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  Books by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

  DEAD HEAT

  SILKS

  EVEN MONEY

  Books by Dick Francis

  THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)

  DEAD CERT

  NERVE

  FOR KICKS

  ODDS AGAINST

  FLYING FINISH

  BLOOD SPORT

  FORFEIT

  ENQUIRY

  RAT RACE

  BONECRACK

  SMOKESCREEN

  SLAY-RIDE

  KNOCK DOWN

  HIGH STAKES

  IN THE FRAME

  RISK

  TRIAL RUN

  WHIP HAND

  REFLEX

  TWICE SHY

  BANKER

  THE DANGER

  PROOF

  BREAK IN

  LESTER: The Official Biography

  BOLT

  HOT MONEY

  THE EDGE

  STRAIGHT

  LONGSHOT

  COMEBACK

  DRIVING FORCE

  DECIDER

  WILD HORSES

  COME TO GRIEF

  TO THE HILT

  10-lb PENALTY

  FIELD OF 13

  SECOND WIND

  SHATTERED

  UNDER ORDERS

  CROSSFIRE

  DICK FRANCIS

  and

  FELIX FRANCIS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2010

  Copyright © Dick Francis, 2010

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195943-6

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Dedicated to the men and women of the

  British forces who have lost

  limbs in Afghanistan

  For them the battle is never over

  and to the memory of

  Dick Francis

  1920–2010

  the greatest friend and father a man could ever have

  With loving thanks to grandson and son

  William Francis

  Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps,

  graduated from

  The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst

  August 2009,

  seconded to the Grenadier Guards

  at Nad-e-Ali, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

  September–December 2009

  Prologue

  Helmand Province, Afghanistan,

  October 2009

  ‘Medic! Medic!’

  I could see that my platoon sergeant was shouting but, strangely, the sound of his voice seemed muffled, as if I was in a neighbouring room rather than out here in the open.

  I was lying on the dusty ground with my back up against a low bank so that I was actually half sitting. Sergeant O’Leary was kneeling beside me on my left.

  ‘Medic!’ he shouted again urgently, over his shoulder.

  He turned his head and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘What happened?’ I said, my own voice sounding loud in my head.

  ‘A bloody IED,’ he said. He turned away, looked behind him, and shouted again. ‘Where’s that fucking medic?’

  An IED. I knew that I should have known what IED meant but my brain seemed to be working in slow motion. I finally remembered. IED – Improvised Explosive Device – a roadside bomb.

  The sergeant was talking loudly into his personal radio.

  ‘Alpha four,’ he said in a rush. ‘This is Charlie six three. IED, IED. One CAT A, several CAT C. Request IRT immediate backup and casevac. Over.’

  I couldn’t hear any response, if there was one. I seemed to have lost my radio headset, along with my helmet.

  CAT A, he’d said. CAT A was army speak for a seriously injured soldier requiring immediate medical help to prevent loss of life. CAT Cs were walking wounded.

  The sergeant turned back to me.

  ‘You still all right, sir?’ he asked, the stress apparent in his face.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but, in truth, I didn’t really feel that great. I was cold, yet sweaty. ‘How are the men?’ I asked him.

  ‘Don’t worry about the men, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after the men.’

  ‘How many are injured?’ I asked.

  ‘A few. Minor, mostly,’ he said. ‘Just some cuts and a touch of deafness from the blast.’ I knew what he meant. The sergeant turned away and shouted at the desert-camouflaged figure nearest to him. ‘Johnson, go and fetch the bloody medic kit from Cummings. The little rat’s too shit-scared to move.’

  He turned back to me once more.

  ‘Won’t be long now, sir.’

  ‘You said on the radio there’s a CAT A. Who is it?’

  He looked into my face.

  ‘You, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘The CAT A is you, sir,’ he said again. ‘Your fucking foot’s been blown off.’

  1

  Four Months Later

  I realized as soon as I walked out of the hospital that I had nowhere to go.

  I stood holding my bag at the side of the road, watching a line of passengers board a red London bus.

  Should I join them, I wondered. But where were they going?

  Simply being discharged from National Health Service care had been my overriding aim for weeks without any thought or reason as to what was to come next. I was like a man released from prison who stands outside the gates gulping down great breaths of fresh, free air without a care for the future. Freedom was what mattered, not the nature of it.

  And I had been incarcerated
in my own prison, a hospital prison.

