Part Six:
Patriots
1
The place looked smaller than Seth Raines remembered. He got out of his pick-up truck and walked up the steps to the front door of the single-storey house. He rapped his knuckles on the door and waited. He looked back at his truck sitting in the dirt driveway behind the crumbling front wall.
‘That you, Seth?’ a voice sounded from inside.
‘Yeah.’
‘Come on in. It’s open.’
Raines looked down at his boots and wiped them on the welcome mat before pushing the door open and stepping into the narrow hallway. It led to a small kitchen at the back of the house with a couple of rooms off to either side.
‘Through here,’ the voice shouted from Raines’s right.
He pushed open the first door on his right and walked into the room, looking back to see if he was trailing any dirt. The man he had come to see was sitting by the fireplace. It was warm outside but the fire was roaring. The man turned to look at Raines. The pain never seemed to leave his eyes. Raines knew why.
Raines lay on the ground beside the dirt track watching blood soak through his combat trousers. Andy Johnson kneeled beside him and tore at his trousers until the wound was exposed. Raines put his head back against the dirt and ground his teeth against the pain as it burned through his leg.
‘It’s okay,’ Johnson said. ‘You’ll be okay, man.’
His voice was high and difficult to hear over the noise.
Raines felt sweat run back off his face and into his ears.
A British Chinook helicopter came in to land using the cover of the three Land Rovers to shield it from the enemy position. It settled on the ground quickly and heavily and a medical team rushed forward. One of the team came to treat Raines, but he shouted at them to get Horn first.
‘Keep him alive,’ he screamed at the medics as they fitted an oxygen mask over Horn’s face and lifted him on to a stretcher.
The rotor blades of the Chinook continued to spin, blowing dust and grit into Raines’s eyes. He closed them and held his hand up as a shield.
When he got back to the base, Horn was already in surgery. Raines leaned against a wall in the operating theatre while the British medics worked on Horn, oblivious to the blood soaking the field dressing on his own wound.
They told him he couldn’t be there. Try and move me, he told them.
No one did.
They worked hard on Horn. He couldn’t have asked for any more effort.
First thing they did was saw off what remained of his left foot. Tried to stem the blood flow from the stump where his right leg used to be by clamping arteries.
His heart still stopped.
They opened his chest and put paddles into the cavity.
Raines closed his eyes, certain that his man was not coming back.
But he did. Somehow. And now here he was in front of Raines.
‘You don’t have to like these people,’ Raines told Matt Horn. ‘They’re a means to an end is all. A tool to help us get what we want.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘You need convincing at every stage. It’s getting old real fast.’
Horn said nothing and looked out of the window at the front of the house. Raines hated the weakness he saw in his friend’s eyes. He walked to the window and leaned against the wall beside it, his face set in a perpetual frown. The picture of Charlie Company that first day in Afghanistan was on the mantel above the fireplace. The same one Raines had in his office at the compound. Raines stared at it. Tried to reconcile the face of Matt Horn that he saw in the picture with the man he was now.
Horn turned his head and followed Raines’s gaze to the photo. He stood awkwardly, pushing himself up with his arms, and walked in a stiff gait to look out of the window. Raines knew that Horn was still getting used to the new artificial legs.
‘You heard about the latest one?’ Horn said. ‘The guy that died in Veterans Park?’
‘I heard.’
‘He was a soldier. Or at least he used to be.’
‘I said I heard.’
‘What about the others? And what about Stark?’
Raines moved off the wall, opening and closing his fists.
‘If that was even his name.’
‘Goddamnit,’ Horn shouted at Raines. ‘When did it get so easy for you?’
He turned and Raines saw his eyes glisten in the light from the sun. Horn wiped the sleeve of his shirt across his face. Raines bowed his head. Wondered if it would be easier for everyone if he killed Horn now. He would never have believed that he could have such a thought.
‘It’ll be over soon,’ Raines told him.
‘It won’t bring any of them back.’ Horn’s voice trembled. ‘Will it?’
‘No.’
‘And how many more will die?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t have anything else to say to me?’
Raines looked again at the photograph above the fireplace – thought about what he would do if he could rewind it all back to that day. Would he do it differently? Any of it? Never volunteer for that trip to the poppy field? He wasn’t sure. His current mission seemed hard-wired into his psyche and nothing would turn him away from it. In quiet moments, he secretly relished it.
‘I used to love this country,’ he said.
‘You still do.’
Raines looked at Horn again and smiled, shaking his head.
‘And now I want it to burn,’ Raines said. ‘I mean, I love the country. But not the bastards that run it. They can rot in Hell for all I care. For all they did to us.’
He pointed at the photograph.
‘We have to look after ourselves. That’s what this is about.’
‘And what about the people we hurt in the process?’
Raines turned to the window.
‘I told you already. I’m tired of this conversation.’
‘Can you at least tell me how this all ends?’
There was no answer.