Ultimate Sanction by Sarah Luddington

Author:Sarah Luddington [Luddington, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913264444
Publisher: Mirador Publishing
Published: 2019-10-24T23:00:00+00:00

15

Unfortunately, sleep eluded me, despite having Jacob curled up against my flank. His story rolled around inside my head gathering dust bunnies full of bullets and blood. My memories fought to escape the careful control of the boxes I used to capture them before further securing them in a room I kept locked so they wouldn’t overwhelm me.

We all joined the army for different reasons, mine were so I could escape my father; maybe succeed at something important; maybe make a difference in a world I struggled to understand as a teenager. No one thought about the consequences of signing up to a life of violence.

It was years before I understood the truth. The army didn’t give a shit about me beyond my ability to do my job and the moment I couldn’t, it wanted me and the skills I had gone. There were always more people willing to fight. Soldiers had to be young when we signed up, before the world broke our optimism.

I sighed, recognising the wheel of misery I was about to travel. These thoughts led in one direction, just like a donkey having to go in a circle to grind grain, going around in an endless circle and never reaching its destination.

With care I extricated myself from the bed, pulled on some clothes and slipped from the room. A quiet drink at the bar might just be enough to switch me off. When I arrived, I found Brant. She sat, spine straight but eyes downcast, watching the amber liquid in her glass. I almost left the bar, but she turned, saw me and nodded. I walked over and sat beside her on a stool.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“Jacob’s out cold, at last,” I said, nodding at the barman and signalling two of whatever Brant drank.

“How is he?” she asked.

“How much of his service do you know about?” I countered.

“Jacob? All of it.”

“Including Syria?” I asked.

She nodded. “I read the reports. I had to before coming out here. There’s a warning all over his file. They only needed one more reason to boot him.”

I considered the wisdom of my next words, but I had to know more, and Brant held the keys to the lock. “He thinks the men with him lied for him, that’s why he wasn’t tried for murder.”

She drank half the scotch left in her first glass before the second came. “They didn’t lie for him, they didn’t even fucking defend him, Mac. What he doesn’t know is that there was a drone over the site. The footage from that cleared him because it captured the hanging and captured the guns the women did hold. If they weren’t so bent on killing those boys they’d have fired on the patrol.”

A strange sensation of relief swept through me. “So he’s innocent?”

She looked at me. “He didn’t murder them in cold blood if that’s what you’re asking, but innocent? None of us are innocent, Mac. We’ve all killed people we shouldn’t have done for reasons beyond those strictly necessary.

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