Dave was thinking how only the stoppage in his weapon had brought him down into the Vector just before the bomb had exploded. A few seconds earlier and it would have been him flying through the air to the left while his leg flew to the right. The stoppage had saved him. It had cost Steve his leg and maybe his life.
'Sarge?' said Jamie.
Dave's escape today had been the narrowest. It should have been him. And at this moment, thinking of Steve and Leanne and the twins, he wished it had been him. He shut his eyes.
He said: 'I'm fine.' His throat was so dry the words scratched their way out of his mouth. He imagined his home, in a quiet street in the quiet camp in England. It seemed nearer than Afghanistan. He knew that, in a few days, the madness of Helmand Province would be home and quiet Wiltshire would be some strange, faraway place.
The Vector proceeded to the Forward Operating Base in total silence.
Chapter Two
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAMIE BEING AROUND AND JAMIE NOT BEING around was that everything went wrong the minute he walked out of the door. The dishwasher had spluttered to a halt before his plane had even landed in Afghanistan. It had been the same with Iraq: the washing machine had stopped, the bathroom pipes had been blocked and the phone had gone kaput within three weeks of his departure.
Agnieszka could cope with the dishwasher because in Poland she had managed without one. But now it was the car. There was a clunk from deep within its bowels. It was the kind of noise you couldn't ignore, the kind which said the car would stop on the motorway just when she was taking Luke to the hospital tomorrow. It was the sort of clunk which said that Jamie had gone and nothing was going to be right until he came back.
So now she was on her way to the garage. She'd shovelled the big pushchair into the back. Luke was crying. And halfway there she realized she should have rung first. Which would have meant speaking on the phone. Which she hated because communicating in English over a phone line was about fifteen times harder than when she could see people pulling their faces into shapes which filled all the gaps in her understanding.