadn't been able to let it go. He had found something, he realised, in the army which he hadn't had before. He had found a family. His family were his comrades in arms, his mates, the men he lived, fought and died with and upon whom he relied. What was more, they relied upon him. They counted on him to look out for them and he was proud of that sense of responsibility. They needed him. They needed him when it counted the most. He had, by some process of osmosis, acquired a sense of identity and a raison d'être that he had never possessed before. The drifter had found a home.

The occupants of that home had changed with a degree of frightening rapidity to the extent that he feared that, although his old unit would probably still exist, the faces that belonged to it would be largely unknown to him. He had, therefore, concluded when he was well again that if he was to remain in the army a move was desirable. It had been Jimmie Twelvetrees who had written to him in hospital to tell him about the final casualty toll, and it had been Jimmie who had announced his intention to join the Rangers. Brad had, of course, heard of the outfit and even come across them once or twice, but beyond that he had been frightened enough when he was with the Marines to think about transferring. From what little he knew about their activities, there had been nothing to suggest that a transfer into their elite ranks was either feasible or desirable. Now, though, that Jimmie, his friend, was going to join the Rangers, like a small boy not wishing to be left behind he was going to try as well.

Olsen, he learned, had decided not unreasonably that, having completed his service, that was enough for him. He thanked God that he had survived and did not mean to tempt providence any further. In any event, as he wrote and explained to Brad, he was keen to get back to the Ozarks. He wished Brad well on his journey and said that Brad was welcome anytime if he happened by that part of the world.

Both Brad and Jimmie survived Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, although Jimmie passed through ahead of him and it was not until Brad was again posted to Vietnam that they met up again and took up where they had left off, Jimmie not saying a good deal and Brad sometimes saying rather too much. Still, they got along and even though Brad had become a sergeant, the two of them were inseparable.

When they were on operations, which invariably took them far behind enemy lines, there was no talking anyway. They communicated with each other and their comrades by signs, but otherwise would have given a Trappist monk a run for his money. Silence was the rule. No noise at all which might alert the enemy to their presence.

It was after a long reconnaissance mission that had passed off without incident that Brad and Jimmie had a few days leave in Saigon, a city of many earthly temptations, that Brad had learned a little more about Jimmie.

One night, Brad had been quite unable to sleep. The bed was too warm and too uncomfortable in the room that they shared, so without turning on the light so as not to disturb Jimmie, he had quietly dragged a table to the balcony where he intended to lie with his head out of the window only to find Jimmie already there stretched out on the concrete balcony with his shoes under his head as a pillow. Jimmie hadn't been able to sleep either, nor could they sleep now even though they were in the open air. There was still too much noise from the street below, so they just lay there in silence.

Then Jimmie said, 'Do you know what Brad? I knew we would meet up again.'

That was quite a long sentence for the usually terse Jimmie and Brad was surprised, but didn't say so.

'Yeah?' he asked yawning. 'How come?'

'I saw it in a dream,' said Jimmie.

'What?!' said Brad, not sure if Jimmie wasn't joking adding, 'What are you, some kind of medicine man?' a comment he regretted as soon as he had said it.

Jimmie ignored the jest and simply answered, 'No, but my father was.'

Brad couldn't quite figure out how they had found themselves in what was proving to be a heavy conversation, but judged it sensible to be serious for a change and to drop the cheerful, chirpy, know-it-all, cockney façade that he often adopted as a means of deflecting any kind of embarrassment or serious thought. For the want of anything better to say, he asked, 'Is your father still alive?'

'No,' replied Jimmie, 'but I talk to him often.'

'You talk to him?'

'Yes, in my head.'

So Jimmie was a conversationalist after all, thought Brad, but it helped if you were dead.

'Does he talk to you?' he asked slightly curious.

'No, but he comes to me in my dreams when I need guidance and he gives me signs as do the other spirits.'

There was a silence, Brad not knowing quite what to say or think. Jimmie continued, 'That's how they come to you,' he said, 'leastways that's what happens to me, the spirits come to me in my dreams.'

Brad preferred to avoid the subject of death. It was something he knew vaguely was there at the end of the day, but even with the constant reminders of the presence and randomness of death, he instinctively felt that it was best not to dwell on it. In fact, when other people were killed near him, it actually illogically reinforced him in the view that no bullet had his name on it. Somehow there was an almost triumphalist thought in the mixture of fear, horror and sadness – 'not me! I'm alright!' True, getting wounded did rather puncture the bubble of invulnerability, but all it did in his view was make you more careful, make you a better soldier and again bolstered his self-image as a survivor. So death and what might happen after it were topics he left to the likes of Olsen and old Baker who had the strength of their religious beliefs to fortify them. One of them, at least, now knew the answer to the eternal question, the question perhaps central to human existence of whether or not there was life after death.

Now, however, for some reason Jimmie was stuck on the theme and he was obliged to look in the can of worms. He did so.

'Do you believe in life after death, Jimmie?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Jimmie without hesitation. 'I do.'

'You're a lucky man,' said Brad after a pause, and then decisively slapping his thighs as he rose to his feet, 'Come on! Let's go get some food,' he said briskly signalling that so far as he was concerned it was time to move on to more earthly considerations. 'And then,' he added reflectively, 'since neither of us can sleep too well, why don't we get a couple of girls to keep us company for a few days?'

Jimmie smiled at him and shook himself gently as if to cast off the introspective mood into which he had fallen.

'Good thinking, white man,' he said. 'I could do with somebody to sleep with who smells a little better than you do.'
CHAPTER 19

The colonel was a tough, grizzled-looking man in his late forties with his hair cropped so short that the beads of perspiration on his hairline, or at least the smudge on his forehead where Brad presumed the hairline might be, were bigger than the stumps of hair on his head.

The room was hot. A fan on the ceiling circled sluggishly and disturbed the tranquillity of the various insects dancing happily in the light exuded by the one lamp in the room.

Brad, Jimmie and the other members of the chosen ones making up the recon and Ranger platoon that were to be tasked with some mission or other were standing to attention facing the colonel.

The colonel's face was grim. Why was it, wondered Brad as the perspiration trickled from his armpits under his shirt and dribbled slowly down his ribs, gathering speed as it went, until absorbed by his waistband, that officers had the habit of addressing the men about a mission as if entrusting them with the quest for the Holy Grail?

The dialogue was predictable. He had heard it so many times by now that he knew it by heart and could silently mouth the words as the officer spoke.

'Men,' the officer would say looking in deadly earnest, 'I don't have to tell you how important this mission is...'

_No_ , thought Brad, _but you are going to_.

'It could alter the outcome of the war.'

_Ah yes_ , thought Brad, _the outcome of the war! Did they, any one of them, really give a shit about the outcome of the war just so long as they survived it? Somebody wins_ , he thought, _but then do they? The dead are dead, and the living are damaged one way or another._

The officer's voice droned on. 'I don't need to tell you why you men have been selected...'

Brad almost smiled, at least to himself. The words of a song his old granddad used to sing after talking about his time in the trenches in Flanders. 'We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here...,' repeated indefinitely to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. It was as good an explanation as any. Cut the crap, Brad thought, just tell us what the bloody job is so we can get on with it and get it over with. He glanced sideways at Jimmie. Jimmie's face was as inscrutable as ever. He rarely gave away what he was thinking.

Despite what Jimmie had told him, Brad still regarded it as one of those odd twists of fate that had brought them both to the Rangers, but whatever it was, he was glad of it. Jimmie was a good friend.

Having dealt as he felt with the essential preliminaries and focused their collective minds on the task in hand, the colonel still did not, like some reluctant stripper, reveal all. All he said was that there was going to be a raid, but what its purpose was and where would only be revealed to them later. For the next few days he announced they would be closeted in isolation like women in Purdah. They would have to familiarise themselves with the geography and layout of the place to which they were going as only when that had been completed would the details of the mission and their individual tasks be given to them.

It was plain, therefore, from the start that this was going to be something big. Outwardly Brad was his usual, sardonic self, but inwardly even he was impressed. Although the details were kept back, the sheer scale of the site they were trying to familiarise themselves with was such that the importance of the mission was self-evident. The area they found themselves looking at was superficially just part of the Vietnamese countryside, much of it heavily wooded or at least that is how it appeared from the aerial photographs, but the model made of papier maché on the table in the centre of the room, which they stood around like medical students observing surgery, indicated that beneath the surface there was a veritable underground city of bunkers, tunnels, chambers, weapon pits and who-knew-what-else besides. It was a fortress underground, largely impervious to bombing, but built in response to the bombing which would otherwise have obliterated all beneath the massive rain of explosives.

Brad wondered how it was that the Americans had come by the intelligence that had not only revealed the location of the site, but also, even to a limited degree, how it was made up. He was soon to find out.

By the end of the second day, Brad reckoned that he could orientate himself easily, even if he had been brought blindfold to the middle of the site which was several kilometres square. Not only that, but he had learned that Jimmie knew rather more about what was going on than he did. This Jimmie confided to him over a meal break saying by way of introduction, 'This is going to be a big one, Brad.'

'I had rather gathered that, mate,' observed Brad grumpily. There wasn't nearly enough relish for the burger or two that he was about to demolish in his view. Jimmie ignored his less than friendly response and continued.

'And we're going to play a key part.'

'Oh yeah?' Brad managed to mumble with a mouthful of burger. 'How come?'

Jimmie explained, speaking slowly and softly, that the lieutenant had taken him to one side and asked him whether he could use a bow and arrow. Brad stopped chewing and asked, 'Was he taking the piss?' It turned out that the question was actually serious and when Jimmie had confirmed that actually he could use a bow rather well, since he had often hunted game as a lad with his father and uncles, the lieutenant had patted him approvingly on the shoulder and told him that he was just the man that they needed.

