01/05/2026
First draft.
THE KILLING OF A SONG BIRD
PROLOGUE
By the Burn
‘Gotcha,’ she squealed and ran down the bank; splashing into and through the shallow pond; the gurgling and cold water leapt, jumped and splashed into her tartan wellies. The first week of the summer break had reached it’s end. He and his brothers had spent the morning with their father at Jumu:ah; fidgeting and grumbling in the early sun while their father smoked a cigar and chatted with an unknown man. His father shook hands with the stranger and ushered them back to the car. Before she headed off to catch some sleep; their mother had fed and dressed them smartly for the occasion. She had come home just after three that morning and would be back again at work in a few hours. His father told him to change before going back out to mess around but the weather was fine and tempting.
He contemplated the odd, shaped rocks that poked above the swirling water. He rubbed his backside where the willow cane had struck him. It didn’t hurt so much; it was more the ambush that had struck at his sensibility. Rebekah made him think of the rogue firework that had chased the dog at Wullie’s bonfire last November. A volatile firecracker that hopped around here, there and everywhere; hardly pausing as she leapt from one interesting thing to another. He kind of liked her; she was okay for a girl but he liked William better; Wullie was a lad and Wullie knew everything there was to know.
‘What was that for?”
She thrashed the water with her stick and giggled.
‘Yesterday!’
CHAPTER ONE
ONE BAG
The names of most team members had been provided, along with profile and position, weeks in advance, and although he had carried out the necessary initial greetings and get-to-knows at the first meeting in the Goldair Lounge, he still wasn’t sure of surnames but felt confident that, with the disembark routine hopping along the alphabet, he would be last to escape the oppressive heat. Andrews, from Coventry and a skilled historian on the Western Isles, had been first, followed by Cochran then Davidson. Marshall stood up and collected his passport; a Hemingway novel and his collection of documents from the next seat; flung a small backpack over his shoulder and walked down the aisle. Seven of his team remained and no one more distant from ‘A’ than him; ‘U’ would be last to leave. From the window, across the aisle, Mount Hermon could be seen rising from the dusty desert before disappearing out of view. A brutal, bare and lonely landscape; the emptiness reminded him of the first days after the long winter. The blizzard had spent its assault as he waited, hours, in traffic, at the Queensferry crossing. Fife lay under a thick blanket of snow, desolate, with little movement, life stalled, only the snail-speed, single line of cars, trucks and army vehicles that arced up and out of sight provided evidence that life continued.
The journey from Zahle had wound its way up and through the valley; rattling past olive groves, unknown crops and lush green fields; some with goats, some with sheep and one with a crowd of head-shaking donkeys that raised their gaze to watch the travelers. The promotional material created scenes of shiny-new accommodation; grassed areas, fully equipped gym, and bustling canteens set in a desert oasis. The last five miles of parched travel appeared to confirm that’s how things would be, however, looking out over the base, the reality seemed set to be entirely different.
Millar got to her feet, appearing, unsteady at first then, clutching at a pole, regained her balance. She was older than his mother by three years; a retired nurse she would be in charge of medical needs on base and coordinate the off-base requirements with Central Hub. She looked at him; raising her eyebrows above her glasses and said,
‘Big change in the weather, hmm? Stay hydrated.’
‘My mum’s a doctor, I’ve been warned.’
‘I know but she’s not here to remind you, I am.’
Millar hailed from just outside of Keswick; half a mile from the Skiddaw path. She was a veteran of the Middle East and a veteran of hilly climates. It had been a mixture of mist and varying rainfall on the weeks leading up to her departure. She adored the sunshine but missed the dreary life of the Northern Fells. For a large part of the journey she had discussed the ‘great storm,’ as she termed it, as she might a fevered patient, it would peak, burn out its angry core, ebb and the land would slowly recover. The land and its people were now healing; back to normal might take some time but it would come.
It was a damp, dreich Edinburgh morning when he got to the airport. A light drizzle settled on jackets and cars. It was again mild for late October with the weather back to its normal humdrum routine; following the same pattern it had followed for the twenty years before the storms. Back home would be a miserably wet and windy winter. There might be some frost and cold clear days in November; come January perhaps a flurry of snow settling on Kilmardinny moor but other than that it would be damp and grey. The sunshine didn’t seem so bad after all and a drink of something would help. He looked at the bottle he had been sipping from the past hour; it was now empty, how much longer he wondered.
Peterson slid across her seat. She was the youngest woman in the group. Of slender build and scalp wrenching hair; she wore large, thick rimmed glasses that gave her an academic air. She smiled at him as she passed.
‘Third last but never least. Thank God; boy do I need to dump,’ she said, ‘meds you know? Nothing for days then all at once!’
‘Thanks for the share.’
‘Not a prob, to be forearmed is to be upwind.’
She laughed and got off. During the chartered flight they had got to know each other; their backgrounds, their hopes, reasons for their current adventure and a brief insight to her recent medical history. From loading cement onto the back of a truck with her father; she had suffered a shoulder injury and had been prescribed pain killers of which she claimed would probably work much better with German beer, she was disappointed having been advised not to drink with them.
