Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,50

about him, but the guy on the range wasn’t exaggerating. People hated him, mostly guys under his command. Floyd was the only one who seemed to have any time for him, but his men wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire. He constantly punished them for trivial stuff, abused his privileges, stuff like that. There was even a rumour that he’d gang-raped some girl with two other guys back in Bosnia. From the sounds of it, it was a miracle that he’d never been fragged out in the field.’

‘Fragged?’ Chalky asked.

‘Killed by one of his own men,’ Jackson said.

‘But we clicked straight away when we met,’ Fletcher continued. ‘He seemed OK to me. Never gave me any grief. Anyway, we became a trio, me, him and Floyd. The three of us would meet up and go shooting together at the firing range. I wasn’t due to be picked up and taken out of there for a few weeks, so I had a hell of a lot of spare time on my hands and I spent most of it with the other two.’

He paused.

‘Soon enough, we started spending more time together outside of the range. Carver had access and privileges that Floyd and I didn’t, being a Captain. He used to go to the stores and get bottles of Jack. We'd get loaded up in his room.’

He paused and swallowed.

The room was so quiet, every man heard it.

‘So one night, we were in Carver’s room. We had some metal going on the speakers, and killed two bottles of whiskey between us. As it normally did, the conversation turned to shooting. Floyd had never even fired his weapon in combat before. He was your typical jarhead. He’d been there for almost a year and hadn’t even taken a shot at the enemy. And Carver had only ever shot at two enemy combatants in his entire career, killing neither, which pissed him off something special. It was eating away at him, just like this cancer in my gut.'

Pause.

'So Carver suddenly said that he wanted to go hunting.’

Fletcher coughed, then shook his head and looked at Cobb.

‘Worst decision of my life,’ he said. ‘One of those moments where you'd give anything to go back and make a different choice, you know? I was drunk out of my mind. I said yes and so did Floyd, figuring we’d just fire off a few rounds out on the plains and drive back. So Carver got into a Humvee and fed the guard on the gate some bullshit excuse about a late-night rendezvous and we went out there, M-16s a piece, stacks of spare clips in the back of the wagon.'

He paused again. Archer saw the man’s eyes weren’t focused on anyone in the room anymore. His mind was back in that vehicle and reliving the drive that night. From the look on the guy’s face, Archer guessed it had happened thousands of times since.

'Floyd was wasted, full of bravado and out for blood, and so was Carver,’ he said. ‘He almost ran us off the road three times he was so tanked. Sitting there in the back of the truck, I started to realise that all those warnings about Carver were right. He was crazy, out of control.’

He stopped, taking a breath. His rising emotions weren’t helping his sick body. In the room, no one made a sound.

‘In that area, the Kosovo army, the KLA, were taking on the Serbs in the valleys. One of their units had evacuated all their women and children out to a township fifteen miles from our camp, to keep them well back from the firing line. Carver knew all about it from the latest reports. So he took us on the dirt track and headed straight there.’

He paused again, closing his eyes.

‘Soon enough, we arrived, and stepped out of the truck,' he said, swallowing, his voice starting to tremble slightly. 'There were only three men in that town guarding the women and the kids. Two of them came up and asked what we were doing there. They weren’t being aggressive, they were just doing their jobs.'

He swallowed hard again.

'Floyd started arguing with them, but then Carver just lifted his rifle and shot them both in the head. Bang bang. Two shots. Killed them both.'

Pause.

'And from there, the floodgates opened,’ he said. ‘The two of them just went berserk. They were going hut to hut, through mag after mag. They hosed down kids as they ran up the