Chapter 4 - Fire Dog

Meet with the prospect of death and life flashes before your eyes, or so the myth has it. Meet with the prospect of death and it’s more likely you’ll have a mind freezing, heart quickening, bowel triggering moment. If my life flashed before my eyes, I can't have had much of a life. I heard the shot. I heard its echo. Then silence. I felt my body go limp. And nothing. Nothing. No memories, no recollections, no visions of my past, nothing flashing before my eyes, not even the muzzle flash of the gun discharging. Sitting in a garden where a lifetime of memories had blossomed … and I was left in barren emptiness.

I've no idea how or why I pulled the trigger, but the barrel must have been close to my face. The explosion half deafened me. The muzzle flash singed my hair, the bullet crashed into the wall behind me, ricocheted, then fell back onto the patio. And I dropped the whisky. It might be the last bottle of malt I'd ever see, and I dropped it.

I sat, smelling the fumes, studying the Humpty Dumpty pieces of broken glass. What was done was done. I couldn't put the world back together again, not even my world. I slipped the safety catch back on, and holstered my weapon. I couldn't end it. I wouldn't end it. Not yet at least. Not without giving things one more try. Life, my life, all life, had to go on. What I had to rediscover was the optimism I'd felt months ago.

No, my life didn't flash before me, but I was left there in the loneliness of my memories, left to ponder the past, hoping it might suggest some direction for the future, and that was something the Army hadn't taught me to do. For ten years the Army had told me where to go and what to do when I got there. It had fed me, clothed me, put a roof over my head, even if it was sometimes a canvas one, or even a starscape sky. Now, there were no more signposts, no orders posted on walls, no briefing sessions, no commands to follow, no commands to give.

The further we left Houston behind, the more optimistic we felt, despite the claustrophobia of that packed aircraft belly, men and equipment jammed together, snoring and farting, the smell of hundreds of sweaty, bad breathed bodies and unwashed socks, but still optimistic, optimism emerging from the sense of relief that we were off the ground … that we were over the sea … that we'd soon be home.

The fact that we landed near Paris didn't diminish our optimism. We no longer had an ocean to cross! We could get home from here! Nothing could stop us now. And then, three days in the rain, huddling under tarpaulins and ground sheets on the airport runway. There was some administrative problem … we weren't going straight back to Scotland, we were being required to fulfil some short-term contract in London, but couldn't get permission to land there, and the French were only too keen to get rid of us.

Three days, and maybe twenty or more of the men took off on their own, trying to make their way back to Scotland. Nobody used the term 'desertion', nobody blamed them, most of us at least toyed with the idea of following them … even me. We'd all had enough. None of us believed we had anything to offer any more.

Ten years a soldier. When I first joined up I'd tried to explain to my parents – I'd argued with Debbie for hours – I'd tried to convince myself. The world, I insisted, needed revolution. Even after the pandemics and disasters and the wars and civil breakdown, nobody except religious fanatics was talking about Apocalypse.

Crazy to think back. If this was my life flashing before my eyes, then it was subject to one hell of a delay, and the painful sections seemed to be playing in slow motion. I watched the smoke drift over the garden and thought back to those days arguing about my decision to enlist. Nobody was thinking Apocalypse, I was arguing opportunity! The world, not just the one we knew but the whole world, the whole world was falling apart.

We needed a new world, we needed stability, we need change, we needed revolution, we needed order, we needed a world where power was in the hands of the people, a world without the corruption of the rich and powerful, a world without the lies of capitalism or religion or individuals skilled in selling charisma rather than values or ideals. Couldn't soldiers, particularly Scottish soldiers, bring a message of hope and optimism to the world, help people sweep aside the corruption, lies and institutions responsible for our predicament?

We were a political nation. We were steeped in belief in and debate about social justice. The new Scottish battalions were dedicated to protecting human values and human rights, even if there had been a struggle weeding out the old unionist dinosaurs. When we volunteered we knew we would be asked to carry out duties on behalf of the United Nations, but we also knew we served the interests of the Scottish people and Scottish Parliament, not some medieval relic of a king, and that our international role meant we would help restore order, save lives, return peace and tranquillity to distant corners of the world, and give people control over their lives.

And we ended up killing. We ended up being funded by an oil corporation struggling to stay alive but already in its death throes. We ended up playing games with lives … and no longer just the lives of dogs. We ended up killing and enjoying it, making a sport of it, ended up as callous mercenaries.

Had I really been that naïve, had I really been that idealistic? I'd argued that soldiering had to be transformed into service to the community, service to the people, that soldiers had to stop being Establishment flunkeys, touching their forelocks to kings and lords and pretending that slaughter and sacrifice were really glory and 'tradition'. Debbie had called me a fool, had cried. What was it she'd told me?

"You'll just be a uniformed overseer for the slave owners. People don't realise they're slaves. The ruling classes pose soldiers as heroes, pretend that they care about them and that their soldiers are a vital link binding together people and rulers! If the people ever realise they're slaves and try to escape their shackles, it's then they'll discover that the heroes have only one real purpose, and that's to ensure the people are kept in their chains."

And I argued my ideals, my dreams of political soldiers coming together to free the world from tyranny, and what I couldn’t tell her was that I loved her so much and wanted her so much, and that the only hope I had of escaping the pain of not having her was to put half a world between us. I was running away to forget, and, with a bit of luck, someone would blow me up or gun me down and finally put her out of my mind.

Did I really think we could be a moral force? Was it just a rationalisation of my flight away from her? If I'd had any real conviction that we could be a moral force, a force for the good, well, that was finally swept away by our time in Houston. It couldn't get worse after that, could it?

That flight home … well, back to Europe. I physically remained in uniform, but, mentally, I’d deserted. I wanted to be back home, home, back to see my parents, back to see Debbie, back to somewhere familiar, somewhere I didn’t feel like an outsider, like an invader, didn’t feel tainted. The optimism of that plane, the optimism on that plane.

And then we went to London. The disillusionment and disgust I’d felt about our tour in Houston was nothing compared to the sense of revulsion I’d feel when they finally flew us to London and immediately loaded us into a convoy of trucks. If I’d known, if I’d guessed, I’d have run off while we were in Paris.

And staring at the azaleas did nothing to relieve that memory. London? As we drove into and across the city along roads virtually free of traffic, we were watched by hundreds of sullen faces. White faces. We'd been travelling for half an hour when I realised that we hadn't seen a black face, had scarcely seen anyone with so much as a tan. London was a white city.

And so it went. As we drove across the city we were watched by white faces. I don't know if anyone else noticed, but I grew more and more conscious of the fact. And then we arrived at the football ground, and I was summoned with the other officers for a briefing session.

We assembled in what had once been a car park behind the stadium … in the days when people attended sporting contests, in the days before the pandemics when people were not afraid to be part of a crowd, in the days before such assemblies were made illegal.

We formed a semi-circle around the colonel and a group of people in a mix of civilian and military clothing. They were all white. Within minutes I was ashen-faced.

A Major Talisbrook, who described himself as having some official position with 'England Rise Again', explained that we were to be used as escort to a special train, and apologised, explaining that he knew we wanted to get home to see our families but that we were the only intact British unit available.

Several of us pointed out that we weren't 'British', that we were 'Scottish', that since Independence we had no legitimate authority in England unless under a UN mandate … and the UN had long-since imploded.

Talisbrook offered a patronising smile, as if we were children who needed a moment's reassurance, then continued. We were to act as escort to the special train which would transport the people who were "temporarily accommodated" in the sports stadium. There were boats in Southampton, apparently, waiting to repatriate them. It would probably take two or three train loads to empty the stadium.

Even then, I don't think the penny had dropped. Even then, we were preoccupied with the fact that it would be a few more days before we could go home, a few more days before we could get back and discover what had happened at home. Surely this was London's problem … whatever it was.

