War with Russia

As they did so, Vronsky made a quick call into his mobile phone. As Petrov and Zadonov emerged from the bar, four men appeared from a side street and followed them.

0945 hours, Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Ādaži Training Camp, Latvia

“A MUCH BETTER effort, guys. Fast, aggressive—you still need to work on the fire control orders. But you’re heading in the right direction.”

Captain Tom Morland, leader of a five-man training team from 1st Battalion, the Mercian Regiment, sent by Britain to provide training support to Latvia, was debriefing a section of sweating Special Tasks Unit soldiers, Latvian Army Special Forces, who had just completed a “live” section attack exercise on the firing range.

Morland had been in Ādaži, surrounded by nothing but endless miles of virgin pine forest and training areas, for three weeks now, and he was enjoying himself. The training was tough, realistic and fun; the Latvians were eager students and great guys to work with and to cap it all, he had the weekends off to explore Latvia and Riga, which was only forty minutes away.

Morland, 6 feet 2 inches, dark-haired and lean, was now a self-disciplined, tough professional but, if it had not been for Oxford and the Army, he knew he might now be one of those noisy, drunk Brits in Moloney’s Bar, hoovering down too much Latvian Labietis beer and chasing the girls on a stag weekend away. In fact, it was already his team’s favorite Riga bar and he had soon been informed that it was now official Team HQ.

The son of a butcher from Bridgnorth, in the West Midlands, he’d first found an outlet for his over-abundance of energy and natural aggression as a fanatical Wolverhampton Wanderers fan, by picking fights with other fans after Wolves games at Molyneux Stadium. All that had changed when Ted Hunter, a grizzled former Para corporal who lived in his street and knew the family, had decided there was more to Morland than street fighting and, probably in time, prison. One Saturday evening, soon after the start of the new football season, Hunter had spotted the fifteen-year-old coming home, sporting a black eye. He had started chatting. Without any lecturing or sermonizing, Hunter soon had the young Morland captivated with stories from Northern Ireland and the Falklands War.

In his spare time Hunter coached at a local boxing club so, one day, he took Morland along. There Morland found an outlet for his physicality and aggression and he quickly became an accomplished boxer. While he still went to football matches, he increasingly stayed out of trouble. Boxing taught him that a man doesn’t need to fight; unless in self-defense or to protect others.

The second great influence on him was Mr. Midgeley, his history teacher at Oldbury Wells Comprehensive. A red-haired Lancastrian with an acerbic wit who was deeply proud of his Rochdale roots, Midgeley recognized the intellectual potential in the young man. Giving him extra tuition, he inspired in him such a passion for history that he ended up getting into Oxford, the first in his family to gain a place at any university.

After Oxford he’d worked in the family business for a year, out of loyalty to his parents, before life as a small-town butcher palled and he’d been accepted by the Army—much to Hunter’s delight, who took to calling him “Sir” and pretending to salute whenever they saw one another. A year of officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst had followed and he had been commissioned in front of his proud parents into the Mercians, his local regiment; a tough, experienced, no-nonsense line infantry regiment, with an impressive operational record in Afghanistan.

Two years as a platoon commander came next and then eighteen months at a Training Regiment, teaching those hard-learned infantry skills back to young recruits. Then he found himself back at 1st Battalion, the Mercians, commanding Recce Platoon, the most coveted job for a young officer in the battalion. But, try and remain enthusiastic as he might, there was a growing sense of “same old, same old” creeping in.

But at least this training team in Latvia was fun, or had been until a few moments ago when, exercise over, Sergeant Danny Wild—his number two and a tough veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, with a Military Cross to his name—had announced he’d just received an email from the Battalion confirming his application to sign off had been accepted.

“You’re what?” Morland asked in astonishment, when Wild had told him he was leaving the Army. “But you can’t leave. You…” And even as he said it, he realized how stupid he sounded. Of course Wild could and would leave the Army, just like so many of the best officers and NCOs in the battalion were doing in ever-increasing numbers these days.