Several rifles were cracking around Kale now and the soldier on his left fell suddenly across him, half of his head torn away. Kale kicked the man off him and watched the thick, sticky blood staining the khaki of his shirt. The shelling had stopped to allow the troops to move in, but no one stirred from his cover. The five men who had moved out earlier were all dead. And now the slightest movement brought the crack of a rifle from somewhere up ahead. Almost without fail the marksman was making a hit. Kale shifted his position slightly and picked up a dead soldier’s helmet out of the dust. He threw it along to the sergeant. ‘Stick that up on your bayonet so he can see it,’ he shouted.

The sergeant glanced grimly at him and saw that there were only the two of them left alive in the crater. The others were sheltering behind a wall away to their left. ‘Who’s giving the fucking orders here?’ he growled. Kale said nothing and the sergeant spat and then hooked the helmet over the top of his bayonet and pushed it above the level of the crater. Almost as soon as it appeared a bullet spun it away behind them and the sergeant heard a second shot from only a few feet away as he pulled himself tight into the rim. Kale had caught only the briefest glimpse of the sniper as the man shot at the helmet. But it had been enough. Enough for him to get in his shot and feel a tight satisfaction as the sharpshooter toppled from his cover at the end of what had once been the main street of the village. Two more figures moved in the shadows. His rifle cracked again, twice, and both fell. ‘That’s some bloody shooting, Private Kale!’ The sergeant grinned momentarily and then thought better of it. ‘You can hang in here and give us cover when we move in.’

Kale had been as accurate in training, but it had meant little to him. Strangely now there was something precious in the skill. When he saw how he could cut men down. The sergeant noticed the curl of a humourless smile on Kale’s lips and frowned. What the hell was there to smile about? But in these last minutes Kale had discovered a sense of purpose. In the final event it was the only thing the army had given him. It had led him to find in himself this cold, calculated ability to kill. An ability that transmuted all his crippled bitterness into a perfect and tangible expression. Out of all those long, hot days under the relentless Aden sun, the endless, cramped, unsanitary nights among the cockroaches and the sweating bodies, had emerged a vocation, and with it an inner confidence that had finally enabled him to stand apart from a world he despised.

*