'Anything else?' asked Brad now rather more interested.

'Only who would I like with me,' said Jimmie with a rare smile before pausing and adding, 'I, of course, chose you.'

'Well cheers, Geronimo, old mate.'

'Think nothing of it, white eyes. Actually,' he continued conspiratorially, 'the officer told me that he had had the idea from the Montagnards he had once seen using a small crossbow. Not only was it effective, it was silent.'

'So, we are going to play at bleeding William Tell are we?' observed Brad reaching for the relish before continuing, 'well that's alright with me, mate, so long as I am not the poor Herbert who has to stand there with a bloody apple on his head!'

Jimmie had no idea what he was talking about and didn't care much anyway. He was wondering why it was that they needed a bow anyway.

It must have occurred to the powers that be that there was little point in continuing the conspiratorial silence about the intended mission, since on the evening of the third day they were again addressed by the colonel who put them out of their suspense, although still feeling obliged to use as many clichés as he could whilst doing so.

'I expect you men have been wondering what this is all about and where you are going to?' he began by stating the obvious. Brad wondered if this bloke had a degree in it, that is in stating the bleeding obvious.

The colonel continued, at last getting to the point. 'We believe that the military headquarters of the Peoples' Army of Vietnam is located currently in a salient of land which straddles the Cambodian and Vietnamese border in Kampong Cham Province, an area we call 'The Fishhook'. We have known for a long time that this was a base and rest area for the North Vietnamese army and the VC. It's also one of the terminus points of the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk Trails. Recent, reliable intelligence suggests that the NVA's political and military HQ is there, at least at present.'

The colonel had all their attention as he paused briefly before continuing. 'The area has been targeted by our bombers, but we believe with little effect because the vast majority of the enemy's facilities lie beneath the ground, dug so deep that they are largely impervious to bombing.'

So this was the underground fortress they had been studying, thought Brad, and looked at Jimmie wondering where bows and arrows came in, particularly if B52 bombers were not able to do the job.

The colonel continued. 'The mission is not to destroy the base. The mission is (1) to assassinate all or any high-ranking Vietnamese commanders we can, and (2) to extricate a very important person, an individual who we believe can help us with details of whatever it is that the NVA are planning in terms of offensive actions in the south. (3) Last but not least, we are to do as much damage as we can, to destroy munitions and supplies and to inhibit the ability of the NVA to attack the south. Any questions so far?'

In any crowd there's always one earnest individual who has a question if offered the chance, and so it proved now, although quite what the point of asking questions was, beyond asking to be excused on medical grounds or saying that he had a note from his mum, Brad didn't know. The old adage 'ours is not to reason why' seemed to apply to whatever was in store for them.

'Are other units involved, sir, or is it just us?'

'The plan is for you men to be inserted under cover of a bombing attack by the USAF, then whilst you go about your specific tasks, there will be a diversionary attack mounted by elements of the cavalry to the north-west. The intention is to distract the enemy and to make it easier for you to complete your tasks.'

'Your tasks', Brad wondered what they were. He suspected that they were about to come to the bows and arrows part fairly soon. And indeed they did. That is to say the lieutenant told them all after the colonel had finished, but did so team by team so that each team knew only what was required of them. Before that, the colonel had a couple of parting remarks to impart.

'Remember, men,' he said. 'Time is of the essence. From the end of the first raid you will have no more than 60 minutes to complete your allocated tasks and to get out of there and head for your respective rendezvous. Speed and surprise are our best weapons. The withdrawal will be covered by a further raid by heavy bombers, so it is imperative that you carry out your tasks both efficiently and fast.' He paused and looked around the room before saying, 'Thank you, men, and good luck!'

It was the lieutenant who filled in the details when they saw him alone a little later. Their task, as he described it, was the extraction of the spy and the assassination of the high-ranking officers. That was where the bows and arrows came in. Actually, it was not a bow in the ordinary sense. They were to use crossbows. The point was, the officer explained, they were silent which was important, not merely from the point of view of not alerting other enemy soldiers to their presence, but also they could be used underground without shattering consequences for their eardrums. Not only that, added the officer, but they wouldn't mind water.

Water, wondered Brad? This, he thought, gets worse and worse. The officer moved over to a diagram on the wall.

'We believe that the command bunker is situated on this part of the site,' he said pointing to an area on the plan. 'Here, not far away, there is a tunnel which exits the underground complex beneath the surface of this river which flows along this boundary of the site. The entrance is underwater. You will enter by that entrance and make your way through the tunnel to the command centre which is where we expect you will also pick up our VIP who is, by the way, a woman. You kill whoever you find there and leave with her by the same means that you entered.

Just like that, thought Brad. 'Won't the command post be guarded, sir?' he ventured cautiously ignoring his golden rule of keeping quiet.

'Other squads will have the task of dealing with other elements of the NVA,' the officer said crisply. 'You just focus on the matter in hand!'

That's alright then, thought Brad. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Still, he thought, they had a good team. They had a job to do which excited him and which he found himself almost looking forward to.

As always though, initial enthusiasm cooled in direct preparation to the proximity of the bowel-loosening event before them. First there was sober reflection. This was quickly followed by apprehension. As the hour for mounting the scaffold drew ever nearer, a numbness of mind set in which he tried to dispel, as did the others, by relentlessly checking his equipment again and again and going over the details in an almost obsessive way. It was essential to concentrate.
CHAPTER 20

A few days later that's exactly what they were doing as Brad and his three companions, Jimmie, Frank and Ed, abseiled down from the helicopter hovering just above the canopy of trees below them whilst, a little distance away, the bombs that had fallen from the invisible B52s exploded in a nightmare of destruction that only an enemy 30 feet or more below the ground could hope to survive. That, at least, is what Brad and his companions fervently hoped, namely that 30 feet below the ground is where their enemy was taking refuge from the furious firestorm above and not only concealing their arrival, but giving them time to enter the tunnel complex unseen.

In other locations, again unseen, other men were similarly descending from helicopters and disappearing fast into the undergrowth. Time was of the essence and they were men on a deadly mission.

It was about an hour before dark, light enough to help them find their objectives, and when they were on their way out again, dark enough to cloak their movements. That, at least, was the plan.

Frank and Ed were two young tenderfeet, at least in Brad and Jimmie's eyes. They had only recently been posted to Vietnam and neither had anything like their experience. They were both from that mould that, situated somewhere deep within the United States, presses out handsome, earnest, young men of the kind most moms would be glad to see their daughters bring home. They had a politeness and a desire to please about them, and were completely lacking the sardonic cynicism of Brad. This was to be their first major mission.

With Brad's team, they also had a Kit Carson, that is a former Vietcong turned friend now instead of foe, a poacher turned gamekeeper, who, if they were challenged, might enable them to bluff their way close enough to the enemy to kill him, since of course they spoke the same language. Brad and Jimmie had had experience of these men before and as far as they were concerned, they were a mixed bag of spanners, as likely to lead you into trouble as to get you out of it. They had both privately agreed that at the first hint of a problem with this one, they would kill him on the basis that it is better to err on the side of caution.

The Kit Carson, as he was called, was a pragmatic man who wore his allegiance lightly. When he was about 14 years of age, he had been pressed into the Vietcong along with the other men of his village on the simple basis of 'you are either with us or you are against us'. If the latter case was applicable, then you were murdered by someone smashing the back of your head in with an iron hoe. This was a strong inducement to join, particularly since in the countryside the South Vietnamese government's writ ran only nominally, even when reinforced by the might of American manpower.

At night, when the VC could move around undetected, it ran not at all. Even if you were not a supporter, as the old adage goes, 'a merciful providence fashioned us hollow on purpose we might our principles swallow.' Co-operation was the pragmatic man's choice. There were no advantages apart from staying alive. He worked in the fields during the day and at night he worked in the tunnels, maintaining and expanding them where necessary, or he was sent out with others to create obstacles and traps for the American patrols – Punji stakepits were dug and constructed containing shit-smeared, bamboo spikes, whereover they might catch and cause harm to the unwary or unlucky, young American who fell foul of them.

They tended to be placed around American bases or on paths that their patrols could be expected to use. They were ingeniously sly camouflaged and deadly. Some had the stakes angled so as to catch the unfortunate soldier's calf as he tried to pull his leg from the pit. Other stakes were set in undergrowth where a soldier might take refuge if fired upon. There were grenades placed so as to explode if the unwary opened a gate or tripped over a wire concealed in the undergrowth. Streams had nail planks placed on their beds which had a similar effect as stepping on to a sea urchin. It wouldn't kill you, but it hurt like hell.

There were not too many firearms about at first. There were some old, French weapons that were hidden in the tunnels and taken by whoever was to use them before being restored to their hiding place in the tunnels before the next sweep by the Americans or South Vietnamese army through the area.

One day he was caught coming out of a subsidiary tunnel entrance by a couple of young, American soldiers. He was fortunate indeed that it was the Americans and not the South Vietnamese who, he knew, would have given him a very rough time before killing him out of hand – at least if he was lucky. As it was, the American who grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him out of the hole just laughed and said, 'Hey Bill! Look what I've got!' as he held him up by one hand as if he had produced a rabbit from a hat.

Holding him by one hand had been easy for the young, well-fed American, since he was skin and bone. He was so thin that his entire skeletal structure could be seen quite clearly through his taut skin, so little food did they have for themselves after the demands of the VC had been met whose regular units they were obliged to feed.

