Chapter Text
It’s 1918, and John Price is standing in front of the cracked mirror hanging above the bathroom sink, shirtless and barefoot.
He found out the hard way that the straight razor is still sharp. A thin line on his finger weeps claret. He waits fifteen minutes for it to stop bleeding, and once he’s scrubbed the sink he spends the rest of the day walking around with his hands behind his back whenever she comes into the room.
Mother didn’t begrudge him Father’s effects, because God knows he’s got no use for them any more and it would be such a terrible shame to waste them.
There’s his sports almanacs, which chronicle mainly football but also horse racing, his wooden cigar box, his very favorite flat cap.
There’s a metal lighter with a shiny new penny coin set into the metal; the portrait of King George has been defaced, somewhat amateurishly, in order to resemble a soldier with a pith helmet and a great big mustache.
There’s even his service pistol, one of the few personal effects that was returned by the army because, as he’d find out later in his life, it was a private purchase- a Colt 1911 with diamond-cut checker wood grips, the kind issued to American soldiers.
Above all else, John has always been fascinated by Father’s shaving kit.
He remembers standing by the sink, watching the old chap applying the cream and scraping it away in slow, measured strokes while his little boy mimicked the action with a comb. Father always thought it amusing, but Mother warned him against the wicked edge of the razor after Father had left it on the edge of the sink and caught him wondering at it.
Don’t touch it, Johnny. It’s sharp. You’ll cut yourself.
It’s 1931, and John Price is standing in line at the greengrocer’s on Woodgrange Road. Mother’s not been well lately, but Ernie always puts a little extra in for her. He always asks John how his old mum is doing, always tells him to look after her as though he needs to be reminded that he’s the man of the house now, don’tcher know.
One day, he fetches something from the top shelf behind the counter and tucks it beneath the bread, baking powder, wax paper and eggs with a conspiratorial wink and a grin.
Your old chap used to like these. Don’t tell your mother, now. There’s a good lad.
He doesn’t smoke the cigar. Not at first. Instead, he squirrels it away in his sock drawer, where he knows Mother isn’t going to look, and occasionally takes it out and looks at it.
The smell reminds him of Father, but he keeps it separate from the ones in the wooden cigar box. This one is his.
Eventually, he takes it around the back of the furnishings store on Oakhurst Road and lights it. It’s smooth, and surprisingly easy on the tongue. Ernie advised him to take it slow so as not to make himself sick, but the thing keeps going out. He goes through half a book of lucifers and ends up smoking about a third of it. The flavor changes each time it’s relit, but every time it manages to remind him of Father.
There’s a slice of cake waiting for him on the kitchen table when he gets home.
It’s a quarter past eleven on September 3rd, 1939, and John is standing in line at the greengrocer’s on Woodgrange Road again. Ernie has the wireless on, dialed up loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear the Prime Minister’s voice come close to breaking as he addresses the nation from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street.
All the colour has gone out of Ernie’s rounded, usually ruddy face. A little boy in the line behind him asks his mum what’s wrong as she mops her eyes with a handkerchief.
Ernie gives John back two shillings change from half a crown. His hands are shaking so much that the coins jingle in his palm.
Get on home now, there’s a good lad. You look after your mother now, you hear?
Mother is sitting at the kitchen table when he gets home, sobbing into her palms as a church bell rings in the distance.
Not again, she keeps saying, and the words are almost a scream. Oh God, not again.
It’s December 2nd, 1939, and someone is fiddling with a wireless as the train departs from Forest Gate station. Half the town has turned out to see them off. Wives and girlfriends wave handkerchiefs and blow kisses, and old men look on with almost reassuring stoicism as mothers shed tears for their sons.
The opening strains of “There'll Always Be an England” filter out of the speakers, laced with crackly static and devolving into a discordant mess as someone fiddles with the dials. After almost half a minute of unsuccessful attempts to retrieve the signal, someone starts up a chorus of “We’ll Meet Again”.
One voice becomes three, becomes four, becomes a dozen and then some more, punctuated by the chuffing of pistons as Forest Gate station becomes a distant dot on the horizon.
After that, the rest of the journey is very quiet.
It’s December 7th, and Private John Price, service number nine zero five one two one zero, has begun to become accustomed to life at Colchester.
Reveille is at oh-six-hundred, followed by a difficult shave standing elbow-to-elbow with other lads his age. Many of them are using cutthroat razors, and Private Price often thinks of his old man’s shaving kit, sitting at home in a little case bound with shiny black leather.
