She was a good kid. She could have had everything but she wasn't satisfied with everything, she wanted more. I would have given her everything, I loved her that much. Stephanie stopped being a good kid at around the same time that she stopped being a kid, at around the same time that she lost the kid's innocence that I had fallen in love with and became a woman and realised that she had a control over men that would give her more, much more, than I could give her.
I have known her parents all of my life and we had sort of grown up together and it was our parents' wish that we should marry when we were old enough. For a while it looked as if that wish would be granted. I sprung a surprise on everyone at my twenty-first birthday by, during my speech I asked her to come and stand by me. Taking a ring box from my pocket I, with great ceremony produced the ring and asked her to marry me. She accepted and that should have been the beginning of the happiest time, but alas it wasn't to be.
Don't get me wrong, for a time there life was very good, we both had good jobs and we spent every minute, apart from when we were at work, with each other. From the outside looking in we were, to all intents and purposes, the perfect engaged couple, but, as they say, looks can be deceiving.
At first I suspected nothing, but she began to work late on a more frequent basis, cancelling dates at the last minute and being reluctant to commit to dinner engagements until the last minute. That I wasn't immediately suspicious was largely due to my trusting her and not believing that she would betray me, but I eventually began to suspect her of infidelity. I pushed my trust aside long enough to wait outside her work after hours to see if she was working late. She emerged from the building with a man I knew to be her boss and she was obviously on very good terms with him because she was laughing and smiling at him and they had their arms around each other. They hailed a cab and disappeared from view taking my life with them.
I deferred my part-tine Engineering studies and resigned my job. I had been accepted on graduating high school into Officer Training at the Defence Force Academy Duntroon so I contacted them and arranged to begin Officer Training at the next intake which was in three months. In the mean time I sold my Mercedes and bought a real 4 wheel drive and headed bush. It was the right time of the year, October, the end of the dry and before the wet set in big time, to tour the Top End which was as far from Sydney as I could get, so I headed North up the coast and headed West through Kakadu and into the Kimberly.
I explored the country with its gorges that had not yet begun to hear the roar of the wet season floods, the parched landscape providing little shelter from the searing sun but I pressed on, through the Bungle Bungles with their layered stone beehive formations towering out of the flat scrublands until I hit the Kimberly coast. Here my journey paused while I experienced the wonders of the tidal races where ten metre tides had to squeeze through narrow gaps in the coastal cliffs forming a horizontal waterfall. One tour company with high powered boats would actually take pleasure seekers through these rapids, it was one hell of a ride. Soon the dark monsoonal clouds began forming in the North so I headed down the coast, pausing to feed the dolphins at Monkey Mia before heading to the Margaret River wine country to try their excellent reds.
A week of wine tasting passed quickly and I was on the road again, across the Nullarbor Plains with their hundreds of Kilometres of flat desert countryside skirting the coastline with its hundred metre high limestone cliffs from the top of which I witnessed the migration of the Southern Right whales that moved into the shallow waters to calf and mate. The whale population has increased dramatically since whaling was stopped many years ago so most side trips resulted in sightings.
I avoided Adelaide, travelling instead through the Barossa Valley onto the Sturt Highway through the Riverland with its kilometre on kilometre of irrigated farmland until I reached the start of the Hay Plains, several hundred kilometres of flat, featureless countryside, mostly salt bush with the occasional area of crops before joining the Hume Highway that took me north to Yass where I turned east to Canberra and my destiny.
I checked into my accommodation and took my mobile phone out of my bag and put it on the charger. I wasn't looking forward to checking my inbox because I knew pretty much what was waiting for me. I scrolled through deleting everything from Stephanie and replied to one from my parents telling them not to worry about me and that I was okay. I decided not to tell them where I was and what I was doing because they would probably pass the information on to the bitch, and I wasn't ready to face her just now and probably never.
I graduated as an officer in the Australian Army and it was assumed that I, with my engineering background, would go into the Engineers but I had other ideas and had been working up to this decision, I wanted to join the SAS, I wanted to be in the thick of action and, if I stopped to think about it, I wanted to increase my chances of being killed in action.