He had never been quite so close to the Americans before. He had seen them on patrol; big men, well fed, as if from a different planet. He must have looked pathetic to them and indeed he was. He was amazed that they actually seemed sorry for him. Having been made their prisoner, once they fed him, he was an immediate convert and happy to be of use to them. It was a bit like being a dog. Pat him on the head and feed him, and you have a friend. Certainly, it was dangerous, but the food was good and it seemed to him that these men were going to win anyway. He told them all about the tunnels under his village, except that part where the food was stored so that when the tunnels were exploded the village could still retrieve the food. He knew he could never return to the village and it was a mercy that his parents had died from fatigue and hunger so that the usual retribution directed at somebody's family by the VC could not occur.

So he became a Kit Carson, a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, a thief set to catch a thief. He was armed and trusted, up to a point. He could be trusted too, up to a point. He knew which side his bread was buttered. He had had direct experience of the alternative and it was a no-brainer as far as he was concerned. Whist things continued as they were, he could be counted upon. Should they change, however, then he was all too aware that he would have to make other arrangements.

He had been selected for the raid since, as a native speaker, if they encountered a challenge from the NVA, he would be able to buy his team valuable time by answering, time that might allow the Americans to take whatever action was needed.

He was armed. He was not going through the river. His task was to await their return and then to be available to perform the same function on the way back to the rendezvous point where they were to be picked up by helicopter.

With the ground beneath their feet still trembling from the impact of the bombs, the team quickly headed for their objective, the river, with Jimmie in front, the Kit Carson just behind him, then Frank and Ed all at intervals and with Brad bringing up the rear.

As they drew near to the river, they passed silently through enemy positions, all of whom plainly had their heads well down, since no challenge came their way. That was just as well, since in accordance with the needs of their task they more resembled a war band of Apache or Huron Indians rather than Rangers, camouflaged and carrying small, hand-held crossbows, quivers with arrows or bolts, knives and, for good measure, hand axes. This last lot had been Jimmie's idea as well. If they ran into trouble, they would need more than a crossbow to get them out of it. Only the Kit Carson with them had a firearm. He was supposed to cover their exit from the tunnel complex and the river, always assuming that they made it back.

He also had Claymore mines with him which he was to set up to cover their retreat after they had returned from the tunnel and when they were heading for the RV. There was nothing quite like one of these evil devices that, properly set up, had a wide killing zone and would thus act as an excellent rear guard for them.

They, on the other hand, couldn't take firearms, firstly because they were going underwater, and secondly because the use of firearms in the confined space of the tunnel could have disastrous consequences for them all. It was this that had made the suggestion of bows, silent but deadly, so attractive.

Darkness came suddenly, but they had by then reached the banks of the small river where, according to their information, on the far bank beneath the huge roots of a shattered tree there was a tunnel entrance concealed by the water.

Locating the tree had seemed to Brad to be crucial. Quite how they were going to do that in the often heavily wooded landscape struck him as a problem. There might, he thought, be many trees and there was hardly likely to be a flag or signpost to indicate its whereabouts. In the event, once they drew near to the area where the subterranean fortress was located, there were not many trees in evidence and those that still stood had been shattered by bombing raids. On the slippery and undergrowth-covered river bank, the tree, which must have been of great antiquity to judge by the size of the roots, stood out from its four remaining fellows, gaunt and obvious on the far bank of the river.

As on so many previous occasions, it was Jimmie who proved the real Ranger and who led the way, slipping first into the water and then disappearing beneath the surface to search for the hidden entrance. The others, too, slipped quietly into the water, but remained at the river bank submerged up to their shoulders waiting for Jimmie to reappear. Brad tried not to think about what else might, unseen by them, occupy the river and even now be interested in investigating them, including whether or not they were edible. Were there nail boards or other traps for the unwary? On balance, it seemed unlikely. The water was too deep to wade. His feet didn't touch the bottom, but then, he thought, the Devil on his left shoulder continuing to plague him, you never knew.

He forced the thought from his mind and tried to concentrate. Unpleasant as it may be, here they were better concealed, but would also be ready to move quickly when the entrance was located. Only the Kit Carson remained on the bank where he, too, did his best to conceal himself, aided by the darkness. He lay listening to the distant sounds of firing and the odd, dull thud of an explosion that drifted over out of the darkness from different parts of the area as other teams went about their business, and tried very hard not to imagine that the enemy knew where he was and even now were stalking him ready to slit his throat.

Nobody spoke. The sound of bombs exploding had ceased leaving a seemingly empty darkness behind. Suddenly, Jimmie was there again on the other side of the narrow river, his head now above the water and motioning to them with his hand to come over. One by one they did, Brad being the first to join him. Not a word was spoken, despite the fact that they couldn't have got much closer to each other if they had been Siamese twins.

Jimmie gave him to understand that the entrance was several feet underwater directly beneath him. Brad fervently hoped so and, putting his brain into neutral, pulled his goggles down from his forehead and a metal clip over his nose. Then he took a breath and submerged, pulling himself down by the tree roots. There, in the darkness, he couldn't see a thing, but forced himself to continue until he felt a space open up before him, which he guessed and hoped was the entrance. Forcing down a rising sense of panic, he propelled himself inside and felt his back scrape along the roof of the tunnel, for so it proved to be.

With his hands, he paddled dog-like up a gradual slope, his body buoyed up by the water. After a few moments and to his intense relief, his head broke the surface of the water and he could breathe again. He couldn't see anything. He pushed back the goggles and still couldn't see anything. He was in total darkness in a pungent, dank, earthen cavern with water up to his nose. Then he felt hands on his legs and one by one his companions joined him using his body to guide them along the tunnel to the surface. Soon there were four heads above the surface of the water, like rats in a sewer, Brad thought, hoping to himself that this tunnel was not literally a shit-hole.

Then, somebody turned the lights on. This turned out to be Jimmie who had removed his torch from a waterproof bag and now had it fixed to his head and turned on so that a beam of light, shining pencil-thin, enabled them to take stock of their surroundings. This didn't take long. A tunnel just about big enough to crawl along stretched ahead of them into the inky darkness and the unknown. Reluctantly, Brad hauled himself from the water, attached his own head torch and began to lead the way along the tunnel. The others followed without a word.

They were now inside the tunnel complex that Brad and his companions had just entered like ferrets down a rabbit hole or, given that it had been underwater, like water rats, he thought. Then he changed his mind. No, he thought, they were amphibious rats, amphibious tunnel rats, before shaking himself and pulling himself together. It was difficult maintaining a sense of reality in the black, nether world in which they found themselves. They were in the underworld, a world between life and death, where the only way to function was to maintain a steely concentration on the job in hand. This was easier said than done. He forced himself to concentrate and crawled on.

It was a bit, he thought, like being a humble earthworm, blind or almost blind in their case, slithering along through the earth feeding on the detritus dragged down from the surface. In the worm's case, that was by choice. In their case, it was because as they breathed, try as they might they could not avoid swallowing all kinds of muck that seemed to find its way into their mouths. As they wormed their way through the intestines of the earth, the tunnel was full of all manner of insects and debris quite apart from reptiles, snakes and rats that Brad fervently hoped he would not encounter. As they crawled, they occasionally caught tell-tale whiffs of smoke and once the faint smell of the fishy sauce that the Vietnamese applied as liberally to their food as the Americans did ketchup to their own.

They went through an airlock, a descent through a trap door and then along a lower tunnel before coming up again through another trap door and continuing as before. The airlock acted as a blast deflection, but if anything the air within it was more stale and putrid than the air in the other tunnel, so when they came back into the other tunnel, the air almost seemed fresh by comparison. The airlock was the sort of place where gas would linger, a deadly cloud to asphyxiate and suffocate. The only thing that could be said for it was that it was not full of water. Sometimes they were and then it called for a real act of faith to enter them. What, for example, if having entered you encountered a dead end? How long can you hold your breath? You can't turn around in the tunnel and there are others behind you. It didn't bear thinking about.

All around them, but unseen, were the occupants of bunkers, air raid shelters, store rooms and sleeping quarters, and somewhere in their midst was the conference or command centre that was Brad's target. This was, they knew, going to be a larger room than usual and was located deep beneath the earth, but not so deep that it didn't have an escape route through an angled tunnel that exited on the surface. That tunnel also provided a route down which reinforcements might arrive in time of need. Otherwise, the chamber, illuminated by the light of a Tilley lamp, was at the end of four, long tunnels, one of which they were crawling along.

The information that had brought them there had, unbeknown to them, been provided by an informant at a very high level within the North Vietnamese command structure. The informant was Thuy whose sympathies and allegiance had been fundamentally altered by the activities of Vietcong murder squads that terrorised the countryside. She had discovered that she was not one of those intellectual revolutionaries for whom the end justified the means, and she had been sickened by what she saw being done to the Vietnamese peasants, yet in the very name of those peasants.

Whilst, therefore, herself a high-ranking figure in the NVA and ostensibly still spying and informing for the North passing on information gained through her intimate relationship with her American love, she was now playing the incredibly dangerous game of double agent. It was she who had got word to her American contacts that something big was in the offing and that high-ranking NVA officers would be at the subterranean headquarters in the Fishhook at a certain time. This information was her ticket out and, once out, this time she had no intention of returning to the north. It was she who had betrayed the underwater access point, close as it was to the command post and so ideal for an attack and escape.

She had no idea of the plans for the raid. Indeed, it was better that she didn't know. She had simply been told enigmatically 'to be ready'. When the air raid had started, she had left the command post where she had been working on some captured American documents, recovered smouldering, but still intact from dead American aircrew, translating them to see if they revealed anything which might be of use to the NVA. There was nothing in particular, just some rather pathetic letters from a man's wife or girlfriend giving him news of home and enclosing a photograph of his baby son which, despite all the suffering and death she had seen, much of it caused by Americans, still moved her almost to tears.

