| Chapter one. Something just hit the fan The door slammed, rattling in its casement and dislodging a flake of old paint from the edge of its frame. The flake dropped silently to the sound of irate footsteps clacking down the street, which in turn awoke the sleeping pigeons in the eaves of the flats opposite. Gary swore silently to the departing figure of his wife and wondered why he bothered at all, they say good things come to those who wait, but you can only wait for so long. Not that Maryann was really been unreasonable, after all how many wives get their husbands call up papers with the usual morning drudge of bills and Readers Digest mailshots. So that was the problem, after nine years of service in the air force where the most dangerous posting had been to Newcastle, and a further three in the Territorial Army, it had finally happened. Call up. Gary sat back down and let out a long breath, then fished the crumpled letter from the side of the armchair where it had been flung. There would be things to sort out, work for one, it was the law that had been passed in parliament earlier that year that stated a reserve soldier called up for duty must have a job to return to. But would it actually happen that way, many of Grays friends were under no illusion that they would come back to nothing, or at least a job for a few weeks until the boss found a way to fire them. It was unfortunately the way of the world. Still they should have seen the signs coming, the reports on the news, the images of the starving population coming across the borders. Whole families loaded onto the back of Massey Ferguson tractors, trailers piled high with the wretched remains of their former lives. The Balkans were a dangerous place to be, a hotbed of fanatical religious parties fighting one another, ethnic cleansing was the buzzword too often quoted on broadcasts from concerned politicians who once again were too late to change a thing. The United Nations peacekeeping forces had been massing in Cyprus and Italy for weeks now and it seemed that the politician’s talks had finally faltered, and rightly or wrongly, someone had pulled the chain on pointless negotiations and settlements. The time had come to send the peacekeepers in. The difference between this conflict and the previous Desert Storm and Falklands war were two fold. On the one had was the fact that the armed forces in Britain had been cut by almost a third of what they were in the late eighties early nineties. On the other hand was the small detail that the ever changing former Yugoslavia states were of course also former parts of the Russian war machine, and no one really wanted to get on the wrong side of the Russian Bear. No matter how cuddly he had become. Gary stood up and walked over to the fireplace, looking at his reflection in the glass on the picture that hung over it, he knew he wasn’t looking at one of life’s winners. After nine years in the RAF he had left at the same time as a wave of redundancy’s, these were caused by natural shrinkage as a result of new technology and a dwindling need for the British to be all over the world, policing trouble spots. But he was under no illusion as to the real reason they didn’t need him any more, it was the same old story, if you didn’t play the right game with the right people then you were out of the running. That’s the way it had always seemed to be, from camp to camp, if you went out every night and failed to make it to work on time, then you were one of the lads. If you stayed at home with your family then you were anti social and didn’t try to fit in. Gary had seen it happen time after time to others, sadly he failed to notice it happening to him. The phone, on its table with the cd’s, rang. |