Burr had made another of his merciful leaps.
"So what took you to Ireland?" he suggested with a smile. "Was that running away from her, by any chance?"
"It was a job. If you were in the British Army ― if you wanted to be a real soldier, useful, live ammunition after all the training rounds ― Ireland was where you had to be."
"And you did want to be useful?"
"Wouldn't you at that age?"
"I still do," Burr replied.
Jonathan let the implicit question lie.
"Were you hoping you might get killed?" Burr asked.
"Don't be absurd."
"I'm not being absurd. Your marriage was on the rocks. You were still a kid. You thought you were responsible for all the world's ills. I'm just surprised you didn't do big game or join the Foreign Legion. What did you get up to over there, anyway?"
"Our orders were to win Irish hearts and minds. Say good morning to everyone, pat the kiddies. A bit of patrolling."
"Tell about the patrolling."
"Boring VCPs. Nothing to it."
"I'm not much of a one for initials, I'm afraid, Jonathan."
"Vehicle Control Points. You'd pick a blind hill or a corner, then pop up out of a ditch and hold up the cars. Occasionally you'd come across a player."
"And if you did?"
"You got through on the Cougar, and your controller told you which course of action to take. Stop and search. Wave him through. Question him. Whatever they wanted."
"Any other jobs on the menu, apart from VCPs?"
The same blandness as Jonathan made a show of remembering.
"Buzzing around in a helicopter a bit. Each group had a piece of land to cover. You'd book your Lynx, take a bivibag, camp out for a couple of nights, then come home and have a beer."
"How about contact with the enemy?"
Jonathan gave a deprecating smile. "Why should they come out and fight us when they could blow us up in our jeeps by remote control?"
"Why indeed?" Burr always played his best cards slowly. He sipped his drink, he shook his head and smiled as if it were all a bit of a conundrum. "So what were these special duties you got up to, then?" he asked. "All those special training courses you did, that wore me out just reading about them? I get frightened every time I see you pick up a spoon and fork, to be frank. I think you're going to skewer me."
Jonathan's reluctance was like a sudden slowing down. "There were things called Close Observation Platoons."
"Which were?"
"The senior platoon in each regiment, artificially created."
"Out of?"
"Anyone who wanted to join."
"I thought they were the elite."
Short, tight sentences, Burr noticed. Monitored as he spoke them. Eyelids down, lips tense.
"You were trained. You learned to watch, recognise the players. Make hides, get in and out of them in darkness. Lie up for a couple of nights. In lofts. Bushes. Ditches."
"What weapons did they give you?"
Jonathan shrugged as if to say, Who cares? "Uzis. Hecklers. Shotguns. They teach them all. You select. Sounds exciting from the outside. Once you're into it, it's just a job."
"What was your choice?"
"Heckler gave you the best chance."
"Which brings us to Operation Night Owl," Burr suggested, with no change in the inflexion of his voice. And sat back to watch the no-change in Jonathan's expression.
* * *
Jonathan was talking in his sleep. His eyes were open, but his mind was in another country. He had not expected lunch to be a tour of the worst pans of his life.
"We had a tip-off that some players were coming across the border into Armagh to relocate a stash of weapons. RPGs." This time Burr did not ask what the initials meant. "We lay up for a couple of days, and finally they showed. We took out three. The unit was pretty chuffed. Everyone went round whispering 'three' and holding up three fingers at the Irish."
"I'm sorry?" Burr seemed not to have heard. "Take out in this context meaning killed?"
"Yup."
"Did you do the taking out yourself? Single-handed, as it were?"
"I was part of it, sure."
"Of the fire team?"
"Of a cutoff group."
"Of how many?"
"We were a pair. Two. Brian and me."
"Brian."
"He was my oppo. Lance corporal."
"What were you?"
"Corporal. Acting sergeant. Our job was to catch them when they ran."
His face had grown a harder skin, Burr noticed. The muscles round the jaw were flexed.
"It was absolute luck," Jonathan said with clean-and-press casualness. "Everyone dreams of taking out a terrorist. We got the chance. We were just terribly lucky."
"And you took out three. You and Brian. Killed three men."
"Sure. I told you. Luck."
Rigid, Burr noticed. Rigid ease and deafening understatement.
"One and two? Two and one? Who scored highest?"
"One each and one shared. We quarrelled over it at first, then settled on half each. Hard to tell who bags who in the heat of battle quite often."
Suddenly Burr didn't need to prod him anymore. It was as if Jonathan had decided to tell the story for the first time. And perhaps he had.
"There was this clapped-out farmhouse right on the border. The owner was a subsidies cowboy, smuggling the same cows over the border and claiming farming subsidies both sides. He had a Volvo and a brand-new Merc and this slummy little farm. Intelligence said three players would be coming across from the South after the pubs had closed, names supplied. We hunkered down and waited. Their cache was in a barn. Our hide was a bush a hundred and fifty yards away from it. Our brief was to sit in our hide and watch without being watched."
That's what he likes to do, thought Burr: watch without being watched.
"We were to let them go into the barn and collect their toys. When they left the barn we were to signal their direction and get out unobserved. Another team would throw up a roadblock five miles on, hold a random check, pretend it was all sheer chance. That was to protect the source. Then they'd take them out. Only trouble was, the players weren't planning to drive the weapons anywhere. They'd decided to bury them in a ditch ten yards from our hide. Sunk a box into the ground in advance."
He was lying on his belly in the sweet moss of a South Armagh hillside, gazing through light-intensifiers at three green men lugging green boxes across a green moonscape. Languidly the man on the left rises on his toes, lets go his box and spins gracefully round, his arms extended for the cross. That dark green ink is his blood. I'm raking him out, and the silly bugger isn't even complaining, Jonathan decides as he becomes aware of the bucking of his Heckler.
"So you shot them," Burr suggested.
"We had to use our initiative. We each took one, then we both took the third. The whole thing lasted seconds."
"Did they shoot back?"
"No," said Jonathan. He smiled, still rigid. "We were lucky, I suppose. Get your first shot in, you're home free. That all you want to know?"
"Ever been back since?"
"To Ireland?"
"To England."
"Not really. Neither."
"And the divorce?"
"That was all taken care of in England."
"By?"
"Her. I left her the flat, all my money and whatever friends we had. She called that fifty-fifty."
"You left her England too."
"Yes."
Jonathan had finished speaking, but Burr was still listening to him. "I guess what I really want to know, Jonathan," he resumed at last, in the commonplace voice he had used for most of their discussion, "is whether you'd be at all attracted by the idea of having another go. Not at marriage. At serving your country." He heard himself say it, but for all the response he got he could have been staring at a granite wall. He beckoned for the bill. And then: To hell with it, he thought; sometimes the worst moments are the best. So he said it anyway, which was his nature, while he counted Swiss bank notes into a white saucer.