A Regimental Affair (12 page)

‘Really? So much?’

‘Are you sitting comfortably? Let me tell you.’

And Debbie launched into her favourite subject – the trials of being an army wife. As she talked, Taz reached into her handbag and, unseen by Debbie, switched on her tiny tape recorder. ‘People think that soldiers are some sort of modern-day heroes but … oh, and talking about being married to a hero,’ she said, remembering something she’d been planning to tell Taz after she had finished her monologue. ‘We’ve got a real live hero in the regiment.’

‘Oh, who?’

‘The CO. You know that piece on the local news yesterday about the car crash on the motorway?’ Taz nodded. ‘Well, it was Bob Davies who went back to try and rescue that woman.’

‘Good grief.’

‘Of course, he doesn’t want it to get out. He’s got enough on his plate what with Kosovo coming up shortly. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

‘You’ve got my word,’ said Taz. ‘Besides, who on earth would I tell?’

As she left the toddler group shortly after eleven, using the pretext that Amelia needed a nap, she thought that if it was a slow news day it was just the sort of thing the
Mercury
or the
Messenger
might like. It was worth a try.

Ginny could hear the CO yelling from her office at the other end of the corridor in RHQ.

‘Someone told them. I want guts for garters,’ he thundered. The phone calls from the press, wanting confirmation about the story, had started about midday and by mid-afternoon he had taken his phone off the hook and ordered Richard to do the same. ‘Anyone who wants us can get us via the chief clerk or Alisdair.’ Ginny had heard that Finnegan had been the prime suspect for a while but eventually he’d managed to convince the CO that it wasn’t him.

‘Let’s face it, Colonel,’ said Richard. ‘It could be anyone.’ The CO was forced to agree, but he issued an order that no one,
no one
, was to talk to the press about this or any other matter without getting permission from RHQ. He knew that he couldn’t stop the wives from giving interviews if they were so inclined, but he made it clear to the troops that if they did they might find their next posting was the Falklands or somewhere equally out of the way. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he meant it.

The only thing left for him to do was to warn Alice and Megan to expect to see him in the next day’s papers. Megan thought it was ‘cool’ but Alice was horrified. Bob had tried to comfort her with the thought that, as they were ex-directory, she wouldn’t get called, and with their house being in a barracks there wouldn’t be any pictures.

‘This story can’t last long with nothing much to go on,’ he said.

Debbie was delighted when Taz asked if she could pop round. Apparently Amelia had been pestering her to play with Danny since they got home from the toddler group and she wondered if it would be OK to bring her over? Debbie had nothing planned to occupy the afternoon and thought this was a grand idea. She rang the guardroom to organise access for Taz into the barracks. A quarter of an hour later they rang to say that her visitor had arrived but it seemed to take an inordinately long time for Taz to appear on her doorstep.

‘I got lost,’ she explained. ‘I never did know my left from my right.’ Debbie accepted this. She was as bad.

The next day Lieutenant Colonel Robert Davies discovered that the
Mercury
had dubbed him ‘Colonel Car Crash’ and, what was more, had a picture of him entering his house. His rage hit new heights. He became incandescent when his new name appeared to strike a chord with the public. Local radio rang and asked for interviews with Colonel Car Crash, and the local TV company wanted a shot of him at the bedside of the rescued woman. Even a couple of the broadsheets ran the story when it also came out that he was just about to embark on an emergency peacekeeping tour in Kosovo. It was good PR for the army but Bob had more than enough to cope with without this sort of limelight. ‘

‘Thank God I’m leaving the country tomorrow,’ he said. At least once he was in Kosovo they’d leave him and his wife alone.

Chapter Eight

Ginny had a window seat on the elderly RAF VC10 transporting the regiment out to Kosovo. From thirty-five thousand feet, the ground below resembled a multi-coloured map more than real terrain and Ginny could clearly see the green and brown of the Italian coast give way to the startling blue of the Adriatic. From her bird’s-eye position she could see minute ships, mere dots, plying across the sparkling water like tiny insects crawling across a blue carpet. The sea then became dotted with dozens of islands – the Dalmatian coast, she assumed – and then they were flying over land again.
Almost there
, she thought, with a slight frisson of apprehension. She felt the pressure in the cabin change as they began their gentle descent into Kosovo and she looked out of the window with increased interest, wondering what it would be like to live and work in a place that had been the scene of such a recent and bloody war.

