Hi All,
This one's a departure for me, I can't give too much away but I hope you enjoy. The only warning I will give is that if you are looking for a story to get you hot and bothered then you might have to read another one after this.
A big thank you to VR Snow for giving up some time in her busy schedule to fix up my mistakes.
This story is dedicated to those who risk their lives so that we can live our carefree existence. I apologize in advance if I have made any glaring errors in the military section of this story. I tried to be as thorough as possible in my research as I have not been part of the Australian Defense Force.
Finally let me know what you think by leaving a comment at the end.
Cheers
CharlieB4
*****
I lay on the bed my heart racing. Emily, my wife, was in the bathroom brushing her teeth before bed. There was real apprehension, as the moment I had thought would never happen again was so close. As I had crawled through the wreckage of the officer's mess in Urozgan province, Afghanistan I thought my return home would be in a box.
My wheelchair was parked at the bottom of the stairs. The plan had been to hop up the two flights with Emily's help but that had to be shelved as in my weakened state, I only made it up three of the steps. The occupational therapist at the rehabilitation centre had only let me out for the weekend on the proviso that there was a bed downstairs. However I wasn't going to let the first chance I had to sleep with my wife in six months go without a fight. So I crawled up the stairs and into the bedroom.
* * * * * * *
To understand my story you have to go back earlier than six months ago. One year ago, I was stepping off a plane having just finished a tour of duty with the Australian Defense Force in Afghanistan. I was jubilant as I had two weeks left as a member of the army and four weeks till I married my girlfriend Emily. Everything seemed to be falling into place for me.
I had been part of an engineering team in Provincial Reconstruction Project. Our job was to repair infrastructure destroyed during the war against the Taliban. My specialty had been logistics, getting equipment and supplies into and out of work zones. I had been given the nickname "Sniffer" as in my twelve months, I had not lost a convoy to a roadside bomb. They thought I could smell trouble. I just put it down to good training and planning. I always changed my routes even resorting to grading new roads to get around possible black spots. It was a record I was proud of, mostly because all of my drivers and support crew were coming home with me.
I had, in some ways, been sad to leave the army. I'd left school as a seventeen year old with no real prospects, only just an average student. My family had never reached any great heights academically and I was expected to follow into a lowly paid job or petty crime. One day there was an army recruiting van parked in the main street. I'd wandered in out of boredom really, but one hour later I had signed on.
Army life agreed with me. The discipline and structure was something I had never had before. Once through basic training I was placed into the supply section. Not a glamorous area but I thrived there and moved steadily up the ranks. My first contract was six years. When it finished, I signed on for six more.
My first overseas placement was in Aceh Indonesia after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. I was there for six months helping get supplies through to the victims. Then came my first tour in Afghanistan in 2006. I was only a Corporal then, but I got through and impressed my superiors enough that they offered to put me through Duntroon, the Australian Defense Force Academy. Four years later, I was a Captain with an engineering degree and back in Afghanistan.
While at Duntroon, I met Emily, a gorgeous brunette nurse three years my junior from the Royal Canberra hospital. She had been wary of the army recruits who regularly got into trouble at local nightspots. However, I wore her down and by the time I graduated and was headed to Afghanistan again, we were a couple. That tour of duty was tough on both of us but we got through it with a lot of Skype conversations. I had nine months back helping train new recruits at the academy. Then I was back to Afghanistan. Because it was my third tour it reduced the time I had to "pay" the army back for my degree, so after it was finished I could be a free man.
Emily had been happy with that news but not the third tour. I told her I wasn't in the firing line, only working logistics but she knew better. Everybody was in the firing line in Afghanistan. I asked her to marry me a week before I flew out, she said yes and there were many tears. I had been given one week's leave so I had taken her to stay at a resort in the Great Barrier Reef. It was a great way to celebrate our engagement. Sun, beaches, fine food, great sex and I even managed to get in a little fishing without too many complaints.
My third tour had been reasonably uneventful, well as uneventful as a war zone can be. Two convoys got shot up but they got through and as I said before, everybody was returning home in one piece. I had sent my resume to a couple of recruiting agencies back in Australia during my last month in Afghanistan and had three job interviews in my first week as a civilian again.
I only needed one. It was with a large trucking company. They owned eighty large prime movers mostly with b double trailers and twenty smaller single trailer rigs. They were trying to muscle into the mining boom going on in outback Western Australia and South Australia. The remote mining sites were nowhere near railway lines and sometimes a long way from sealed roads. To get the heavy equipment needed, trucks were the only way and sometimes you had to build your own road. My experience meant they wanted me bad and were prepared to pay handsomely for it.
They had wanted me to start straight away but I told them of my wedding plans so they gave me two weeks after that so we could have a honeymoon. The job meant some extended trips away from our new home in Sydney but Emily was happy no one was shooting at me.