One thing, one of many things, that I learned during the three years of intensive, brutal, physically and mentally demanding training was the SAS was about avoiding getting killed by being the best there is. We were taught to second guess the enemy in any situation, and with the emphasis in the current World political climate, that would have to be Afghanistan. It was a case of travel light, travel fast, hit hard and get away.
It was hard up there with the heat and the dust, not knowing where the enemy was most of the time and trying to think like him. The Taliban had a completely different mind-set when it came to fighting than we did, he wasn't above using civilians as a shield for his operations and if our intelligence proved to be wrong and we hit civilian targets it appeared as if by magic on the Web, as a result we tended not to use third party intelligence, choosing to rely on our own.
We, for once, found ourselves having to mount an operation based on third party intelligence and we were discussing the best plan of attack. We had been advised that a Taliban group was based in a small village about fifty kilometres away, but something about this information set the alarm bells ringing loudly. We had satellite images of the village and there was evidence of some sort of military activity but that wasn't what we were worried about. To get to the village we would have to travel down a valley and about five kilometres before the village the terrain was perfect for an ambush, it passed through a narrow ravine with plenty of rocky cover on either side.
We had been ordered to mount the raid for the next day. Again the alarm bells, why had we been asked to wait. A decision was made to do what we do best. A patrol would be sent out in the morning but it would stop well short of the ravine, out of rocket range, and wait. Another patrol would set out at dusk this evening, conditions were in our favour, no moon, and using night vision glasses we would travel half the way in APCs and the rest of the way on foot arriving in the early hours of the morning in time to set up in the high ground looking down from either side into the ravine.
As the sun rose we could make out about a dozen men leave the village and set up either side of the ravine with their rocket launchers. Another group went along the road setting up IED's, (improvised explosive devices) they really meant business, we would be lucky to survive. As soon as they saw the dust cloud from our decoy patrol approaching several men ushered a group of kids and a herd of goats down the road toward the ravine. Their plan was to block the road with the goats forcing our patrol to stop in the ravine in a position that left them vulnerable to attack. Any effort to turn and run would be stopped by the IED's.
The patrol stopped at the same time as the goats entered the ravine and this caused the enemy some concern, they couldn't understand why the patrol had stopped, bends in the road meant that the patrol couldn't see into the ravine and there hadn't been any radio warning. Curiosity got the better of them after half an hour by which time we had a fix on them. Our radio scanner picked up a message from the waiting group to someone. We expected to see someone come out of one of the houses but instead a man emerged from the entrance of a cave some fifteen hundred metres from where were dug in and about five hundred metres the other side of the village. A fix was made on the entrance to the cave and when the order was given three rockets were launched simultaneously. Two struck the men on either side of the ravine while the third followed the man as he ran back into the cave. The result was total devastation, particularly the rocket that hit the cave. It must have been the main munitions stockpile for this group because the explosion was much greater than we would have expected from the rocket. There was a smaller explosion near the entrance to the cave that caused a rock-fall that blocked the entrance. This was followed by a much larger explosion that caused the whole hillside to erupt in a cloud of smoke, rock and dust.
As soon as the dust settled the patrol on the road moved in led by the mine clearance boys and they were soon in the village surrounded by kids and older people. We followed them in and our interpreter began to gather information from the residents. We had managed to complete our mission without the loss of one civilian life.
It transpired that they had been forced to comply with the orders given by the Taliban leader who had also set up a camera team that hoped to get vision of our forces firing on the villagers as well as the fighters. They had been holding the village women in one of the houses but the guards had run as soon as we had attacked and the women escaped.
One disturbing piece of information that we managed to glean from the people was that, the day before, a helicopter had landed near the cave and a westerner had got out and spent about an hour inside before flying away. What did this mean? Was there someone, one of our own, working against us.
It didn't take long to find out who the real enemy had been in that operation. Someone had leaked information to someone else that we were preparing to move on poppy fields, and that someone else didn't want a reduction in production because there was good money to be had from high grade heroin in the US. When there is money involved, in this case shit loads of money, lives no longer matter, not even friendly lives.
