Chapter 1: The Pool
The pool was up to six hundred and forty quid by the time Ghost walked into your med tent with blood running out from under his mask.
You knew the exact figure because Soap had tried to sell you a square that morning over powdered eggs. The board lived on the back of a door in the comms container at Forward Operating Base Tarik, twenty kilometres outside Al Mazrah city: a grid of guesses in a dozen different hands. Burn scars. Third-degree. Lizard skin. Ugly as sin. Handsome, actually, which is worse. Gaz had written He has no face, it's skull all the way down and put a fiver on it.
"Come on, Captain," Soap had said. "You're the medic. You're going to see it first. Insider trading, I know, but I'll cut you in."
"I'm not betting on a patient's face."
"He's not your patient. He's never once come in."
That wasn't true, and you'd been careful not to say so. In the eleven weeks since the Royal Army Medical Corps had attached you to Task Force 141's forward element, Lieutenant Simon Riley had come into your tent nine times. A sprained wrist he hadn't let you strap. A cut on his forearm that needed glue, not stitches, and which he'd watched you close with a stillness that made the back of your neck hot. A request for paracetamol. Twice, for nothing that you could identify at all; he'd stood in the doorway, said "Captain," looked around the tent as if checking it for threats, and left.
You hadn't put that in any log. You hadn't told Soap. You'd lain on your cot afterwards with the generator thudding and wondered what a man who killed people for a living was doing hovering at your door like he'd forgotten his lines.
Now he was standing in it again, with his rifle slung and his left hand pressed to the side of his head, and blood was coming out from under the hem of the balaclava at his jaw in a slow red line, soaking into the collar of his combat shirt.
"Sit," you said.
"It's fine."
"It's dripping on my floor. Sit."
He sat on the edge of the treatment bench. You snapped on gloves and came round to look, and he turned his head away from you, sharply, the first sudden movement you'd ever seen him make.
"What happened?"
"Wall happened."
"Did the wall have help?"
"RPG." A pause. "Missed."
"Clearly not by enough." You put your fingers on the back of his neck where the fabric met skin, lightly, and felt him go rigid. "Lieutenant. I need to see the wound. It's under the mask."
"No."
"I'm not asking about your face. I'm asking about your head. Scalp lacerations bleed like the end of the world and sometimes there's a fractured skull underneath being very quiet about it. If you pass out in my tent, I'm cutting the whole thing off with trauma shears and Soap gets his photograph."
He made a sound low in his chest. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a threat. With Ghost, you'd learned, the two lived very close together.
"Behind the ear," he said finally. "Left side."
"Then here's what we'll do." You'd already been thinking about it, the way you thought through a difficult extraction. "You face the wall. I stand behind you. I roll the mask up from the back, just enough to see the cut. I don't come round the front. I don't look at anything I don't need to look at. If you want me to stop, say so and I'll stop."
He was quiet for a long moment. Outside, someone was shouting about fuel, and a Chinook was spinning up on the pad, and the canvas of the tent breathed in and out with the rotor wash.
Then he swung his legs round on the bench and sat facing the canvas wall, his broad back to you.
"Go on, then," he said.
You had done this hundreds of times. Scalps, faces, a man in Helmand whose ear you'd sewn back on by head torch. Your hands knew the work. They did not know, apparently, what to do with the back of Simon Riley's neck.
You hooked your fingers under the hem of the balaclava. His skin there was warm and damp with sweat and a little gritty with dust. You rolled the fabric upward slowly, a centimetre at a time, over the nape of his neck, and the short hair there was a sandy colour you hadn't expected, the soft fuzz of a fresh clipper cut. You felt him breathe in and hold it.
"Alright?" you said.
"Just get on with it."
The cut was four centimetres long, a clean split in the scalp just behind his left ear, the edges gaping. Not a fragment wound. Stone, probably, from the wall. You palpated around it with two fingers, gently, feeling for the give of bone, and found nothing but a lump the size of a quail's egg rising underneath.
"Good news, your skull's intact. Bad news, you've got a head like a coconut. Any vision problems? Nausea? Ringing?"
"Only you."
You didn't let your hands pause. "Is that a symptom or a complaint?"
"Haven't decided."
You irrigated it. You numbed it, and felt his shoulders lock and then loosen as the lidocaine took. You stapled it, four staples, the stapler clicking loud in the quiet. Your other hand was resting on the side of his neck to keep his head still, and with your fingertips just under the rolled edge of the fabric you could feel the hinge of his jaw, the rasp of stubble, the steady thud of his pulse. It was not steady. It was going nearly as fast as yours.
You thought about the nine visits. You thought about the paracetamol.
"Why do you keep coming in here?" you asked, before you could stop yourself.
His jaw moved under your hand. "I'm bleeding."
"Not today. The other times. You came in on Tuesday and asked me for a plaster for a cut you didn't have."
"Had a cut."
"It was a paper cut, Lieutenant. You showed me a paper cut. You've been shot six times; it's in your file. You don't need me for a paper cut."
He went very still.
"Done," you said quietly, and pressed a pad of gauze to the staples and held it. "You can roll it down."
You took your hands away. He didn't move. He sat with his back to you and the balaclava rolled up to the base of his skull, and the bare nape of his neck looked strangely defenceless in the white light of the tent, the most naked thing you'd ever seen on him.
"I don't need you for a paper cut," he agreed, in a voice you'd never heard from him before. Lower. Less flat. "That's not why I come in."
Your mouth had gone dry. "Why do you come in?"
He reached up and pulled the balaclava down himself, one smooth tug, and stood, and turned, and the skull was back in place. Black, grinning, impassive. Above it his eyes were very dark brown and fixed on you with an intensity that made your skin feel too small.
"Ask me tonight," he said.
You didn't hear him knock. You'd been lying on your cot in the dark for an hour in a T-shirt and shorts, not sleeping, listening to the generator and the far-off mutter of the radio and your own pulse. Your quarters were half a shipping container with a curtain across it, a cot, a footlocker and a fan that turned its head slowly from side to side like it disapproved of everything.
Then the door opened, a slice of floodlight fell across the floor, and closed again.
You sat up. "Lieutenant."
"Ask me now," Ghost said, from the dark.
He hadn't turned the light on. You couldn't see him at all, just feel him, the size and the heat of him filling up the narrow space by the door, the smell of soap and gun oil and the dust that got into everything out here.
"Why do you keep coming in?" you said. Your voice came out rough.
"Because you talk to me like I'm a person," he said. "Not a mask. Not a callsign. You tell me I've got a head like a coconut." A pause. "And because I wanted to know what your hands felt like. Thought I'd have to get shot to find out. Wall was quicker."
You laughed, shakily. You heard him take a step closer. The floor of the container creaked.
"I'm not going to turn the light on," he said. "Not tonight. Not yet. But if you want to know what I look like, Captain, you can find out." Another pause, and then, quieter, as if it cost him: "If you want to."
You stood up. Your knees felt unreliable. You put your hands out in front of you in the dark until they met the cotton of his T-shirt, warm, and the solid wall of his chest underneath, rising and falling fast.
"Say it plainly," you said. "I'm a doctor. I like consent in writing."
"I'm taking the mask off," Simon said. "I want you to touch my face. And then I want to kiss you. And if you say no to any of it, I'll put it back on and walk out and you'll never hear about it again."
"Yes," you said. "To all of it. Yes."
You heard the soft whisper of fabric being drawn over a head, and felt the air move as he let it fall. Then he took your wrists, gently, in his big rough hands, and lifted your palms, and laid them against his bare face.