As the bombs pounded into the earth causing everything to shake and a fine, chalk-like dust to fill the already dank and putrid air, she had been told to go to the air raid shelter nearby. This was located in a nearby chamber and offered no more protection than the command centre, although being located so deep was more or less impervious to the bombs. She hoped so, anyway. She had never been caught in the middle of such an intense bombing raid before and was frightened. She was frightened more than anything else of being entombed, buried alive by collapsing tunnels or chambers.

There was no hope of rescue in those circumstances, even if anyone else was left alive. When she reached the chamber, having crawled along a tunnel trembling with the force of the explosions above, she passed a kitchen area where the cooks still worked despite the bombardment, displaying a serenity and calm that was enviable. When she reached the conical air raid shelter, conical because it amplified the sounds of approaching aircraft, it was already full of a cluster of skinny, dingily dressed NVA soldiers who had been on some duty or other which they had abandoned to take refuge there. There was only one entrance and exit, so once inside the claustrophobic, little chamber, there was no way that anybody could leave, save singly and in an orderly manner.

When she left the command post, the senior officers were still pouring over maps and conversing in low tones. The stuffy room had a large table in the middle which was covered in maps with the men leaning over them seemingly oblivious to the bombardment. The whole scene was suffused with an eerie, yellow light which lent both men and the surroundings a jaundiced appearance. It was more reminiscent of a group of Scots body snatchers in the gloom of an Edinburgh churchyard bent over the cadaver they were exhuming in the name of profit and science than that of a military command post.

Before she had left, she had heard them talking about a reinforcement from the north that they expected, but she had only caught snatches of what they were saying. That didn't matter. She already knew from what she had overheard over the preceding weeks that a spectacular attack was being prepared, not just using this base as a springboard, but all over the south of the country, and again from what she had seen and heard it was apparent that the preparatory build-up had begun and was continuing. This is what she wanted to communicate to the American high command. She also wanted out. She had had enough of man's inhumanity to man and she longed for the normality of her old life in France, which now seemed like an impossible, unattainable dream, yet she was determined and the promise of information to the Americans was her passport to that life.

The arrival about three days before of the North Vietnamese's most senior officer, below the great Giap himself, reinforced the imminence of the planned offensive. The man himself did not look like a great general. He was a podgy, little man in an ill-fitting suit of roughly-made clothes with pasty skin and glasses with very thick lenses, without which he was as blind as a bat as had been apparent on one occasion when he mislaid them and had been quite unable to do anything until a careful inch by inch search of the floor had discovered them under some decomposing vegetation strewn on the ground.

As always, though, a book should not be judged by its cover. He was a shrewd strategist and a ruthless and determined exponent of warfare. In a past life, he had been a school teacher, but now, although he knew and remembered that well enough, it seemed more like a dream to him than a reality. He had been a frontline commander when it was the French who were being persuaded to leave Vietnam. Now, his formidable talents and the lives of the men he now commanded were directed at the Americans. The great man was now still in the command centre along with the other high-ranking officers.

He was a dispassionate man. Attacks were planned by him with a complete lack of regard for the casualties that his men might incur. This complete detachment from the human suffering engendered by war made him an ideal person to direct the abattoir of war. At whatever cost, his sole concern was to win. If he had paused to reflect upon it, which he never did, he might have been surprised to discover that he actually had no agenda beyond that which raised the interesting question of whether or not that which he lived for hadn't become an end in itself.

Thuy was one of the very few women entrusted with work of any consequence, her skill with languages and her courage combined to make her a very useful asset indeed. Perhaps also because she was an intellectual, a kindred spirit to the one–time schoolteacher, that also helped to set her apart from the others around the great man, most of whom were peasants with whom he had very little in common.

When the bombing ceased and the ground ceased to shudder, Thuy left the shelter chamber and made her way back to the command centre which was now the centre of considerable activity. It appeared that an attack was coming in from the north. Although it wasn't yet clear how large a force was involved, men were coming in with reports of attacks and orders were being issued to deal with the incursion.

The little general was in his element, the still point at the eye of the storm, swiftly and quietly giving orders as he deemed necessary, dealing with the situation as it developed. Little did he or anyone else know for that matter that within a short distance of and closing rapidly was a desperate band of individuals intent on killing him. Had he had any inkling that that was the case, he might not have appeared quite so serene. The reality of war and man's inhumanity to man was about to be visited upon him.

Brad and his companions continued to worm their way along the tunnel that they had entered. Although they were careful, they were reasonably confident that there would be no booby traps because the tunnel entrance was so concealed and also because any booby traps that were placed would hinder the enemy if it needed to exit the tunnel system quickly by that route. Brad, therefore, who was in front, whilst the others wriggled and crawled along behind in the darkness, his head torch being the only one to illuminate what was ahead, shut his mind to the possibility and pressed forward as quickly as he could. They had to get the business over before the next bombing raid and in time to make their rendezvous afterwards if they were ever to stand a chance of getting out of there.

On their way, they passed trapdoors that were closed both below and above them leading to the bunkers, and even to a kitchen facility located near the surface so the smoke from the cooking fire could exit, albeit by some remote smoke outlet at a distance from the kitchen itself so as not to give away its exact location. Brad paused at the trapdoor that led up to the kitchen and sniffed hopefully, but no comforting smell of food met his nostrils, just the same odour of stale air laced with other smells that he preferred not to dwell on too closely. On reflection, he thought as he lay there for a moment or two to catch his breath, he didn't smell too good either and could probably have given a skunk a run for his money. A shove on the sole of his boot brought him out of his reverie and he crawled on.

They crossed a well shaft bridging across the walls of the well to reach the continuation of the tunnel, and then reached a corner around which came a glimmer of light and the murmur of voices. Brad turned his torch off and he crept to the corner, sensing rather than seeing the others behind him. Cautiously he peered around the corner. There was some sort of antechamber ahead as far as he could see in the very dim light and then, beyond that, a chamber longer than it was broad and a cluster of individuals around a table, the whole illuminated in an intermittent way by what looked and sounded like a Tilley lamp, a sort of primus lamp that made a sound a bit like a blow torch. The lamp stood on the table and as people passed between it and his viewpoint; they interrupted the gleam of the lantern.

Now that their target was directly in front of them, he felt suddenly reluctant to move. It wasn't that he was too frightened to move. He had in his time experienced fear so great that he was rooted to the spot and only just able to force reluctant and suddenly heavy limbs to function by an exercise of will, whilst, at the same time, his heart hammered and he gasped for breath. No, this was different. He was scared, but not that scared. It was just that in an odd sort of way, the scene he beheld looked almost cosy and homely and it suddenly seemed an abomination to leap in and destroy it. The thought only lasted for a moment. He armed his hand crossbow, turned his head torch on and launched himself forward tripping over something as he did so and falling head first into the chamber. The others were right behind him, which was just as well because as he fell he dropped his crossbow. The others did not and fired with deadly effect in the confined space.

Thuy, as they crashed into the chamber, although startled almost out of her skin, had sufficient presence of mind to grab the Tilley lamp from the table and retreat with it to the corner of the room where she held it so she could be seen and hopefully recognised, otherwise she realised full well she would be killed. A moment after she reached the corner and held the lantern up, another person crashed into the corner as well and looking down she saw the general with a crossbow bolt sticking out of his shoulder. The podgy, little man was whimpering with pain and blinked at the lantern, now more or less blind, since he had again lost his glasses. Then she found herself caught in the beams of the head torches that quickly inspected her, the general and the room now with several bodies on the floor.

There was the briefest pause, then one of the dark figures behind the torch light asked quietly, 'Is that the girl?'

'Ask her,' said another voice.

'Who's the King?'

'Elvis,' she replied at once.

'That's our girl,' replied Brad adding with a note of urgency in his voice, 'Come on, let's beat it.'

Then somebody noticed the general move. There was another pause. The general was plainly still alive.

'Kill him quick,' said Ed. Brad had other ideas.

'Nope – let's take him with us. If we get him back in one piece, the information he can provide will be second to none. If we don't, no big deal.'

Although this made a sort of sense, it was really only that the idea of killing him in cold blood didn't appeal to him that he mentioned it. He half hoped that one of the others would contradict him and just kill the poor devil. Nobody did.

The folly of what he suggested was almost immediately apparent. As Ed pulled the general to his feet and dragged him over to the tunnel by which they had arrived and were now going to depart, the general, not surprisingly, screamed from the pain caused by his wound at being roughly hauled to his feet.

'Shit,' said Jimmie, and he and Brad positioned themselves to the side of the other entrance to the chamber, that being the direction from which the enemy reinforcements were most likely to come. As a precaution, they stuck earplugs in their ears. Although this meant they couldn't hear too well, it should save their eardrums if there was any firing.

Thuy had scrambled to her feet and had taken the lantern to the table where she scooped up the map, folding it up and shoving it into Brad's hands saying, 'Here, take this.' Brad had just about sufficient presence of mind to scrunch it up still further and stuff it into his waterproof bag that had contained his head torch, otherwise, of course, there was no hope of bringing it back in one piece through the tunnel.

Meanwhile, the others made haste to leave dousing the light as they did so, with Ed pulling the general into the tunnel like a wounded buddy, Frank at the general's feet and Thuy close behind. That left Brad and Jimmie in the chamber, now in total darkness. They did not have long to wait.

They sensed rather than saw or heard the enemy coming along the other tunnel that led into the chamber. The tunnel down which they were descending was the escape tunnel angled down from the surface and, as they moved, they dislodged earth and detritus which fell into the chamber announcing their imminent arrival. They didn't know how many there were and it didn't matter because only one could drop in at a time. Quickly, Jimmie and Brad positioned themselves either side of the entrance.

