That was the same company, and then the same rifle platoon, as Milton.

They were almost immediately sent to South Armagh.

B Company had been assigned to South Armagh. That was bandit country, and Crossmaglen, the town where they would be based, was as bad as it got. It was right on the border, which meant that the Provos could prepare in the south and then make the quick trip north to shoot at them or leave their bombs or do whatever it was that they had planned to do. The men had been billeted in the security forces base and their rifle company lived in ‘submarines,’ long corridors with beds built three high on one side. Milton had the top bunk and Pope was directly beneath him. It was the kind of random introduction that the army was good at but they quickly discovered that it was propitious; they had plenty in common. Both liked The Smiths and The Stone Roses and the films of Tarantino and de Palma. Both liked a drink. Both wore civilian duvet coats from C&A beneath the nylon flak jackets and both had taken to writing their blood groups on the jackets just like all the other blokes. Both had girlfriends back home but neither was particularly attached to them. Milton’s sense of humour was dry and Pope’s was smutty. They were both obsessed with getting fitter and stronger and both intended to attempt SAS selection when they had a little more experience. The chemistry just worked and they quickly became close.

One memory was clearer than all the others.

One night.

He remembered it almost as if it were yesterday.

It had been towards the end of their first posting. The battalion was due to go back to Andover the following week and they had one more patrol to do. They were picked up by helicopter and flown out into the countryside. It was a four-day cycle: four days out, four days on town patrol, four days in sangars. The helicopter was one of the Army Air Corps’ Lynx AH-9s and, as it powered up to take off again, there was a muffled bang from the direction of the tailboom and the engines died. The pilot tried everything he could think of to get it started but nothing worked. It was grounded.

The Lynx was a multi-million pound piece of equipment and not something they could just leave there overnight. The men were put on stag to guard it while they flew in an engineer. It was farmland. The farmhouse itself was five hundred feet away. Dark and isolated, lots of barns and outbuildings. It was cold and wet and there was an almost tangible sense of danger. The platoon were arranged in a defensive posture with an inner and an outer cordon, split up into groups of two and three. Their arcs overlapped each other, giving them three-hundred-and-sixty degrees cover around the stricken chopper.

Milton and Pope formed one of the two man teams. They lay face-down in the mud, their SLRs resting on bipods, both squinting down range into their nightsights. They were cold and soaking wet. Pope’s legs were frozen, the cold chilling all the way through to the marrow, his hands felt like blocks of ice and he couldn’t cover his ears because he had to listen for activity. They were both in a foul mood, cursing the pilot for breaking the chopper and the engineer for his inability to fix it.

Pope looked through the nightsight.

Movement? He checked and rechecked.

“Two men coming out of the barn towards us,” he reported.

“Bollocks.”

“And there’s a third. I’m serious, John.”

Milton looked through his nightsight. “Alright. Not bollocks.”

Pope watched them as they approached. They were moving carefully, keeping low. Two of them were carrying rifles and the other the unmistakeable shape — long, and with a bulbous onion-shaped end — of an RPG. Just their luck. They must have landed right in the middle of a PIRA hotspot. They were coming straight for them.

Despite the short tour in Iraq, Milton and Pope were still green. Chasing outclassed Republican Guardsmen on the road back to Baghdad was one thing; the Provos, with years of experience and full of hatred for the army, were something else entirely. Pope started to panic. What were they going to do? They couldn’t contact an officer or NCO for advice since they were too young to warrant a radio. Protocol said that they should issue a challenge since these could be three of their own men but if they weren’t friendlies then that would mean that they would either be in a firefight or chasing the players as they went to ground, and this was not the sort of country where you wanted to get lost and cut off from your mates.

Milton did not panic. He was calm and assured. He knew the correct routine for this situation and he followed it to the letter.

He pulled back the bolt to cock his rifle, identified himself as army and called out for them to stop.

They ran for it.

Milton fired. Pope fired.

The farm descended into pure chaos. The inner cordon saw the two tracer rounds from the tops of their magazines and thought that they were under attack. They started to fire on Milton and Pope. They both rolled into a slurry-filled ditch and covered their heads, screaming out that they were friendly. One of the lads with a light-machine-gun joined in the fun, sending a fusillade of fire down onto them. They were safe enough in the ditch and Pope remembered very well the look he had seen on Milton’s face as he risked a glance across at him. He grinned at him and then, in the middle of the firestorm, in bandit country with a broken-down Lynx and twenty men throwing fire down upon them, he gave him a big, unmistakeable wink.

The search for the three Provos had been both immediate and thorough. And utterly thrilling. It had been, Pope recalled, the best night of his life and the one when he had decided that the army was definitely what he wanted to do. It seemed as if the whole company had descended on the farm. The brass sent a Gazelle to join in the search, circling overhead as it shone down its powerful Night Sun searchlight. A Saracen armoured car turned up with a soldier manning the big turret-mounted machine-gun. Roadblocks were thrown up and dogs and their handlers spilled out of cars. The rifle company was out all night but it looked as if their quarry had got away.

But then, two days later, a man admitted himself at a hospital in the south with a 7.62mm wound in his buttocks. Pope and Milton knew it was one of the Provos that they had chased into the fields and that one of them had shot him. They argued about who should claim the credit for months.

* * *

Pope wasn’t one for mementoes but he had kept a couple of photographs from that part of his career. He took down an album and flicked through it, finding the photograph that he wanted: seven men arranged around a Saracen. In those days, the vehicles were fitted with two gallon containers at the rear. They called them Norwegians. The drivers filled them with tea before they left the sangar each morning and although the tea grew lukewarm and soupy before too long, it was a life-saver during cold winter patrols. The photograph was taken in a field somewhere in Armagh. Three of them were kneeling, the other four leaning against the body of the truck, each of them saluting the camera with a plastic cup. Milton was at the back, his cup held beneath the Norwegian’s tap, smiling broadly. Pope was kneeling in front of him. Milton was confident and relaxed. Pope remembered how he had felt back then: it had been difficult not to look up to him a little. That respect was something that remained constant, ever since, throughout their time together in the Regiment and then the Group.

The microwave beeped. He knocked back the rest of the whisky, collected the meal and took it into the lounge.

He sat down with the album on his lap.

Memories.

He didn’t question his orders but they were troubling. Control had said that Milton had suffered from some sort of breakdown. That didn’t seem very likely to Pope. Milton had always been a quiet man, solid and dependable. Extremely good at his job. Impossible to fluster, even under the most extreme pressure. The idea that he might snap like this was very difficult to square. But, there again, there was all the evidence to suggest that something had happened to him: the trouble he had caused in East London, shooting Callan, and then, after six months when no-one knew where he was, turning up again in Mexico like this.