Department 19: Battle Lines by Hill Will

Author:Hill, Will [Hill, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

34

THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

“Are you benching me?” asked John Morton. “You are, aren’t you?”

Jamie shook his head, trying to buy time. He hadn’t expected the rookie to so quickly work out why his squad leader had come up to the Level A dormitory to see him. “No,” he said. “That’s not what’s happening. But you should know, because I wouldn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, that I asked the Interim Director to place you on the inactive roster. He refused.”

Morton stared. “You don’t want me on your squad?”

“That’s not true,” said Jamie. “What I want is you at your best, ready to face what’s out there. And I don’t think that’s where you are.”

“I’m fine,” said the rookie. He pushed his chair back from his desk and turned it to face his squad leader. “Really, sir. I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” said Jamie, softly. “I think you’re scared.” He saw colour begin to rise in Morton’s cheeks and moved to defuse the situation. “It’s not a criticism, John. It takes people different amounts of time to adjust to being part of Blacklight, to come to terms with the reality you get shown. There’s no shame in it.”

“I’ve been scared, Jamie,” said Morton. “I know scared. This is something else.”

But you admit there is something, thought Jamie. That’s a start, at least.

“What is it then?” he asked. “It will stay between us.”

Morton looked down at his hands for a long moment. “Afghanistan,” he said, eventually. “Last summer I was attached to a Recon Marine battalion, working the mountains in Helmand. I saw everything you can imagine, and probably stuff you can’t. Dead kids, men who’d been tortured over hearsay, women who’d been gang-raped for teaching girls to read. We came into this village one morning, where three Taliban fighters were supposed to be holed up. We’d pounded the area all night, drone strikes from twenty miles away. I don’t know how many missiles, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. We had air surveillance at both ends of the valley and they confirmed that no one had got out, in any direction.

“So, when dawn came, they sent the six of us in. We came over the rise at the head of the valley, and where the village had been there was just rubble and dust. Nothing standing, nothing moving. We just walked right down the middle of the track, because there was no way anything could have lived through what the drones had done, and we found the first body about twenty metres outside the village. It was an old woman, gone below the waist, just a spray of blood. She was face down in the dust. There was a square in the middle of where the village had been, a little patch of dust not much bigger than this room. Two kids were lying on the ground, holding hands. Both dead. In the ruins of the buildings we found more bodies, bits of bodies really, almost all of them children, some women.

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