After a day of drilling with rifles, bayonets and Bren guns, five-mile runs and quick marching, Private Price stands in line for a meal of reconstituted potato, boiled beans and a piece of meat that has no identifying characteristics beyond being tough and stringy.
It’s bitterly cold at Colchester, and Price can never seem to get warm. He comes to stop regarding food as something to be enjoyed, and often finds himself so hungry that he doesn’t care about anything except getting it down his neck.
Memories of his mother’s cooking begin to fade, but he still finds himself craving the warm, smoky comfort of a Villa Clara cigar, if only to remember what it was like.
It’s February, 1940, and Private John Price is standing on a train bound for London in full kit.
The civvies make no effort to disguise their stares, but will not meet his gaze- all except for a little girl who points at him and insists to her mother that it’s her daddy. Look, mummy. Look. It’s daddy.
The woman shushes her daughter, and mumbles an apology at Price without meeting his eyes. The little girl keeps staring at him until they reach London.
It’s June, 1940. Corporal Price is a thoroughly sensible and well-spoken chap, respected by his subordinates and superiors alike. He has been offered the opportunity of a commission, and is sent to the 166th Officer Cadet Training Unit.
The training is frightfully dull, with more time devoted to polishing buttons and parade-ground drills than anything sensible. In his down time Price listens to the wireless, and wonders what it would be like to kill a man.
Nineteen days later, the Germans drop a parachute mine on a technical school in Liverpool. One-hundred and sixty-six people die in an underground shelter as the school collapses, and Price decides as he’s listening to this that yes, he could most definitely kill a man.
It’s November 9th, 1940, and Corporal John Price has earned a commission to the rank of Lieutenant. A dull-witted platoon sergeant whose instruction on military strategy consisted mainly of waffling, tangential remarks and assurances that there was “nothing to it” shakes Price’s hand and observes that he’s going to have to salute him now. He seems to think this is the height of comedy.
Price forces himself to smile as the man tells him that he’ll make a damned fine officer. The praise sets his teeth grinding, and he’s careful to keep his mouth shut.
It’s May, 1941, and Lieutenant Price’s mustache is the talk of the battalion.
Some opine- though never to his face- that the Lieutenant looks “an utter twit” with the handlebars stretching from one cheek to the other.
Many more have since requested permission to try and cultivate mustaches of their own.
It’s October 29th, 1942. Captain Price leads the men of the 7th Armored Division on an audacious raid on a remote enemy supply dump, drawing the attention of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps away from Field Marshal Montgomery’s forces to the north.
Price commands his soldiers with distinction, but is careful to listen to the enlisted soldiers under his command. It’s a delicate balancing act; if he doesn’t take charge, the lads won’t respect his authority. If he doesn’t pay attention, he could get them all killed.
It’s November 6th, 1942, and the skies are clear over El Daba. Spitfires and Stukas chase each other through the air, their engines scarce heard amid the guns below.
When the guns finally fall silent, Price wonders at the empty buildings that were once homes, the streets that once hosted markets where people would haggle over everything from their weekly grocery shop to expensive jewelry.
He imagines that children once played in these streets, just as they did in the streets of London before Göring’s Luftwaffe came with their bombs. He wonders if this land will remember the men of the 7th Armoured Division and Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
Probably not, he decides. This place has seen too much of war already.
It’s seven minutes after midnight on June 6th, 1944, and Captain Price has been assigned to lead the men of “D” Company, 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, in an audacious airborne raid.
The men of Ox and Bucks come from the night in the hours before the landings at Normandy, their faces darkened with gentian purple ointment supplied by their section’s medical officer. He can hardly fault the lanky German who first spots them for screaming. They must look like monsters. They are shadows come to life, only the whites of their eyes visible until their dark outlines are thrown into hazy focus by muzzle flashes.
The battle to claim the Pegasus Bridge is swift, decisive and brutal. They lose two men in the process. A lieutenant with a wife eight months pregnant back in Blighty is struck in the back of the neck by machine gun fire, and a poor bloody lance-corporal who was thrown from his glider after a messy crash-landing drowns in the river below.
It’s June 11th, 1944, and Captain Price is standing with his finger on the trigger of his 1911 pistol as a terrified German soldier begs him not to shoot in heavily accented English. The man’s trembling hands reach skywards as his squadmates, none of whom speak any English, watch him explain that they have wounded here.
One of his men suggests that they should slot the whole bloody lot of them. The Germans don’t need to speak English to know what that means. The language of hatred is as universal as fear.
Price orders the lads to hold their fire, and they sullenly obey. Although he doesn’t realize it at the time, had any one of them defied that order he would’ve turned his own weapon on them without a second’s hesitation.