We were thinking immigrants, thinking people fleeing from France or Spain or Holland, people who had tried to escape whatever horrors had befallen their own lands. And what? They'd shoved them into a football stadium? There were plenty of empty buildings, plenty of empty houses and flats. Had the civil authority broken down so badly no one was capable of organising that?

Or maybe they'd just turned against the foreigner. Send them back. Herd them together and herd them back across the Channel. And, at the back of our minds, that nagging question … surely things weren't this bad in Scotland?

And suddenly I was thinking about my gun again. Would I hear the shot before it blew my brains out? I’d do it, I’d do it, if only I could guarantee that life would flash before my eyes and not drag out the painful passages. Could I not remember some place, some time when I was happy? Oh, when was the last time anybody in this world was happy?

And I had to get up and do something. I wandered back into the house, determined to make myself busy cleaning and tidying. I had nowhere else to go, so I had to make the place habitable, had to unload the supplies from my wagon outside, had to secure the building.

The kitchen had always been spotless, despite my best efforts as a child and adolescent. Now, the pile of dirty dishes on the draining board, the smashed mug on the floor, the splashed stains, the empty soup tins, the discarded wrapping paper which had once concealed a piece of butcher meat or a couple of potatoes obtained at the barter market, the empty but spotlessly clean fridge and freezer, the scattered feathers of a plucked pigeon or two, all testified to my mother's final days, bereft, abandoned, hopeless, confused, slipping away. She'd kept a couple of bags of refuse inside the house so they wouldn't be ripped open by the birds or attract stray cats and dogs. There was so little to throw away these days, it was almost as if she was creating a compost heap in the kitchen. Maybe that's what attracted the first flies?

How long had she sat alone in that house, listening to her cherished grandmother clock ticking away the last of her life? I only had to look at the kitchen to imagine her, thin, fading, an energetic and dynamic woman hopeless and alone, becoming increasingly desperate as her physical and emotional resources ebbed away.

I’d found her on the floor. What? Had she fainted, tripped, slipped, fallen? How long had she lain there unable to get up? Or had it been quick? I hoped so.

Dad must have died some time before her. He was arranged in their bed. Though his corpse was skeletal and discoloured by the time I arrived, I could tell mum had washed him and tried to make him comfortable, but the fluids from his body had drained and leached into the mattress. She’d fought a losing battle trying to preserve the corpse. There was little she could do. The armchair beside the bed testified to her sitting there. I imagine she talked to him.

She'd started to leave a note for me. My name was written at the top of a sheet of paper. "Sandy". And there was a date, about six weeks ago. That was all. Did she assume I was already dead, that this was a futile exercise? All my life she'd been the organised one, the determined one, optimistic and alive, the battery which charged and re-charged me and dad.

I found her in the toilet, collapsed, head jammed beside the bowl. I threw up onto the already stained floor, then went outside, still retching emptily, and cried. I thought I'd prepared myself for what I might find. But I cried, and cried, then made myself busy, burying my mother, dragging dad across the road, trussed up in that disgusting mattress.

Maybe my mother would have been outraged at the idea of me setting fire to a bungalow, but she had always hated that one. It was the ugliest wee building on the street. And Miss McCready had been the neighbour from … . She'd been nosey, interfering, she'd complained about anything and everything. Her front 'garden' was overgrown with weeds - the seeds used to blow across and invade my mother's orderly domain. And Miss McCready kept cats. Must have had a dozen or more at any one time.

Cats which prowled into my mother's back garden – I sent a few flying with well-aimed stones … and one, a perfect shot from my catapult, had its brains dashed out and just lay there, and I shook and cried and my dad buried it and talked about learning a lesson in the importance of life and how the taking of life should never become a casual or routine affair, even if you were hunting for food.

When I was a child, I was convinced Miss McCready was a witch, that she would turn me into a toad, or put me to sleep for a hundred years. I used to run past her bungalow, used to race back into the safety of my own home if I saw her out on the street or in her garden. My mother constantly fought with her over the cats. She called her Spinster McCready … "Women with cats," she'd say, "you mean 'spinsters'?"

I half expected to find Spinster McCready's remains in her bungalow … half hoped she'd been eaten by her damn cats and that a dozen little feline skeletons would be lying around her gnawed one, but when I broke through the door, the house was empty and had been stripped off anything useful.

So I build a pyre out of doors and wooden furniture, and sacrificed some of my scarce petrol. Quite a satisfying blaze. I really think my mother would have approved. I could imagine her standing outside her front door, hopping from foot to foot, clapping her hands and laughing, then helping herself to a glass of port and sausage roll as if it was Bonfire Night … and then I remembered that it was my dad who was burning, not just Spinster McCready's ugly bungalow.

Recalling the blaze, I walked back to the front of the house and wandered out through the front door. Spinster McCready's old place was well and truly ablaze. There were technicolor flames dancing around a pirouetting exclamation mark of smoke, as if our old neighbour was finally being erased and a huge punctuation mark stamped into the air to signal the occasion.

But the weeds and bushes at the front had caught. Small fires had started in the neighbouring front gardens. Although there was scarcely a breeze to fan them, I hesitated for a moment. I didn't want to set the whole street on fire. I didn't really think those few burning weeds or hedges would pose any danger … but. And that column of smoke? It was bound to attract the attention of the locals. I decided to do a quick recce, and maybe stamp out a bit of the bush fire. I retrieved my carbine from the kitchen and walked back out to cross the street.

And then I saw him. The cowboy. As I raised my rifle to my shoulder, I wondered which of us was the faster draw … and which the better shot.

Chapter 3 - Sniffer Dog

Douglas Ewart Cairncross had a mental age, but no one was quite sure what. He'd lived in Dunkillin all his life, which included most of his mental years and all of his age.

Few would have heard the army vehicle arrive in town, not at that time of the morning, but Douglas Ewart Cairncross was not merely an early bird, he could be nocturnal as the wolf, sometimes prowling by day, sometimes by night. He was prowling that night, prowling till morning.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross made up for his lack of sense through his acute senses. As he wove down the street on his small wheeled performance bike, dodging potholes, negotiating scattered debris, he kept to the middle of the road, away from the potential ambush area of the pavement, away from the twin museum ranks of rusting hulks of car, forlorn wreckage long since stripped of tyres and parts and now collapsed, chassis down, on the legacy of tarmac below.

This morning, as Douglas Ewart Cairncross sniffed the air, he caught a hint … just a hint … of engine … of engine … not noise, it was hardly loud enough to be 'noise' … but … it sounded like … like an engine. He rubbed at his nose and sniffed the air again. He didn't know why, it was just something wolves did.

At 5.00 am on a Scottish midsummer morn there was abundant light, enough to paint pastel shades and promise shadow, though the sun had not yet risen. A few garden birds sang – it was a long time since the town echoed to the raucous assaults of seagulls … they'd returned to the sea when food litter became too precious to scatter in the cities. A few birds – blackbird, thrush maybe - the usual background noises which Douglas Ewart Cairncross filtered from consciousness. He stopped his bike, and stood, breathless, wheels silenced, listening, listening for that hint of something that wasn't noise. He sniffed.

Crouched low over the handlebars he peered the hundred metre length of the street to its junction with London Road, a once affluently-lined highway leading to the south and the English border. At that distance, and hidden behind the skeleton of a once blue utility vehicle, nothing and no one passing along London Road would notice him.

Crouched low, he watched as the vehicle coasted past the road's end … its electric engine barely purring. In the days of dogs it might have caused a twitched ear or two, maybe even a bark from the more neurotic ones … which humans took as evidence that these were conscientious guard dogs. Tonight, only Douglas Ewart Cairncross heard it passing. His ears didn't twitch, but his heart jumped. And he sniffed.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross had recognised it immediately. A military patrol vehicle, the sort once used by the Scottish Army, soft-skinned, high ground clearance, robust, canvass covered at the rear. The military were practically the last people to use the roads – domestic and commercial traffic had melted away over a decade or two. Douglas Ewart Cairncross hadn't seen any military activity for months. Many months.