The temperature on the ground was pleasantly warm when they disembarked at Priština airport. Well, it was called an airport but the reality was a large concrete shed, a cluster of sundry tatty buildings, and a motley collection of aircraft, all military.
Hardly Heathrow
, thought Ginny. A tractor towing a rickety assembly of trailers rattled over towards the RAF passenger jet ready to collect their luggage, and by the terminal were a group of men, all in scruffy jeans, waiting to move the bags from the trailers to the ancient conveyor belt that was the Kosovan equivalent of a luggage carousel.

Ginny and the rest of the troops lounged around in the sun as they waited for everything to be sorted. It all seemed so normal and pleasant. It was hard to imagine that this was a country that had torn itself apart, neighbour against neighbour, so recently. Ginny and the others lay in the warm sunshine and took their ease, with nothing to do until their kit had been unloaded. Their boredom was relieved as they watched another military transport in United Nations livery come in and there was another flurry of activity as a couple of helicopters took off from the other side of the runway. Then their gear arrived at the terminal and bedlam ensued as they all scrabbled to find their own stuff and take it to the waiting convoy of buses.

They drove through the main town. Ginny was surprised by how normal it all looked. She hadn’t been quite sure what to expect but it hadn’t been this modern, bustling town with gleaming buildings of glass and concrete. But it wasn’t long before they left Priština behind and drove out into the country. Again, it all looked so
normal
. The fields were cultivated, there were crops and cattle and prosperous-looking farms, and then they drove into a village. Superficially it could have been any foreign village; houses topped by roofs with wide eaves to provide shade from the intense summer sun and protection from the heavy winter snows; balconies and verandas for the inhabitants to siesta on; shady, dusty trees growing in scruffy yards; and side roads consisting of little more than compacted hard core. Cats dozed on the tops of walls; a couple of scrawny dogs nosed about a pile of rubbish and the locals pottered about, shopping, chatting on street corners, sweeping dust off the front steps to their houses. But in amongst this placid normality were dozens of reminders of more brutal, vicious times. There were burnt-out shells of buildings, pockmarks on the walls where bullets or mortars had struck. There were splash marks in the concrete where heavy ordnance had landed. The minaret of a mosque was lying shattered on the ground; there were patches of weed-covered rubble where buildings had been completely destroyed, And yet, around these scenes of destruction and violence, life was continuing as before. One house, completely roofless, was clearly still inhabited as there were clothes drying on the line in the unkempt garden and a child’s trike parked by the open door. Presumably, whatever had happened to the house had left the ground floor or the cellar habitable.

Richard, sitting in the seat behind Ginny, leaned forward to talk to her. ‘The houses that are untouched mostly belonged to the Christians. The ones that have been trashed belonged to the Muslim Serbs and the Albanians.’

And Ginny realised it was obvious, now that Richard had pointed it out to her. There were little groups of completely wrecked buildings, then beside them, or on the other side of the road, were groups of untouched ones. Ginny had thought that the destruction had been random – the luck of the draw – but now she could see that it had been carefully, sadistically targeted.

Although there were numerous reminders of the recent fighting, the people were trying to eradicate them as fast as their meagre resources would allow. A couple of buildings had been patched up; new roofs were replacing the war-damaged ones. Some of the bullet holes had been filled in with new plaster and, in places, the rubble had been bulldozed away and new buildings were going up. But Ginny wondered if it was the old inhabitants returning or others moving in, taking advantage of the vacant possession. She didn’t think many would be inclined to return to their old villages if their neighbours had driven them out. The scars of the fighting were being removed but would the human scars be so easy to shift? Somehow she doubted it.

It was a couple of hours later that their coach drew up outside a large brick and breezeblock building. It had once been some sort of industrial unit – a factory or a warehouse – but now it was to be their home while the soldiers patrolled the local area, keeping the different ethnic groups apart, stopping them from settling scores or wreaking revenge. As a new home it looked far from inviting but, as it was situated at the head of a wide valley, it did command a spectacular view across the countryside to the distant mountains that rose broodingly against the far horizon.