  I suppose, looking back, I had to admit that it had passed quite quickly. But, at the time, every hour, even every minute, had dragged interminably. Progress, seen day-by-day, had been painfully slow, with painful being the appropriate word. However, I was now able to walk reasonably well on an artificial foot and, whereas I wouldn’t be playing football again for a while, if ever, I could climb up and down stairs unaided and was mostly self-sufficient. I might even have been able to run a few strides to catch that bus, if only I had wanted to go wherever it was bound.

  I looked around me. No one had turned up to collect me, nor had I expected them to. None of my family actually knew I was being discharged on that particular Saturday morning and, quite likely, they would not have turned up even if they had.

  I had always preferred to do things for myself, and they knew it.

  As far as my family was concerned, I was a loner, and happier for it, perhaps the more so after having to rely for months on others for help with my personal, and private, bodily functions.

  I wasn’t sure who had been the more shocked, my mother or me, when a nurse had asked, during one of her rare visits, if she could help me get dressed. My mother had last seen me naked when I was about seven and she was more than a little flustered at the prospect of doing 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.

  ‘Anywhere will do,’ I said.

  ‘But do you live in Hammersmith?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘So where do you live?’

  Now that was a good question. I suppose that I was technically, and manifestly, homeless.

  For the past fifteen years I had lived in army accommodation of one form or another: barracks, Sandhurst, officers’ messes, tents and bivouacs, even in the backs of trucks or the cramped insides of Warrior armoured cars. I had slept in, under, and on top of Land Rovers and, more often than I cared to remember, I had slept where I sat or lay on the ground, half an ear open for the call of a sentry or the sound of an approaching enemy.

  However, the army had now sent me ‘home’ for six months.

  The major from the Ministry of Defence, the Wounded Personnel Liaison Officer, had been fair but firm during his recent visit. ‘Six months’ leave on full pay,’ he’d said. ‘To recover. To sort yourself out. Then we’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t need six months,’ I’d insisted. ‘I’ll be ready to go back in half that time.’

  ‘Back?’ he’d asked.

  ‘To my regiment.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he had repeated.

  ‘What do you mean, we’ll see?’ I had demanded.

  ‘I’m not sure that going back to your regiment will be possible,’ he’d said.

  ‘Where, then?’ I’d asked, but I’d read the answer in his face before he’d said it.

  ‘You might be more suited to a civilian job. You wouldn’t be passed fit for combat. Not without a foot.’

  The major and I had been sitting in the reception area of the Douglas Bader Rehabilitation Centre in Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, London.

  Part of Headley Court, the military’s own state-of-the-art rehab centre in Surrey, had been temporarily closed for refurbishment, and the remaining wards had been overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded with missing limbs. Hence I had been sent to Queen Mary’s and the National Health.

  It was testament to the remarkable abilities of the military Incident Response Teams, and to their amazingly well-equipped casevac helicopters, that so many soldiers with battlefield injuries, which would in the past have invariably proved fatal, were now routinely dealt with and survived. Double and even triple traumatic amputees often lived when, only recently, they would have surely bled to death before medical help cou
ld arrive.

  But not for the first time I’d wondered if it would have been better if I had died. Losing a foot had sometimes seemed to me a worse outcome than losing my life. But I had looked up at the painting on the wall of Douglas Bader, the Second World War pilot after whom the rehabilitation centre was named, and it had given me strength.

  ‘Douglas Bader was passed fit for combat,’ I’d said.

  The major had looked up at me. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Douglas Bader was passed fit to fight and he’d lost both his feet.’

  ‘Things were different then,’ the major had replied, somewhat flippantly.

  Were they? I wondered.

  Bader had been declared fit and had taken to the air in his Spitfire to fight the enemy simply due to his own perseverance. True, the country had been in desperate need of pilots but he could have easily sat out the war in relative safety if he had wanted to. It was his huge personal determination to fly that had overcome the official reluctance to allow it.

  I would now take my lead from him.

  We’ll see, indeed.

  I’d show them.

  ‘Will the Tube station do?’ Vicki said.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘The Tube station,’ she repeated. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Home, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘And where is home?’

  ‘My mother lives in Lambourn,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Near Newbury, in Berkshire.’

  ‘Is that where you’re going now?’

  Was it? I didn’t particularly want to. But where else? I could hardly sleep on the streets of London. Others did, but had I gone down that far?

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the train.’

  My mind was working on automatic pilot as I negotiated the escalator up from the Underground into Paddington mainline railway station. Only near the top did I realize that I couldn’t remember when I had last used an escalator. Stairs had always been my choice and they had to be taken at the run, never at a walk. And yet here I was, gliding serenely up without moving a muscle.

  Fitness had always been a major obsession in a life that was full of obsessions.