Hello and a Happy New Year to you all - hope 2015 brings you everything you could wish for.
Thanks once again to everyone who has read and reviewed/messaged and thanks for your patience - sorry I didn't manage to get this chapter out before Christmas. Not sure how many more chapters there will be now, but probably only two or three more to go. This chapter is currently un-betaed so please excuse any mistakes I may have overlooked.
To 'nazaya', who I couldn't PM, thanks for the review and your English was fine...certainly better than my German ;p
No action in this one, just an angst-ridden heart-to-heart.
Sam raced towards the small, bullet-ridden building that had been made into a make-shift medical unit for injured personnel on the outskirts of Fallujah. The cooler air of the shaded building was a welcome relief after the intense heat of the midday sun. He looked through the darkened hallway, desperately searching out a familiar face before coming to a stop, relief taking over as he saw the young sniper alive.
Mick and Sam had often crossed paths on their overseas tours, and they had both made the effort to meet up where and when they could when the military was not dictating their lives. Over the years they had become good friends, despite their actual time together amounting to very little indeed.
With Sam embedded with the US Marines and Mick forever moving about with British Special Forces, they didn't see a lot of each other if they weren't stationed at the same FOB, and when their paths crossed, different commitments often gave them little real time together. However, when they did meet up, it was as if no time at all had passed since their last meeting, both falling into the easy camaraderie they had gained from their time together at Al Asad FOB.
It was with that friendship in mind that had Sam running around like a headless chicken once he received word of an ambush in Fallujah – he knew that Mick and his troop had been sent into the city along with US Special Forces for an operation earlier in the day.
He found his friend sitting down on a bench, staring intently at his hands that were covered in blood and Sam had a hard time telling if it was Mick's or someone else's.
"You ok?" he asked, his dry throat making his voice sound particularly gravelly.
"It's not mine," Mick said quietly, "Well, most of its not mine," he conceded, sparing a glance towards a jagged wound on his upper right arm.
"Danny?" Sam asked needlessly. Mick was a popular man, for all that he was closed off about any and all things personal, and he had no shortage of friends in the military, but he and Danny were like brothers and Wallcroft was the only one likely to elicit such a devastated look from the Welshman – Sam hated to think what losing the man would do to Mick
"We were in the city – Intel had insurgents going after a school, a suspected bombing, only we didn't know which school so we were going around trying to evacuate them all. We didn't have enough people and the bomb went off. So did another one at a mosque and another one at a police station and another one at the mayor's office. The Army helped ferry people to the hospitals and we got orders over the net to go to the one where they'd sent the mayor and the head of police – we were to move them to a secure location because apparently the Brass was worried about their deaths bringing further destabilisation to the area."
"We'd only just got there and…" Mick looked at Sam, his eyes damp but resolute about withholding the tears. "Those bastards used the explosions to get as many people into the hospital as possible – anyone they didn't kill with those first blasts, children and parents, police and local politicians, they were all there in one place for them to take out.
"An RPG blew the wall out in the entrance and Danny went down straight off. He caught some shrapnel in the gut from the explosion and there was a lot of blood. We retrieved him under cover-fire and I dumped a year's supply of Celox gauze and some morphine into him. God, Coop, the noises he was making and I couldn't do a damn thing to help him!
"All around us there were bleeding civilians, some of them quite literally in pieces, crying and begging for us to help, but we had to go and get the mayor and the police chief, grab our wounded and go. US Marines were coming in to help the situation but until then we had our orders to get the VIPs to safety and leave the civilians behind."
Sam frowned, unsure of what to say or do – he thought saying anything about how he was just following orders could be seen as trite and more than a little tactless. He couldn't comfort him about Danny because he had absolutely no idea as to the severity of the wound and while hope was always welcome, false hope could be debilitating at the outcome.
"I know Army life isn't perfect, I've never been naïve enough to think otherwise, but I guess I always thought that saving innocent civilians would come before helping the corrupt local officials to safety," Mick shook his head, his anger causing his voice to waver in its intensity.
"The mayor's a White House favourite," Sam explained.
"Bin Laden was a White House favourite once upon a time, too, back when the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, so I hardly think that counts for much at the end of the day. God, I have never been so angry at orders before!"
"You're always going to get orders you don't like, or ones you don't agree with," Sam pointed out the inevitability. "You're a soldier, Mick, and more often than not that entails following orders."
