TWENTY-TWO

May 23. 07.45 hrs. Mac was at home. At home, and glad that his wife Rebecca had let him back after his recent misdemeanours. Not before time. The atmosphere back at base was horrible. Porteus’s departure had caused a weird air of mistrust among the men. Moreover, word of how Sam had been asked to stay behind with the men from the Firm had got around. It didn’t take the guys a great deal of head scratching to work out that the two events were related and, as everyone knew, Mac was Sam’s closest mate in the Regiment. They went way back. He could barely show his face without someone trying to pump him for information. Truth was, Sam had gone off the radar. Mac had tried to call him any number of times; he’d even gone round to his flat. He felt half-worried, half-angry. There was no doubt about it: Sam Redman had some explaining to do.

Back home, nobody knew anything of this, and so it was that he found himself at the breakfast table of the unim-posing two-up two-down in Hereford, listening to the chink of his kids’ spoons against their cereal bowls, while nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover. Rebecca, sitting in her dressing gown with her long hair mussed, cast him an occasional kittenish look. Amazing what a night of drunken passion could do. He smiled at her.

‘Are you back for ever now, Dad?’ asked Jess, his nine-year-old daughter.

Mac smiled at her. Not for the first time he felt a pang of guilt about his less than perfect parenting skills. ‘’Course I am, love,’ he said.

‘Except for when you go away to kill baddies,’ Huck butted in, his mouth still half full of Weetabix. Huck was seven, and although he knew nothing of the SAS, the fact that his dad was a soldier with lots of guns had caught his imagination. ‘How many baddies did you kill last time, Dad? Loads, I bet.’

‘Huck!’ Rebecca admonished him. ‘Stop asking your father silly questions and eat your breakfast. You’re going to be late for school.’

‘You’re not even dressed,’ Jess observed sulkily.

Rebecca opened her mouth to deliver another reprimand, but Mac gave her a subtle shake of the head. ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.

‘Yeah!’ Huck cried. He jumped down from the table and rushed to find his school things.

It was just gone eight-thirty when the kids were ready. Mac pulled on his jacket, kissed Rebecca on the cheek and led them outside. It was a ten-minute walk and he hoped the fresh air would clear his head.

He didn’t even make it out of the front garden before he stopped.

The figure standing on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamppost, looked like a ghost. Mac’s sharp eyes saw that his face was cut up; his eyes were haunted.

‘Sam,’ he said under his breath.

Sam said nothing. He didn’t even move. He just continued to stare.

‘Come on, Dad!’ Huck shouted. He was out of the gate now, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Jess was kicking her heels.

Mac looked over at Sam. ‘Wait there.’ He mouthed the words silently and pointed a finger to emphasise what he was saying. ‘Wait there!’

Sam nodded.

The walk to school was a brisk one. Huck talked nine to the dozen, but barely received a response from his dad – just a ruffling of the hair at the school gates, and a kiss on the cheek for a slightly embarrassed Jess. They sloped off into the playground and Mac ran back home. As he turned on to his street, however, and looked over at the lamppost, he saw that Sam was no longer there.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath.

‘Language, language.’ A voice from behind.

Mac spun round. Sam, right behind him.

‘Jesus, Sam. What happened to your face?’ Close up he could see just how bad it was. The skin was sliced and splintered, all the way from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his neck. A couple of the larger cuts had been closed up with steri-tape, but the treatment had a distinctly homemade feel about it. Sam touched his fingers to his face; as he did so, Mac noticed that his wrists were also deeply cut.

‘Head-butted a windscreen,’ Sam said. ‘Long story.’

‘You’d better come back to mine,’ Mac replied. ‘Becky’s good at this stuff. She can patch you up a bit better.’

Sam shook his head. ‘Let’s walk.’

They headed to a nearby park. Mums with kids played at the swings, but the two men took a seat on a park bench at a good distance from them. Sam looked like something from a horror movie, after all. They sat in silence for a moment. Mac deduced that Sam would speak when he was ready.

‘Jacob was there,’ he said finally. ‘In Kazakhstan. I warned him off.’

Mac took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it took a certain effort to dampen down his anger with his old friend. ‘That what you told the Firm?’ he asked.

Sam shook his head.

‘They believe you?’

‘No. Listen, Mac. All sort of shit’s gone down since then. I need to know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.’

‘Fucking hell, mate. Everyone’s asking questions.’

‘Can I trust you?’

Mac closed his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘Course you can.’

Sam gazed into the middle distance and then he started to speak – quickly, as if the words were painful for him. Mac listened in rapt attention as his story unfolded: Porteus’s letter, the red-light runners, seeing J. Then Sam described his interview with the Firm – how Bland had called his bluff about going out to rescue Jacob and how Sam had denied everything. He told Mac about the laptop, Dolohov, escaping from the SBS. And, finally, the meet.

‘When is it?’

‘Tomorrow night. Piccadilly Circus. The Firm will be there, Mac. Dolohov knew the time and place. And they’re hardly going to give J. the benefit of the doubt.’

Mac took a deep breath. ‘Mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but J.’s got a lot of questions to answer.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure he’s not in cahoots with the Russkis? He was treated like shit you know…’

Instantly Sam lost his temper. ‘You think I don’t fucking know that?’ He slammed his wounded hand against the arm of the park bench.

‘I’m just saying,’ Mac flared. And then, more quietly, ‘I’m just saying, all right?’

Sam was breathing heavily to regain his composure. He stood up and started walking. Mac walked with him. ‘These red-light runners,’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘You know what? They don’t sound so different from me when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for Jacob, I’d still be like that. It was him that put me on the right track, you know? Not my parents – they’d washed their fucking hands of me. Not my friends – they were a bunch of shitkickers. It was Jacob.’ He stopped and looked intensely at Mac. ‘I don’t know what Jacob’s up to,’ he said. ‘I just don’t fucking know. Half of me thinks he’s working for the FSB, some kind of gun for hire. Half of me thinks there’s got to be more to it than that. I’m not going to know until I ask him, Mac. Face to face. If the Firm get their hands on him, that’ll never happen. You know what those bastards are like, Mac – they’ll make what I did with Dolohov look like a tickle under the armpits.’

Mac stared at his old friend. He could feel his anger and his confusion, like heat from an oven. And somehow – he wasn’t quite sure how – he knew what was coming.

‘I need help, Mac. At the RV. The place is going to be crawling with spooks and ham-fisted coppers. I need another set of eyes. I need a weapon. I can’t ask anyone else, Mac. I can’t trust anyone else.’

Mac looked down to the ground. He felt torn – torn between his loyalty to Sam and… And what? Had Jacob turned? Was he a traitor? It seemed impossible; and yet…

He sighed, then looked back up at his friend. ‘You remember Baghdad?’ he asked quietly.

‘’Course.’

‘Before it happened, during that raid. We could have been goners if Jacob hadn’t turned up.’