How many men were in the vehicle, he wondered as he waited. It had passed and he waited. The military usually travelled in convoys. Not this time. This time, it was on its own.

That puzzled Douglas Ewart Cairncross as much as it piqued his curiosity. He sniffed. What would a single army vehicle be doing on the London Road at this time of the day? The Laird would want to know about it. The Laird would ask questions, would demand to know where it had gone and what it was doing. Douglas Ewart Cairncross resolved to follow, pushing off on his bike and pedalling furiously to the road end where he turned a sharp right, expecting to see it some distance away.

London Road was deserted.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross listened, certain he could still hear the engine, certain the noise was coming from what the informed would have described as his 'left'. He resumed frantic pedalling. The Laird would want to know, and the Laird was good to him, not like other people.

Taking the first left, he was just in time to see the vehicle's tail disappear round the corner of the next intersection. London Road had been pretty much cleared of obstructions – it was still one of the town's main thoroughfares and carts and barrows were regularly used to bring produce in from the outlying farms and homesteads. Once off this main road, even an army vehicle, built for rough ground, could be slowed to a crawl by debris and the abandoned detritus of a car-bound era.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross reasoned this in less eloquent language. Douglas Ewart Cairncross reasoned this the way a lab rat reasons its way through a learned maze. He knew the road network of Dunkillin blindfold, knew that he was far more mobile on side streets than any four-wheeled vehicle, no matter how powerful its engine or how adept it was at handling rough terrain.

He sniffed. The Laird would want to know where it had gone.

Turning left again – and concepts of 'left' and 'right' were as incomprehensible to Douglas Ewart Cairncross as they were to any lab rat – turning in the direction his eyes took him, he was confronted by an empty street. Again, nothing moved. There was silence. The vehicle, Douglas Ewart Cairncross reasoned, must have pulled in somewhere. He rewarded himself with a nod of agreement. And a sniff.

Dismounting, Douglas Ewart Cairncross wheeled his bike cautiously along the pavement. Wolves on the prowl do not push bicycles as they hunt their prey, but that was lost on Douglas Ewart Cairncross. Nevertheless, silent as a wolf, he crept along, senses alert to any hint of movement or sound, if not smell. Silent as a wolf. Silent as a wolf.

Rounding a slight bend in the road … Douglas Ewart Cairncross thought … he thought … he was sure, sure he'd heard sounds.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross concealed his bike within a thickly overgrown hedge - he was as masterly at camouflage as any trained soldier – and crept along the pavement, bent low as he picked his way across itinerant creepers, through encroaching bushes and boughs, and over paving stones tossed up by underground roots.

The sounds had come from this side of the road. He thought for a moment, rubbing at his nose, then sprinted silently across to the other side to take cover behind the carcass of a van. He could see the army vehicle again. It had drawn off the road and was parked in the narrow driveway before a two storey sandstone house. Judging by the integrity (not a word Douglas Ewart Cairncross would have understood) of its shutters and the relatively weed-free driveway and pavement before it, the house had remained occupied, whether by squatters or … or … he recalled an old woman he'd seen pushing a pram up and down this street.

As he watched, a soldier appeared – boots, combat uniform, chequered scarf knotted about his head and wound around the lower half of his face, dark goggles propped on his forehead. Not a big man, scarcely the size of Douglas Ewart Cairncross, but with a carbine cradled in his arms.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross shrank back as the man stepped out onto the pavement and gazed up and down the street. When he looked back, the soldier had gone.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross waited for a few minutes. There were no further signs of life around the house, no further noises, so he stepped hastily across the pavement and made his way into the thick undergrowth of an overgrown front garden. He waited, listening, heart racing, then negotiated his way across three more gardens, one heavily overgrown, the next gravelled … he padded, silent as a wolf across that … and the last, once neatly paved, now a chequerboard geometry of weeds and mosses. He crawled across that until he was diagonally opposite the soldier's … the old woman's house … and lay behind the end of its once gated low wall, concealed behind an overturned refuge bin which had long ago been stripped of its wheels.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross lay there for some time, trying to ignore his sense of fear and exposure, peering through the narrow gap between wall and overturned bin. He could hear occasional sounds from the sandstone house, but for a long time there was no further sight of the soldier.

And then the man reappeared, dragging what seemed to be a rolled up mattress. It seemed too heavy for a mattress. The man struggled with it, struggled as he hauled it across the road and into the neighbouring front garden. There were sounds … . There were sounds, as if the soldier was breaking down the front door, and then more noises from within the bungalow, something, or some things, being smashed.

Presently the soldier re-emerged, crossed back over to the army vehicle, and took a jerrycan from its rear. If that was full of petrol, even half full, the Laird would have paid handsomely for it. Again, the soldier crossed to the bungalow. This time he reappeared after only a few minutes, still holding the jerrycan, but it looked a lot easier to carry this time.

The man stopped in the middle of the road, carbine slung across his back, and put the jerrycan down. It had a hollow ring to it. Douglas Ewart Cairncross watched. Had he better understood human emotions he might have imagined that the soldier was crying, for the man visibly stooped and put a hand to his masked face.

The soldier stood in the middle of the road, intent on the bungalow. Douglas Ewart Cairncross pressed himself low to the ground, watching through an anarchic clump of coarse grass as the soldier straightened and stretched. There came a … a thump from the bungalow and Douglas Ewart Cairncross sensed a hint of something burning. Presently, thin wisps of smoke emerged from the bungalow, thin wisps which thickened and spiralled into the now sunny air.

Each of the silent watchers endured slow minutes of concentration as the smoke became denser and flames took hold of the bungalow. And still the soldier stood in the middle of the road, careless of the fact that the column of smoke must be visible across half of Dunkillin. Stood and watched the burning building, from time to time shaking his head.

And then he bowed slightly, bent to pick up the jerrycan, and, having returned it to the rear of his vehicle, disappeared back into the sandstone house.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross lay there, alternating his gaze between the sandstone house and the burning bungalow. Lay there, afraid to move … until he heard the shot.

It's effect was that of a starting pistol. Douglas Ewart Cairncross leapt from concealment, sprinted back across the road to his bike, and pedalled demonically away from the sandstone house and burning bungalow. Pedalled and pedalled and pedalled, waiting for the crack of the carbine and the impact of the shot, pedalled until he was round the corner and out of sight, pedalled round the next left turn, pedalled, all the while imagining the purring sound of the military vehicle giving chase.

He pedalled until he reached the outskirts of New Farm, a sprawling 20^th century housing scheme. Pedalled on through it, taking footpaths and alleyways along which no army vehicle could follow, pedalled until he saw the road block which regulated access to the Laird's castle. Pedalled until he recognised the yellow haired man with the funny name.

- - - - - - - - -

Custard McGinty raised the shotgun to his chest as he saw the bike hurtling towards the roadblock.

"Sniffer Doug's here," he called to the men in the bunker of concrete blocks which occupied a pavement and half the street. One of them emerged and strode over to the red and white barrier which closed the other half of the approach to the castle.

"What's he bringing us today?"

"Nothin! Hasnae got his dog cart wi him," observed Custard.

"Fuck, looks like he's seen a ghost," said the man, Brian McBride by name, kicking away the chocks from behind the wheels and hauling open a fraction the red and white cheval de frise.

"Morning Sniffer, what's got into you?"

"Need to see the Laird. Need to see him."

McBride had never seen Sniffer this agitated. The boy … well, he was in his mid-twenties, but no one ever thought of him as anything but a 'boy' … the boy was usually nervous or hyperactive, sniffing uncontrollably when he was excited about a trade or had information to sell, but this morning he looked like someone had put the fear of death into him.

