Crossfire - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,1
so again twenty-five years later. She’d suddenly remembered that she was late for an appointment elsewhere, and had rushed away. The memory of her discomfort had kept me smiling for most of the rest of that day, and I hadn’t smiled much recently.
In truth, 25198241 Captain Thomas Vincent Forsyth had not been the most patient of patients.
The army had been my life since the night I had left home after another particularly unpleasant, but not uncommon, argument with my stepfather. I had slept uncomfortably on the steps of the army recruiting office in Oxford and, when the office opened at 9 a.m. the following morning, I had walked in and signed on for Queen and Country as a private soldier in the Grenadier Guards.
Guardsman Forsyth had taken to service life like the proverbial duck to water and had risen through the ranks, first to corporal, then to officer cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst followed by a commission back in my old regiment. The army had been much more to me than just a job; it had been my wife, my friend, and my family; it had been all I had known for fifteen years, and I loved it. But now it appeared that my army career might be over, blown apart for ever by an Afghan IED.
Consequently, I had not been a happy bunny during the previous four months, and it had showed.
In fact, I was an angry young man.
I turned left out of the hospital gates and began walking. Perhaps, I thought, I would see where I had got to by the time I became too tired to continue.
‘Tom,’ shouted a female voice. ‘Tom.’
I stopped and turned round.
Vicki, one of the physiotherapists from the rehabilitation centre, was in her car turning out of the hospital car park. She had the passenger window down.
‘Do you need a lift?’ she asked.
‘Where are you going?’ I said.
‘I was going to Hammersmith,’ she said. ‘But I can take you somewhere else if you like.’
‘Hammersmith would be fine.’
I threw my bag onto the back seat and climbed in beside her.
‘So they’ve let you out, then?’ she said while turning into the line of traffic on Roehampton Lane.
‘Glad to see the back of me, I expect,’ I said.
Vicki tactfully didn’t say anything. So it was true.
‘It’s been a very difficult time for you,’ she said eventually. ‘It can’t have been easy.’
I sat in silence. What was she after? An apology?
Of course, it hadn’t been easy.
Losing my foot had, in retrospect, been the most straightforward part. The doctors, first at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and then at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, had managed to save the rest of my right leg so that it now finished some seven inches below my knee.
My stump, as all the medical staff insisted on calling it, had healed well and I had quickly become proficient at putting on and taking off my new prosthetic leg, a wonder of steel, leather, and plastic that had turned me from a cripple into a normal-looking human being, at least on the outside.
But there had been other physical injuries too. The roadside bomb had burst my eardrums and had driven Afghan desert dust deep into my torn and bruised lungs, to say nothing of the blast damage and lacerations to the rest of my body. Pulmonary infection and then double pneumonia had then almost finished off what the explosion had failed to do.
The numbing shock that had initially suppressed any feeling of hurt had soon been replaced by a creeping agony in which every part of me seemed to be on fire. It was just as well that I remembered only a smattering of the full casualty evacuation procedure. Heavy doses of morphine did more than inhibit the pain receptors in the brain, they slowed its very activity down to bare essentials such as maintaining breathing and the pumping of the heart.
The human body, however, is a wondrous creation and has an amazing ability to mend itself. My ears recovered, the lacerations healed, and my white blood cells slowly won the war against my chest infection, with a little help and reinforcement from some high-powered intravenous antibiotics.
If only the body could grow a new foot.
The mental injuries, however, were proving less easy to spot and far more difficult to repair.
‘Where in Hammersmith do you want?’ Vicki asked, bringing me back to reality from my daydreaming.