Ginny looked around the bleak room that was to be hers and sighed. She supposed she was lucky to get a room to herself but, with its bare concrete floor and breezeblock walls, it was the most unwelcoming place she had ever lived in and, with only just enough space for her camp bed, one of the smallest.

Richard put his head round the door. ‘Lucky you. Luxury.’

‘Huh,’ said Ginny.

‘You’ve at least got a window – mine hasn’t.’

‘That’s
all
I’ve got. What’s your place like?’

‘Same stunning range of matching soft furnishings, carpets and wall coverings as yours but bigger, so I get to share with five others.’

‘Ugh. And no window! You’ll need your gas masks at the ready, won’t you?’

‘I hope to God no one smokes. A naked flame in that sort of atmosphere could be dangerous.’

‘Lethal,’ agreed Ginny. She pushed her kitbag into a corner and began to assemble her camp bed.

‘I’ll let you get on and sort yourself out. Don’t forget the CO’s briefing. At five.’

‘I won’t.’

For Ginny, life in Kosovo was not that different from her life back in Britain. The job she did, to all intents and purposes, was much the same – basic admin didn’t change just because the location did – and she was surrounded by the same faces as before and working much the same hours. The weather was undeniably better than back in England and Ginny, with very little in the way of entertainment, found that most of her leisure time, when she wasn’t trying to maintain her level of fitness, was spent reading books and improving her tan. Every now and again it was necessary for her to go to the main British base to get cash for the soldiers’ pay and deal with sundry other admin jobs. She looked forward to these trips as they relieved the boredom of her normal routine.

Late in the autumn, Ginny was in Richard’s office checking with him which would be the best day for her to do her next run back to base.

‘Whichever,’ Richard had said. ‘It’s all the same to me, to be honest.’

‘How about tomorrow?’ said Colonel Bob from the doorway.

‘Why?’ said Ginny turning round.

‘I’ve got to go too. It makes sense for us to go together and save a journey.’

Ginny couldn’t argue with that logic.

‘Right. I’ll meet you at oh-eight-hundred out the front.’

Ginny went back to her office feeling happy. She couldn’t deny it – a day in Bob’s company would be a whole heap better than a day in the company of a squaddie driver. She looked forward to the morning …

‘So, where’s Corporal Finnegan?’ asked Ginny, the next morning, as she shoved her briefcase in the back of the Rover and climbed into the passenger seat.

‘I gave him the day off. I quite enjoy driving and there didn’t seem much point in dragging him along. Besides which it would have been a squash with three of us in the front.’

‘True.’ And the back was mostly taken up with the radio set, although there was a seat for a radio operator, but the ride in the rear was desperately uncomfortable and with the sort of roads they would be travelling over it would have been a nightmare.

‘Do you know the way, Colonel, or would you like me to map read?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Bob as he slipped the vehicle into gear and drew away from the building. ‘I hope you’ve got plenty to do. I’ve got a meeting at two which won’t finish till three at the earliest.’

‘I’m sure I’ll find something to keep me out of trouble till you’re finished,’ she replied. A whole day away from the claustrophobia of their billet. Bliss.

Ginny tried not to clutch the seat of the Land Rover as it wound up the side of the valley. On her right was a steep forty-five-degree drop through woods to the valley floor, a couple of hundred feet below. The view was stunning and Ginny tried to concentrate on that rather than on the parlous state of the road and the rapidly approaching dusk. Occasionally the road crossed a bridge as a stream hurtled its way down the mountain to join the main river that gushed along the valley floor. Bob changed gear down into second as the road steepened. The engine roared and Ginny tried to ignore the dodgy highway with its crumbling verges, potholes and occasional rocks scattered along it from the hillside above.

‘Not so far now,’ he said loudly over the racket.

‘Good,’ yelled back Ginny, hoping she sounded unconcerned. She squinted out of her window at the sun, dipping behind the ridge across the other side of the valley. ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it back before dark, though.’