Free First Into Action by Duncan Falconer

both were articulate in speech and sophisticated in manner and dress. So much so that out of uniform they were often mistaken for young officers in training. I never asked either of them why they were not.
    A week later I trudged out of CTC carrying my kitbag and suitcase, having added a few uniforms to my worldly possessions, and headed for Poole. I had a weekend’s leave, but I didn’t want to go home to London and my father. I didn’t want him to know I was attending an SBS selection course either, not that it would have meant anything to him. He had been a soldier himself, in the Second World War, a conscript, but he knew nothing about soldiering today. I decided to send him a postcard when I got to Poole just to say hello. Poole was not far away, but I took the whole weekend getting there, catching buses and stopping off at a couple of coastal bed-and-breakfast places on the way. I was more unsure of my future than ever, but for some reason the world was starting to look quite a beautiful place to me.

3
    By the third night of the ambush I started to have serious doubts about whether O’Sally was ever coming. I had lost the razor edge I had arrived with the first night. The muzzle of my weapon had drifted off the critical arc of fire I had set for myself. I shifted a little too noisily. I often took my hand off my weapon stock to reach into a pocket for a piece of nutty. I began to realise why they had given me this ambush. It was because the odds on O’Sally coming home were really very low. ‘Let the sprog have that one,’ I could hear them saying. Otherwise they would have sent their best people on a kill like this. And what had the SAS trooper around the front done to deserve getting stuck on this job?
    Then I heard a noise close by – a stick breaking underfoot. My senses screamed into focus, my head went tight with concentration, I stopped breathing, my heart virtually stopped beating and the world moved into slow-motion.
    Seconds later it came again. Definitely a footstep, followed seconds later by another. My heart kicked in again. It felt like a lead weight bouncing hard inside my rib-cage. Someone was slowly approaching down the hedgerow. My mouth was slightly open, an instinctive reaction that improves the hearing. I took shallow breaths. Adrenaline pissed through my veins. I carefully moved my weapon to aim at the end of the hedgerow just yards from me. Another footstep. My finger was lightly touching the trigger, a little more pressure and a burst of bullets would roar from it. I wanted to hit him in the head first shot, but what if he was crouching? What if I aimed too high and missed his brain? I aimed lower, my plan being to move it up and unzip him from belly to forehead. It would not matter if he had a bullet-proof vest, not with this weapon. You would need three-quarter-inch steel plate to stop 5.56mm high velocity at this range.
    The footsteps paused. He was listening. I could not afford to even blink or swallow now. If I could not see his face, he could not see me yet. How long would he wait to step forward? As soon as I could make out the remotest outline I would let rip at it. What if it wasn’t O’Sally? Tough shit. I’d find out when I shone a torch on his dead face. No one else was supposed to be out here anyway. It was not my SAS partner. We had a signal worked out if one needed to approach the other. A few days earlier, on the border near Forkhill, a duck-hunter had been shot and killed when he turned the corner of a field to face the point-man of a Marine patrol. The Marine simply saw a man carrying a gun and cut him in half. No one blamed the Marine. Duck-hunting in bandit country was not the brightest of pastimes. Anyway, this had to be O’Sally. He always took point. I had the drop on him. I was going to shoot the son-of-a-bitch right through his message centre, stop the signals from moving down his cerebral cortex to his finger so he would not pull that trigger and kill me.