kit.
I lay on my bed and did some mental adding up: The house and stables might raise half a million, the business might just fetch fifty thousand, and there was another fifty thousand in the bank. Add the ISAs and a few pieces of antique furniture and we were probably still short by more than four hundred thousand.
And my mother and Derek had to live somewhere. Where would they go and what could they earn if Kauri House Stables was sold? My mother was hardly going to find work as a cleaner, especially in Lambourn. She would have rather gone to prison.
But going to prison wasn’t an either/or solution anyway. If she was sent down she would still have to pay the tax, and the penalties.
Over the years I had saved regularly from my army pay and had accumulated quite a reasonable nest egg that I had planned to use sometime as a down payment on a house. And I had invested it in a far more secure manner than my parent, so I could be pretty sure of still having about sixty thousand pounds to my name.
I wondered if the Revenue would take installments on the never-never.
The only other solution I came up with was to approach the circumstances as if I had been in command of my platoon in the middle of Afghanistan planning a combat estimate for an operation against the Taliban.
PROBLEM: enemy in control of objective (tax papers and money)
MISSION: neutralize enemy and retake objective
SITUATION: enemy forces—number, identity and location all unknown friendly forces—self only, no reinforcements available
WEAPONS: as required and/or as available
EXECUTION: Initially find and interrogate Roderick Ward or, if in fact really dead, his known associates. Follow up on blackmail notes and telephone messages to determine source.
TACTICS: absolute stealth, no local authorities to be alerted, enemy to be kept unaware of operation until final strike
TIMINGS: task to be completed asap, and before exposure by local authorities—their timescale unknown
H HOUR: operation start time: right now
6
A ll I could see of him were his eyes, his cold, black eyes that stared at me from beneath his turban. He showed no emotion but simply raised a rusty Kalashnikov to his shoulder.
I fired at him, but he continued to lift the gun. I fired at him again, over and over, but without any visible effects. I was desperate. I emptied my complete magazine into him, but still he swung the barrel of the AK-47 around towards me, lining up the sights with my head. A smile showed in his eyes, and I began to scream.
I woke with a start, my heart pumping madly and with sweat all over my body.
“Thomas! Thomas!” someone was shouting, and there was banging on my bedroom door.
“Yes,” I called back into the darkness. “I’m fine.”
“You were screaming.” It was my mother. She was outside my room on the landing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just a bad dream.”
“Good night, then,” she called suddenly, and I could hear her footfalls as she moved away.
“Good night,” I called back, too quietly and too late.
I suppose it was too much to expect my mother to change the habits of a lifetime, but it would have been nice if she had asked me how I was, or if I needed anything, or at least if she could come into my room to cool my sweating brow, or anything.
I laid my head back onto the pillow.
I could still remember the dream so clearly. In the last couple of months, I had started to have them fairly regularly about the war. They were always a jumble of memories of real incidents coupled with the imagination of my subconscious brain, unalike insofar as they were of different events but all with a common thread—they all ended with me in panic and utter terror. I was always more terrified by the dreams than I remember ever having been in reality.
Except, of course, at the roadside after the IED.
I could remember all too vividly the terrible fear and the awful dread of dying I had experienced as Sergeant O’Leary and I had waited for
I lay on my bed and did some mental adding up: The house and stables might raise half a million, the business might just fetch fifty thousand, and there was another fifty thousand in the bank. Add the ISAs and a few pieces of antique furniture and we were probably still short by more than four hundred thousand.
And my mother and Derek had to live somewhere. Where would they go and what could they earn if Kauri House Stables was sold? My mother was hardly going to find work as a cleaner, especially in Lambourn. She would have rather gone to prison.
But going to prison wasn’t an either/or solution anyway. If she was sent down she would still have to pay the tax, and the penalties.
Over the years I had saved regularly from my army pay and had accumulated quite a reasonable nest egg that I had planned to use sometime as a down payment on a house. And I had invested it in a far more secure manner than my parent, so I could be pretty sure of still having about sixty thousand pounds to my name.
I wondered if the Revenue would take installments on the never-never.
The only other solution I came up with was to approach the circumstances as if I had been in command of my platoon in the middle of Afghanistan planning a combat estimate for an operation against the Taliban.
PROBLEM: enemy in control of objective (tax papers and money)
MISSION: neutralize enemy and retake objective
SITUATION: enemy forces—number, identity and location all unknown friendly forces—self only, no reinforcements available
WEAPONS: as required and/or as available
EXECUTION: Initially find and interrogate Roderick Ward or, if in fact really dead, his known associates. Follow up on blackmail notes and telephone messages to determine source.
TACTICS: absolute stealth, no local authorities to be alerted, enemy to be kept unaware of operation until final strike
TIMINGS: task to be completed asap, and before exposure by local authorities—their timescale unknown
H HOUR: operation start time: right now
6
A ll I could see of him were his eyes, his cold, black eyes that stared at me from beneath his turban. He showed no emotion but simply raised a rusty Kalashnikov to his shoulder.
I fired at him, but he continued to lift the gun. I fired at him again, over and over, but without any visible effects. I was desperate. I emptied my complete magazine into him, but still he swung the barrel of the AK-47 around towards me, lining up the sights with my head. A smile showed in his eyes, and I began to scream.
I woke with a start, my heart pumping madly and with sweat all over my body.
“Thomas! Thomas!” someone was shouting, and there was banging on my bedroom door.
“Yes,” I called back into the darkness. “I’m fine.”
“You were screaming.” It was my mother. She was outside my room on the landing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just a bad dream.”
“Good night, then,” she called suddenly, and I could hear her footfalls as she moved away.
“Good night,” I called back, too quietly and too late.
I suppose it was too much to expect my mother to change the habits of a lifetime, but it would have been nice if she had asked me how I was, or if I needed anything, or at least if she could come into my room to cool my sweating brow, or anything.
I laid my head back onto the pillow.
I could still remember the dream so clearly. In the last couple of months, I had started to have them fairly regularly about the war. They were always a jumble of memories of real incidents coupled with the imagination of my subconscious brain, unalike insofar as they were of different events but all with a common thread—they all ended with me in panic and utter terror. I was always more terrified by the dreams than I remember ever having been in reality.
Except, of course, at the roadside after the IED.
I could remember all too vividly the terrible fear and the awful dread of dying I had experienced as Sergeant O’Leary and I had waited for
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