Crossfire Read Online Free Page A

by my mother’s first husband, whom she had married when she was seventeen. Richard Kauri had been rich and thirty, a New Zealand playboy who had toyed at being a racehorse trainer. My mother had used his money to further her own ambition in racing, taking over the house and stables as part of their divorce settlement after ten years of turbulent marriage. Their young son and daughter had both sided with their father, a situation I now believed she had encouraged, as it gave her more chance of acquiring the training business if her ex-husband had the children.
    Almost immediately she had married again, to my father, a local seed merchant, and had produced me like a present on her twenty-ninth birthday. But I had never been a much-wanted, much-loved child. I think my mother looked upon me as just another of her charges to be fed and watered twice a day, mucked out and exercised as required, and expected to stay quietly in my stable for the rest of the time.
    I suppose it had been a lonely childhood, but I hadn’t known anything different and, mostly, I’d been happy enough. What I missed in human contact at home I made up for with dogs and horses, both of which had plenty of time for me. I would make up games with them. They were my friends. I could remember thinking the world had ended when Susie, my beloved beagle, had been killed by a car. What had made it much worse was that my mother, far from comforting me, had instead told me to pull myself together, it was only a dog.
    When my parents divorced there had been a long and protracted argument over custody of me. It was not until many years later that I realized that they had argued because neither of them had wanted the responsibility of bringing up an eight-year-old misfit. My mother had lost the argument, so I had lived with her, and my father had disappeared from my life for good. I hadn’t thought it a great loss at the time, and I still didn’t. He had written to me a few times and had sent an occasional Christmas or birthday card, but he clearly thought he was better off without me, and I was sure I was without him.
     
     
    S o, darling, how was Afghanistan? You know, to start with, before you were injured?” my mother asked rather tactlessly. “Were you able to enjoy yourself at all?”
    My mother had always managed to call me “darling” without any of the emotion the word was designed to imply. In her case there was perhaps even a degree of sarcasm in the way she pronounced it with a long r in the middle.
    “I wasn’t sent there to enjoy myself,” I said, slightly irritated. “I was there to fight the Taliban.”
    “Yes, darling. I know that,” she said. “But did you have any good times?”
    We were sitting around the kitchen table having dinner, and my mother and stepfather both looked at me expectantly.
    It was a bit like asking President Lincoln’s wife if she had been enjoying the play before her husband was shot. What should I say?
    In truth, I had enjoyed myself immensely before I was blown up, but I wondered if I should actually say so.
    Recording my first confirmed “kill” of a Taliban had been exhilarating; and calling in the helicopter gunships to pound an enemy position with body-bursting fifty-millimeter shells had been spine-chillingly exciting. It had sent my adrenaline levels to maximum in preparation for the charge through to finish them off at close quarters.
    One wasn’t meant to enjoy killing other human beings, but I had.
    “I suppose it was OK,” I said. “Lots of sitting round doing nothing, really. That, and playing cards.”
    “Did you see anything of the Taliban?” my stepfather asked.
    “A little,” I said matter-of-factly. “But mostly at a distance.”
    A distance of about two feet, impaled on my bayonet.
    “But didn’t you get to do any shooting?” he asked. He made it sound like a day’s sport of driven pheasant.
    “Some,” I said.
    I thought back to the day my platoon had been ambushed and