"Yeah, that excuse went down great in Nuremberg, too," the sniper scoffed. He went to run his hands through his hair as he was wont to do when particularly agitated, but he caught sight of the blood once again and lowered his hands, releasing a heavy sigh of frustration. He closed his eyes and took a deep, shaky breath as he tried to calm himself. When he opened them again his gaze immediately went to the door hiding his oldest friend.
"I left the FBI when I got angry with the Brass," Sam said. He had never really talked about his time in the FBI – it was still one of the few subjects that was largely unexplored between them, as was what had happened to Mick's family. But he didn't want his friend dwelling on the potential loss of another loved one and couldn't think of another topic that was so wholly unrelated.
"You saying I should leave?" Mick asked, breaking his vigil to look questioningly at his friend.
"I'm just saying that it's a possibility," Sam shrugged. "Find something new to do with your life."
"Like you, you mean?" the Welshman said almost scornfully.
"Why not?"
"Because you never really left, did you Coop," Mick said rather astutely. "You seem to spend your time over here in penance for something you think you did over there. And I don't buy for one second that you left because you were angry – you're the sort of person who likes to think things to death and by then anger has a habit of dying down somewhat."
"Depends on what got you angry in the first place," Sam suggested nonchalantly.
"Yeah, I'm not buying it. So why did you really leave?" Mick asked with an arched eyebrow. He had sensed Sam's loyalty, seen the very real evidence of it in the man's interactions with Hassan and himself – abandoning his friends and his duty in a fit of pique simply didn't ring true.
"For someone who hasn't had an ounce of training as a profiler you seem to be pretty much a natural at it," Sam laughed wryly, shaking his head. He didn't know why it kept on surprising him, having long ago learnt that there was a whole hell of a lot more to Mick than the man ever liked to show, but every time the younger man's intelligence came through he seemed to come to a stop. "You ever think about what you'll do once you leave the military?" Sam asked him curiously.
"Not really," Mick shrugged. To his credit, he didn't seem at all surprised by the non sequitur and carried on. "Never really thought about leaving."
"Really?" Sam was surprised.
"Come on, Coop," Mick sounded a tad exasperated. "I didn't even finish school, let alone go off to uni and get a degree – I'm hardly an employer's wet dream."
"But you're intelligent…"
"So what?" Mick interrupted. "That doesn't mean anything unless you've got a little piece of paper to back it up, and I have no intention of going back to school to get that piece of paper. Besides, I think I'd go insane being stuck behind a desk all day – can you seriously imagine me answering phones and photocopying?"
"No," Sam replied honestly. Mick was not someone who liked to be in any one spot for too long. The man was a paradox, really – give him a nest and he'd spend three days as still as a statue doing nothing but watching his target through a scope, but make him sit down off duty for more than ten minutes and he was crawling out of his skin with boredom. "No," Sam repeated, "I think Health and Safety would try and stop you for the sake of everyone else's sanity," he joked. "But there is more to the working world than sitting behind a desk…"
"I know that. I do actually work for a living too, mate," Mick pointed out wryly.
"But you could be so much more than just a soldier," Sam tried to search for the right words, desperate as he was to make Mick understand that he had more to offer the world than his ability to use a rifle.
"I don't see it as being 'just a soldier'," Mick replied, more than a little insulted, his exasperation turning towards irritation.
"No, I didn't mean…" Sam tried to interject but Mick was having none of it – his worry over his friend, his anger over his orders and his general frustration at the helplessness of it all took hold.
"I know people see the uniform and think we're nothing more than a bunch of idiots who couldn't hack it in academia, but some of the best people I know in the world are wearing this uniform and most of them have more common sense than the wankers in charge.
"We're making an actual difference while the politicians and the diplomats and all those other highly educated people would rather talk about it from afar. We mere soldiers know these people better than anyone who studied Middle Eastern culture at university ever could – we know their customs and their language, their traditions and their resilience to all this shite the political intelligentsia inflicted on them from the safety of the White House and Downing Street.
"While those clever people on TV do roundtables and talk about how terrible this war is, we're here to crawl through the burnt out remains of a town attacked by insurgents, to find the body parts strewn about the place from the latest suicide bombing and to rescue those left behind to pick up the pieces of their lives.