'You first,' hissed Jimmie and they took it in turns to belt the enemy soldiers as they struggled into the chamber one by one. Three men dropped in in rapid succession and three men were killed in rapid succession, the greatest danger to Brad and Jimmie being the chance of being hit or stabbed by their companion because neither of them could see a thing. Fortunately, nothing of the kind happened.

No more men dropped into the chamber. This didn't mean that there were none however. What next?

Brad sensed rather than saw Jimmie in the total darkness that surrounded them like some nightmare. The enemy knew they were there so there was no real need to maintain silence, but it was still best to keep the enemy guessing about how many of them there were. Equally, they needed to get the hell out of there. Now that there was a pause, there was the opportunity to do just that. Jimmie tapped Brad on the shoulder, pulled his earplug out and whispered, 'Let's beat it, brother – now!'

Brad needed no second bidding. Jimmie made straight for the exit like an arrow which neither of them could see, but which, like the underwater entrance, Jimmie seemed to know where to find. Hardly had the thought been expressed, then the two men were out of the chamber and around the corner, which was just as well because as they turned the corner, behind them the chamber was suddenly filled with bullets which stitched their way through the darkness searching for their vulnerable bodies.

Plainly, the Vietnamese were not bothered about their men's eardrums which must have exploded under the cacophony of noise that the firing unleashed. Neither Brad nor Jimmie were spared the pain, but the fact that they were a little distance away and around a corner helped to a degree and this was with the earplugs, although neither saved their eardrums. When the firing ceased, it still left them with throbbing ears. Neither of them would be able to hear if the other spoke anyway, so communication was reduced to shoves and thumps.

Jimmie thumped Brad and Brad moved, turning his torch on and travelling as fast as he could go, oblivious to the pain in his knees and elbows, the skin scraped raw and his eardrums feeling as if someone had shoved a metal skewer into them. Behind him, Jimmie did not follow at once, but rigged a booby trap with a grenade. If triggered, that would hold up the enemy and cover their retreat, but given the possible consequences to them as well, it was a desperate act of a desperate man. Whatever chance they had of saving their hearing would not be helped if that went off any time soon.

They reached the well shaft and crossed it and then caught up with the others who had been slowed down by the wounded general, for whom being dragged blind, like some mole, though the tunnel had been a form of prolonged torture. They were, however, impervious to his cries of pain and his protests. Only Thuy could understand what he said anyway, and what he said aroused no feelings of pity in her, since a good many of them were directed at her and consisted of curses and promises about what would be done to her when the NVA got hold of her. She had, by now, seen a great deal of that anyway and didn't need the general to draw her to a picture. She resolved mentally to take her own life if necessary rather than to fall into their hands.

When Brad and Jimmie caught up with them, they had come to the point where the water had to be entered to exit the complex. They paused, despite the urgent need to keep moving. The six of them were jammed together in the tunnel like sardines in a tin, at the point where a shallow cavern had been hollowed out by the water that lapped indifferently and uninvitingly a few feet away.

Ed and Frank were for leaving the general behind, with his throat cut naturally. That was, after all, what they had come to do. It was obvious now to them all that the general was going to be a liability. Even if they got him across the river, manhandling him would seriously slow them down and the noise he would make in the process would swiftly bring retribution from an outraged enemy, since the whole area would now be alive with them like ants in a disturbed ant hill. Brad was aware of this just as much as the others, but he still saw the prize that they might gain if they could bring him back with them, so he concluded the brief debate by clouting the general hard on the back of the head with the handle of his axe. This was not very easy in the confined space in which they found themselves, but he managed to hit him hard enough to stun him. Then he tied his mouth shut with a strip of cloth and said to the others, 'Let's move.'

One by one, Jimmie first again, they slid head first into the creamy, dark water, slimy with unspeakable things that were best not thought about. That wasn't actually too daunting due to their desperate desire to get out of there. Ed dragged the general down the sump-like hole, disappearing with the sound of water going down a plughole, to be followed by a sudden rush backwards of the water displaced by their bodies when they had gone. Then it was Thuy's turn, who had sat shivering and silent throughout. She was followed by Frank, which left Brad alone to face the demons of the dark and any of the enemy who might happen along.

As far as that was concerned, he spent the short time waiting fixing a grenade booby trap as well. It was better to be doing something and, since there had been no explosion behind them, it was more than possible that the previous booby trap had been discovered and even now the enemy might be close behind them. How close? Brad listened, struggling to catch any sound there might be. Were they there? He couldn't hear them with his damaged ears. He didn't know. Then he turned, took a deep breath and dived head first into the sump thinking, now I know what a turd feels like. This was rather indelicate, he knew. His old gran would have been ashamed of him, but war had long since stripped him of all niceties of thought and behaviour, such thin veneer of civilisation as had cloaked him was long gone and in its place a naked desire to survive drove him on. He no longer cared what he did or how he did it in his frantic scramble for the light.

Not that there was any light, of course. When, after what seemed an age, his head bobbed up alongside the others who were clinging to the roots of the tree, he found that it was almost as dark outside as it had been in the tunnel, but for a moment at least he savoured the satisfaction of being out of that hell hole. When he had got his breath back, he said, but only inaudibly heard, 'Let's go,' and forced his tired and aching body across the stream. To judge by the occasional, slight splash in the water, the others were with him. He reached the other bank and clung to the vegetation. Where, he wondered, had they got in? Was the Kit Carson still there? There was only one way to find out. He hauled himself from the water, its slimy fingers slowly and reluctantly releasing him, but leaving him festooned with heaven knows what filth and parasites now enthusiastically burrowing into his flesh. Whatever they were up to would have to wait, he thought. For the moment let them eat him. The others were with him now on the bank and from familiarity he could identify some of them.

There was still the sound of firing from elsewhere which indicated that the Rangers were still engaged, although it could not be for much longer, given the need to get out of there before the next bombing raid.

The general was there and Ed loosened the gag around his mouth, perhaps to let the general catch his breath. This was a serious mistake. The general did indeed draw in his breath and, rather like an infant who having taken a deep breath lets out a roar, that was exactly what the general did yelling aloud. The Kit Carson who was concealed nearby heard this and thought it was the enemy, which in a way it was, and promptly opened fire killing the general and Ed and Frank at once, the general and Ed falling backwards with a splash into the river, and Frank dropping without a sound where he stood. The noise was enough to awaken the dead, or at any rate to alert the enemy, who, for all they knew, were so numerous and so close that they could not have thrown a stick in any direction and failed to hit one. Brad was both aghast and furious.

Where the hell was the Kit Carson who was supposed to be covering their withdrawal, he thought, not knowing at this point that it was their own side that had, in a burst of automatic fire, killed two of his mates as well as the unfortunate general who, wounded, had been dragged through the tunnel to here. What was worse was that attention would now be focused on where they were. If instead of following them along the tunnel the NVA had put two and two together and, noting the direction that they had taken, had left the tunnels and followed their route to the tunnel exit on the surface, then they would have now a grandstand view of where they were. The only saving grace was the darkness. Did the NVA have any flares with them? He fervently hoped not.

All this flashed through his mind in the brief moment that it took Jimmie to shake him urgently by the shoulder. Brad understood. Time to go. Brad grabbed Thuy and pulled her with them. He just wanted to communicate that it was time to go. Then, after that, as far as he was concerned, it was up to her to keep up.

There were no flares, but an enemy machine gun opened fire and hit the Kit Carson who realised who they were and now followed them. Whether or not he realised the mistake he had made, Brad and Jimmie would never know. He was dead before he hit the ground. In fact, they didn't even know in the darkness that he was there and were never to find out that it was him rather than the enemy who had done the damage. Their attention had been focused on where they were going, eyes straining in the darkness to try to catch any sign that might indicate the presence of the enemy before the enemy saw them. They headed towards an area of flooded paddy fields which they would have to cross to reach more woodland beyond which was the rendezvous point. If they were not at the RV on time, the helicopter, which offered a fast ride out of there, would not wait.

The machine gun opening up was actually quite helpful. At least they now had an idea where the enemy might be. They had dropped to their bellies and were now working their way in commando crawls, just as in the tunnel, whilst the machine gun traversed and fired streams of bullets above their heads. Although unpleasant, Brad realised that there was a silver lining to this, since it was unlikely that the enemy would be firing in the direction of their own side because of the obvious danger of hitting them. This gave Brad and Jimmie a reasonable indication of the best direction to go and they followed it as quickly as they could until they reached a drainage ditch, which proved to be knee-deep in water, but afforded more cover than the paddy field they had now crossed. In the ditch, huddled together, Jimmie checked his watch and silently showed it to Brad and Thuy. They had 10 minutes to reach the RV. Time to move on again.

The firing had stopped. They left the ditch and ran, bent double, for the trees, Brad clearing the last few feet with a jump. To his surprise, he found himself falling and when he landed heavily on his back, he was temporarily winded. Then, just as he struggled to get up, Jimmie landed on top of him. Thuy must have stopped in time because she did not make the involuntary descent into whatever hole or gully they now found themselves.

They were uninjured, but as became almost immediately apparent, they were not alone. They found, to Brad's horror, that they had inadvertently dropped into some kind of enemy position whose startled voices suggested that Brad and Jimmie now had a serious problem, the only solution to which was to get stuck in. Hesitate, and you are lost. This they duly did with axe and knife, shoulder to shoulder in the darkness, striking hard and fast. Darkness and desperation were their allies as they hacked their way through the men around them until suddenly all was still. Almost exhausted now, they leaned on each other breathing hard. Thuy joined them. It was her turn now to push and pull them, pointing to the sky and then hurrying off through the trees. They followed her and behind them, over the NVA base, the bombs were beginning to fall from the second wave of B52 bombers whose attack was to help screen their departure.

