Read Driftwood for Free Online Page A

of the way in which Flynn might get his parcel back. Some bloke dropped this off for you. Said he didn’t want it. Followed up, probably, by Don’t have your bloody packages delivered through the gate, Lieutenant. We’re not the Royal Mail .
    He struggled to put the whole mess out of his mind. It was over, and a good lesson to him in not allowing random elements into his life. Probably he would never see Flynn again, and if he had offended him, what was the harm? But what if you’ve hurt him , the undamaged parts of Thomas whispered, making him shiver and become abstracted when conducting routine medical checks, taking temperatures, listening to nicotine-clogged chests. That was ridiculous, though. It had been a half-hour encounter, and Summers had probably since then faced death several times on the open seas, winching stranded fishermen to safety. He wasn’t going to care about some imagined slight from a man whose name he had likely forgotten by now. In all probability he was simply relieved that he’d got away with it, not had his mad impulse taken to heart.
    Still, it nagged at Thomas. He seemed to notice the passage of the Sea King helicopters overhead, with their distinctive grey and red livery, far more intensely than he had ever done before. By the following Saturday, he liked himself even less than usual, and instead of spending his day in the stern isolation that went some way towards repairing the social exhaustion of his week, he packed up the Land Rover, wolfhound and all, and drove down to the Perran Beach air show.
    He’d never attended such an event before. Like any other kid he had watched the choppers plying the Cornish skies on their missions and imagined himself up there, but had felt no interest beyond that. He wasn’t really interested now. Any fascination with helicopter travel he might have been harbouring had been thoroughly knocked out of him by his first few Chinook flights over hostile terrain in Helmand Province.
    He stood, beached and a little disoriented, beside the Land Rover, parked in a field among the hundreds of other cars, mobile homes and Volksie buses glittering in the sun. Occasionally he would spot acquaintances in the crowd and exchange a smile with them, wryly noting their surprise at seeing him there.
    Glancing round at Belle, he saw that she was wearing her most haughty mask. Anyone who didn’t know her would think her unfriendly. For the first time, it occurred to Thomas to think about his own image—the effect he produced on others. He wasn’t unfriendly, either, but not one of the people who caught his eye and smiled at him came up to say hello. For the first time, he found himself minding.
    A thunderous reverberation on the edge of the world distracted him, and he leaned on the Rover and watched the display. Six Sea King helicopters and four military Lynxes, the full Hawke Lake and Plymouth complement, breached the horizon in tight formation. The sight was oddly moving, Thomas had to admit, as long as he kept in mind their lifesaving remit and forgot that they also bore down mercilessly, with fully armed crews, on the gun- and drug-runners who often made a dash along the Cornish coast. Perhaps what touched him was the brotherhood implicit in their close-quarters flight. What faith you must have, in yourself and your comrades, to spin those double sets of thin, flashing blades so close to those of the surrounding craft, to fly almost flank to flank.
    He listened to the announcer trying to give the crowd a commentary through the wind and rotor roar. Their pilots were trained, he said, to maintain steady height relative to a forty-foot pitching ocean swell, to compensate for hurricane-force winds. Each of the Sea Kings was fifty-five feet long, weighed in at six tons, could reach speeds of one hundred forty miles per hour…
    It should have been hard to imagine Flynn, who stayed in Thomas’s memory as a bright-haired sea spirit,