"We know what it is to pull people from the mud and mire of a landslide, the aftermath of an earthquake and from rising floodwaters, setting up yet another refugee camp for yet another displaced populace. We're the ones who have to be on the ground distributing aid to the desperate, sometimes desperately violent people after the military big-wigs in the MOD and the DOD decide that civilian infrastructure is a perfectly viable target. We're the ones who see each and every consequence of the actions perpetrated by the educated men in charge, so most days I think being 'just a soldier' has a hell of a lot to say for itself!"
"Mick," Sam said softly. "Please, I didn't mean to sound so derogatory. I have been, for the most part, proud to wear this uniform too. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo notwithstanding, I have seen some of the best work in the military done by the lowliest of grunts and most of them don't have a Harvard degree either.
"I know the military means a lot to you, and I know you take a lot of pride in your abilities and your friends and I can assure you I don't give a damn about whether or not any of you finished your education – you've all done well enough without it as far as I can see. However, I still think that with a mind like yours, you should be doing something other than looking down the barrel of a gun. I don't know why you seem to think so little of yourself," Sam shook his head in dismay. "Anything to do with your abilities as a soldier and you're damn near cocky, but for the rest of it…" he trailed off, not sure what to say.
"You're an intelligent young man, and a compassionate one, a highly capable man and a damn good one, but you're still a young man. We've known each other off and on for a few years now and I really don't want to see you leave this world ahead of your time, fighting a seemingly endless war far from home. You have so much more to offer the world than your ability to shoot someone between the eyes from half a mile away."
"I can shoot further than that," Mick grumbled with half-hearted indignation.
"And there's that ego," Sam pointed out. "So why can't you be as confident with the rest of it?"
"Come on, Coop," Mick sighed, exasperatedly. "The military is all I know, unless you want me to put my street skills to the test – pickpocketing and lock-picking, theft and trespassing. Hell, I could become a regular old Fagin and have little orphans running all over the city doing it for me."
"You would never be capable of using anyone in such a fashion!" Sam stated firmly.
"I'm no angel, Coop. I ran drugs and stole money from struggling single mothers and kids half my age when I was on the streets. I had a certain moral flexibility back then that I'm not entirely convinced I'll ever escape.
"There's more to being a good sniper than knowing how to shoot – you need to be fully prepared to pull the trigger and not give a damn about the consequences. It's different than being on the ground with your assault rifle – then when you fire you're normally reacting, shooting back at those who opened fire on you. The RoE's can be pretty fluid at times, but mostly, they tell us we can only fire back at those shooting at us.
"It's not the same as a sniper – there you get your target, and then you kill them, without them firing one bullet in your direction, without even knowing you're there. Often you might be watching them before they're even green-lighted as a target – hell, sometimes you're the one who makes them a target! You get to know them better than their own mother by the end of it, and more often than not you see the good in them, too – you see them give a kid in the compound their last bit of rice, pet the mangy dog despite the fleas, laugh and joke with his men and treat the village elder with the respect he deserves. You see a whole person and not just the enemy.
"There are a lot of people who can't take the shot after watching their target acting like a normal, decent human being for three days straight. I'm not one of those people, Coop. Don't make me into something I'm not," he warned his friend.
"I know you're not an angel, Mick," Sam agreed. "But I also know you're not the Devil. Trust me, I've met more than a few men without a conscience to guide them in my time and you're nothing like them. You're damaged, no doubt, but then there are few of us who are completely unscathed. Damaged, sure, but you're not broken, Mick."
"Well, maybe there we'll just have to agree to disagree," Mick shrugged, unpersuaded. He had long ago convinced himself that he was broken, that there was nothing in the world that could ever make him feel like a normal person again. For a time he had tried to experience that normality vicariously through his sister, but that had only served to remind him just how far he was from that reality, and the sense of estrangement he felt from Jenna at those times was more potent than any sense of longing he might once have held.
"You've really never thought about leaving the army?" Sam asked, almost incredulously after a long few moments of uncomfortable silence.
"That surprises you? Really?" Mick asked, genuinely perplexed by the profiler's reaction. "The Army gave me my first real home since I lost my parents. It was a roof over my head, food in my stomach, money in my pocket and a brother at my side. Danny helped me pick myself back up off the ground and he's stood by my side ever since – all the shit we've gone through and he's never once wavered. The OCs pushed me to better myself at more than just my shooting and they managed to keep me in check without resorting to breaking an arm or rupturing a kidney.