Brad and Jimmie stumbled along behind Thuy who now led the way. Despite the air bombardment, random shots were being fired behind them, although whether from comrades of the men killed in the gully or perhaps survivors of that vicious, little fight was not clear. Not that it mattered, of course. A bullet was a bullet whether fired by friend or foe, not that they thought they had any friends let alone fans in the immediate vicinity.

Suddenly, Brad saw the helicopter. It was right on time! What was even better was that he and Jimmie were on time for the RV as well. A sense of relief filled him and he turned to Jimmie. There was no Jimmie. Where, he wondered, was Jimmie? He had been there. They had been stumbling along together and occasionally bumping into each other in their tired clumsiness. He stared into the darkness expecting his friend to appear.

Thuy had seen the helicopter too and turned to him and smiled, beckoning him to follow her. He felt a rising sense of panic. Where was Jimmie? Thuy now looked at him more earnestly and grabbed him by the shirt, tugging him. He pulled her hand away saying, 'I must find Jimmie!'

He turned and retraced his steps, leaning forward into the sporadic firing just as people do when walking into a strong wind. Then he found Jimmie by the simple expedient of tripping over him. Jimmie had been hit.

'Jimmie! Jimmie!' he said urgently, but there was no response. Brad got to his feet and straddled Jimmie, pulling him upright and then bending over to allow Jimmie's body to fold over his back. Then, with Jimmie on his back, he ran as best he could to the helicopter. This was not easy. A man on your back is a dead weight and not easy to carry, but he was not going to give up on Jimmie. He was not going to leave his mate.

He reached the chopper. Thuy was on board. Hands pulled Jimmie in and then himself and, before he knew it almost, he felt the helicopter lift from the ground and soar into the air. As it rose, he looked back at the bombs exploding over the Fishhook.

'This is all of you, is it?' shouted a crewman in his ear. This was a bloody stupid thing to do in Brad's view because in the first place it hurt his ear, and in the second place that should have been bleeding obvious, but he simply nodded and said, 'Yes, two Rangers.'

The crewman looked at him and looked at Jimmie who was being attended to by another crewman. Then he shook his head and said, 'Sorry, buddy, one Ranger. Your friend is dead.'
CHAPTER 21

It was a sunny morning. A light wind was blowing off the sea and ruffling the leaves of the rehabilitation centre perched high on the hillside.

Brad sat on the terrace in a wheelchair parked conveniently in the shade and enjoyed watching the insects dancing in the shafts of light that shone through the dense and luxuriant vegetation. His head didn't hurt so much now and he was able to think a little beyond focusing on the necessary but mundane practicalities of everyday life, such as putting his shoes on or tying a necktie. Not that he wore a necktie. It was far too warm for a tie and he wouldn't have worn it even if he had had one. No, tying a necktie had been simply one of the many exercises he had had to undergo as part of his rehabilitation.

He now understood that there had been an explosion, but where and in what circumstances he had no idea. He had a vague recollection of going up in the air, but nothing else. There was nothing else until he came out of the heavily concussed state that he had been in for about 4 weeks after the event. He didn't actually recall that event, just a succession of intermittent images, a young woman holding him tightly and saying, 'It's ok sergeant, you've got them all now,' to reassure him that the enemy he thought he was beset with had all bit the dust. There was no enemy present, of course. It was his damaged brain on autopilot reacting to what it thought it saw, whilst in reality he didn't for a while even know his name. That had to be relearned like tying a necktie.

He recalled a young woman sitting on the end of his bed and asking him if he knew who she was. He remembered thinking about it, but not what his answer had been. He remembered being fed on one occasion. The food was somehow vaguely familiar and reminded him of when he had been a little boy. He searched his mind to try and recall what it was and then suddenly, as the smell of the food struck some memory buried deep inside him, he remembered. It was rice pudding! He had loved rice pudding, which was just as well because now he had it every meal. The reason for that was that one of the injuries he had sustained was a shattered jaw and the only food he could swallow was food that did not need masticating. It was fortunate indeed that he liked rice pudding.

He remembered also being puzzled by the much bandaged individual that he saw occasionally on the other side of the ward he was in, and his eventual realisation that this was actually his reflection in glass marked another step in his slow recovery.

Eventually he had been well enough to move to the rehabilitation centre from where he was told in due course he would be moved on to another centre in the States.

He had virtually no visitors. A doctor came sometimes to check him over. There were nurses, of course, but no friend came to visit. All his friends, he recalled eventually, were dead. Then, one day, he did have a visitor. He was sitting at his favourite spot on the terrace dozing a little in the sunshine. Something caused him to open his eyes and when he did so, it was to behold Thuy whose smiling face seemed to fill the sky. She said nothing at first, but pulled up a chair and sat down, still smiling at him before enquiring, 'How are you, Brad?'

Now that the beautiful vision had spoken, Brad suddenly felt awkward and uncomfortable. What the hell must he look like, he wondered? He hoped to Christ that he hadn't been dribbling or asleep with his mouth open. That would be just too embarrassing. Unusually for him, he was lost for words. Eventually, he managed to stutter, 'Er... ok, all things considered.' Having managed to say something, he even managed to ask her how she was and to enquire what she had been up to.

She must have realised that he had no memory of what had occurred because she looked at him in a concerned way and took his hands in hers, moving closer to him. At that moment, Brad suddenly felt completely and utterly happy and just immersed himself in the presence and fragrance of this beautiful creature. He didn't mind what she said. She could have recited multiplication tables or the alphabet backwards if she wished for all he cared, so entranced was he by the femininity that she exuded.

'Don't you remember what happened?' she asked. He didn't. He listened, fascinated as she told him that he and she had been together at a café in Saigon where they had met. She had been called away and, shortly after she had left, a bomb had exploded injuring him and many others, as well as killing others in the vicinity, both US servicemen and civilians. She said it had been a miracle that he had survived. He had been closer to the bomb than others, all of whom had been killed despite the fact that they had been further away. Be that as it may, he had survived, but had been badly injured. He had been unconscious for more than a month, she told him. This was not the first time that she had been to see him. She had been many times, but it was the first time that he had been well enough to recognise her.

He didn't know what to say, but pressed her hands and managed to murmur his thanks. She rose to her feet saying that he must be tired so she would leave now and return at another time. Then, to his surprise, she leaned over and kissed his forehead before smiling and walking away.

He sat on the terrace for a long time trying to remember what had happened before the explosion. Why had they met in Saigon? He remembered the raid on the Fishhook. He remembered all of that, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what had happened next.

When the nurses came to wheel him back inside, he reluctantly allowed them to do so, but would take no food and lay on his bed in the darkness listening to the sound of the fans revolving and trying to remember. He tried so hard it made his head hurt.

He must have fallen asleep because when he awoke with a start, it was morning. He could hear birds singing outside and the room was flooded with light. Then, suddenly, he remembered, dear God, he remembered!

Stunned, as he had been in the helicopter, he had nonetheless a vague sense that he had seen the Vietnamese woman before, now sitting soaked-through, scratched and bedraggled with her hair lank and grimy. It wasn't that her appearance was any different to his, but there was something about her face which seemed familiar. It was, however, only when they were being debriefed at the firebase that it dawned on him that she had been the woman that he and Jimmie had found in the tunnel beneath the village months and months before. So, she had survived. He was curious to know more, but he was tired, his friends had not made it and he wanted to sleep. Now that the tension had gone, he had felt utterly exhausted and all he wanted to do was to sleep.

He had said his goodbyes to Jimmie on the helicopter before they zipped him up in a body bag which was the last he saw of his friend. It was odd, he thought, as his eyes filled with tears. He had not realised how much his friend had meant to him until he was gone. Now he was gone. Gone for good.

After the raid, he had been due some leave and he decided to take it in Saigon where he found a room in a modest backstreet hotel, clean and quiet. He wasn't there for the bars or the girls. He just wanted time by himself, so he avoided the obvious temptations all around. He realised that it might seem strange that someone seeking solitude should head for the centre of a vibrant city, but he knew from previous experience that you can be surrounded by people and yet be quite alone, a stranger in a crowd. He loved the anonymity of it and would sit for hours in small cafes just watching the world go by, or maybe walk in the gardens of a temple day dreaming. He spent a lot of time thinking about his friends who had been killed, especially Jimmie. He couldn't comprehend why they had died and yet he had somehow survived. Sometimes he felt guilty too, guilty that he was still alive by some fluke and they were not.

It was whilst he was deep in thought and preoccupied that he bumped into Thuy. She had been worshipping in a temple and he had been wandering around aimlessly outside. When she came outside, he had blundered into her, almost knocking her over, but managing to catch her before she fell.

He offered his apologies and, to his surprise, when he then asked her if she would like to have a drink with him, she agreed.

From the start there was a closeness between them as if they had somehow known each other well for a long time, whereas in reality they had only met twice and knew absolutely nothing about each other.

They met every day after that. Sometimes they walked and talked, and sometimes they sat and talked. That is Thuy talked and Brad listened. She didn't know why, but it was as if in Brad she had found somebody to whom she could unburden herself. She trusted him. She had good reason to and he was happy to listen. He needed some purpose in his life and in this petite, pretty and thoroughly vulnerable, young woman, now confiding her innermost thoughts with him as if with a Father Confessor, he found a reason for living.

He listened and learned of her childhood in France. She told him where her family lived near the Champs Elysées and how, after university, she had turned her back on France and, by implication, her family, and as a bright, young radical determined to change the world, she had gone back to Vietnam.

