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Her hands fluttered against her throat, a shocked sound escaping her lips.
‘They wrote a letter? When Mikey was in a warzone?’
‘They meant well. I guess they thought he was better finding out with his friends around him than coming back home to his wife knowing nothing about it.’
‘God,’ she breathed. ‘What an impossible choice. But surely... I mean, why did they put him on that mission?’
Guilt, black and familiar, erupted through him like molten lava in a volcano. She gasped, horrified.
‘I’m so sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean it at all how it sounded.’
‘His OC thought he was okay.’ His voice was raw, fractured, barely recognisable. ‘When I mentioned my reservations to him, he said that he’d known Mikey a long time and that he was confident. I couldn’t argue. I tried telling Mikey he should sit this one out but he begged me not to push it. He explained that he already knew about the affair, that he’d confronted her about it after we’d come back from our previous tour of duty, but she’d sworn it was over.’
‘Oh, Myles. What a horrible choice to have to make.’
‘He told me it wasn’t news to him, that he’d been handling it just fine all this time whilst the rest of his squad knew about it. I couldn’t put my finger on why I wasn’t so sure, so I let it go. We were days away from the end of his third tour and his rifles squad had been protecting my medical team for eight months. We’d been lucky enough to be together from the start of this tour without any significant casualties, and he didn’t want to dip out on the last mission of the tour.’
‘He made it sound so plausible.’ Rae exhaled.
‘He did, and I believed him. With hindsight, I should have known better. The other guys saw what they wanted to see, whilst I was just far removed enough to see the warning signs for what they were. But it was a standard recce and we didn’t expect to see anything significant out there so I made the decision to keep his secret. It’s a decision I will regret for the rest of my life.’
His voice cracked and for a moment, he couldn’t speak.
‘What happened, Myles?’ Rae prompted softly, and he actually believed she could feel every last drop of his anguish. ‘What did Lance... What did Mikey do?’
It was as though a dense, black fog had descended over him and he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Still, he forced himself to push through it.
‘We walked through that village, looking for survivors, the stench and the sights worse than any kind of horror film anyone could ever make. I still can’t be sure exactly what triggered him,’ he began, ‘but suddenly he just lost it.’
‘Lost it?’
Something roared through Myles, as though trying to drown out the words he didn’t want to say.
‘He knew they had to still be somewhere in the area. They weren’t hard to track. We tried to stop him but... I’ve never seen anyone move so fast, as though the horror of it had taken him over. We heard the firefight even as we raced in but it was too late.’
He stopped the vehicle, unable to trust himself; needing to step out for a moment, to let the cool night air flow over his skin, to quell the nausea churning his stomach into a quagmire of regret and recrimination.
Wordlessly, Rae got out of the vehicle and moved around it until she was standing in front of him. He had no idea how long they stayed there; it could have been hours, or maybe merely minutes. Then, abruptly, she bowed her head so that her forehead was resting against his, cool and settling. Neither of them moved, barely even breathed, but eventually, eventually, the roaring in his head began to abate.
‘None of us have ever voiced it, but I can’t be the only one to think that Mikey must have known what the outcome would be. That he couldn’t have hoped to take them all on alone. That he...didn’t intend to come back from it.’
Rae raised her hands to cup his face.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I should have told someone I thought he wasn’t up to it. I should have fought harder to make people listen.’
‘You said it yourself, they already knew but they chose to see what they wanted to see. A strong Mikey, not one who was hurting.’
The vision of her swam in front of his eyes.
‘You think that makes it easier?’
‘I’m not sure anything will make it easier.’ She jerked her head lightly from side to side. ‘Your responsibility and loyalty to the men you were so close to is strong. I think you’ll always believe there must have been something you could have done. Even if there wasn’t.’
‘You don’t understand. It was my job to anticipate all of that. If I had insisted on dropping him from the recce, he’d still be alive. A five-year-old girl would still have her father.’
‘That’s not realistic. And I think you know that, deep down. You did as much as you could with the information you had at the time. Odds are, if you’d left him behind on that mission, you’d have come back to find he’d found another way to do it. Rafe told me a few soldiers couldn’t take any more and took their lives in the toilet blocks on camps.’