"It gave me a home and it gave me a purpose and it gave me as close to a family as I reckon I'll ever get again. None of that is an easy thing to consider losing, especially by your own hand."
Coop nodded quietly. He'd always suspected that Mick saw the army and its occupants as a family, but due to the man's stoic nature and incredible poker face he had never been sure as to the depths of those feelings.
"So, I reckon fair is fair, tit for tat and all that," Mick said as he leaned back in his chair and scrubbed at his tired eyes. He tried to ignore Danny's blood under his fingernails and staining his clothes and instead chose to focus on the man next to him. "Why did you really leave the BAU?"
"Like a dog with a bone, huh?" Sam asked dryly.
"Like you're one to talk, mate. Now, I may not be a profiler but I've gone through my interrogation training all the same and I can spot evasion as well as the next soldier, so…no more avoiding and answer the damn question, if you please," he smiled at his friend to take any sting out of his words.
"Imagine a world where there's no light at the end of the tunnel, only darkness," Sam started off rather poetically. "That's what the world felt like by the time I left the BAU – dark and dangerous and impossibly hopeless."
"Surely it can't have felt like that all the time, otherwise why stick at it for so long?" Mick wondered.
"It didn't, not at first. I was there almost from the beginning, setting it up and helping to establish it as it is now. I was so proud," Sam laugh with derision. "I thought, naively so, that we'd see a reduction in the type of crimes we specified in, but it never happened. If anything, we ended up getting more and more cases passing across our desks, more and more police officers and agents desperate for our help, more and more bodies in the ground
"It got to the point where we had to start turning down people who were asking for our help because we simply didn't have the manpower to cover them all. Of course, the Brass, in all its infinite wisdom, decided that what we needed next was a budget cut, which meant we had even less time and resources than before to work our way through our case load.
"One of the worst things about it was the politics behind it all. Because the FBI Brass were so determined not to step on anyone's toes, so eager not to offend anyone, the BAU had to wait to be invited onto a case. Which meant that we might be sitting in our office between cases and we've seen a pattern and come up with an initial profile, but we can't do anything because we have to wait until someone asks us – I hate to think how many people died simply because the officer or agent in charge waited too long to call us in.
"By the end of it all, I was so angry, so disillusioned and so resigned to the fact that we were always going to be too late that I'd forgotten all the reasons why I'd wanted to work in the BAU in the first place," Sam trailed off sadly.
There was a long moment of silence as both men sunk into their thoughts – Mick on what he'd heard and Sam on what he'd given up so long ago. The young Welshman decided to try and talk some sense into the American, bewildered by the way Coop could call him up onto the carpet for his bullshit and yet fail to see when he was wallowing in his own mire of self-worth issues.
"I'm not trying to belittle what you felt about it all, but surely you can't believe the BAU increased the number of serial killers?" Mick asked tentatively, almost incredulously.
"Of course not!" Sam fired back, his emotions about that particular chapter of his past still too raw to invite calm, rational thinking.
"Then why the guilt I see plastered all over your face?" Mick demanded, equally as unforgiving in his tone. "So you got more cases, more people were asking for help, surely that just means that you and the rest of the BAU proved a useful tool in catching the sick bastards! As to more bodies, that's not always a bad thing. Back in the UK, we've still got victims we know are dead and buried, but we don't have a body – can you imagine what that does to the family? More bodies doesn't necessarily mean more deaths, it could just mean that you've found them before they're nothing but bone fragments and dust.
"I mean, I can't believe that America has all of a sudden got ten times more serial killers and serial rapists and all those other sick sons of bitches you hunt down. The more likely reality is that because of the BAU, because of your training and your understanding of these people, law enforcement is better at spotting patterns, better at narrowing down suspects and dump sites and methodology. And if that's the case, then you shouldn't feel guilty, Sam, you should feel proud!"
"I probably should," Sam agreed with a cynical smile.
"But you don't," Mick pointed out needlessly. "Why not?"
"I bailed on it, didn't I?" Sam shrugged, as if that explained everything.
"You don't strike me as the kind of guy who'd bail for nothing, Coop," Mick said, the conviction in his voice leaving his friend in no doubt that he believed in him.
"Colby Holme," Sam confessed softly after silently debating with himself about whether or not he could reveal the whole truth.
