scooped up her bag and left the room. Slamming the door, she added, ‘I am twatting going!’
Danny and Dale looked at each other, Danny raising his right fist and Dale hitting it with his own. They were enjoying this, their weekly game of wind up the ‘gay teacher’, made all the better if they could also piss off Sam Reynolds. Danny leant back in his chair and put his feet up on the table and Dale opened a can of Coke. Arnaud, facing the whiteboard, was oblivious of this and continued to calm his breathing, writing the page number, date and title in his neatest handwriting. He would report this behaviour once the lesson was over; Sam was already on report and would be internally excluded for her outburst. Behind him the noise level in the class started to grow. He was about to turn around again and give them another telling off when suddenly it stopped.
‘Put your feet on the floor, and you… put that can in the bin.’ The man at the door looked at Arnaud, a stern expression on his face. ‘Let me know the names of the ones who’ll be picking up litter at lunchtime.’
Arnaud returned with an equally stern face of his own, ‘Will do, Mr Middleton.’
Middleton nodded, glowered again at Danny and Dale, and shut the door. Outside he could be heard shouting. Arnaud let out a sigh, sat at his desk and opened his book.
‘Le weekend. Can anyone tell me what that means in English?’
The remainder of the lesson was only slightly less chaotic. Sam returned after having been spoken to by Middleton and sat solemnly at the front, refusing to work and doodling, while Danny and Dale were quiet because they were listening to their iPods. In fact, the only pupils working were the six on the front two rows. At ten-fifty the bell sounded and there was a sudden mass exodus. Chairs were left upturned and books lying on tables. Arnaud sighed heavily and made a note on Sam’s report. She looked at it and then at him with a face full of hate, before she, too, left. This wasn’t what teaching was meant to be like. He bent down to pick up a sweet wrapper and got a handful of sticky chocolate for his trouble. He wiped his hand on a piece of A4 paper and collected up the French textbooks.
Twenty minutes for break, then another two hours until lunch, and finally a free period for lesson five. Unless they gave him another cover! Two more Year Nine classes and then a bottom-set Year Ten. Now he knew why the government had paid him to train as a teacher! Still, he was nearly at the end of his NQT year and would be a fully qualified, respected teacher in September.
He shut the door and locked it behind him. Instantly, he was banged into as pupils pushed past in an attempt to get to the canteen and gorge on junk food as soon as was humanly possible.
He had grown immune to the knocks now. Arnaud had been at Horley Community College for almost two years, first as a student, when he was given easier classes, and then as an NQT – newly qualified teacher. The school had offered him a job and he, like a fool, had accepted it. ‘Best to work in a difficult school – baptism of fire, as it were,’ his mentor had told him. Yeah, right. At least it was a nice day outside, which was probably why the kids were so fidgety. He couldn’t blame them. Who would want to be inside concentrating on French grammar or asking how much for a kilo of pommes when, just through the window, the summer had truly arrived?
One more week, he kept telling himself, and then the summer holidays and unemployment. Well, not quite. Having given a term’s notice, his contract would finish at the end of August and the school had said there would be supply work for him if he still hadn’t found anything. Supply work, in Horley? He laughed to himself as he entered the staffroom; Beirut sounded safer.
Arnaud sat wearily in the worn easy chair that occupied the corner of the room. Around him, teachers scurried to get as much coffee as their break would allow. He spotted the sexy blonde student teacher he’d seen on the train and wished her into the vacant seat next to him. It didn’t happen. She sat between two fit-looking men in shorts. P.E. teachers! Puh! He sipped his hot coffee and burnt his tongue. Bugger.
‘Heard any more about that job you applied for?’ the Head of Foreign Languages, Richard Middleton, asked as he sat down heavily.
‘Not yet.’
‘Kyiv, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ He moved his tongue inside his mouth, feeling the burn.
‘Ah, did you know that Kyiv is the birthplace of modern Russia?’
‘No.’ Arnaud turned in his seat.
‘Kyiv-Rus was the original capital of Russia almost a thousand years ago, long, long before the Tsars, the Bolsheviks and the Communists popped up. Back then it was populated by nomadic tribes.’
Arnaud was impressed. ‘Did you study Russian history at uni?’
Middleton smiled. ‘No. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.’
Odessa Oblast, Ukraine, near the Transdniester border
Bull looked through the kite sight. Nothing yet. He and his Brigada were watching and waiting. If all went to plan, this would be the first step. He shivered in the cold of the pre-dawn. It brought back memories of a lifetime ago…
The chill of the Afghan night had all but disappeared, to be replaced by the weak warmth of dawn. In the half-light, the poppy field stretched ahead of them and west on the valley floor. A beautiful flower to some, but to others as deadly as any bomb. To the east, the unnamed village with its ramshackle huts. Bull lowered his binos and rubbed his eyes.
His Spetsnaz assault group had been given specific orders: attack the village, eliminate all Mujahedeen, burn the poppy crop. His men, the true elite of the Red Army, were ready. They lay prone on the ridge, waiting. To Bull’s left and hidden in a dip, Captain Lesukov’s fire-support team had their mortars ready; to his right were Lieutenant Gorodetski, Sergeant Zukauskas and the rest of the Brigada. The plan was simple, brutal and effective. Lesukov’s men would commence shelling of the village, and then Bull’s team would move from house to house, picking off anyone and everyone who survived. Intelligence supplied by a local informant had said the village was a sham, nothing more than a base for Mujahedeen fighters and Arab Islamic mercenaries to grow and distribute the death that came from the poppy in the field. The Red Army could not let this continue in a ‘partner state’. Hence the unequivocal orders. Bull looked at Lesukov. ‘Start firing your mortars in two minutes.’
Lesukov nodded. ‘Good luck.’
Bull smiled. ‘Ivan, we are Spetsnaz. We make our own luck.’
Bull’s men moved silently over the ridge and into the valley. Thumph. Thumph. Mortar shells whistled through the sky. There was sudden movement from the village. A robed figure appeared and looked directly at the ridge. He yelled, raised his rifle and fired into the sky. As he did so, an explosion tore the very earth from under his feet. More shells landed, flattening the Afghan houses and destroying the beauty of the new day. Then, as abruptly as they had started, they stopped.
Bull’s men now swept through the carnage before them. The dead and dying littered the village; many had been asleep, others in the process of grabbing weapons. Several had fled to the fields and were chased down by rounds not even the fastest could outrun. Bull reached the building he knew housed the village elder. The roof was intact even though part of one wall was now missing. The old man was sitting on a crimson rug in the corner, his henna-red beard specked with dust. His eyes angry, he showed no fear. He waited until Lieutenant Gorodetski had entered the room behind Bull before speaking words of venom.
‘He says it is a trap;
