HG’s “reward” was to be made a full colonel and posted to the Bahamas. Anywhere out of the way. Why the Bahamas might need a tactical nuclear weapons expert was neither here nor there nor anywhere.
George never heard from the Russians again. He expected to. Every day for six months he expected to. But he didn’t.
Six months on, Boris’s death was eclipsed.
George arrived home in West Byfleet to find an ambulance and a crowd of neighbors outside his house.
Mrs. Wallace, wife of Jack Wallace, lieutenant in REME- George thought her name might be Betty-came up oozing an alarming mixture of tears and sympathy.
“Oh, Captain Horsfield… I don’t know what to… “
George pushed past her to the ambulance men. A covered stretcher was already in the back of the ambulance and he knew the worst at once.
“How?” he asked simply.
“She took a tumble, sir. Top o’the stairs to the bottom. Broken neck. Never knew what hit her.”
George spent an evening alone with a bottle of scotch, ignoring the ringing phone. He hadn’t loved Sylvia. He had never loved Sylvia. He had been fond of her. She was too young, a rotten age to go… and then he realized he didn’t actually know how old Sylvia was. He might find out only when they chipped it on her tombstone.
Grief was nothing-guilt was everything.
Decorum ruled.
He did not go to Henrietta Street for the best part of a month. He wrote to Donna, much as he wrote to many of his friends, knowing that the done thing was the notice in The Times, but that few of his friends read The Times and that the Daily Mail didn’t bother with a deaths column.
When he did go to Henrietta Street, he cut through Covent Garden, fifty yards to the north, and bought a bouquet of flowers.
“You never brought me flowers before.”
“I’ve never asked you to marry me before.”
“Wot? Marriage? Me an’ you?”
“I can’t think that ‘marry me’ would imply anything else.”
And having read the odd bit of Shakespeare in the interim, George quoted an approximation of Hamlet on the matter of baked meats, funerals, and wedding feasts.
“Sometimes, Georgie, I can’t understand a word you say.”
She was hesitant. The last thing he had wanted, though he had troubled himself to imagine it. She said she’d “just put the kettle on,” and then she seemed to perch on the edge of the sofa without a muscle in her body relaxing.
“What’s the matter?”
“If… if we was to get married… what would we do? I mean we carried on… once we got shot of the Russians, we just carried on… as normal. Only there weren’t no normal.”
George knew exactly what she meant, but said nothing.
“I mean… oh… bloody nora… I don’t know what I mean.”
“You mean that serving army officers don’t marry prostitutes.”
“Yeah… something like that.”
“I have thought of leaving the army. There are opportunities in supply management, and the army is one of the best references a chap could have.”
The kettle whistled. She turned it off but made no move toward making tea.
“Where would we live?”
“Anywhere. Where are you from?”
“Colchester.”
Colchester was the biggest military prison in the country- the glasshouse, England’s Leavenworth. Considered the worst posting a man could get. He’d never shake off the feel of the army in Colchester.
“Okay. Well… perhaps not Colchester…”
“I always wanted to live up north.”
“What? Manchester? Leeds?”
“Nah… “Ampstead. I’d never want to leave London… ‘specially now it’s started to… wotchercallit?… swing.”
“Hampstead won’t be cheap.”
“I saved over three thousand quid from the game.”
“I have about a thousand in savings, and I inherited more from Sylvia. In fact about seven and a half thousand pounds. Not inconsiderable.”
Not inconsiderable-a lifetime of saving roughly equivalent to a couple of years on “the game.”
“And of course, I’ll get a pension. I’ve done sixteen years and a bit. I’ll get part of a pension now, more if I leave it, and at thirty-five I’m young enough to put twenty or more years into another career.”
“And there’s the money in the bottom of the wardrobe.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“I counted it. Just the other day I counted it. We got seventeen hundred and thirty-two pounds. O’course there been expenses.”
Donna was skirting the edge of a taboo subject. George was in two minds as to whether to let her plunge in. Who knows? It might clear the air.
“I give Judy two hundred. And there was money for the room… an ‘at.”
George bit, appropriately, on the bullet.
“And how much did the gun cost you?”
There was a very long pause.
“Did you always know?”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t come cheap. Fifty quid.”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Marry without secrets.
George cleared his throat.
“And of course, there’s the cost of your return ticket to West Byfleet last month, isn’t there?”
He could see her go rigid, a ramrod to her spine, a crab-claw grip to her fingers on the arm of the sofa.
He hoped she’d speak first, but after an age it seemed to him she might never speak again.
“I don’t care,” he said softly. “Really I don’t.”
She would not look at him.
“Donna. Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll marry me.”
Donna said nothing.
George got up and made tea, hoping he would be making tea for two for the rest of their lives.
FATHER’S DAY by John Weisman
20 June 2004, 0312 hours. It had to be close to a hundred degrees when Charlie Becker, retired Army Ranger and current spy, rolled out of the blacked-out Humvee. He hit the ground like he’d been body-slammed. He was lucky not to have separated his shoulder.
Screw it. What was pain? Just weakness leaving the body.
Charlie scuttled crablike off the highway into the ditch and rolled over the closest dune-rolled so he wouldn’t leave any telltale infidel boot tracks-into the soft sand of the rough scrub-brush desert.
Weapons check. He patted himself down in the spectacles, testicles, watch, and wallet mode. Pistol, knives, four M4 mags, four Sig mags. Flexicuffs, marking pen, duct tape, digital camera. Everything was where it had to be. He made sure the mag in his M4 carbine hadn’t been jarred loose by the impact, took the suppressor out of the padded pouch on his tactical vest, and twisted it over the flash-hider.
Comms check. He ran his hand from the mike mounted even with his lower lip to make sure the connection on the back of his left ear-cup hadn’t shaken loose. Then he flipped the night vision goggles down, rolled onto his back (ensuring, as he did, that a healthy portion of Iraq’s fine-grit sand slipped down the back of his shirt), and watched as the three APCs and eight Humvees disappeared down Route Irish, fading into the moonless night on their way to Forward Operating Base Falcon.
Now it begins. Charlie flipped the NVGs up and just lay there. Except he wasn’t just lying there. He was a human antenna dish, a sponge sucking up every external sensation he could absorb. Ears keened, jaw dropped, he listened.
A dog barked somewhere off to Charlie’s north. Through the amplified stereo hearing protectors he heard the convoy engines grinding. Other than that: quiet.