‘Hey, boss,’ said Carr. ‘We’ve got Wayne down round the back there, and Geordie’s took a bad one to the leg. So you’re right, it’s not good that he’s dead. It’s fucking great. Now, we need to get the fuck back to the FOB.’

2.

SIX MONTHS LATER – nineteen years after he’d passed Selection and walked into Stirling Lines in Hereford for the first time as a young blade – it was all over.

Carr had spent the time since getting back from that last tour on gardening leave, getting ready to leave the Army.

It wasn’t easy – the military was all he’d known since his early adulthood – and his marriage was collapsing. Not many lasted in his line of work: the longest period he and Stella had spent together since he’d joined the Regiment was three weeks, and being thrown together – with all the comedown of a demanding trip to Iraq, and the emotion of leaving... They weren’t at daggers drawn, but she didn’t know him anymore, and he didn’t know her, and neither of them cared too much. She was talking about taking the kids back home to Bangor, the County Down town where they’d met and courted. He wasn’t too keen on that – his little girl, in particular, was happy and settled in a good little school near Hereford – but he wasn’t sure he had the strength to fight her.

At least he had a decent job lined up – security manager with an oil company in Southern Iraq. Eight hundred quid a day, month on, month off. He might finally buy himself a decent car.

He’d spent a fair while with Geordie – that round in Dora had shattered the SQMS’s femur, and after three operations and a lot of metalwork he’d been left with a nice limp and a good line in bitter, melodramatic asides. The SAS never medically discharges any man against his will – there’s always a desk job needs doing somewhere – but Skelton had put his own papers in. If he was never going to make sergeant major, and clearly he wasn’t now, then what was the point?

‘Probably for the best,’ Carr had said, deadpan, as he sat in his mate’s hospital room. ‘You’d only have ruined the Squadron, anyway.’

The last thing he’d done in uniform was to attend the funeral of Wayne Rooney. It always upset him to see a flag-draped coffin, adorned with a beige beret, and it was even worse when the guy in question was young.

Rooney had been just twenty-four, and engaged to his childhood sweetheart.

But Carr took comfort in the fact that the men who wore that beret accepted the risk that came with it.