His temper was building again as he chewed over the many poor decisions that had been made in the previous week, and it was only Barney’s answering the call that short-circuited a bout of foul-mouthed, solitary cussing. His friend’s voice filled the cabin, sounding flat and tinny as everyone did on speaker-phone.

‘S’up, buddy?’

‘Hey, Barn. I’m heading over to Costco right now to check things out. You on your way?’

‘About four or five minutes away. I’m just coming over 1st Avenue Bridge. Heather should already be there. She overnighted in town to get there early.’

‘Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Good for her.’

Kipper was taken aback for a second. Heather Cosgrove was a young civil engineering graduate on a six-month internship with his road maintenance guys, all of whom had been at a conference in Spokane when the Wave hit. If he was giving out a prize for Most Freaked Out, Heather was an unbackable favourite. She was from Minneapolis, and apart from her job, she had nothing left.

‘It’s spooky, isn’t it,’ said Tench, completely oblivious, ‘without any traffic. Like a doomsday movie or something.’

‘Yeah,’ replied Kip, getting his head back in the game. ‘Listen, did you hear about the raid last night?’

Barney snorted down the line. ‘Dunno that I’d call it a raid, man. What I heard was two dreadlocked jerks got stoned and tried to steal a pallet of Cheetos from the food bank on South Graham.’

‘Well, d’you hear they got shot?’

The speaker-phone hissed quietly for a second, as Kipper swung down the off ramp at South Forest Street.

‘No. Sorry, I didn’t hear that,’ said Barney. ‘Who told you?’

‘Cops rang at about two this morning.’

‘Why’d they call you? Why not one of the councillors?’

‘Said they couldn’t raise them.’

Tench laughed. ‘That’d be right.’

17

AN NASIRIYAH, SOUTHERN IRAQ

‘Fedayeen!’

The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic weapons fire started up. The Cav troopers moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry with their M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles joined them when they moved into the town.

Bret Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the Rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and ageing muscles. He landed next to Specialist Vincent Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a massive broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.

Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection, moments before they entered Iraq. Nobody said one word to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armour and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him with a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he’d always been one of the sceptics on the WMD front.

In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for Melton to be able to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they’d been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some asshole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn’t needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending.25 mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.

When the specialist came back down, he spat a green stream in the sand, his cheeks bulging from a wad of chew. ‘Fuckin’ ragheads.’

The volume of fire going down-range was impressive and deafening, nearly drowning out the shouts of Lieutenant Euler and his non-coms as they organised the counter-ambush with the infantry troops who had linked up with them.

Melton did his best to collect himself and commit to memory as many details as possible. He would write notes out later, when the immediate danger had passed, and his hands, hopefully, weren’t shaking too much. As always, the head rush of contact was giddy and horrifying – a glassy funnel of light and colour down which you fell as soon as you realised somebody was trying to take your life. Melton found it harder to deal with as a reporter than he had when a soldier, perhaps because he was older and wiser, perhaps because now he had nothing to distract him from the experience. Indeed, having the experience and recording it for others were his sole reasons for being there. He couldn’t shut down and get on with whatever task the sergeant or corporals assigned him. He played his part by opening up his senses to the madness of battle, letting it burn its terrors and banalities directly onto his cortex.

He savoured the taste of the dust in his mouth, the gritty, choking, dog-shit and tangy metallic diesel flavour of it. He noted the struggle of a green bejewelled bug caught in a wad of gum, stuck to the side of Alcibiades’s boot; tried to freeze in his memory the smell of the man next to him, a cloying miasma of body odour, stale farts and wintergreen Skoal chewing tobacco. He studied the contours of the street, the way the ancient biscuit-coloured buildings snaked away, slightly uphill. The yellow-green, foul-smelling stream of raw sewage and trash that flowed down-slope towards him. The soldiers themselves – some cool and frosty, others sweating but focused, most of them scared out of their minds.

Lieutenant Euler took shelter behind a pockmarked stone pillar, which may well have stood on the same spot since the time of Mohammed. He was on the radio with a map in his hand, looking at something Melton couldn’t see. The radio operator kept security, his carbine traversing along the rooftops, looking for snipers, RPG gunners or any other Iraqi in desperate need of a new weeping asshole in the middle of his forehead.

Bo Jaanson was doing the standard shoot, move and communicate drill, moving the soldiers, infantry and cavalry both, around the restricted battle space of the narrow street like a brutal chess master. Some soldiers would balk, while others would execute on command. With some, Jaanson calmed them with a pat on the shoulder and a few fatherly words, the way one would handle a terrified horse. With others, it was a boot imprint on the ass. Melton couldn’t help but smile, having been there himself.