The temperature at the airport had hovered around twenty-five and, the driver assured his passengers, that as the got onto the higher ground the heat would ease an it would be a pleasant nineteen or less by the time they arrived in Shebaa. The heat within the bus hadn’t dropped since leaving the airport and the rattling air conditioning and brief stop at Zahle for shawarma and tepid fruit juice had done little to ease the hot and claustrophobic confines of the armour plated coach
‘Smith? Documentation and passport, ready, please,’
‘He wasn’t in Athens, changed his mind,’ Ben said and leaned out from his seat as the armed name announcer stuck his head into the bus, ‘hurt himself, apparently,’ Ben sat back into his seat and tried to reconcile the image of the desert with his memories of two years ago; both were savage landscapes he guessed.
‘Tibbet, passport and paperwork ready, thank you.’
‘What’s the hold up?’
‘Your safety.... and ours.’
Albert Tibbet had site managed a number of large projects across the United Kingdom; including major infrastructure works in the energy sector. In his forty year role part of his job was to be impatient; the impatience hadn’t waned with retirement. He had been known as a horrible bastard by most of those that had worked under him. This was his opportunity to set the record straight. He was already irked that someone less than half his age was his boss.
‘Benham Usmani? Passport, looks like you.’
A weathered and unshaven man stood under a weather beaten gazebo; behind him a rickety table and a pile of half-stacked empty boxes littered the ground. To his right a shorter man of wiry build and keen, dark eyes, scanned the area beyond the fence; he carried a rifle slung over his head and hanging down his back. The smell of burning fat drifted across the yard.
‘Burger King?’ Ben enquired.
‘Contractors, Yank funded, they can afford to eat.’
Connor McCormack lifted the last unopened box onto the table and scanned it with a hand-held Quick Reader then punched a couple buttons on the keypad. From his pocket he took a large, heavy knife; opened it with a flick of the wrist and cut the thick tape that held the box together,
‘Looks like it’s your birthday,’ he had repeated the same sentence seventeen times that day and several hundred more over the course of the past nine months,‘vest!’ he handed him a clear plastic back that contained body armor and carrier; he scanned the bag code and punched another set of numbers, ‘put it on now; AR five hundred, bit last decade but it’ll stop most of the friendly fire,’
Ben frowned, ‘Your pals use you for target practice? Well, that’s novel,’
‘QR code to the front; Ben nodded and swung the heavy plates over his head, The Irish man nodded to the other armed store man ‘he’ll adjust so it fits right, don’t un adjust it.’
‘Not new, I saw it once and stopped it once in Afghan.‘ McCormack continued, ‘You got locals comin in wit fake ID. Shoot the place up then blow themselves up.’
‘That don’t seem very friendly, fairly unfriendly, I reckon.’
‘That’s why you get the hat; keep the tinking part in place. Head, he’ll get the clip,’ McCormack nodded to his assistant and turned back to Ben, ‘don’t un adjust it.’
Connor McCormack began his military career when working as a tradesman’s assistant at Kandahar Air Base where he became involved with American contractors before following them to the French Foreign Legion. Since then he worked in Africa and Ukraine and, more recently, had worked with a weapons development contractor near the Siberian Border. As a veteran he had seen a mix of kinetic work, security positions and private financed projects. A serious man, his tolerance for smart fools, as he liked to call them, was very limited and the afternoon sun on his back only added to the weariness of the task.
McCormack lifted a smaller box from the original and pulled out a ceramic plate with an embossed QR code; swung it around Ben’s neck and tightened the chain before checking its fit and scanning the code
‘Don’t un adjust it?’ Ben asked.
‘You can’t, we cut it off before you go home.’
From the box McCormack lifted out four short straps; two yellow and two red with Ben’s name and date-of-birth stamped in black. They contained the same ceramic code plate and were reinforced with wire braid.
‘Wrist......remove the watch,’
‘Nice day for it, ae?’
‘Right arm.....that’s the other one.’ McCormack made a tight lipped smile.
‘Nice jewelry?’
‘In case you stand on something you’re not meant to we can put all the bits in the one bag. Karim will cut and seal the ends,’ McCormack looked over at his assistant; scanned the ankle straps and pointed at an upturned box, ‘put your foot up there.’
‘No ear rings?’ Ben asked.
McCormack pressed his lips together, again, before turning to his assistant and speaking in Arabic. Karim made sweeping motions with his hand towards his clip board before throwing its invisible collection over his shoulder; shrugged his shoulders, smiled and replied in Arabic.
‘Something funny, what’d he say?’
‘He said, if the head comes off there’s not much left so it’s swept up and chucked in a dumpster.’
Blackened clumps of snow; thrown unceremoniously, by a grim-faced Wullie, onto the back of a trailer, skipped through Benham’s thoughts; tumbling with the first images of his injured mother as she lay in a hospital bed. He stared past the bus at the mountain beyond. Exposure to the unknown felt heavy; a pressing consciousness of his closeness to events beyond his abilities and he questioned the logic to undergo this baptism of privation on his road to inner identity.
