Without warning

He was getting used to the chaotic, tumbling, whitewater rush of events, to waking up in different cots or beds, or a plastic picnic chair at some random transit point. Of course, Melton had experienced plenty of hurry up and wait during his time as a Ranger, and although he enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy in his later career as a civilian correspondent, he was, in the end, still hanging around the army, which had raised ‘hanging around’ to an Olympic-standard event, interspersed with short bouts of furious ass haulage and seemingly pointless tail chasing. The thirty-six hours after he awoke in the field hospital featured plenty of each.

He’d been upset on returning from the mess tent to discover Corporal Shetty was gone, evacuated on a medical flight to Ramstein. He was alone again, without friends or colleagues or even a passing acquaintance, until Corpsman Deftereos returned, this time bringing with him a set of three-pattern desert BDUs and a standard-issue brown undershirt and underwear. The young orderly was accompanied by an exhausted-looking female doctor, who gave the reporter a perfunctory once-over, checked his stitches, wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics and signed off a travel order, ripped from a clipboard and pushed into Melton’s pocket.

‘Congratulations,’ she said in a voice devoid of any spark. ‘You win a no-expenses-paid trip out of my ward and on into the next exciting phase of your own personal mystery tour.’

He hadn’t even drawn breath to ask what the fuck she was talking about before the doc was gone, administering more scripts and travels documents like some sort of malfunctioning vending machine. Deftereos at least had been a little more helpful, gesturing for him to stay exactly where he was for the next couple of minutes. Melton felt abandoned and more alone than he had in a long time as the two of them swept out of the ward, and he was on the verge of simply climbing back into his cot when the corpsman rushed back in, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him upright.

‘No, really, you gotta get the hell outta here, right now, sir.’

‘Why? What’s up, Tony?’

‘What, you think they tell me anything? I don’t fucking know – excuse my language, sir.’

Deftereos was babbling, and noticeably distracted. ‘Look, we just got word through that we’re shifting at least a third of our cot cases,’ he said. ‘Corporal Shetty scored a golden ticket with the 86th Airlift while you were out. And you just lucked in with a civilian charter, to London. If I was you, I wouldn’t even be here anymore. I’d be a dust ball, on my way to the fucking helipad. Now go!’

He pushed a small bottle of pills into Melton’s hand. Vicodin. ‘It’ll help, with the shoulder and your finger,’ he added. ‘Don’t worry about your kit. All your stuff has gone ahead. Now you gotta get going too.’

And with that Melton had changed out of his scrubs and been given the bum’s rush out of the tent and into the dust and harsh sunlight, to join a small throng of the walking wounded, all recently displaced and as thoroughly nonplussed as himself. They had just enough time to work up some really wild theories about battles gone wrong, bio-weapon exchanges, hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, when a white bus with dark blue Hilton Hotel insignias pulled around the corner formed by a pod of air-conditioned shipping containers a hundred yards away, and a navy chief stuck his head out of the rear door, roaring at them to get their worthless carcasses into the vehicle or they’d get left behind for good.

Bret remembered a short ride out to a vast helipad where civilian choppers of all manner and description vied with US military helicopters for landing and take-off slots. He remembered shuffling onto a Vietnam-era Chinook with Australian aircrew, but missed a lot of that flight after downing two of the Vicodin with a swig of warm, bottled water. He vaguely recalled half an hour spent in some lavish civilian airport where he was at least able to fill the prescription for his antibiotics, at a mark-up of about a thousand per cent.

Melton slept through a C-130 flight to Qatar, and fetched up for a long spell in a giant hangar where hundreds of wounded Marines and soldiers were laid out on stretchers if they were lucky, or if they weren’t, on a makeshift line of bright orange moulded plastic chairs. Groggy from the Vicodin and creeping exhaustion, Melton made his way towards a small mound of duffel bags that had been colonised by half-a-dozen Polish commandos. They all seemed in fine fettle, with their equipment stowed neatly in a pile to one side, guarded by one of their own – a huge blond stone monolith of a man.

‘Witam!’ Melton smiled in greeting, before holding up his hands to forestall a Polish-language landslide. ‘Sorry, that’s all the Polish I know. Besides piwo and piekna dzie … dzi…’