"Who's that? One of your UnSubs?" Mick asked.
"No," Sam shook his head sadly, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out his wallet. He handed over a photo of a young boy – it was curled at the edges and the general wear and tear suggested to Mick that his friend had been repeatedly punishing himself by forcing himself to look at the picture and endure whatever self-recriminations it produced.
"I was working a case with a couple of other agents. We had five dead boys and we worked the profile and that eventually lead us to a guy who confessed to all five murders, but we knew…we knew he wasn't responsible for them all because the preference was too varied and it just didn't fit. But gut instincts don't count for much and the local cops shut down the investigation, satisfied that they'd got their man, and the FBI brass demanded that we come home. So we did, reluctantly and full of apprehension, worried that the case wasn't really over, but we had our orders and no real evidence, so we headed back to Quantico.
"It might have been different if I'd been working a case, helping someone somewhere, but it was a rare lull and I was at the Bureau just waiting to be called in on another case. Hotchner, one of the other agents, had been called away to a case in Denver, I think, and that's when I got the call. Colby Holme," Sam said, choking on his emotion as he pointed to the photo still in Mick's hold, "was the little boy who was killed by the second offender that we knew was out there. Local cops found him dumping Colby's body in the woods.
"I was so angry at the Brass for calling us away before the case was done, furious at the ridiculous system that has us waiting for a phone call before we're even allowed to help, and mostly, I was pissed off with myself because I knew the profile didn't work with one offender and yet I ignored my gut, and Colby paid the price.
"I couldn't stay after that, not after Colby," Sam said firmly, his eyes moist with unshed tears and guilt.
"You do know that it wasn't your fault, right Coop?" Mick almost begged. "If you had no leads, no evidence to lead you to the second offender then the chances of you catching him before he killed someone else…"
"Slim, I know," Sam said bitterly. "I guess when kids are involved you sort of lose your rational side."
"You know one of my first confirmed kills in country was a kid," Mick said quietly, looking intently at his bloodied hands in an effort to avoid eye contact. "Are you going to hold me to account for that?"
"No! Of course not!" Sam frowned. "I know you, Mick, and if you killed a kid then I'm sure you had a reason."
"I did," Mick agreed. "He had an AK and was firing at the Joint Taskforce. We'd hit an IED and started taking enemy fire, we had two dead and three injured and we were taking mortar fire, too – a shit day all round," Mick smiled grimly. "We needed to move to a more secure location and so we laid down suppressive-fire. Naturally, as the high man I was ordered to find a nest and cover the rest as they carried the injured to safety. I looked down my sights and the first thing I see is a kid, maybe twelve, but certainly no older, and he was firing away at the convoy, not even flinching at the cover-fire coming in at him. And I shot him."
"I can't imagine that was easy," Sam tried to console his friend.
"It wasn't," Mick agreed.
"But you had to shoot him, Mick," the profiler stated, not a trace of doubt in his voice.
"Did I? I'm one of the best snipers in the world and I could have injured him, shot the gun out of his hands, taken out one of his knees…"
"That's not how we're trained," Sam disagreed. "We go for the kill shot for a reason, to make sure that we're safe. How much longer does it take to line up a shot where the intention isn't to kill? If you tried to wound him and he still went for his weapon and started shooting at the convoy again, how many lives would have been at risk, how many people could he have shot? You can't play the 'what if' game, Mick. It doesn't do anyone any favours."
"So why are you playing it with Colby Holme?" Mick asked, finally looking his friend in the eyes.
"That's a dirty trick," Sam pointed out, his eyes narrowed at his friend, irritated that his own words were being used to prove him wrong.
"Look, some things are always going to stick with you," Mick said, under no illusions that he'd managed to convince his friend he was not to blame. "And you're right, kids tend to make it all seem so much worse. But at the end of the day, Coop, you weren't the one to pull the trigger, the UnSub was, so if you want to be angry with someone then blame the sick son of a bitch who killed Colby.
"And if you needed to get away from the BAU for a while to rediscover some vestige of humanity in the world, then I hardly think anyone can blame you – it sounds like a rough job at the best of times. But you didn't end the BAU, Coop, it's still running, catching the bad guys and helping out the police across the States. You helped set it up and what's running today is down to you and the other agents who saw a need for something like that – whatever else, that's something you should be proud of."
