Read For Valour for Free Online Page A

dad who cared enough to keep my memory alive. On the other, I’d always believed that, in war, shit happens.
    I scanned the headlines on the Telegraph and Sun sites, and the Mail Online , but there was nothing much there either. A page-three girl, who called herself Victoria Crossley, claimed to have had a Brazilian in the shape of the legendary medal. The caption writer said that he’d be happy to share her firing position anytime.
    I stopped to take a sip of the Americano, then gave my full attention to the pig roll. As the fat seeped out between the layers of bread and dribbled over my fingers, I thought life didn’t get much better than this.

5
    You could drive to Grwyne Fawr Reservoir from Abergavenny through the Mynydd Du Forest, but I never put my trust in cul-de-sacs without good reason. And Trev hadn’t invited me up there to draw attention to myself. I turned left onto the Crickhowell road, and the remnants of last night’s hail crunched beneath my tyres as I skirted the western edge of the Black Mountains. There was snow on the high ground, and the sulphurous tint to the light promised more before the day was gone.
    I pulled off the main some distance short of Talgarth and wound my way up the back lanes, through patches of woodland. I parked not far from the church at Llanelieu. I’d first spotted it when Trev and I had found our way out of the Elephant’s Arsehole, and gone back later when I’d started getting excited by medieval history. God no longer paid St Ellyw’s formal visits, even on Sundays, and it had never been on Father Mart’s beat, but I figured his wagon wouldn’t be out of place there. And I wanted to see if the loft was still painted blood red.
    The 110’s rear door gave a squeal of complaint as I went back to sort out my kit. That was when I noticed the graffiti. In the coating of mud beneath the Defender label someone had added ‘of the Faith’ with a wet fingertip.
    I decided against taking my Russian tank commander’s hat. I’d bought it from a stall when Anna and I had been wandering around an open-air market near Gorky Park. The sheepskin earpieces made it the warmest thing I’d ever owned, but if you wore that kind of gear outside Eastern Europe you just looked like a dickhead or a Chelsea fan.
    I threw the shovel and all the other shit that I’d bought into the daysack. I might not need any of it, but I’d spent a fair chunk of my adult life running around with thirty-five-kilo packs on my back so it was hardly going to slow me down. I fastened the gaiters, tightened the straps on the sack, grabbed my ski gloves and was ready to put one foot in front of the other.
    My first objective was the bothy beside the stream that fed the reservoir. I didn’t go straight there, but I didn’t zigzag like a lunatic either. Trev was playing Secret Squirrel, but as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was a well-equipped walker in search of the best vantage-points from which to enjoy the breathtaking scenery.
    Once I’d left the sheep grazing in the churchyard behind me, there was no sign of another living thing on the hillside. I stepped from tussock to tussock, their tufts of grass crisp with frost beneath my Timberlands. We used to call them baby’s heads when I was a squaddie, and I could never quite shake the image from my mind.
    The bothy was a tiny stone-built affair with a slate tile roof, tucked into the hill above a weir. During the summer it virtually disappeared from sight among the greys and greens and browns of the surrounding landscape. Today it stood out against the dusting of snow.
    There was no smoke leaking from the chimney above the wood-burning stove, so I decided it was a good moment for a brew. I filled my flask from the stream and scooped up some more water with my brand-new mess tin.
    Once inside, I broke a chunk off a hexy block and watched it bring the water to the boil. Being out of the wind with some of Father Mart’s Yorkshire Tea inside me