McBride didn't hesitate, didn't bother questioning him, just signalled the boy to follow. Douglas Ewart Cairncross fell into step behind, wheeling his bike along.

The 'castle' – a fortified 20^th century tenement block – stood apart from several rows of two storey, semi-detached houses. This morning, Scott Mackie, universally known as 'The Laird', was in the one behind the row guarded by the road block. There, the two houses nearest the castle had been stripped out and converted into a stable block. It was before these that the Laird was … .

McBride approached, gaze directed down to ground, trying to conceal his look of embarrassment.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross had never seen anyone having their portrait painted. He stopped twenty or thirty metres short of the Laird, currently sitting astride the huge chestnut stallion which went by the name of 'Gan Daft'. Douglas Ewart Cairncross didn't much like horses, and this one was huge, and it worried him that even its name warned of its craziness.

Unable to get Sniffer to approach any closer, the Laird dismounted, and walked over to the 'boy'. The artist, busy sketching outlines and deciding on his 'colour palette', resumed his studies of 'Gandalf', once again choking back the question he needed to ask some day. Wasn't Gandalf supposed to be Grey or White?

The artist's presence struck the Laird as ironic. His interrogation of Sniffer was less like drawing teeth, it was more like drawing a dentist, drawing teeth. Whatever the boy could tell him, he couldn't answer the crucial questions. What was the Army doing in town? Did the Army, in fact, still exist? And if Sniffer had seen one soldier, how many more were there?

The column of smoke certainly advertised someone's presence. A number of people had already pointed it out to him. Burning buildings weren't that unusual, but each one needed investigation, even if there was no way of putting fires out once they caught hold.

Twenty minutes later, while the artist scowled in frustration, the Laird rode off down the road, rifle holstered in front of Gandalf's saddle.

Douglas Ewart Cairncross watched him depart, sniffing nostalgically. He'd been invited to have a Narky Visit, and Douglas Ewart Cairncross liked Narky Visits. It wasn't just that he got a slice or two of nice cake, though the cake reminded him of his childhood in the big house, with its big, always warm kitchen, and his big bedroom with its toys, and the people who had been his 'Mummy' and 'Daddy', and the happy times before he'd been put into that other big house with all the rough children and his mummy and daddy and his toys had all gone away.

No, Douglas Ewart Cairncross enjoyed his Narky Visits because he liked Doctor Rossi, who wasn't a doctor for sick people, but who was always nice to him and took an interest in what he did and what was happening in his life.

Few people were interested in the news Douglas Ewart Cairncross carried – who had he seen, what was happening around the town and countryside. Only the Laird and Doctor Rossi. No, most people were only interested in what Sniffer had found, and what he could get.

"I need some barbed wire, d'you know what that looks like?"

Or, "If you come across a stepladder, about this high … ."

Or, "Baking tins, Sniffer, so I can make loaves … here's one, they look like this."

And Douglas Ewart Cairncross, who knew every street and alley and pathway in and around Dunkillin, whose eyes spotted and catalogued and filed away details of even the most mundane of objects to be found in abandoned buildings or left to rot in the open, Douglas Ewart Cairncross would find barbed wire, and stepladders, and baking tins … and tools, and containers, and raw materials, and a teddy bear, and a thousand other things which would be secured in or on or to the little dog cart he usually trailed along behind his bike.

But Doctor Rossi, who never called him 'Sniffer' and who wasn't for sick people, and Douglas Ewart Cairncross wondered if this was because he hadn't learned enough yet which was why he was always asking questions, Doctor Rossi never asked for anything, except of course books and paper which he was always wanting, and pens if they could be found, and other funny things. No, all Doctor Rossi asked for was Douglas Ewart Cairncross's time and company, and Narky Visits always meant slices of cake and, often, a glass of the sweet lemonade they made in New Farm, or hot soup in winter. And fresh bread! And they'd wash his clothes for him and give him clean ones. And Doctor Rossi, who wasn't a doctor for sick people, kept telling Douglas Ewart Cairncross how important it was to wash any cuts or injuries he might pick up when four-age-jing.

So Douglas Ewart Cairncross told Doctor Rossi all about the hearing of the soldier's vehicle and his pursuit of it across London Road and how he'd watched the soldier take things into the bungalow and how the man had stood there watching the place burn, and how Douglas Ewart Cairncross had been frightened by the sound of the shot, and how he hoped the Laird would be all right on his own and wouldn't be shot at.

- - - - - - - - -

At one time there had been something like 50,000 people in Dunkillin. Today, there were probably only 800. Scott Mackie, Dunkillin born and bred, former police inspector, and now Laird of New Farm, the most densely populated area of town, didn't expect to see anyone on his way to the scene of the fire. What he didn't want to see was any extensive evidence of the Army's presence.

Nothing stirred. Gandalf was left to maintain a leisurely pace over the three quarters of a mile which separated the castle from … from whatever was happening. And, apart from the smoke, neither horse nor rider witnessed anything unusual or unfamiliar on the journey. A natural silence prevailed, one broken only by the sound of birdsong, breeze, and the rhythm of shod feet clattering on hard road.

They stopped at the road junction. The house where the soldier had been seen was out of sight round a slight bend, but the burning bungalow was visible, flames blending with smoke. There was scarcely a breeze, so it seemed unlikely the fire might spread to any neighbouring house, but fire was unpredictable, as far as the Laird was concerned. He'd instituted a stringent fire prevention policy back at New Farm, and every one of the two hundred and fifty or so people there knew what to do in the event of a fire. He was confident they could deal with one, but maybe they should think about setting up a mobile fire service to tackle a blaze anywhere in Dunkillin.

The Laird unholstered the rifle and coaxed Gandalf up the street until he could see the outline of an army vehicle parked in the driveway of a sandstone house. He'd just pressed the binoculars to his eyes when a soldier emerged from the house and stared back at him. For some reason, the theme from an ancient Western began to play in his mind. What was it called?  "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"!

Chapter 2 - Dog Tags

The day I boarded the plane for the flight home, the only thing I could think about was whether we were running away or whether this meant someone had finally shown some spine and acted decisively. The military transport was packed with happy smiling faces, peering out through a morass of weapons, baggage and equipment. It was scarcely possible to move. I was convinced we were so overloaded we'd never get off the ground.

There was an overwhelming general sense of relief as the wheels lifted from the runway and we climbed rapidly, gaining altitude to minimise the risk of a missile attack. I don't know what constitutes a safe height, but as the plane levelled off the packed troops cheered and sang, smiles became even broader, the chatter louder and bawdier, the last lines of tension faded. After nearly two years, we were going home, finally going home. We were going home!

The plane banked and made the slow turn to take it away from the city. I ignored protests from the aircrew and dragged myself through the jungle of limbs, rucksacks, bags and rifles, clambering up to look out one of the gunports in the transport’s hull.

My last look at the city, my first and last chance to see its vast scale. For nearly two years I'd watched it from ground level. It was a perimiter to patrol, a succession of streets to be viewed with suspicion, buildings to be entered, rooms to be searched, one by one until it had become a routine and the city had ceased to have any meaning or identity. It was a threat, a place in which our only purpose was to survive.

Not that we'd seen much of it recently: for the last few months we'd scarcely left the safety of our compound; for the last few months we'd simply looked out across no man's land from the security of our perimeter fences, the city a hostile horizon. We no longer knew what was happening there (as if we ever did) save for the odd pictures we got from the spy drones which circled above it, or the impressions we gleaned in discussion with the various politicians, war lords and power brokers who were allowed to approach the front gate.

Seen from above, the city was scarred, blackened in places, its once thriving business centre derelict. The people, the ones left, were scattered across isolated enclaves and ramshackle shanties thrown up close to waterways. Handfuls of small boats were visible, hundreds in all. Small knots of people gathered, spilling out onto the streets and patches of open ground, summoned by the novelty of planes taking off from the airfield.

