Chapter 7

We woke about 03.20, absolutely freezing. Your core temperature drops naturally about two or three in the morning in the morning, because of your body's natural rhythm, then rises again just before you wake. This was going to be a hard stag. Derek produced another flask. More tea, a fag, and a piss, then we dressed forward. This time I took the radio and log first.

Like I said earlier, in the city, not much moved at night. Here, in the arsehole of nowhere, there was fuck-all cubed. Most of the patrols, that had held my attention earlier, had withdrawn from the ground, so there were very few messages to log. All that was left was the nocturnal animals. Their snuffling and quiet rustling was all there was to distract our attention.

The game became one of trying to gauge their position by their noise and lying so quietly that they would approach us. Sometimes a mouse would sniff its way forward but rarely anything bigger. We would try to see if there were any owls flitting noiselessly overhead, but the trees sheltering us, also restricted our vision. We attuned to the environment and small noises would seem to thunder through the night. We watched, as nothing happened, trying to find anything to activate our minds, just to prevent us from falling asleep.

The oddest thing was if you focussed in on an object. The closer you watched it, the more you convinced yourself there was someone sneaking up on you. You had to look away and then look back. Then you could see a bush or rock had scared the crap out of you. We swapped tasks and I had the gun again. Now if I thought someone was creeping up on our position I could use the night vision scope to relieve my anxiety. However, I was able to use it to ratchet up my concern about my marriage. The sight was an image intensifier, so it used the available light and amplified it. I could see nothing through the closed curtains. I wondered if a thermal imager would have let me see some of what was going on.

I still didn't want to believe what I had seen. There was nothing I had done that would make Jean betray me. I mean, I had been in exactly the same position as her. I barely saw her, but I wasn't running off to screw the nearest woman. So what was so different that she would think about fucking Windy bloody Miller? Nothing. She despised him. At least that's what she told me. O.K. so he had provided her with a car, but it was a 'company' car. When she went back to the Civil Service she'd have to give it ba ... Derek nudged me. "I'm going to waken the others for stand-to, get your gear on".

I started to pack up everything bar the gun. We had arranged it so that Cincinnati and Nobby used their kit to put up the basha. Now they would pack it all away for dawn stand-to. If we had been on a long term op we would have dug in and stayed quiet and still, but since this was a temporary position we used the drills for short term locations. We had our kit on, bergans beside us, and everyone took a fire position. Gradually the grey tones of darkness gave way to colour as the sun came up.

We waited. Near the road Jonty's team would be doing the same. If the terrorists had spotted our position, dawn or dusk were the optimum times to attack. So we had every pair of eyes and ears alert. We could react as the situation required. If the enemy attacked the other team, we could give fire support to let them extract, or we could counter attack, or we could all join up to concentrate our firepower. We had lots of options that had been included in the original briefing. When it came right down to it, they were only normal infantry tactics. We had practiced them in training. Everything was packed so we didn't leave anything behind.

Purples, and blues, gave way to lighter softer greens and straw tones peppered with the dark green and yellow of the gorse or the mauves and white of heath and heather. Wraiths of mists sighed over the hillsides, the sheep started to graze, and we heard a fox bark somewhere to our left. The sky lightened and the birds commenced their dawn chorus. Fucking singing birds. What the fuck had they to be so fucking cheerful about? All they fucking did was remind me of the special times with Jean. The time I first asked her out, the time we admitted our love for each other. Here I was in the middle of the Mournes, a place I first discovered with her, when it looked like Narnia. Yeah. Rub it in big style. Catch yourself on. Pay attention. Watch your arcs.

Smoke rose from the few, small, hill farms, where some people still tried to preserve a way of life that was slowly dying. From the soft scent that reached us, some of them were even burning peat. Although, that may have been from a rental, where townies or tourists were playing at being The Quiet Man. Our client, however, wasn't stirring.

Derek called stand-down. We wiped down our weapons and rubbed a little oil over them. Not too much or they would smoke if we opened fire, and give our position away. I was tasked to get breakfast. We had been issued with compo rations. They could be eaten cold if necessary. A lot of guys hated them but they were pretty good if you had any imagination, and carried a few extras. They came with a little folded metal stove that used solid fuel tablets. The problem was, they burned with a very distinctive smell. Most of us carried small gas stoves. I got two of them and boiled water for tea. It was my chance to star.