"You'd make a good profiler," Sam said after several minutes of silence. "You're good at reading people and getting in their head."
"I'm not sure I want to be in your head, Coop. I think it's even more fucked up than mine," Mick joked.
"I don't think I'd go that far," Sam disagreed with a laugh. "Thanks, though," he said with sincerity as he looked at his young friend. "I don't really talk about it much, and generally try to avoid it as much as I can but I think you've managed the impossible."
"Impossible?" Mick queried.
"By getting me to talk about it. I don't really do the whole shrink thing," Sam confessed. "I know my job at the BAU probably sounds like I spent my days reading Freud and Jung, espousing the benefits of psychiatry, but honestly, I never could stand talking to shrinks."
"Me neither, mate, can't blame you there. Although it might explain why neither one of us is exactly the most well-balanced of individuals," Mick pointed out wryly.
Sam was about to reply when the doctor exited the room holding Danny. Mick shot up and any sign of his previous levity was lost in a heartbeat.
"Is he ok?" Mick asked tentatively.
"He's lost a lot of blood but we think we've managed to contain that. We've repaired the damage but obviously we'll need to keep a close eye on him and make sure we didn't miss anything – he had a lot of shrapnel in his gut and some it was pretty damn small, so there is that risk. We want to get some more blood in him and stabilise his blood pressure before we think about sending him back home on a long flight, but on the whole the prognosis looks good and we're cautiously optimistic for a full recovery."
"I'm O negative," Mick offered as he let out a huge sigh of relief. "That's universal donor, right? I can donate a couple of pints. Can we see him?"
"I'm not going to let you in there, especially looking like that," the army doctor pointed out the mud and blood that caked the young soldier's hands and clothes. "He's resting, he's being well looked after and right now he's looking a damn sight better than you. I'll have someone see to that arm and once we have a clue as to the wound's severity, then we'll see whether or not you'll be up to giving us any blood," the doctor said pointedly. "We only like to take one pint and if you're all good then I'll have a nurse set it up, but after that…rest!"
"That's you told," Sam smiled as the doctor headed outside, his own relief palpable in the way his breath finally felt as though it wasn't catching on anything at every inhale. "You and Danny, between you…nine lives, I swear."
"If only those lives were a little less exciting," Mick said tiredly. Now that he knew Danny was going to be ok, he felt his own fatigue seeping in.
"That bothering you?" Sam asked, gesturing towards the wound on his arm.
"No, it's barely a scratch," Mick shrugged off his concern.
"You'd say that if the arm was hanging off," Sam said almost accusingly.
"Come on, you know I've had worse. This is nothing."
"I hate to think what it'd take for you to think it was something," Sam shook his head in dismay. Mick had long since been a friend and Sam had accepted the man, faults and all, but there were times that the profiler wished his young Welsh friend had a better sense of self-preservation.
"You already know what 'something' is like," Mick said, gesturing towards the closed doors of Danny's makeshift hospital room. "I suppose I should get this seen to, because if I don't go now I swear to God, I'll fall asleep right here."
"Alright, sit down and I'll go see if I can find that doctor."
"Coop," Mick called after his retreating friend. "Thanks, for everything. I know you only told me what you did because you didn't want me focusing on what was going on in there," he gestured towards the closed doors that hid his best friend. "I appreciate it."
"I told you because you're my friend and I trust you," Sam countered. Mick merely raised an eyebrow which caused the older man to laugh sheepishly. "A natural-born profiler, I keep telling you," he shook his head amusedly. "I'm just glad it helped."
"Me too," Mick agreed. "Maybe one day I'll be able to return the favour."
"You already did," Sam said quietly, leaving before Mick could ask what he meant.
Sam watched Mick as he watched the needle go in and out of his skin, pulling the jagged edges together – he winced, but otherwise made no further sign of his discomfort.
"So where are you off to after this?" Sam asked, once again trying to distract the man from his pain. He was aware that Mick might not be able to give him a straight answer due to the covert nature of his job, but at least it started a topic that neither one of them should be uncomfortable with.
"Back to the UK, mate," Mick smiled tiredly. "Nine whole months on home turf. We're on CT rotation, so it will be pretty relaxed – lots of tea, I'm told."
"CT rotation?" Sam queried.