At first I focused on the distant pillars of smoke which marked the oil wells which were still burning, but then, below, I noticed the final tableau of destruction being played out. A pensioned off tank, decades old, was hurrying along the road to the base we'd occupied for nearly two years. I craned my neck to follow its progress as it wove erratically trying to avoid the people who were emerging onto the highway, drawn like moths by the sight of aircraft leaving.

As I watched, feeling suddenly exposed and defenceless in the crowded belly of the transport, I saw the last action by our troops still on the ground, those who'd drawn the short straw and were left to wait to board the final transport. An anti-tank missile zoomed off down the highway. I followed its trail as it zeroed in on target, then closed my eyes. I couldn't watch. When I opened them again the tank had become a statue, angled in to the road's edge, its gun barrel hanging impotent, its turret tipped forward, a block of lifeless metal burning like a watchman's brazier, the smoke a parody of the burning wells. For some reason, all I could think of was my dad roasting chestnuts on a bonfire, the brown shells blackening and crackling.

I said a silent thanks that I was on the first plane to take off, not the last, that it hadn't been my responsibility to order that final execution. I was going home, leaving the ghost city behind and finally returning to civilisation and normality.

But the burning tank extinguished my euphoria. What had happened down there couldn't be happening back in Scotland? It just couldn't. Were there French troops patrolling my home, were Italian soldiers huddled in a compound outside the town watching it across another no man's land, was my mother dependent on Nigerian soldiers for her weekly supply of water, had Australians carried out raids on selected streets trying to snatch known terrorists or dissidents?

I watched the city recede from view then returned to my seat. For a few minutes I'd had it in perspective, had been able to see the whole panorama of the sprawling metropolis. It taught me what an impossible task we'd had. How could fifteen hundred troops hope to contain and control a city that size?

Perspective? I didn't know what was happening down there, and that was just one city. What was happening in hundreds of others? What was happening at home? Did I even know where or what home was?

We'd arrived with a set of aims and objectives. Restore order, return control to the elected city authorities, help re-establish a unified local police and militia force, disarm any dissidents and anti-democratic factions, encourage the re-emergence of the local economy, ultimately get the oil flowing … what was left of it. Nobody said it all had to be done before breakfast … all that seemed to matter was that we were seen to be making an effort.

I'd arrived with ideals. The world had descended into chaos, fuelled by shortages of oil, water, food, and natural resources. The environment, like the economy, had sunk into meltdown. Climate change led to agricultural failure, famine was rife, natural disasters were occurring on so unnatural a scale it was no longer possible to respond to any of them. This time the apocalypse wasn't heralded by a handful of horsemen; this time the hordes of the apocalypse were sweeping across the planet, unchecked.

Diseases we'd long supposed conquered had returned vengefully, killing and crippling humans, animals and crops. New pandemics were evolving, not orchestrated by some satanic mind but by-products of the insane logic of human life. There were plagues of locusts, and ants, and parasitic wasps, of rabbits and mink, of slugs and snails. Border clashes returned peaceful neighbours into traditional enemies, skirmishes became invasions, armies fought over a source of water or minerals or oil or access to the sea. Nightly, if the electricity worked, and if you were close enough to one of the few local stations still broadcasting, and if you could find someone who still had a working set, and if they could be bothered switching it on on the off-chance there might be a picture, there were television images of starving white children!

And still I had ideals. For the whole twenty eight years of my life I'd witnessed the apocalyptic merry-go-round, riding on the periphery, never quite being swept up by its vortex. Scotland had been relatively untouched - a few shortages, the odd epidemic, a few incidents with refugees, an embarrassing situation or two when we were asked to help restore order in English cities - but relatively untouched.

I believed soldiers could provide moral purpose and certainty, not just practical help and organisation. We were the rear guard of civilisation, the front line of salvation, the honest brokers who could be charged with the restoration of civil order and political freedom, crusaders for peace and a fruitful future. Scottish soldiers, like the Irish, Swiss, Norwegians and a few others, had a reputation for impartiality and a neutral cachet which won acceptance in many trouble spots.

By the time the plane had climbed away from the city and headed off across the ocean, all my ideals had gone. We were going home, we were going back to be with our own folk, we were going back to what? How bad was it at home? What were we going to have to do? Would I be expected to shoot people on my own streets?

We'd long ago retreated not only from the city but from any illusion that we could be responsible for its recovery, that we could restore 'order'. For those last few months we'd concentrated on ensuring our own survival, maintaining our own supplies of food, water and fuel, preserving our own health from contamination by the city's survivors. We listened impotently to the sounds of shooting and explosions from beyond no man's land. We observed the smoke and flames, We discouraged contact with escalating demonstrations of violence. Surely the same thing wasn't happening in Scotland?

Throughout the entire flight back I sat in my seat, dozing, replaying the nightmare thoughts.

For months, getting home had been the sole topic of conversation. Oh, we'd talked about 'going home' ever since we arrived. It's in the nature of soldiers to complain. Soldiers are never happy. They always want to be somewhere else, doing something else. They complain about food, kit, accommodation, too much to do, too little to do. They complain about the weather, about insects, about the natives, about politicians, about officers, about lack of leave, about lack of promotion, about lack of sleep, about poor pay, about their feet and their arses and lack of activity for their dicks. As long as the troops are complaining, they'll do their job … if maybe a bit grudgingly. When they stop complaining, you know you've got a mutiny on your hands and you start checking your bed and your boots and the latrines for booby traps.

But as the world changed around us our quibbles about 'going home' were rephrased. We started to talk about 'getting' home, as if we all recognised that we might never escape from here, as if home was as inaccessible as the dark side of the moon.

We were soldiers - we weren't supposed to dabble in politics. Oh, the surviving media back home sometimes reminded their readers about 'our boys' keeping the peace in some far off land, but keeping the peace had gone on for so long scarcely anybody outside our immediate diaspora of friends and family was interested.

We heard occasional rumours of a peace movement, about demands to bring our boys home, but it was neutered by the simple reality that there weren't enough deaths to make it a political priority. As the months passed our body count became irrelevant. We weren't suffering that many casualties, even if the rest of the world was dying. Fifteen hundred of us had disembarked on that airfield … less than 800 packed into the planes for the return.

The politics ground on. We heard rumours - they got louder and more frequent in direct proportion to the failure of the communications systems. The cell phones went first - there was simply no local broadcasting system left in operation. Internet and landline phone links atrophied, our satellite, laser and radio connections became spasmodic. Road traffic ceased, air traffic was reduced to a monthly flight, bringing in necessary supplies and a handful of heavily censored letters - one or two tapes and video messages were smuggled in, and those with the equipment and batteries to play them did a roaring trade. Few of these contraband messages betrayed anything of what was happening back home. Nobody really cared to hear about the 'truth', but we'd pay good money for porn and drugs.

The political tensions and contradictions inherent in our presence had been one of the main reasons behind privatising large sections of the West's military - the supposedly essential task of maintaining peace and order could now be costed in monetary terms, not lives. Domestic politicians could be excused responsibility for placing the children of their constituents at risk - if men and women volunteered to serve as humanitarian mercenaries, serving the UN and the interests of world peace, the coffins could come home without political repercussions. Just so long as we could be seen to be doing a good job … and it didn't cost too much. Lives were cheap.

My brigade had an initial six month contract, for which we were well paid. There had been no shortage of volunteers for the job. Sponsorship by one of the leading oil companies meant we were awarded a further 20% premium on our salaries. For a time the brigade's commercial director was the most popular man in the unit, even though the deal he'd secured meant we had to wear the oil company’s logo on our uniforms and vehicles … and it did look a bit too much like a bullseye.