From the very beginning the north Vietnamese had seen her potential as a spy, and with her brains and good looks it was not difficult getting her into beds in high places. Throughout it all, the prostitution and the treachery, treachery that cost men their lives, she had managed at least for a while to cling on to her ideals believing that what she did was for a noble purpose for the people of Vietnam. These ideals wore increasingly thin in the face of what she experienced and saw. She came to see the north Vietnamese as no better than their enemies, and when one night she had suggested to her American general boyfriend that she might be useful as an agent for the Americans, to her slight consternation he had jumped at it seeing this as a potential feather in his cap. Indeed, so it had proved, the information that she was able to provide as a double agent both helping the US army and furthering his career.

What the general didn't realise, of course, was that she was playing both ends against the middle and doing the same thing for the north.

In reality, she was doing it ultimately for neither. She was doing it for herself and when the general suggested she might like to accompany him to the States, she saw the chance of a ticket out of the hell that was Vietnam. The rumoured northern offensive gave her the opportunity to realise that chance.

After three days, Brad was hopelessly in love with her and could think of nothing else. He loved to gaze at her when she talked. He loved the way she wrinkled her nose and would point to it laughing saying that her face was like a moon and her nose was the centre. He loved her delicate wrists and long fingers. He adored her and she knew it.

Only once did he try to kiss her. He couldn't resist it and when her head was slightly turned away from him, he gently kissed her neck. She was not pleased. She looked at him without smiling and said that he ought not to, somebody might notice and the general might find out.

That evening Brad was plunged into despair. He walked and walked through the teeming city trying to understand what was going on. He knew that he loved her and had been foolish enough to think that she might love him, but her coldness and the mention of the general had been like a bucket of cold water in the face. What, he wondered, did the general have to do with it? Surely she was not now, not after what had happened between them, thinking of going to the States with the general?

Then he stopped dead as reason began to penetrate even his love-addled brain. Just look at it from her point of view, Brad, he said to himself. You are a few years younger than her. You are a sergeant with no home and no prospects. The truth be told, you don't even have a name, that is not your own name anyway. It was obvious that he didn't compare too favourably with the general and all that he had to offer.

The realisation of the true position did not make him feel any better, nor did her failure to show up at their usual meeting place the following day.

Brad lay on his bed almost wishing that he hadn't remembered. He recalled now all too clearly that what he had done next was to go to the general's headquarters to see her and where, in order to get rid of him, she had agreed to meet him the following day, the day of the explosion.

They had met that day as arranged, he simply desperate just to see her, not knowing or caring about anything else. For her part, it was her intention to tell him that she and the general were leaving in a few weeks' time for the States. She had not had the time to tell Brad that before she was summoned by telephone urgently back to headquarters. The planned offensive was under way.

As a result of the explosion, Brad neither knew about her intended departure, nor the northern offensive. By the time he woke up, the offensive was over and had failed with the north suffering heavy losses. The general's departure had been delayed as a consequence, but now he was cock-a-hoop. The intelligence that Thuy had delivered had played no small part in the preparations that had been made to meet the offensive. Now the general couldn't wait to get back to the States to reap the rewards whilst memories were still fresh of the contribution that he had made.

It was a Wednesday when Thuy came to see Brad and to say goodbye. He was walking now, but only short distances. He was pleased to see her. He had realised that she would be gone from his life soon and he wanted to try and fix her in his memory as she was then, so petite, so trim, so beautiful.

He didn't wait for her to speak. He walked carefully up to her and took her hands and smiled saying, 'So when are you off?'

'Saturday,' she said with a hint of a break in her voice. 'Listen,' she started to say. Brad interrupted her.

'No. Don't say anything. Let me remember you as you are now.'

She stepped up to him and kissed him and turned to go.

'God speed,' said Brad as she took a few steps.

'You too, sergeant,' she smiled back at him. Then she was gone.
CHAPTER 22

Her departure left a void in him that was almost unbearable, at least for a while. He was young and he was recovering rapidly from his wounds and, after a few weeks, the pangs of unrequited love were not quite as painful as they had been. Indeed, they vanished completely when, out of the blue, he received a package from the States. The nurse who handed it to him said with a smile, 'Something from home,' and then left him with the package on his knees wondering if there had been some mistake. He didn't have a home. He didn't have a family. He had precious few friends and those he did have were thousands of miles away.

He picked up the parcel, which was about the size of a shoe box, and examined it carefully from different angles. It was certainly addressed to Bradley C Robinson Junior and, as far as the United States' army was concerned, that was him. Finally, he had the bright idea of opening it and did so to reveal piles of letters and photographs, many of very attractive high school girls that quickly helped take his mind off Thuy.

What on earth was going on, he wondered, but then, as he began to read some of the letters, it became clear. This was a package from Brad's old high school back home in the States. The teachers and the students had put together a morale-boosting package for the former pupil serving in Vietnam in the time of his country's need.

Brad quickly realised that this could get awkward. Many of the letters expressed the wish that he came to see them on his return to the States. This, plainly, he could never do, since the teachers at least would realise at once as soon as they saw him that the person in front of them was not the Bradley C Robinson of popular memory.

Brad was due to be discharged soon. The extra time he had spent in Vietnam recovering from his wounds counted towards the service he would otherwise have had to complete back in the States. He would be eligible for discharge pretty much as soon as he got back to the States. He now had a sense that the past might be catching up with him and he began to wonder what on earth he was going to do next. Obviously, he couldn't go back to Minnesota, neither, for that matter, did he want to do so. He had no idea really what he wanted to do or where he might be able to go. Getting out of Vietnam and the army seemed a good place to start though, and he now started to look forward to that. The sense of family that it had once engendered in him was largely gone now that his closest companions had either been killed or, in the case of Olsen, returned home. Remembering Olsen, he suddenly had an idea. Perhaps, he thought, he could go and visit Olsen on his return and try to get his bearings?

*

Some months later, the train he was on pulled slowly into the Gare du Nord station in Paris. He had spent most of the time, following his discharge from the army, with Olsen in the hills of the Ozark country in Missouri where the tranquillity of the surroundings and Olsen's hospitality had provided him with a breathing space from life and given him time to recover fully. It had also offered him a sanctuary and a refuge from the enquiries that Olsen told him had begun to be made about Bradley C Robinson Junior. Questions, it appeared, had begun to be asked when somebody he didn't know had discovered that there was an increasingly eminent American academician in Sweden, called Bradley C Robinson Junior, but also simultaneously apparently in Vietnam serving with the US forces.

Had he still been under the control of the US military, he might have had some explaining to do. As it was, once he had been discharged, thanks to Olsen, nobody knew where to find him. Sergeant Bradley C Robinson Junior had disappeared off the radar.

He told Olsen all about it, at least as far back as how he had become Bradley. Olsen didn't need to know any more than that, but in the circumstances he at least had to come clean, if only to a limited extent. He didn't mention his earlier life. It would have seemed too fantastic and it didn't matter anyway. As far as he was concerned, what mattered between people was the experience that they shared, not who they were or where they came from. They were just details.

Olsen couldn't get over the deception that the original Bradley's family had perpetrated.

'Son of a bitch,' he swore gently.

This was highly unusual for him, so he must have been deeply impressed. He was so honest and straightforward himself that he could hardly conceive of anybody carrying out a deception of that kind. Not only that, but to do so to avoid serving your country was inconceivable. This, he thought, was truly remarkable.

People from the Ozarks had a reputation for exaggeration. Olsen was a native of a region with a long tradition of telling outrageous whoppers that would have made Baron von Munchausen blush. Brad laughed at his surprise. It struck him as amusing that, despite the whoppers Olsen was used to hearing, this particular whopper still seemed almost inconceivable to him.

Brad played down the monetary consideration that had played an important part in his decision. He didn't want to completely destroy any remaining vestiges of faith that Olsen might have had in human nature. He assured him that it didn't matter. He had been happy to sign up under, what for him, was a John Doe. The only question was, what did he do now? It was apparent to him at least that he was going to have to slough off the identity of Bradley C Robinson Junior like a snake sloughs off an old skin, but who was he now to become? Where was he to go? What was he to do?

It was Jan Olsen himself who came up with the answers. He and Brad were fishing for catfish in a small lake early one morning before the sun got too hot. Brad was not an experienced fisherman. The closest he had come to putting a fishing line in water was when, on board the Monarch of Bermuda, he and the boys had washed their dirty dungarees in the sea by trawling them on a line through the water as the ship lumbered on. Then, in the jungles of Vietnam, fishing had consisted of lobbing a grenade in the stream or river and scooping up the dead fish that floated to the surface. Since he had been in the Ozarks, though, fishing was one of the pleasures that Jan Olsen had introduced him to and he, too, was now happy to spend hours in a state of suspended animation watching a float sitting on the placid surface of the water or, as it often turned out, dozing quietly regardless of what the float might be doing. It was odd, he often thought, but in this part of America Huckleberry Finn was almost a tangible character.

On this particular occasion, Brad was sunk, as usual, in a happy and dreamlike reverie when Jan suddenly, like Saul on the road to Damascus, saw the light and leapt to his feet and announced, 'I've got it!'

Brad sleepily enquired what it was that had caused Jan to display such an unwarranted amount of energy.

Olsen stopped dancing excitedly about and explained that he had just had an idea. It was quite simply that Brad should now become Jan Olsen, at least he could if he didn't intend staying in the States. Now that he was home in his beloved hills, he had no intention of ever leaving them again and he didn't anticipate that it would cause him any trouble at all if Brad borrowed his identity to help him move on. Brad listened to what he had to say and then looked serious and thanked him very kindly, but said he couldn't possibly accept, since, if he did, everyone would think he was just a dumb hillbilly! Jan leapt at him and the two of them fell into the lake fighting where Brad swallowed so much water from laughing that Jan in the end had to save him from drowning.