"Well, you know about the massacre at the '72 Olympics in West Germany? The one where the Black September terrorist group killed all of those people?" Mick asked and waited for Sam to nod. "Well, after that, word is that Heath, the Prime Minister at the time, wanted to create a unit that would be able to respond to an incident like that on British soil. So they created the Special Projects Team.
"Basically, it's a counter-terrorist group inside the SAS, trained in anti-hijacking, CQB, siege-breaking, hostage rescue, and the like. The squadrons rotate through the duty and go through refreshers on the training every 15 months or so. They sometimes work abroad but the basis of it is that there's always someone on home ground to take care of any issues that crop up.
"Five years after it was created, there was the siege in the Iranian embassy, so that kind of confirmed the need for it and negated any ideas about it being a waste of funding. And now here we are," Mick shrugged.
"So you'll have an easy time of it," Sam ventured.
"Hopefully," Mick nodded. "Although with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Al Qaeda and the aftermath of 7/7, the current threat level is rated as severe, so who knows. We'll be doing some training with Special Branch and the Met. no doubt, but on the whole, I'm not really sure what to expect except for a whole load more training."
"It'll be nice for you to be that much closer to Jenna, though, right?" Sam asked.
"I guess," Mick agreed.
"You guess?" Sam queried, puzzled by his friend's discomfort.
"You know what we were saying earlier, about being broken?"
"I'm pretty sure I said you weren't broken," Coop clarified.
"Well, even if you want to leave it at damaged…" Mick shrugged. "I don't know. It's just, she has her new family and they take care of her and love her and she loves them, even if I don't understand that last part myself. It seems like every time I come back into her life it's because of something bad. She's so…" he scrabbled for the right word. "She's normal and I feel like I'm always fucking things up for her – I don't want to be the one responsible for damaging her!"
"You don't think she's old enough to make her own mind up about that?" Sam suggested.
"Maybe," Mick shrugged. He didn't think it would matter to him how old she was, she would always be his little sister and he would always want to protect her, even from himself.
"Your sister is smart, almost as smart as you are, and while I don't know the particulars, I would hazard a guess and say that the reason she isn't already as damaged as you is because you protected her, even back then when you were just a kid yourself," Sam guessed, and was pretty sure he'd hit the nail on the head when he saw Mick flinch slightly at wherever his thoughts had taken him.
"You want me to let go of Colby Holme? Then you work on letting go of your past. I'm here, ready to listen, anytime you need me," Sam offered quietly.
"One day, Coop," Mick stated wryly. "You'll wear me down in this war of attrition you've got going with my demons."
"We can only hope," Sam said sincerely.
Please let me know what you think and if you spot any mistakes - thanks!
And for those of you who need it...
FOB – Forward Operating Base.
RPG – Rocket Propelled Grenade.
Celox Gauze – used by both the UK and US Military (and many more worldwide), it is a dense, haemostatic gauze used to pack bleeding wounds.
VIP – Very Important Person.
MOD/DOD – Ministry of Defence and Department of Defence for the UK and US respectively.
Abu Ghraib – a prison near Baghdad, where 17 US soldiers were accused (and 11 charged) of human rights violations and torture.
Guantanamo – a section of Cuba occupied by a US Naval Base. Guantanamo Bay is the infamous prison set up in 2002 that was to house any deemed to be particularly dangerous to the US. Torture has only been confirmed on one detainee but is suspected to be far more wide-spread – regardless, the methods used there have received worldwide condemnation.
RoE's – Rules of Engagement – rules that are given to the military and dictate what measures are acceptable in any given situation. They are a relatively fluid concept that can be changed to adapt to most circumstances. They can also change in the blink of an eye - from only being allowed to fire at enemy soldiers firing at you, to everyone being declared 'hostile' and therefore a target.
OCs – Officer in Command/Officer Commanding.
IED – Improvised Explosive Device.
CT – Counter-Terrorism.
CQB – Close Quarter Combat.
7/7 – the bombings that occurred in London on the transport system on the 7th July, 2005.
Special Branch – part of the Police Force, they acquire and utilise intelligence to protect the State from actual and perceived threats, especially in relation to terrorism.
The Met – nickname for the Metropolitan Police, who police Greater London (the City of London Police cover, not surprisingly, the City of London or the "Square Mile") and are involved in counter-terrorism and protection of high-ranking officials, including the Royal Family.