Six months in and we were given a second contract, and a pay rise. I explained it to the troops, muttering something about the 'exigencies' of the situation and how it was highly unusual for one unit to do a full year in one arena but that we were getting premium remuneration and would be guaranteed a substantial period of leave at the end of it. Faces remained blank but, for a time, anger seemed blunted. I double checked my bed and my boots and the latrines for several days until the boys settled back into routine moaning.

But for those few days, their silence worried me. I was convinced we had a mutiny on our hands. I stressed the positives, tried to keep them on song and onside, and reminded them that it was less than a year since Yorkshire, so another six months here would give people at home a better chance to forget. I was the propaganda machine, the face of spin, and nobody felt I was personally to blame … not even for trying to treat them like fools. It's a young man’s game and there's a fatalism to soldiering, a stark materialism which leaves little room for sophisticated argument or analysis. Shit happens.

As the smoke and the barren remnants of the city became a memory, I thought about the eighteen month then two year extensions to our contract, about the sceptical faces, about the obvious hypocrisy in my voice as I'd tried to offer yet more glib explanations or reassurances. For nearly two years nobody had believed the company's line. Now, at least, we were going home, finally getting there, even if there was to be no leave. And the closer we got to home the more I kept questioning, surely the same thing couldn't be happening in Scotland?

- - - - - - - - - - -

As I dozed, my dreams became slow replays of those last two years, incessant as the noise of the plane's engines. I could picture myself arriving at the base, stepping off into the desert heat, my eyes growing acclimatised to the glare and the lack of greenery.

It had been a modern city, its oil wealth enabling it to become a thriving seat of Western technology, Western culture, Western consumption. It was now a medieval city, dependent on donkey and cart, on physical labour and sweat of the brow.

When we arrived, it had been torn apart by the years of civil war and attempts to reconstruct political stability. We'd hoped that we'd be greeted as peacekeepers but there were no flags waving, no streets lined with an excited populace welcoming liberation from chaos and corruption.

Instead, our arrival seemed to polarise the locals, drive them into one or other of the various competing factions - the independence movement, the separatists, the nationalists, the religious fundamentalists, the democrats and republicans, the anarchists and communists, the fascists and racial purists, the cults and the sects, the brigands and crime syndicates, not to mention the swathe of people who opted out and determined to get on with their own lives their own way. If they couldn't be induced to collaborate or agree on anything else, they all quickly absorbed a shared hatred of the Scottish invader.

Our tour of duty was supposed to be just another, same as the one before except with different faces and a different logo on the uniform. We replaced an American brigade - universally hated by the city. They were clearly the enemy, an occupying force. There had been hopes that we'd calm the situation, that we wouldn't inherit the animosity felt for the Yanks - boys from New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio, keen as us to get away, to get back home. Were they plagued with fear that the same thing might be happening to their home towns and cities?

We did, indeed, have a honeymoon week of relative tranquillity - that was when we took the publicity shots of us distributing sweets to the local children and installing stand pipes in a couple of neighbourhoods to ensure a rationed supply of fresh water. We arrived with a guarantee of neutrality - which every faction in the city took to mean that we'd be on their side and would help them beat their rivals into submission. And, because we were on nobody's side, we became everybody's enemy.

By the end of that first week the entire city was infested by this view. From then on, wherever we went, we were aliens and we defined the situation by our presence. An army can win battles, it can't win lasting control of a city without overwhelming use of force. It can't win hearts and minds except superficially, and the more antagonistic the city became, the fewer fucks we gave about the bastards.

Within days, occupation had settled into a routine of bombings, patrols, raids, and firefights. The human cost to the city could be measured in how far back into history it was driven. We paid the price by being dehumanised, by becoming figures on a balance sheet.

Statistically, you could pretty much programme how many deaths there would be each month - casualties were entered on a human profit and loss account into which were factored the price of getting the body home, insurance and pension liabilities, the costs of training a replacement, plus equipment loss, offset against the temporary saving in wages.

A predictably certain death toll had its advantages - we could inflate the rates we charged, so more profits for the company, a bit more pay for the troops … until we stopped shipping the bodies home and simply buried the dead along the side of the runway … until there was a long line of unkempt, unmarked graves, and we were all left to speculate on who would get the next berth, and whether anyone would bother burying the last of us.

So much for peacekeeping theory. Oh, we could pose as the saviours of humanity, pictured with small children and laughing civilians - these were the images we continued to promote, alongside human interest stories of loss or the death of a particularly young soldier … the death of a pretty young female one was even better for publicity, if not for unit morale. We thought only of survival, of the profit and loss account, of getting out and getting home. Fuck the bastards, they could have what was left of their city, we didn't want it.

In reality? It’s a truism, but generals and politicians always re-fight the last war, they’re never prepared for the next one. Two aircraft fly into the New York airspace, two columns of smoke hang over an American city, and suddenly we have a war on 'terrorism' predicated on the use of land armies, set piece battles, invasion and occupation. It was a vision of warfare which had become ingrained for a generation, and about as relevant to the front line soldier as the lessons from the First World War trenches.

We no longer trained for conventional warfare. 'Terrorism' had become a catch-phrase, as if it was something new, an ideology not simply a tactic. And this after the British Army had spent thirty years trying to pacify a tiny corner of a small island within a few minutes ferry travel of the Scottish mainland, a small enclave where the people were of pretty much the same ethnic background, spoke pretty much the same language, adhered pretty much to the same culture. My grandfather fought in that Irish non-war and never forgot the insanity of it.

So we camped outside the city, shuffling the cards. Each day the pack would be re-dealt - the faction which had been 'terrorist' yesterday was today an ally and we respected their righteous concerns for the future of their city and nation. Yesterday's Queen of Hearts could become today's Knave … and our task was now to win Spades, Diamonds, Clubs and minds.

We became absorbed into the same process of occupation the Yanks had established, but slowly, slowly, we shrank away from the city. As the occupation ground on, it began to dawn on us that this wasn't the city we’d seen on the television news back home, this wasn't the city we'd contracted to police and pacify. The city was sinking into its own mire. Our casualty rates were falling. And falling. It was the city which was dying.

At its height, over two million people had lived there. There was less than a tenth of that number left when we arrived, hanging on because it was the only life they knew. Scattered communities homesteading, scavenging what they could, trying to maintain a pretence at urban life. Five years of intermittent civil war, two decades of biblical plagues and disasters, twenty plus years of food shortages and rationing giving way to medieval bartering and self-sufficiency … or simply, to survival.

A peace march approached our compound a month after we arrived - a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred women and children. They wanted someone to take charge of food production and distribution, someone to ensure that water was made available, someone to guarantee humanitarian order.

They refused to stop at the barrier, despite a volley of shots being fired over their heads. They screamed and cried and cowered, but then pressed on. So a full company, around a hundred men, was detailed to charge them - no shooting, no bayonets, just drive them away. Most fled, a few recalcitrant ones had their arses stripped and tanned red with belts and rifle straps. They never came back. So much for peace. It would have been less humiliating if we'd simply shot them.

- - - - - - - - - - -

For the first six months our fuel supplies remained fairly predictable - our vehicles went out on patrol, aircraft came and went with a degree of regularity. The same old same old. But motor vehicles within the city became a rarity. Trains ran from time to time – maybe once or twice a month - packed out, people crowding the carriage roofs, clinging on to packages and tradeable goods for market.

Most of the time, people walked or cycled. Horses, donkeys, or bullock carts began to appear in numbers – we saw this as progress … they were no longer eating the horses.

However, with workable oil reserves still on the city’s horizon, fuel was unobtainable, income from the oil non-existent. We watched, or increasingly listened to the city starve then consume itself with food riots and despair. You could buy a blow job for a can of beans, for a dozen eggs you could fuck anybody, make it a chicken and you could have the whole family.

