Vassall had raised himself to his knees. He closed both hands around Owain’s ankle. His eyes were rolled up in their sockets, the blank white gaze somehow fixed on Owain’s face. He was dead, an animated corpse.
“Save me,” he burbled, the hole in his neck dilating, blood oozing out of his mouth with each word. “Take me with you.”
Owain was seized with revulsion and incredulity.
He kicked the corporal in the chest, sending him tumbling, and slammed the door shut.
Through the window Owain saw Vassall raise himself to his feet with jerky movements, heedless of the stinging snow that was assailing him. Owain scrambled into the driver’s seat. As he was putting the engine in gear Vassall heaved himself up and pressed his face to the window.
“Help me,” he mouthed, smearing redness across the glass.
Owain accelerated away at speed. For a while Vassall clung on, pleading with Owain from outside the window, his words lost in the engine’s roar. They hit a hollow and snow fountained up over the windscreen. Owain flicked the wipers on and kept driving. When he dared to look again the corporal was gone.
He drove madly through the blizzard, ploughing across terrain that made the Spectre buck and veer, climbing inclines and descending slopes with frantic abandon, wrenching the wagon through its gears. His face was still burning, and when he glanced in the miror he saw that it was covered with festering pinpoint burns. The body of the Spectre appeared undamaged by whatever was in the snow.
It had to be a new enemy weapon. There were rumours of experimental devices that used microscopic machines. Perhaps they had seeded the snowstorm with mini-incendiaries or engineered particles that would penetrate flesh and clothing.
The land levelled and he drove straight across it as fast as he was able. With the navigation systems out of action there was no way of telling whether he was driving in the right direction. The wagon bumped and pitched, throwing him around in his seat. There was a mechanical bang, and the right-hand side of the Spectre dropped away. Owain was catapulted forward, his head smashing against the dashboard.
It took all his willpower not to pass out. At length he raised his head and managed to lever himself up.
The blizzard had stopped and he saw that the Spectre was lying at a forty-five degree angle, a corner of the windscreen buried in snow. Its engine was still running, though all the electronics on the dashboard were dead.
He clambered out through the co-driver’s door. The cold air was like a balm on his face. It felt washed and sterilised.
The Spectre had gone down into an old bomb crater and lay in a pool of muddy slush, exhausts still billowing, a single red light flashing on its rear. The heat from its underside had melted enough of the snow for him to see that it would be impossible to reverse it out.
He skirted the wagon, half expecting to find Vassall still clinging there, grim and dogged even in death. But there was no sign of the corporal.
Overhead, the clouds had rolled away and the sun was shining in the palest of blue skies. It felt like months since had had last seen it, and the sight made him want to cry.
Nearby a line of birch and pine backdropped a ramshackle cluster of wooden huts, long abandoned and half buried by the blizzard. The snow lay over everything like some enormous flag of truce, nature’s response to the ravages of men, an effortless obliteration of all their works. Nothing moved, and the silence was so profound it was clamorous.
His face had started to burn again. Suddenly he was kneeling in the snow, scooping it up and slapping it against his cheeks, bathing himself in the whiteness.
He heard a familiar rumbling. It grew in volume as he raised himself to his feet, the ground beneath him rippling, snow cascading from the trees, inundating the derelict hamlet.
Everything was shaking and heaving, his teeth chattering in his mouth. He fell face down in the snow and tried to cling to it, to hold on like a man perched on the very skin of the earth, about to be torn off it in its final cataclysm.
When he came to, it was twilight. He was being hauled on a stretcher through a glittering haze towards a Fishtail that sat with its belly open, i rotors whirling. Men were calling to one another in German, and a tractor truck was going up into the belly of the helicopter, the wrecked Spectre on its trailer. Before he passed out again he felt a fleeting sense of amazement that against all his certainties he had been saved.
Owain was still lying on the sofa in his living room. A woollen blanket slithered from his lap to the floor. Marisa must have covered him up before she left, hours ago.
I knew I hadn’t directly experienced his dream: he had already woken before I shared his fraught memories of the mission. It had all happened over nine months before, but Owain had relived it many times since. To him, the nightmare had the absolute stamp of authority. There were crucial features of it that he had never told anyone.
Owain was agitated; he couldn’t keep his thoughts from me. More than ever I wanted to be free of him but I couldn’t will myself away. He had eventually woken to find himself in a military hospital in Hamburg, confined to bed and with his face bandaged. He’d spent a month in solitary convalescence, attended by a parade of bedside visitors that had included combat counsellors and personnel from the intelligence services.
They told him he was the only one of the team to survive and that he was lucky to be alive. Despite the loss of life, the mission had been more of a success than he might have imagined, though of course they weren’t permitted to go into details. Owain was in turn as cooperative as he could be, though circumspectly so. He recounted everything he could remember of what had happened, omitting only any mention of Vassall’s ghoulish resurrection. As a military man, he knew it was never prudent to talk of things that could not be objectified.
He repeated his story numerous times, to both medical and military people. Their responses varied from the curious to quizzical, especially when he spoke of the burning effects of the snow, which had left clusters of sores across the whole of his face. They wouldn’t confirm or deny that nuclear weapons had been used to obliterate the base: all the major powers had observed an unofficial moratorium on their use for over a decade. But he was assured that he had suffered no radiation exposure. This puzzled him because the assurances appeared so patently genuine.
Towards the end of his convalescence his uncle unexpectedly visited him. Sir Gruffydd was jovial and fulsomely relieved that he had survived. They conversed in familial Welsh, as in their domestic fireside chats of his youth. The field marshal was quick to reassure Owain that he had not been a victim of some nefarious new enemy weapon. There had been no microscopic particles embedded in the blizzard that had struck him: instead he’d been hit by the blast of an old-fashioned phosphorus fragmentation mortar shell. He was fortunate to have escaped being blinded.
His uncle praised his resilience in getting away; he had it on good authority that the rebel group they’d encountered had almost certainly used nerve-gas agents. Possibly he had been exposed to them, which was why they were keeping him under observation for a little while. Did Owain have anything to report that might suggest such an exposure? Anything he recalled that he hadn’t yet mentioned? The field marshal’s tone was gentle and unthreatening. Without prejudice to yourself, my boy. Owain considered before shaking his head and insisting that he was fine.
Shortly before his discharge from hospital, his uncle visited again. He told Owain that he’d made a good recovery and that everyone was pleased with his progress. However the medical experts considered it prudent that he be taken off frontline combat duties for a spell. It was standard procedure, no reflection on his calibre as a soldier. In fact, he was being promoted to major in recognition of his services. To ensure a thorough convalescence Sir Gruffydd had arranged a posting to his staff in London.