I started the job with great expectations and high hopes but those were quickly dashed. In the army when you told someone below you what to do, they did it! When you spoke to someone above you, you showed respect. In this trucking firm, it didn't work like that. Looking back with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, my people skills sucked. However, I was dismayed that so many of the people that worked at the place had not even a basic idea of manners and common decency.
The planning and logistics stuff was easy. Getting the staff to follow the plan was a different matter. It came to a head four months in. I was working on a project for a mining company getting their initial site preparation done. First, I had to make a fifty-kilometer road to the site and an air strip at the site. It was in the desert. It didn't have to be sealed but it had to handle heavy vehicle traffic. There had been two graders, a bulldozer and an excavator working on it for a month.
It was time for the first convoy to head out with the workers accommodation, rudimentary runway lights, workshop and two massive cat diesel generators powered by turbo charged V 16 cylinder motors. I specially selected the drivers, as we had to get this payload there on time. The mine construction workers were due to fly in the day after the trucks arrived. We had a briefing the night before we were leaving and I went through the whole trip with them. I had their rest breaks, fuel stops, driver changes all set out. Then at five am, the next morning, I arrived at the depot to wave them off and I noticed Frankie was in one of the trucks. Worse, it was the truck with the generators on its trailers.
Frankie was a fuckwit! There is no other way to put it. He was constantly stuffing up and I twice asked the boss to fire him. He was a protected species somehow, . I later found out he was the boss's mistress's son. It appeared one of the drivers was "sick" so Frankie had been put into the truck as a second driver. By the boss! I tried to ring him but he wouldn't answer. The other driver was fuming. He didn't want to share the trip with the idiot, either. It was fifty hours each way. One hundred hours in a truck with that fuckwit would have Mother Teresa plotting a murder.
With much trepidation, I told them to go. The first day they made it to Adelaide without a hitch. Maybe it would workout. At lunchtime the next day, disaster struck, . I got a ring from one of the satellite phones. They were six hours north of Adelaide in the middle of nowhere. Frankie was doing his stint in the driver's seat and feeling the need to relieve himself had pulled off the road. Now as unpleasant as it sounds most of the drivers carried a bottle with them and if they needed to urinate away from a designated stop, they pissed in the bottle and then got rid of it later. Never drink from a water bottle on the side of the road! Frankie should have known better, but like most young guys, he thinks he knows it all. The truck got stuck in loose sand. The next designated stop for fuel was one hour down the road so the rest went there, filled up and waited. I organized a heavy vehicle tow truck to get their as quick as it could from Adelaide.
It was still possible to make it but I hadn't counted on dickhead Frankie. The other driver had gone in one of the other trucks to wait at the roadhouse. Don't blame him really, why stay in the middle of nowhere when it's one hundred in the shade when you could be an air conditioned roadhouse. By my calculations, the trucks should have never got below fifteen percent fuel in the tanks. The tow truck arrived and got the truck back on the road but Frankie ran out of fuel ten minutes from the roadhouse. Even if he had the truck running the whole time to keep the air conditioner going, which I suspect he did, he should have still made it.
The roadhouse owner ran some fuel up the road in his truck and got Frankie going again. When he finally got in to the roadhouse to fuel up, we were seven hours behind schedule and there was no more allowance for delays. Again, the guys let me down, . I had asked them make sure Frankie left with them but they were keen to get going so they went while he was still fueling up.
Unfortunately, the waitress at the roadhouse was running a private business on the side, offering sexual relief for horny travelers. Frankie opted in but left the keys in his truck. While he was out the back getting a fifty-dollar blowjob two guys drove in to get fuel. They saw the truck with the door open and keys inside. The other driver was eating in the diner and saw the truck turn out but had no way of catching it. The thieves were obviously hoping that there was something on the trailers they could easily offload into their little truck and sell later. It would have been nice to see their faces when they pulled back the curtains to see two massive generators.
They knew that someone would be on their tail so they only went ten kilometers down the road and stripped what they could out of the cab and off the generators. So the UHF radio, satellite telephone, fridge, and GPS were taken from the cab and the dual batteries of the motors off both generators. By the time the police arrived from the nearest settlement and Frankie got on the road again, he was three hours behind the others with no way to contact them. The whole thing was a disaster. The generators got there late, and with no batteries to start the motors, they were useless until more batteries were flown up the next day. The mining company had to keep the construction crew in Adelaide for an extra day and our reputation was fucked.
My boss got his ear chewed by the CEO and he offered him my head on a platter. The CEO was in my office that afternoon.
"Sorry Andrew, it's not working out. We can't afford to lose those sort of clients! We will pay out the remaining two months of your contract, pack up your stuff and be out of here by four o'clock."