We watched the population fade away. The living became emaciated figures. Their begging became loud and aggressive, but we hardly ever sent patrols into the city anymore - no further than the suburbs just beyond no man's land. When we did, the beggars would press against our vehicles, the men staying out of sight, children and young women struggling to gain our attention and sympathy. After a few weeks of beatings the begging was reduced to wide eyed silence. We would drive down the middle of the road, they would keep to the road edges and watch. If you saw a face you liked, you could toss a tin of beans or peas or stew from hand to hand, make a couple of hand signals above your groin and, if they nodded, you had a bargain.

Soldiers are always obsessed with sex, always have been. It’s a young man’s game, it’s testosterone fuelled, it’s a trade which emphasises power and might and dominance, and it‘s a trade which recruits the people with the least bargaining power, the ones who can't get any other job. Soldiering is a haven for the scum of the earth, for those escaping bad homes, criminal associates, educational failure, or needing to flee a past … or trying to outrun memories. Why should anyone be surprised to learn that soldiers commit rape and murder? No, you should be surprised that so few do.

I knew that soldiering wasn't about glory or heroism, but I had a belief that it could be moral, that it should strive to bring peace and security to troubled peoples. We simply became an irrelevance. Around us, people starved. Typhus, cholera, tuberculosis were widespread. There were no plagues of frogs or locust, but chickenpox and measles began to kill in biblical proportions.

As the city sickened and died, we retreated further, abandoned patrols, razed trees and vegetation and buildings to extend the free fire zone that was no man's land. We built up the perimeter fences, added another line or two of barbed wire and laser wire, expanded the minefields, put out thicker and thicker concentrations of electronic monitoring devices. Our stocks of beans and stew and eggs began to mount again - contact with the natives no longer meant risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, instead, you risked catching whatever plague was currently rampant … or risked being barbecued.

Combat operations ceased. For weeks there would be no casualties, except the odd broken bone in a vehicle accident, and once an emergency transfusion because some idiot had been clumsy with a tin opener. Our routines became obsessive as we endeavoured to keep disease from our door. On the rare occasions a vehicle left the base it would be thoroughly disinfected before being allowed back in, and, if you were unlucky enough to have been chosen for the patrol you had to endure a routine of being sprayed and washed before being allowed back across the threshold, your clothing and equipment being bagged up and taken for disinfection at the new extension to the medical block. You left our world fully clothed, you returned naked - well, you were given paper overalls to wear until you could get back to your billet.

And still men died. Accident, infection, the occasional shooting, a couple of bomb blasts … suicides.

We were forgotten soldiers, remembered only by the auditors who argued about our expenses and the mounting cost of an operation which has lost any semblance of purpose other than the saving of face. We were still soldiers as we forgot why we were here and remembered that we could be home. We didn't have 'conversations'. We bitched. We whined. We grumbled. We complained. A hundred times I was asked, "When are we gan hame, captain?" And I'd shake my head and look out across the deserted airfield, knowing that what they were really wondering was, "How are we getting home?"

There were hardly any aircraft still flying. We all knew that, but we convinced ourselves that somebody would find fuel enough to get us back. Somebody.

"For fuck's sake, cap'n, we're sittin on top o yin o the biggest oilfields in the world, can we no jist get it fur oorsels?"

The days passed like grains of sand through an hourglass … one grain every twenty-four hours, each grain reluctant to drop, each grain dragging out its destiny to the very last microsecond. We were confined to barracks, quarantined in our compound at the airbase, a few miles outside the city but a million miles from its realities. We waited, surrounded by an infinity of desolation, waiting for that one grain of sand to fall every twenty four hours, hoping that the next grain would signal something different and not just the same routine.

We rationed our fuel so we could keep the generators working, pump water, and keep ourselves ready for movement. Only tracked vehicles were permitted to leave the base - before they could return they would have their tracks and wheels sprayed with scarce petrol and any risk of contamination burned off.

We paced around on the sun bleached soil, hoping we could speed that one grain every twenty four hours through the glass, trying to keep in the shade, trying to keep busy without moving. We drilled, we cleaned, we maintained order. We overhauled the batteries and electric engines on our vehicles, maintained the generators, strung out a few more solar panels and constantly had to reconnect the dislodged cables which ran from them to our personal virtual reality game players.

We kicked sand - one grain every twenty-four hours. We circulated our stock of books, magazines, and porn, we stopped looking at our watches, judging time by the angle of the sun, and willing that next grain of sand to fall in the twenty-four hourglass. We contrived to measure days in wanks, to divide it up into the time it took to find somewhere quiet and private where you could slip your hand down the front of your trousers and escape into fantasy or memory. Toilet paper and tissues were vital to our currency.

Allotments were contrived. We started growing our own food. Hoeing and raking my little plot, queuing for my ration of water, nurturing my first crop of vegetables, all brought home memories of home and provided me with a tangible link to my mother. I couldn't recreate her garden, but I harvested some cherished memories of happier times and tried to imagine her, at home, hoeing.

The only other relief came in mounting perimeter guard. We shot any stray dogs that came within range, before they reached the minefields. It became a competitive sport and we began to elaborate rules to establish which platoon had returned the highest kill ratio of dead dogs to rounds fired. Blazing away with a machinegun was unsporting - each platoon had its star strikers, its marksmen who could blow an animal's brains out at a quarter mile.

We even divided the perimeter into a sort of 36 hole golf course, with agreed range markers and obstacles and handicaps to a clear shot, so an animal shot at ten metres from the minefield might only count a half while one killed at a distance might be worth three or four. The troops spent hours debating the appropriate handicap for dust storms, poor light, wind, drifting smoke, or whatever.

A committee was elected (unofficially, of course) to oversee rules, umpires were appointed (unofficially), duty rotas were magically re-arranged to ensure that approved umpires were always available. Rumours of bribery and corruption abounded. 'Dog tagging' not only became a popular sport, small fortunes in porn, drugs, and distilled booze changed hands according to nightly, daily, or weekly results. Everyone bitched, and everyone was happy.

It was shooting the humans which caused problems. I understood that we had to maintain the quarantine so any of the locals who came too close to the compound had to be discouraged, had to be made to understand that they must stay away. But there were some who didn't understand, or maybe they were just desperate. Or maybe they'd had enough, maybe they'd reasoned that they wouldn't hear the rifle shot which killed them.

As stray dogs died out and people became more animated by despair, the 'Dog Tagging' rules were revised and became the new sport of 'Body Count'. Single shots were still favoured, but each kill had to be ‘righteous’ - it had to be someone who had been warned to stay away but who had clearly trespassed into the killing zone, not some straggler who happened to be passing by on the road. As long as the killing was righteous, marks out of ten would be awarded for the elegance or unusual manner of death, and a book would be run on whether the next one would exit with a simple crumple, a full pirouette, would fall heads or tails, or whatever.

At first, when we shot children, the men fell silent for a while. You get used to gallows humour, you become callous as the only rational alternative to insanity, you make obscenities of the obscene and profane the ordinary. But shooting children always left us listening, waiting for that next grain of sand to fall, hoping it might be the last one. "Come oan, cap'n, when the fuck are we gan hame?"

"Cap'n, Ah was talkin tae yin o the boys in Transport an he says as how we've got enough fuel and vehicles tae drive away frae here. Surely we could get mair fuel, ken, maybe requisition a couple o they ships in the harbour?"

Twenty two months we spent on that last tour. Our jobs changed, our role changed, but what we didn't appreciate was that the world we'd left behind was ebbing away. We were children playing at soldiers' games while the world aged around us. We were already re-fighting the last war, and losing it all over again. We bitched about where we were and what we were doing, assuming that home was frozen in time, that it was a place to which we'd return and be able to recapture the person we'd once been, that we'd be restored to our old haunts and resume playing ourselves instead of playing with ourselves. We were all thinking, "This couldn't be happening in Scotland?"

