Whispers of Betrayal Read Free

and a portrait hanging in a position of honour in the mess. A man who had risked his life on occasions beyond remembering in the service of his country.
    A man who now values his life as no greater than a discarded cigarette butt.
    Scully.
    They’d betrayed him, too.
    One minute he had been sitting in a bar off a cobbled backstreet in Osnabrück, having a last drink before being sent out to Kosovo, the next he’d been spewing his mince and tatties into his partner’s hands, his leg and his career shattered by a coffee-jar bomb. Kids’ stuff, those bombs. A simple affair, nothing more than a glass jar filled with scrapyard confetti and a compression detonator, and the top screwed on. The coffee jar had been thrown from the back of a motor scooter which disappeared into the night even before the coffee jar had hit the floor. The one brief sighting of the bombers suggested they were teenagers. Truly kids’ stuff. When the glass broke less than a dick-length away from Scully’s right foot, the detonator had decompressed and exploded, and the confetti – sharp, murderous chunks of metal with razor teeth – had chewed a path halfway through his leg. All in a day’s work for a Para keeping the peace on the streets of Djakovice or Pristina, perhaps, but not in a backstreet bar in Germany, not when he wasoff duty. Which is why, when they decided they had no further use for a soldier with only one leg, they offered him their very best wishes but no compensation beyond a meagre disability payment. They argued that Osnabrück wasn’t a war zone, the sort of place where you budget for a heavy cripple count. Hell, he was off duty. Drinking! Couldn’t expect the Treasury to pay for every last damned scratch. It was unfortunate, of course, and unexpected, but that’s what goes with being a soldier. Have to expect the unexpected. Of course, the two youths on the scooter might have been members of the pro-Serbian Prince Lazar terrorist group that was chucking bombs all over the place. That was entirely possible, but not provable. So, sorry, Skulls. Now, if you’d actually reached Kosovo, that would’ve been different, and Northern Ireland, too. Part of the home country. Sensitive. Soldiers weren’t supposed to get blown up and butchered on home turf, so if Scully had copped it there he’d have got a thousand pounds a stitch.
    But Osnabrück wasn’t the Bogside. Scully hadn’t been an innocent victim. He’d simply been … well, unlucky. Wrong place, wrong life. A trooper with a bad break. And only one leg. As if he’d fallen down stairs on a Friday night. And if they paid out to every soldier on the basis of bad luck, where would the System be?
    So Scully’s career had disappeared, and with it his wife. Then Scully, too, shortly after that.
    Until tonight.
    Amadeus was about to launch himself after the RSM, but now his wife was at his side, dragging him back, as always she dragged him back. Anyway, Amadeus knew there was little point in pursuit; if Scully didn’t wish to be found then he would not be found.
    Suddenly Amadeus found himself overcome by a feeling he could only describe as envy. Envy of Scully, of this man in the gutter. Of his freedom, his ability simply to be able to disappear and leave the whole miserable mess behind him. God’s bollocks, it had come down to that. He was jealous of a fucking tramp.
    His wife was summoning him, demanding he find a taxi. The call of duty. At one point in the Gulf War, during his tour with the SAS, Amadeus had been leading a Scud hunting patrol and in the darknessof the desert night had stumbled across a recce company of Iraqis. They shouldn’t have been there, according to the oxymorons at Army Intelligence, and even if they were they shouldn’t have offered any resistance, certainly not a fire fight. With only seven men Amadeus had captured 43 Iraqi regulars – 49 if you counted the body bags. Stopped an entire Iraqi company. For that they’d given him the Military