‘Corporal Shetty?’

‘Uh-uh. What’s left of me.’

Their surroundings slowly came into focus. Melton was lying on a cot in a tent. On either side of him lay more men in uniform, some heavily bandaged, some apparently undamaged, at least on the outside. A fine layer of sand covered the plywood floors, and through a flap a short distance away he could see the fierce white light of the desert. He noticed the thrum of a heavy-duty air-con unit, keeping them cool. It looked as hot as a furnace outside. He slowly turned his head towards Shetty’s voice, noticing immediately that the corporal was short one limb. His left arm had disappeared just above the elbow.

‘Yeah, gonna have to work extra hard scratching my ass now,’ he said. ‘And that was my natural ass-scratching hand, too. Least I still got an ass, though. And my nuts.’ He gave his groin a reassuring squeeze with his remaining hand.

‘Where are we?’ asked Melton. His voice was cracked and he reached for a squeeze bottle of water on the small stand next to his bed. It was warm and tasted slightly metallic, but still felt like sweet dew in his parched mouth.

‘We scored an evac slot,’ Shetty told him. ‘Don’t know where from exactly, they’re not saying. But I’d bet Kuwait or Qatar if I had to… if I had any money. Germany is our next stop.’

Now fully awake, if still groggy at the edges, Melton found himself unpleasantly aware of just how much he hurt. His entire body seemed to ache, but here and there, more intense pain warned him of some very special hurts he’d picked up. Shetty seemed to read his mind.

‘You’re not doing too badly, Mr Melton,’ he explained. ‘Doc told me you lost a finger off your right hand. A big chunk of shoulder meat. You lost about half of your Ranger tattoo. And you got peppered with shrapnel and one big hunk of wooden window casement. Had a splinter as big as Florida stuck in your ass, apparently. Doc said that hunk of wood coulda been a thousand years old. Said they shoulda had an archeologist dig it outta your butt.’

Melton forced a weak smile, more in recognition of Shetty’s attempt to cheer him up than from any genuine amusement. He carefully levered himself up on his elbows to have a look around. The tent was about as big as a tennis court and housed something like sixty or seventy cots. All of them were occupied. He was surrounded by a forest of IV lines and blood bags, but very little specialised equipment.

Shetty was on the other side of his cot, propped up on a couple of dirty-looking pillows, one stump of an arm heavily bandaged. He was smoking Kools with his free, intact hand.

‘Glad to have you back, Mr Melton. You’re the only familiar face in here. They got guys from all over, but nobody from my platoon.’

‘How bad?’ asked Melton.

Shetty’s eyes clouded over slightly. ‘They fucked us up three ways from Sunday, sir. The lieutenant’s dead, Sarn’t Jaanson, everyone in my squad. About fifteen guys all up, most of ‘em in that alley. There just weren’t nowhere to go. You and me, we got blown clear into a little shop. That’s what saved us.’

‘Holy shit,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal. I really am.’

‘I know, sir. You’re a good guy. The boys, they liked having you along with them.’

A jet flew low overhead, the screaming whine cycling up quickly and shaking Melton’s rib cage from the inside out. The dull thud of chopper blades emerged from the tail end of the cacophony. He tried to move around to face Shetty but only succeeded in hurting his left shoulder. Waves of grey washed out his vision and a thin layer of sweat broke out all over his body. He started shaking.

‘Take it easy, sir,’ said the wounded non-com. ‘You’re going to be a while getting better.’

Somewhere down the row of cots to his left a man began screaming. There was no warning, no cycling up. His shrieks suddenly filled the entire tent and brought two orderlies running. Melton turned his head as far as he dared but could only see what was happening in the very limit of his peripheral vision. The medics appeared to inject the soldier, and a few seconds later he slipped back into unconsciousness. The reporter gave up and eased himself onto his pillows.

‘So, you know what’s been happening here, Corporal? Or back home? Anywhere?’

Shetty drew on his cigarette and shrugged. Melton wondered idly how he’d managed to get one in and light up. There were no oxygen tents nearby or flammable chemicals that he could see, but he was sure there had to be a rule against smoking in a hospital tent. Yeah, there would definitely be A Rule.

‘You were out of it a coupla days, sir. You missed a lot of stuff. We’re fighting Iran and Iraq now. Expecting to have to fight pretty much everyone between here and wherever we’re bugging out to-probably Europe, maybe the Pacific somewhere. But the Kuwaitis and the Saudis aren’t too happy about that, so it’s all up in the air. And it ain’t just us. Israel has called up all of its reserves. Everything they got is ready to go, on a fucking hair trigger, is what I heard. Had my first walk outta here just this morning. Over to the mess tent. Guy there, a reporter like you, he told me the only reason the Arabs ain’t invaded Israel so far, or tried to, is the bomb. That Ariel Sharon, he went on Al Jazeera and just straight up said, “Yep, we got it, in fact we got over two hundred of ‘em”, and then he read out a list of cities they’d nuke if anyone so much as looked at ‘em wrong.’

‘Holy shit,’ muttered Melton.

‘Yeah. Rules are changing. Even so, the Israeli army is fighting right now. They’ve gone into those Palestinian areas – what is it again? – that Left Bank Gaza joint, I can never keep that shit straight. Anyway, Israelis have put a world of hurt on ‘em. They’re fighting Hamas, the PLO, a whole bunch of fruit-and-nut-bar Islamic whackjobs. They pretty much hammered Arafat’s guys flat. But Hamas is shooting loadsa rockets at ‘em from Lebanon or something. Everyone thinks they’re gonna get nuked.’

Melton felt dizzy and had to sip at his water bottle and lie back with his eyes closed. ‘What about Iraq?’ he asked. ‘What’s happening with them? You said we’re fighting Iran too now. I sort of remember something about that before getting clobbered, but it’s all hazy. My head feels like mush, you know.’

‘Well, they ain’t allies or anything. It’s more like a street fight where everyone’s piling in. Do you remember the Iranians had sent all them little speedboats into the Gulf waters, half of them suicide bombers? They got some good fucking licks in early, too, before we started sinking anything that didn’t belong to the Coalition. They got a coupla our cruisers, sank a British destroyer, tagged some Australian boat full of clearance divers. It was fucking chaos for an hour or so, and then the skies were full of fucking MiGs: Iranian, Iraqi. Our guys were raking ‘em out of the air, but these things are unloading hundreds of bombs and missiles, and some of ‘em got through. Fucking scuds start landing on us – well, not us here, but right on some port where the Brits were fighting a bunch of Republican Guards and those Fedayeen motherfuckers. Those fucking scuds, man, they don’t discriminate – they’re dropping like rain, killing everybody. Iraqis, Brits, a buncha Marines who happened to be in the wrong place. It’s fucking madness. A brawl, not a war.’