Page 1 of The Words Beneath the Noise

ONE

ORDERS IN THE COLD

TOM

The train carriage smelled of wet wool and tobacco smoke, bodies pressed too close together, breath fogging the windows until the glass wept. I kept my forehead against the cold pane and watched England blur past in shades of mud and grey, fields churned to soup by December rain, skeletal trees clawing at a sky that hung low enough to choke on.

Three days ago, I'd been in France.

Three days ago, I'd watched Corporal Eddie Shaw take a bullet through the eye socket while I lay in the rubble of what had once been a schoolhouse, scope pressed to my face, finger on the trigger. The German sniper had been good. Patient. He'd waited for Eddie to shift position, to reach for his canteen, and then he'd taken his shot with the kind of precision I recognised in my own hands.

I'd killed him four seconds later. Centre mass, because by then my hands were shaking too hard for anything cleaner.

Eddie had still been warm when I'd crawled to him. Still had that surprised look on his face, like he couldn't quite believe the war had finally caught up with him after three years ofnear misses and close calls. I'd closed his eyes with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling and stayed there in the dust and brick until someone dragged me out.

The train lurched over a rough patch of track, and I pressed my palm flat against my thigh to stop the phantom tremor. Steady now. Steady as stone. It didn't matter. The damage was done.

Light duty, they'd called it when they'd pulled me off the line. As if being sent away wasn't punishment enough. As if I didn't understand exactly what it meant when the medical officer had looked at me with those careful, clinical eyes and written something in my file that I wasn't allowed to see.

Sergeant Hale is physically recovered from his wounds but displays symptoms consistent with acute exhaustion. Recommend reassignment to non-combat duties pending further evaluation.

I'd heard them talking outside the hospital tent, voices low but not low enough. Words likeshell shockandnot fit for dutyandcan't have him freezing up when it matters. As if Eddie's death had been my fault. As if the shrapnel that had torn through my shoulder two weeks before that had somehow unmade me.

The woman across from me, wrapped in layers of darned wool, glanced at my uniform and then away. I was used to that. People looked at soldiers differently now, four years into this bloody mess. Not with the bright-eyed admiration of 1940, but with something warier. Like they could see the war clinging to us, a film of mud and death that no amount of scrubbing would shift.

Smart of her. I didn't want to be seen either.

Outside, the rain thickened to sleet, then softened into snow. Fat flakes drifted past the window, sticking to the glass before melting in slow tracks. The landscape shifted as we movednorth and west, industrial sprawl giving way to farmland, then woodland, then villages with church spires rising through the white like fingers pointing toward something I'd stopped believing in somewhere between Tobruk and Normandy.

I thought about the lads I'd left behind. Hutchins with his bad jokes and worse singing. Morris who wrote letters to his girl every night and read them aloud whether you wanted to hear or not. Young Peters, barely nineteen, who'd looked at me like I had answers when all I had were bullets and a scope and the sick certainty that one day I'd be too slow.

They were still out there. Still freezing in foxholes, still waiting for dawn, still trusting that someone was watching over them from the high ground. And here I was, rattling through the English countryside toward some desk job because I'd had the bad luck to get hit and the worse luck to show weakness afterward.

The anger was easier than the guilt, so I held onto it.

The station was barely morethan a platform and a shed, the sign half-buried under snow. I was the only one who stepped off, kit bag slung over my good shoulder, boots crunching on the frozen ground. The cold hit like a slap, sharp and clean after the fog of the carriage, and I stood for a moment just breathing it in.

A guard huddled under the overhang, cigarette cupped in his palm. He looked me over with the quick assessment of someone used to sizing up strangers. “Hale?”

“That's right.”

“Truck's waiting.” He jerked his head toward the road beyond the fence. “Don't keep the captain waiting. He doesn't like it.”

I didn't ask questions. Questions had stopped doing me any good around the time I'd learned that knowing why didn't make the dying any easier.

The truck was a Bedford, canvas sides flapping in the wind, engine idling with that familiar rattle that meant it had seen better days. I climbed into the back and sat on the wooden bench, alone with my thoughts and the cold that seeped through my greatcoat.

We drove for what felt like hours but was probably twenty minutes, down lanes so narrow the branches scraped the canvas, through villages that were nothing more than a pub and a church and a handful of houses. The snow fell steadily, muffling everything, turning the world into something soft and strange.

My mind went where I didn't want it to go. It always did.

The ridge outside Caen. Smoke so thick you could taste it, cordite and burning petrol and something sweeter underneath that I'd learned not to name. Danny Martinez had been spotting for me, calling out positions while I worked the bolt, and everything had been going fine until it wasn't.

The German had come out of nowhere. Or maybe he'd been there all along and I'd missed him, too focused on the officers in my crosshairs, too confident in my own accuracy. He'd risen from a pile of rubble like something crawling out of a grave, rifle already tracking toward Danny, and I'd known, in that fraction of a second, that I wasn't going to be fast enough.

I'd hesitated. Just a heartbeat. Just long enough to see the kid's face through my scope, young, too young, barely old enough to shave, and in that heartbeat Danny had taken the round meant for me.

I'd killed the German. Clean shot through the throat I couldn't trust myself with anything finer. But Danny had still bled out in the mud with his hand reaching for mine, and all the shooting in the world couldn't bring him back.