The reader finished and closed the book.

“Do we have any new members tonight?” the secretary asked.

No-one raised their hand.

“Any visitors?”

There was no point in staying silent; they all knew he was fresh at the meeting. “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “I’m from London.”

The others returned the greeting, welcoming him.

The secretary introduced the speaker. The man’s name was Chuck. He was corpulent: he dressed in a white shirt and beige trousers and he talked in a lazy American drawl. He didn’t discuss his background in depth, but Milton gathered that he was stationed in the city on behalf of an American corporation. His story was about the things he had done as a younger man; he did not specify exactly what they were, fencing around the subject even in light of the injunction that members should not fear honesty, but it was obvious that something had happened with his family and that it still caused him great shame. Milton closed his eyes again and allowed the man’s words to wash over him. The precise content of the story was not important (it involved a series of domestic faults that this man had to regret) and it could not have been more different to the bloody crimes that that haunted Milton’s dreams. The point of a good share was to find the similarities and not the differences, and Milton understood the man’s disgrace, his insecurity, and the fear that he would never be able to atone for his sins. Those were the universal similarities that bonded all of them together; the details didn’t matter.

Chuck finished and the secretary opened the floor. There was a long pause and, smiling, the secretary turned to Milton. “How about our visitor?” he said. “Care to share back?”

Milton cleared his throat. “Thank you for your share,” he said. The man acknowledged him with a duck of his head and, for a moment, Milton wondered whether he had said enough. He remembered the advice of his first sponsor, the man who had taken him under his wing at the first meeting he had attended in London: you had to share, he had advised him. It was the only way to draw the sting of the toxic thoughts that would inevitably lead to drink. The others were waiting to see if he was going to continue; he cleared his throat and went on. “I’m not from Hong Kong. Just here on business, stopping for a couple of days and then moving on, but I really needed a meeting tonight. I’m very grateful to have found it.”

“And we’re glad you did too,” said the secretary.

“I don’t really know what I want to talk about. I suppose it is partly about gratitude. I’m grateful to you for being here, I’m grateful to the fellowship for giving me the tools that I need to quieten my mind and I’m grateful that my life has been returned to me. I have a lot of things in my past to regret and this has been the only thing I have ever found that gives me peace. Saying that, I haven’t been to a meeting for days. It’s the longest I’ve been without one throughout my sobriety and I don’t mind admitting that it has shown me that I’m very far from being cured. I’ve been struggling with memories from my past and with the temptation to drink so that I can forget them. I couldn’t sleep tonight and I was close to going into the hotel bar and ordering a gin. If this meeting hadn’t been here, maybe that’s what I would have done. But it was, and I didn’t, and after listening to your story I know that I won’t drink, at least not tonight. Day by day, right? That’s what we say. We just take it a day at a time.” He paused again. He felt better, the stress that had twisted in his shoulders dissipating with every word. “Well,” he said. “That’s it. Thank you. I think that’s what I wanted to say.”

It was one in the morning when the meeting finished and the others explained that they usually went for noodles at a late night restaurant that was around the corner. Milton thanked them for the offer but politely declined. He wanted to have a little time to himself. The hotel was on the other side of the island.

He decided that he would walk.

Chapter Twenty-Four

His thoughts reached back; years ago, although it still felt like yesterday. He would usually do anything to think of something else because the memory was the foundation for the dream. As he walked along the harbour front he allowed himself to remember.

Milton and Pope were in the middle of the desert. It was blisteringly hot, the air quivering so that it looked as if they were gazing through the water in an aquarium, and he could still remember the woozy dizziness of being broiled in the sun for so long. It was Iraq, at the start of the invasion, and their eight-man SAS patrol was deep behind Saddam’s lines. There was some suggestion that the madman was readying his army to fling scuds tipped with nerve gas into Israel and the patrol’s instructions were to set up observation posts, find the launchers and disable them.

A Chinook had dropped them and a second patrol, together with their Land Rovers and eighty-pound Bergens, into the desert between Baghdad and northwestern Iraq. They had been given a wide swathe of territory to patrol. They found one launcher within the first three days; they had killed the crew, slapped a pound of plastique on the fuel tank and blown the equipment to high heaven. They ranged north after that, travelling at night and hiding out during the day, and eventually they had picked up the scent of another crew.

They had tracked them to a village fifty clicks east of Al Qa’im. It was a small settlement dependent on goat herding, just a collection of huts set around a tiny madrasa. The soldiers were elite, Republican Guard, and they were smart. Their launcher was an old Soviet R-11 and they had driven it right into the middle of the settlement, parking next to the school and obscuring the vehicle beneath a camo net. The thinking was obvious: if they were discovered, surely the Americans would think twice about launching a missile into the middle of a civilian area, much less at a target that was next to a school?

They had found an escarpment five hundred feet to the west of the village and settled in to reconnoitre. They would wait where they were until either one of two things had happened: either the launcher abandoned its hiding place and moved out, in which case they would take it down with a LAW missile once it was out of range of the village, or, if it stayed where it was, they would wait until sunset to go in and take out the crew. Those options, as far as Milton was concerned, were the only ones that would remove the risk of civilian casualties.

He used the HF radio to send an update to command and then settled down to wait.

He watched the village through the scope of his rifle. Further away, just visible on the fuzzy hills in the distance, he could see the battered old 4x4s that had transported the goat herders to their animals and the indistinct shape of the men and their goats. Closer, within the village, the crew of the launcher had set up a canvas screen and were dozing beneath it, sheltering from the sun. He breathed slow and easy, placing each member of the crew in the middle of the reticule one after the other. Five hundred yards was nothing. He would have been able to slot one or maybe even two of them before they even knew what was going on, but it would be neater at night, and he did not want to frighten the children. He nudged the scope away from them, observing the women as they went to and from the small river that ran through the centre of the settlement, carrying buckets of water back to their huts. He nudged it to the right, watching the five youngsters in the madrasa. They had been allowed outside to play and run off some steam. They had a yard, bordered by a low chickenwire fence, and they were kicking a football about. Milton watched them for a while. A couple of the boys were wearing football strips, Barcelona and Manchester United, and the cheap plastic ball that they were kicking around jerked and swerved in the gentle breeze. If they knew what the scud launcher was, and the danger it represented, they did not display it in their behaviour. They were just kids having fun. The light sound of their laughter carried up to Milton on that same wind; innocent, oblivious to the chaos that was gathering on the borders of their country that would, within days, obliterate everything in its way in a mad dash to Baghdad.