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him they constituted an unconscious world of faith and necessity. You go to sleep knowing these men might be the last thing between you and the shit. They stand up for you. They think your thoughts. They need what you need. He loved the banter and the way the banter brought the boys together. But he felt worried on the road to Maiwand that they were jumpy in advance of the mission. They weren’t coping well with the heat and their brains were soft from months spent doing nothing, killing some imagined enemy on screen, posting rubbish on YouTube, or lying under mosquito nets thinking hard about the car they’d buy if they ever got home.
The convoy stopped on Highway 1 and some of the ordnance blokes got out to check for roadside bombs. ‘That’s fine,’ Luke said to the three soldiers in the Vector, ‘you can get down. We’ve got half an hour. Try not to shit your pants. Eat the oranges butnot too many. This is Terry bandit country and we’re camping right in the middle of their spawn-point here, waiting for them to drop on us.’
‘2M2H?’ Dooley said.
‘No, Doosh. Not too much to handle. Don’t be a prick. I just don’t fancy my crack platoon getting wiped while sitting on their skinny wee arses eating tropical fruit. Keep your peepers open and do what the captain says, there’s a good lad.’
‘Roger that.’
The Royal Engineers had work to do on some of the convoy’s vehicles and the search for roadside bombs took longer than they thought, so they were stuck. Luke radioed to Sean in the vehicle behind, telling him to ask the ANA soldiers who knew the terrain if they had any clues about where the bombs might be. ‘They should do,’ said Sean’s crackling voice. ‘They probably planted half of them.’
LIGHTWEIGHT
Sitting against the trucks, shirts round their necks, the boys had smokes going. It was way too hot. ‘If you don’t know the difference between Death Metal and Thrash Metal,’ Lennox said, ‘you may as well just get out your fucken assault weapon and start blowing your tiny brains all over the fucken desert.’
‘He reasoned,’ Luke said.
‘I mean it, bitches. I can’t believe I’m turtling here in the sand with a bunch of fucken newbs with a low-ping connection to the universe – Dooley, Flange, look at the nick of them – and it’s Game On in this shithole and these fucken ’tards think that “ThePunishment Due” by Megadeth is an example of Thrash Metal. Cop on, bell-ends. Go up the front there and sell that shit to the Gobblers.’
‘What’s the Gobblers?’ Dooley asked.
‘The Grenadier Guards,’ Luke said.
‘Awesome. It’s all Royal Engineers up there,’ Dooley said.
‘The Chunkies,’ Lennox said. ‘A corps of Bennies up there with a single fucken standard grade and a metal ruler between them, pumping up tyres and thinking they’re God.’
‘Fuck them all, man. We got the battle honours.’
‘Fucken right,’ Flannigan said, leaning on the cabin door and closing his eyes. ‘But we’re the ones sitting here for hours going red pigs …’
‘Hot, man.’
‘Like boiling,’ Flannigan said. ‘And the cocknoshes up there, man, the fucken Chunkies, giving it fuck-o-nometry with some cunting Rupert from Bastion nodding all impressed like and we’re sitting up here getting Kit-Kat arse in the sun.’
‘Some officers are dicks and they’ll always be dicks,’ Lennox said. ‘Not you, Captain.’
‘Steady,’ Luke said.
‘Jesus,’ Dooley whispered. ‘I wish something would happen. I want to be all over this map. I want a whole lot of kills and then I don’t give a fuck what happens. They can take me home.’ His voice had gone down a level with the heat and he swigged water from a plastic bottle and then threw the bottle into the road among the rocks.
‘I don’t care what anybody says,’ Lennox said. ‘Megadeth is not Thrash Metal. It’s Death Metal, so it is.’
‘The guitars are gunning, man. It’s Thrash.’
‘Bollocks, it is.’
‘They