Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(17)
“Wuh . . . what?”
“YOU WILL MAKE YOUR WAY TO BARRACKS ON FOOT DUGGAN! NIGHT NAVIGATION EXERCISE, YOU LUCKY MAN! PULLED YOUR NAME OUT OF THE HAT AT RANDOM SO HELP ME GOD!”
Duggan did not move.
“WELL COME ON, DUGGAN! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? EVERY MINUTE YOU SIT THERE ON YOUR ARSE IS A MINUTE YOU ARE KEEPING THESE SOLDIERS FROM THEIR STEAK-AND-ALE PIES AND THEIR HOT BATHS AND THEIR BEDS!”
“Buh . . . but I don’t know how to get to buh . . . barracks.”
“BARRACKS IS IN WARMINSTER, DUGGAN, EXACTLY WHERE WE LEFT IT!”
“I know where buh . . . barracks is. I don’t know whu . . . where we are.”
The sergeant major leered. The loose flap of canvas set up a volley of sudden claps as a gust caught the truck, rocking it on its springs.
“DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN HAVE IN YOUR POSSESSION ONE BRACKETS ONE COPY OF THE MAP WITH WHICH YOU WERE ALL ISSUED MR. DUGGAN HIS MAJESTY’S ORDNANCE SURVEY SIX INCH TO ONE MILE ENGLAND DASH WILTSHIRE COLON ZERO FIVE TWO?”
“Yes buh . . . but I don’t know whu . . . where we are on it.”
“DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN WHEN I WARNED YOU THAT THE MIST WAS CLOSING IN USE THE LAST VISIBILITY TO TAKE BEARINGS WITH YOUR MARK TWO HAND-BEARING COMPASS AND LANYARD THEN TRANSFER THOSE BEARINGS ONTO THE AFOREMENTIONED MAP AS PER YOUR TRAINING MR. DUGGAN IN ORDER TO TRIANGULATE YOUR POSITION?”
“Nuh . . . no, Sergeant Major.”
“Oh,” said the sergeant major reflectively. “Could be a long night for you, then. Never mind, lesson learned. Come along now, out you hop.”
Duggan’s face blanched in the hard disc of torchlight the sergeant major kept him pinned in. His eyes were red. “You can’t duh . . . do this.”
The sergeant major said nothing and kept the torch trained. Duggan, dazzled by the light, appealed blindly to the company.
“He can’t duh . . . do this. He can’t suh . . . single me out!”
Alistair could not watch Duggan’s face, urgent with expectation, falling when nothing came back from the other men. There was only a soft scraping of boots on the wooden floor of the truck as positions were adjusted.
“Duggan,” said the sergeant major, “I can understand that you may not wish to do this alone, so let me give you a choice. If you are not out of this vehicle in thirty seconds, then everyone will get out and the whole company will march back to barracks with you. Is that what you want, Mr. Duggan?”
Duggan was brittle in the torchlight. “I . . . I . . .”
There was silence for five seconds, then ten. Then, somewhere outside the cold disc of torchlight, a man coughed, and stretched it into a muttering. The hard guttural of the cough disguised the initial consonant: “*et out!”
A pause, then more coughing from the men in their darkness. “*et out! et the hell out of here! et the bloody hell out Duggan you useless *astard!” The men coughed their judgment into the dark, each damnation blent with a paroxysm of the diaphragm so that the men spoke not only with their tongues but also with their tired bodies that were scourged and sleepy and did not want to go back out into the storm.
Alistair did not join in, but though he wished they would stop he did nothing. Duggan turned to him—or almost to him. Blinded in his small circle of light, he addressed a place slightly to Alistair’s right. In a small voice on the edge of cracking he said, “Huh . . . Heath?” And then, when no answer came, “Alistair?”
Alistair clutched his arms tight around himself. He heard the roaring of the gale and felt the fragile warmth within him. He would be so quickly struck back to numbness if he went out into it all again.
He made himself look at Duggan. The man had a strangely flat face in the torchlight, almost concave. It was a weak face—Alistair saw this now, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before. It would not be a difficult one to take aversion to. If I had a face like that, Alistair thought, I should probably have learned by his age to be more careful whom I was rude to.
Alistair looked at the weak, beseeching face and felt a surge of anger. This was a man he had spoken with for only a few minutes, and who therefore had no claim to fraternity. They had exchanged a few witticisms, that was all. They had sat out of the wind for a moment, enjoying a solidarity that, now he came to think of it, had been rather smug and based on the understanding that they were cut from finer cloth than the other men. And now here he was, warmed by those other men’s whisky.
“Alistair?”
The wind whipped at the canvas. The men waited on his word. But Alistair did not want to go back out into the storm, and so in the darkness he said nothing.
In the spotlight of the torch, Duggan’s pleading look softened into misery and then dissolved entirely. Finally, as he took his pack and rifle and clambered toward the tailgate, Duggan, the actor, was expressionless.
The truck lifted on its springs and settled again as Duggan’s weight dropped over the back. The sergeant major extinguished his torch and slammed the tailgate shut. Alistair felt the truck rock again as the sergeant major climbed into the cab, then the door slammed and the truck lurched as the driver set it in motion over the tussocks of grass. In the back, all of them sat in silence as the truck picked up a lurching, jolting speed over the trackless plain.
No one joked now, or swore, or passed whisky. Now each man alone in his sodden clothes weighed the warmth of the things he had gained against the cost of them, and since the price had been paid by all of them acting together, it was best if they all sat alone. Rain roared against the canvas and entered in chill streams wherever it found ingress. The wind blew knives.