- - - - - - - - - - -

It hadn't just been excitement we felt as we boarded the planes. We'd known for weeks that our presence in the city (our presence in that whole blighted country) was superfluous. As the last plague took hold, all semblance of organised politics or organised religion … or organised resistance … imploded. The survivors were too busy burying their dead to bother about killing one another, those at any rate who weren't burying their heads in the sand and pleading with some god not to forsake them.

There were no more showcase funerals of bombing victims or martyrs killed by our troops or one of the city's rival militias or gangs; the images returned by the drones and robot vehicles sent to prowl the nearby suburbs told a graphic tale. As the deaths increased, the funerals became less sophisticated, less conspicuous. The numbers of mourners dropped off. There were no longer any elaborate processions, merely carts being pushed along carrying one or more shapes swaddled in sheets. Ceremony had given way to pragmatism - there was no respect for the dead, merely a responsibility to dispose of the cadaver as quickly as possible, out of respect for the living.

You could see that the wailing and protestations of grief had ceased, and not merely as outward displays; these were emotional luxuries the survivors could no longer afford. As the dead passed the streets emptied and fell silent, except perhaps for the squeaking of a cart wheel. People seemed ashamed to be seen in the presence of death, maybe through guilt at survival, more likely through dread that they'd be next … and soon.

You could sense it, even through binoculars, even looking at the monitored film from the drones and robots. Expressions of personal and family tragedy had been silenced; onlookers kept their distance, their faces expressing suspicion and fear. Within a couple of weeks, disposal of the dead was switched to the hours of darkness. Bodies could be seen, left abandoned in the streets - left where they'd fallen, or been dumped. Here and there one would still be attended by some distraught child or loved one … or maybe they were just robbers?

The local police and militias and medical services, or what was left of them, no longer had time or resources to devote to the living. Theirs was the management of the necropolis. If they came close to our base, we discouraged their approach. Co-operation was restricted to moral support by radio and the occasional token drone-drop of medicines which everyone knew were ineffective - which was the only reason we were prepared to throw them away.

We faced our own form of burial. It was as if we had been forgotten by our ain folk. We lived within a bunker mentality, coffined in the cramped conditions of a fortified barracks which stank of sweat and washing, of makeshift cigarettes and alcohol stills, of young but fast-ageing soldiers' bowel movements and boozy breath.

You got used to the claustrophobia, to the tension, to the obscene language, gallows humour, racist quips, and the daily need to find somewhere quiet where you could have that wank - a sterile privacy, because everyone knew what you were doing and many made no secret of it as they headed for the latrines clutching tissues and a well handled magazine. Magazines were currency - when you traded one you made sure none of the pages were stuck together. Life went on.

But at night you could see the flames on the city outskirts and the glow from beyond. Smoke hung in the air throughout the day.

Over those last few weeks we simply shut down and shut ourselves off. We were the survivors, we were fit, we were healthy, and we were staying that way. But nobody looked at magazines any more. We drilled, we trained, we found ways to fill up the hours. But we no longer even wanked - it seemed too personal, as if it made us feel human, and that was something we were trying to forget.

And we watched evidence of the city's slow death. We watched people fleeing from it as if safety lay somewhere beyond. We watched people fleeing to it as if it offered a haven from … from whatever worse lay beyond. We watched the recognition dawning on them - them, not us - that there was no escape. And now, when we discouraged them from approaching the base it wasn't with the odd rifle shot, it was no longer sport. We used machineguns and mortars and cannon fire as if we wanted to destroy all evidence of their existence lest it act as reminder of our impotence.

We needed someone to blame - and that someone was easy to find. We blamed the people in the city, the poor in their hovels, the rich in their armed enclaves, the people who had reduced a modern city to a medieval slum, the people whose greed, corruption, incompetence and failings had caused us to be here and whose ingrained inability to cooperate and coexist caused us to remain here.

Without them, we would be home. We could wear civilian clothing, we could go shopping, could go down the pub on a Friday night, could get laid, could go to bed at night in privacy and not have to share the space with the same people you'd shared it with for as long as you could remember. We'd not have to listen to them farting or wanking or crying out in their sleep. We could wash when we wanted, spend as long in the bath as we wanted, have a shit without smelling the piss and shit and puke of the last fifty people who'd used the toilet, without having to listen to someone wanking in the next cubicle. It was easy to find someone to blame, easy to find someone to hate. By the end, most of all, we hated ourselves.

I wished I'd had a copy of Samuel Pepys. He wrote about the Great Fire of London. I suspect he would have recognised the experience. One day we began to notice significant numbers of fires breaking out in the city. I think we assumed it was an alternative body disposal system being instituted. By night, large areas of the city - the poorer ones - were ablaze. They were trying to drive out the infection with flame. Didn't they realise, to succeed they'd have to incinerate the entire world?

The authorities, or at least the survivors with authority, asked for our help. The fires were out of control. Could we help create some firebreaks to stop the conflagration expanding? Throughout an entire afternoon our howitzer battery shelled the city, assisted by two helicopter gunships strafing chosen streets, razing them ahead of the flames to deny the fires any fresh fuel.

It was too much for one of the men. He put a pistol to his mouth and blew his brains out. He was our twenty-fifth suicide, the first one I'd witnessed, the first one to take place in public. Everyone understood. Every one of us would have happily seen the entire city bombed to oblivion. Every one of us wanted to erase the past, wishing this had never happened, powerless to wind back time to some distant memory of some 'normal' life. Every one of us was feeling that maybe our lives were meaningless and it was pointless going on. Every one of us had picked up a gun, time and again, and wondered, wondered if it would be painless, wondered if we could just switch off.

And then, miraculously, one morning we were told to pack. Anything and everything we couldn't carry, we burned or blew up. The atmosphere? 'Euphoric' doesn't even come close. Our activity was frantic, maniacal, like some orgy of release. We were going home. Surely nothing like this could be happening in Scotland?

- - - - - - - - - - -

And that final memory of the city came back to haunt me. I didn't know then what it would presage. Below me, a score of tall office blocks - they used to call them sky scrapers but that image was no longer appropriate … the buildings were dwarfed by the pillars of smoke which dotted the landscape, reaching up to blacken the sky. Civic pride and business prestige had raised these buildings; it would take centuries for nature to raze them, but they stood blackened, every pane of glass broken, ringed with a moat of debris hurled from successive floors - it must have been fun breaking into those offices and dropping redundant computer equipment from the windows. Did some of them play their own version of 'Body Count', hurling the detritus of commerce at unwary scavengers down at ground level?

How many suicides had made their way to the tower blocks? Did they become gateways of release for those who had given up, had they become the site of ritual human sacrifice? Climb the stairways to heaven hoping that the plunge would offer escape from hell? Had the buildings been torched in some perverse spectator sport, or as some insane religious ritual, a room or a floor systematically filled with debris then ritually set alight, briefly turning it into a lighthouse parody of the burning oil wells to invoke the wrath or beneficence of whatever deity held sway?

Then there was the sports stadium where so many of the dissidents had been held, and who knows how many executed, the miles of highways no longer going anywhere, evidenced by the littered congestion of redundant vehicles, the shells of houses, the detritus of civilisation, the empty landscape with hundreds of miles of flat desert broken only by patches of scrub and the tangled, rusted remains of the oil industry.

Here and there a well still burned, the desert around blackened by its smoky residue. And beyond the city centre, miles and miles of flat, sprawling suburb and shanty town, anonymous hovels for anonymous peoples. It was a city which had once been rich and famous, had even figured in a popular catchphrase. "Houston we've got a problem!" Well, Houston could keep its problems, we'd had enough of them.

Landscape gave way to seascape and the placid, boring miles of water washed away the past. We were going home. Surely the same thing couldn't be happening in Scotland?