A month or two later, a parcel was delivered to the Ferguson farm in Minnesota. It was addressed to Bradley C Robinson Junior, c/o The Ferguson Family, and it contained Brad's uniform insignia, his army pay book and dog tags as well as a handful of purple hearts he had accumulated, together with a note to Bradley and Susan saying simply, 'You may need these. All the best,' and signed 'Ron'.

Brad, or rather Jan Olsen as he now was, had travelled south to Mexico and was about to leave the American continent for Europe.
CHAPTER 23

He had no clear idea of what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go. For no other reason than that it was where he had started from, he took a boat to England, luxuriating in being a passenger rather than a coal-dust stained creature of the underworld. The air was better and the food was better too and, to his intense relief, prepared in a separate galley to that of the crew's meals. Cockroaches, though, he knew were no respecters of boundaries whether geographical or social, and so he kept a careful eye out for any of his former entomological shipmates.

One thing he did discover, now that he was a seafarer of leisure, was just how boring it was being on a boat with nothing but bloody sea visible in all directions. It was with some relief, therefore, when England hove into view and they made land fall at Southampton. When they docked, he had a careful look around, half expecting to see the old Monarch of Bermuda tied up there, but there was no sign of her. She had probably been broken up for scrap by now, he thought, or perhaps more likely foundered in some far flung, foreign sea. He half hoped she had. At least that would do for those bloody cockroaches, he thought.

Having landed, he was now presented with a further problem, namely where on earth to go? He knew he didn't want to go back to that dead and alive hole that he had once called home. He had toyed with the idea of going to see Ron. He might, with remission for good conduct and depending on how long he had got, be out by now. On the other hand, he couldn't see the point. If there had been any repercussions following on his antics as Ron on the Monarch of Bermuda, it was probably best that he stayed away.

So, he stayed away and instead went north to the Westmoreland Yorkshire border to the Western Dales where his grandfather had come from, to the land where his ancestors had lived from when they first came to England until the day when his grandfather, desperate for work to feed himself and his young sons, bought a cheap, day excursion ticket to London.

Unfortunately, his grandfather had not been fortunate enough to come across a lucky cat and had never managed to climb the social ladder and become Lord Mayor of London like some modern Dick Whittington. He had had trouble finding work even in London. Times were hard. The skills he had learned in the trenches came in handy now in the street demonstrations that he drifted into, fuelled by frustration and desperation like so many other men confronting the ranks of police horses and batons. His grandfather didn't care where a man came from so long as he wasn't French, but he would fight a Welshman on sight because a Welshman would work for even less money than him.

His wife and children joined him and they shared a cellar together in Camden Town, to which cave one day he returned to explain to his wife that he had not managed to get a job as she had hoped at the rail yard because he was too old. They were only taking younger men.

His wife, a fearsome giant of a woman with flashing, dark eyes and the temperament of a troll, promptly got out his youngest son's birth certificate and altered the date of birth to suit and granddad was sent back to the rail yard a younger man. He got a job, albeit in his son's name, and until he retired many years later, he cleaned engines, great soot-covered monsters that were washed down largely by hand.

It suddenly struck him that what he had done as firstly Ron and then Brad was, in a funny sort of way, similar to that which his grandfather had done. It was becoming an odd sort of family tradition, he thought as he smiled to himself and wondered what his grandfather might have made of it.

He had never really known his grandfather, largely because of the split in his parents' marriage. He had a memory of holding his hand and stepping over countless railway lines on his way into the engine shed full of steam engine locomotives waiting to be cleaned, metal, soot-covered monsters exuding steam and coal smoke mixed together in the chilly air. He recalled his grandfather's voice, its flat-toned, northern English accent, as he presented his grandson proudly to his workmates and he recalled the workmates' total disinterest both in grandfather and his young grandson. He remembered going to the wages office where his grandfather picked up his pay packet and then walking along a road holding his hand and passing the door of a public house out of whose door wafted the smell of beer and the sound of a piano being played. He sensed his grandfather pause as if wanting to go inside and then reluctantly carrying on walking. That was about it really.

It was all very different from that landscape of hills and moorland that the family had come from, he thought, as he stood high on the fells overlooking Dent dale, gazing across the dales towards Westmoreland. He stood a long time despite the wind blowing steadily from the north east amidst a cluster of stone cairns erected nobody knew when for nobody knew what reason. Maybe, he daydreamed, they had been erected to commemorate the Norse kings who had fallen with King Eric when he had ruled these lands long ago and been killed with them on Stainmore, and who even now feasted and fought with him in Valhalla. If so, he felt they would be fitting company for a cairn that he proceeded then to erect from the stones lying all around. This one, as he built it, he dedicated to Jimmie and Ralph and all the boys who had died, even to that bastard Kykarsky. It was fitting, he felt, that warriors should be remembered as such. It was growing dark as he finished and started to make his way back down the fellside to the village pausing as he did so to look back in memory and silent salute to his friends and comrades who had died. Then he went back to the land of the living.

Then he took the train and rail ferry to Paris, drawn there on a whim to see Thuy or at least where she had lived, since as far as he knew she was still living with the general in America. It was, he knew, a silly idea borne of a wishful sentimentality that he found difficult to shake off. The truth was, he supposed, that he had no plans and was at a loose end and so his mind kept taking him like a dog or an old wolf over old trails in search of the familiar and the comforting.

He knew where to find her family's flat. She had described it to him and he found it easily enough at the end of an avenue that ran parallel to the Champs Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe end of that grand avenue. It was an old flat in the 8th arrondissement and on the sixth floor with shuttered windows that looked out at the busy street below, indistinguishable from all the other flats in the building.

He knocked at the door, a heavy, wooden door that opened on to the clinical and, he felt, vaguely threatening stairwell that he had just ascended. He spoke no French, but had mastered one sentence. When the door opened and an elderly gentleman appeared, he said, 'Bonjour Monsieur – je veux parler avec Thuy s'il vous plait.'

Monsieur responded in French, of course, which naturally he did not understand. What he needed at that moment was the French equivalent of a Kit Carson, but there was no help at hand. Instead, he spoke English. He apologised for not being able to speak French, but asked if Thuy was at home. To his surprise, he was invited in in very good English by the gentleman who had opened the door and who explained, as he ushered him into a large sitting room, that he was Thuy's grandfather. His wife was there too, a quite ancient-looking lady seated on a once elegant chaise-longue. The room was full of Asian antiques and objets d'art, presumably collected by the family during its long association with the area. It was just as Thuy had once described it to him. When he explained briefly that he was a friend of their granddaughter and had known her in Vietnam, they made him very welcome.

'Ah, you must be the Englishman that she mentioned to us in a letter?' said the grandfather with a questioning look at their unexpected guest.

'I believe so,' he answered. He didn't know, of course, but reasoned that on a balance of probabilities he was one and the same Englishman. This was confirmed when they asked him if he had fully recovered from his wounds, the vivid, white scars of some of which were still to be seen on his face, all the more visible due to his suntanned appearance. He assured them that he had and felt pleased that Thuy had thought enough of him to mention him in a letter home. It was a crumb of comfort that he seized upon gratefully, digesting it to assuage his desire for affection and approval.

He wanted to know where she was and plucked up the courage to enquire. She was, it seemed, living in the States and in fact had been to visit them only recently before returning there.

'What a pity,' said her grandfather, 'that you missed her.' He agreed that it was and rose to his feet to leave, since, politeness apart, there was no reason to remain. He had, he felt, presumed upon their hospitality enough and it was time to go. He thanked the man and said that he must go. The grandfather rose to his feet also and accompanied him not only to the door of the flat, but also down the stairs towards the street as well. It was as if the grandfather wanted to say something, but didn't know quite how to begin. Finally, when they reached the doorway to the busy street outside, the grandfather looked at him closely and said, 'You did love her, didn't you?'

The grandfather's face was full of sympathy which was reinforced by him placing a hand gently on his shoulder.

'Yes,' he answered simply. There didn't seem to be any harm in admitting it. It was the truth anyway.

'What will you do now, mon ami?' the grandfather asked.

Good question, he thought. He really had no idea. He had no name, that is he didn't have a real name. He had no job and no home. All he knew, apart from how to use a shovel, was soldiering.

He shook the grandfather's hand without answering his question. He didn't know the answer anyway and turned to go. The grandfather shrugged and called after him, 'Bonne chance!'

He mooched aimlessly around the centre of Paris for a while. All around him he saw attractive, well-dressed people walking, talking, laughing, drinking a glass of wine. All these people had somewhere to go, something to do and, as like as not, someone to do it with. He, on the other hand, could not have been more alone than if he had been in the middle of a desert somewhere.

He gazed at his reflection in a shop window. A fit-looking, young man looked back at him, the face, he thought, suggesting that as young as he was, he already knew a good deal about the realities of life. Or, maybe, he thought, he was just deceiving himself, trying to pretend to himself that he was in some way different.

He walked on. Actually, he thought as he walked slowly by the banks of the River Seine, I am different. I am set apart by language, background and experience. I am an outsider and that's the way I like it.

'What can I do', he thought aloud, 'become a monk?!' He dismissed the idea. He was too young for that. Apart from anything else, he would miss the women and wine that ordinary life offered, even if only occasionally.

Then, his mind made up, he strode purposefully to the nearest station and then made his way to Marseilles where, with a sense of relief, he joined La Légion Etrangère under the name Philippe Anglais.

_Phew_ , he thought as he stood to attention before the sous-officer, _a home at last!_

THE END

