Jack levelled his gun at Polly’s head.

“I love you, Polly, but I’m leaving you again. This time for good.”

“Peter!” Polly shouted.

“Who?”

“The stalker! He knows, he knows an American was here. He saw you! He could describe you!”

“That’s right. He could, Polly, which is a pity for him because you told me where he lives.”

Jack’s finger was taut on the trigger.

“Jack, no,” Polly whispered.

“I’m sorry, Polly, but you do see I have no choice, don’t you?”

Jack meant it too. As he saw it he had no choice. In fact it was his duty. He saw himself as the best remaining candidate to lead the army he loved, and it was his responsibility to ensure that nothing compromised his ability to command. Jack had already sacrificed Polly once to the oaths he had made when he had joined the service. Now he had to find the courage to do so again. And this time he would have to do it while looking Polly in the eye.

Polly was still sitting on the bed. Jack stood before her, his arm outstretched, the gun levelled between them, his target pale but somehow calm, calmer than Jack had expected.

“We have a child,” she said.

Jack had been about to shoot. At the very moment that she said it he had been about to shoot.

“What?”

“When you left me I was pregnant, Jack.”

Every well-honed instinct of self-preservation within Jack’s icy soul told him to shoot and shoot immediately, but somehow he could not, not yet, not for a moment.

“I don’t think so, Polly.”

“Well, what the fuck would you know, you bastard!” Polly snarled. “You left me pregnant! That was why I always waited for you… That was why I couldn’t forget you. How could I?”

If she was acting, and Jack was almost sure she was, then she was very good at it; the sudden and bitter venom of her statement was uncomfortably convincing.

It was convincing because it was true. Jack had left Polly pregnant. She realized about three weeks after he had walked out on her. It was not his fault. He could not have known; those had been in the days before AIDS, and Jack had never used condoms because Polly had been on the pill. Unfortunately, like many a young girl before her, Polly had been made careless by love and the result was that she suddenly found herself alone and carrying the child of a man who had had his way with her and then gone.

Polly stared at Jack over the vicious snout of his pointing gun, her eyes teary with angry memories.

“How could I have got over you, Jack?” she said. “You were still there with me, growing inside me every day.”

Jack knew that this was nonsense. He tried to shoot, but still he could not. Because if it were true, although it could not be, but if it were true, it would be so… Jack shut the thought from his mind. He had come to kill this woman.

“It was a boy, Jack,” Polly whispered. “We have a son.”

All Jack’s life he had wanted a child, and being a soldier, of course, he had particularly wanted a son. He and Courtney had not had children; she’d been young and ambitious for her career and they’d grown apart so quickly. But to have a son with Polly! Jack had often daydreamed of exactly that, imagining what a wonderful spirited boy such a union might create. Jack struggled to regain control. He had no business to be indulging in fantasies of this sort at such a time. Imagining Polly as the mother of his child reminded him of how much he was still in love with her, but he could not afford to be in love with her. He had a higher love to answer to – his love of power, of ambition, his love of self.

Yet still he could not pull the trigger.

“What’s his name?” Jack asked, allowing himself to relish the dream.

“Misty Dawn,” Polly replied instantly.

“Misty fucking Dawn? You called a boy Misty Dawn?”

“He changed it to Colin when he was at school.”

“What was wrong with Jack?”

“Everything was wrong with Jack, you bastard.”

Jack knew that he was talking too much. He knew that it was time to get on, time to do the deed. The deed that was the heavy duty of men who would be leaders of men; those who sought to command must know how to sacrifice.

Polly could see Jack’s hesitation. “You can’t kill me, Jack,” Polly said slowly and clearly. “I’m the mother of your child.”

This was madness. Jack knew it was madness. “You were on the pill,” he said.

“I lied to you. I knew you were paranoid about anything that might damage your precious career, so I lied. I don’t approve of putting chemicals into my body. I was using a natural sea sponge and it leaked.”

That sounded convincing. Polly had been just the sort of over-confident, illogical, ideological young nut who would have deployed a sponge as a barrier to a liquid. Just the sort of cocky idiot who would have considered her principles more powerful than the laws of physics. On the other hand, she had not mentioned anything before. Jack struggled to think, not an easy thing with Polly’s eyes burning into him, pleading for her life, a life he held so dear.

“Fifteen years old, Polly,” Jack said. “That’s all he’d be.”

“That’s right, he’s fifteen.”

With a tremendous effort of concentration Jack began to get over his initial shock and doubt, and began to regain control.

“Then where is he?” Jack asked. “Doesn’t a young boy need his mom?”

“He’s at his gran’s!” Polly replied, perhaps a shade too quickly, too desperately. “She spoils him. Lets him drink alcopops.”

Jack knew now. “One photograph, Polly,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t see one photograph. Not one. Show me a photograph of our son, Polly. As a baby, as a toddler, now. One photograph, Polly.”

Polly could see that the game was up. She’d known that she could not keep up the lie for long, long enough for a course of action to present itself, long enough perhaps for her to find a way to reach across her bed and press the panic button on the wall. But it was not to be.

“I… I don’t have any,” she replied.

Polly had not wanted the abortion. She’d loved Jack so much and suddenly she had found herself still carrying a part of him. But at the time she’d felt that she had no choice: a seventeen-year-old girl with a fatherless baby? There’d been a girl like that in the year above Polly at school. How Polly had pitied that girl, old before her time, her whole youth sacrificed for a single moment of passion. Polly loved Jack, despite what he had done to her, and she had wanted to keep his baby, but not in exchange for her life and that was how she had seen it at the time. At seventeen she had thought that having a baby would be the end of her life. What cruel and terrible irony to know now that had she kept it, it might have saved her life.

“I’m sorry, Polly,” Jack said.

And he was sorry, so very sorry that she had no child to give him. Sorry that they had not shared their lives together, sorry that he had ever left her in order to serve a cold, ungrateful country. Most of all, sorry that despite all that, he would still have to kill her.

Polly sensed his resolve hardening, sensed her life slipping away.

“You said you still loved me,” Polly pleaded, dropping to her knees.

“I do still love you,” Jack replied and for the second time that evening there were tears in his eyes.

“Then you can’t kill me,” she begged.

“Polly,” said Jack, and it was almost as if it was he who was doing the pleading. “Try to understand. If I make chairman of the joint chiefs, do you know what the next step could be for me?” Polly had started to sob. “President. Yes, president. Leader of the world’s only superpower. There was a time when men waged war all their lives over a few square miles of mud and huts. They sacrificed their sons and grandsons to defend a paltry tribal crown. People have fought and murdered in pursuit of power since the dawn of time. Rivers of blood have flowed for it. For little power, for nothing power! I have before me the possibility of being the leader of the world! The world, Polly! Your existence severely compromises that possibility. Are you seriously suggesting that with such a destiny within my grasp I should shrink from the killing of just one single soul?”