Free The Soldier's Wife by Joanna Trollope

it.’
    â€˜Thanks,’ Gus said, ‘but I’ll grab a bite in the mess. I’ll go back there when I’ve dropped you.’ He grinned briefly. ‘I might catch a sight of the new girl subbie they’ve appointed to target information. She has a habit, apparently, of coming down into the mess at night in her pyjamas and coolly picking up a plated meal to take back to her bedroom.’
    â€˜A looker?’
    â€˜Blonde,’ Gus said shortly.
    Dan said, ‘I’m not going to have a drink tonight.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜I – I can’t concentrate. I’m still too amped to concentrate. Drinking makes it worse.’
    â€˜Or bearable.’
    â€˜Maybe.’
    â€˜What Kate doesn’t get,’ Gus said, staring straight through the windscreen, ‘is that I don’t drink to blot out the bad stuff I’ve seen and been a part of. I drink because – because I miss the good stuff.’
    â€˜We haven’t been back a week yet.’
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜The trouble is,’ Dan said, ‘that on ops, everything is important.
Everything
. Nothing is taken for granted. You can trust the next man with your
life
, for God’s sake.’
    â€˜I expect,’ Gus said, a little sadly, ‘that you could trust Alexa with yours.’
    â€˜When I was out there,’ Dan said, ‘when I wasn’t thinking about the battery, I was thinking about her. And the girls.’
    Gus grunted.
    Dan said, ‘It was a bit crackpot, I suppose, but I sort of told myself I was protecting them.’
    Gus turned to look at him. ‘You bloody
what
?’
    Dan stared straight ahead too now. ‘Didn’t you feel that? Didn’t you think that even if you couldn’t justify killing for its own sake, you could always make a case for killing to protect people you love?’
    Gus shook his head. ‘Mental …’
    â€˜It’s not,’ Dan said. ‘It’s just understanding that if you are protecting something precious, you can get your head to a place where anything seems justified.’
    Gus sighed, as if arguing with Dan would be a complete waste of breath and effort. He said, ‘Would you say that to Alexa?’
    â€˜Nope,’ Dan said.
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜More protectiveness. I don’t want her to know what we saw and did. Especially the close shaves. I most
definitely
do not intend for her to know that. If I tell her something, even something with a happy ending, like the medic who told me to grind my knee into Flasher’s thigh, between his wound and his heart, to stop the blood flow, and it worked, I’d still leave her with the image, wouldn’t I, and then she’d be wondering what I hadn’t told her, what happened that
didn’t
have a happy ending. She’d be picturing the blood and the piss and the—’
    â€˜Stop it, Dan,’ Gus said. ‘You’re fucking sweating.’
    â€˜I don’t want to sweat in front of Alexa.’
    â€˜At least,’ Gus said, ‘she’s
there
.’
    â€˜Fuck
me
,’ Dan said. ‘
Fuck
me. So
sorry
—’
    â€˜Maybe it’s for the best, Kate sticking to her routine. I don’t want to be a nuisance round her. I’ll have adjusted a bit more by Friday.’
    Dan bent forward and put one forearm across his eyes. Gus put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’ he said again.
    Muffled, Dan said, ‘I should be asking you that.’
    â€˜I’m no more OK than you, mate. Brave face, fighting talk. That’s what we do.’
    Dan raised his head. He said, ‘You long for home, don’t you? You fight for it. But what you forget when you’re away is that ordinary life won’t kill you, except by accident, so of course everything looks pretty small here by comparison. And pretty dull.’
    â€˜There are some advantages, though.’
    â€˜Name