The wounded are prisoners, around half a dozen Yanks who were captured storming the beaches at Normandy. Private MacGregor brings around a lorry and they stagger towards it in a bloody, limping conga line with an uneven number of limbs and eyes between them. The lame are leading the blind and the blind are carrying the lame. The surrendering Germans are permitted to help under the watchful supervision of Sergeant John Davis.
Davis reminds Price a lot of himself when he was first called up. He’s the strong, silent type. Still fresh-faced but with a quiet intensity that belies his boyish features.
Later that night, Price gets word from brigade HQ that three of the prisoners were too badly wounded and didn’t make it.
It’s July 10th, 1944, and Captain John Price has been recommended for the Special Air Service along with Sergeant John Davis.
The unit’s exploits in Africa have made them famous among the Allies ranks and infamous to the Germans. Reputedly, Hitler has issued an order that any such “terror and sabotage troops” should be swiftly executed rather than taken prisoner.
Two days ago, at dawn, thirty captured SAS troops and an American pilot who’d attached himself to their unit after being shot down a month prior were executed by a Wehrmacht firing squad. Three more who had been wounded and hospitalized were killed in their beds by the administration of lethal injections.
Letters are sent, and Price and Davis’ transfer is approved.
It’s September 1st, and Captain Price and Sergeant Davis are welcomed to 3 Troop, 2 SAS by Sergeant Waters, a smooth-faced young man with wingnut ears that he doesn’t appear to have grown into.
Waters looks to be about half Price’s age, and yet knows half as much again of war as Price. He has a rough manner of speaking, the syllables laced with the guttural twang of South London that Price’s officer training has all but scrubbed away, but when he speaks the men listen.
Price listens too. He’s not some Sandhurst boy who’s still wet behind the ears, but he’s spent enough time in the field to know that an experienced enlisted man is a damn sight more useful than an officer who thinks he knows better, so he jolly well keeps his mouth shut.
It’s October 27th, 1944, and everything has gone tits-up.
Price’s uniform was enough to get them onto the Tirpitz, and his German was good enough to get them below decks. It was also good enough to realize that the forged documents the SOE provided them with wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, and their excuse about the officer they killed on the boat ride over here being called to an emergency meeting would only arouse the Jerries’ suspicions further.
The 1911 pistol tucked into his waistband isn’t Kriegsmarine-issue either, but by the time he’s shot the two sailors who are trying to raise the alarm it hardly makes a difference.
The front of his uniform wouldn’t pass muster now. It’s pock-marked with bullet holes, sticky and damp with blood. There’s dead Jerries all over the shop, and he’s not quite certain how many of the kills are his and how many belong to Sergeant Davis.
Davis is long gone. Not his fault. They got separated just before Price went and got himself shot. Bloody stupid. He’s drifting in and out of consciousness. Davis must have seen his bullet wounds and taken off. Can’t blame the old boy for thinking the Jerries had done him in. Frankly, even he’s a little surprised that he’s still breathing.
There’s a muffled boom from somewhere below the decks, and Price permits himself a small smile.
Ah, yes. That’ll be the charges going up. He hopes Davis made it off in one piece.
A pair of heavy boots goes thundering past his head, stamping claret prints onto the deck and yelling in frantic German.
Not to worry, old chap. The water will put the fires out.
He’s still grinning at a joke nobody will ever hear as the darkness takes hold of him again.
It’s November 1st, 1953, although John Price doesn’t know that.
He doesn’t remember the trawler scooping him out of the icy waters of the Sandnessundet strait, between the islands Kvaløya and Tromsøya. He doesn’t remember one of the fishermen uttering an oath as they watched the slow rise and fall of his chest, nor does he remember another inspecting his dog tags.
Jonathan…Price. Britiske…han er en britisk soldat?
Hvorfor faen er han kledd ut som en tysker?
He doesn’t know how he got here, because he doesn’t know where here is.
His arm hurts. The muscles are tender beneath the itchy spot on his skin, but he can’t scratch it.
Everything is…muddled.
Price. John Price. Nine zero five one two one zero.
Price. John Price. Nine zero five…nine…nine zero…
John. John Price. He’s a soldier. He was in the war. They were fighting.
…Did they win? They must have won, surely.
Is the war over now?
John Price.
Price.
Nine zero five.
Nine zero…
Someone’s blowing smoke in his face. A red spot flares in the darkness. A cigar. Villa Clara?
How’s he taking it so far?
Better than the other subjects.
No shit.
Ashes. Ashes.
We all fall down.
Tough old buzzard.
The Brits aren’t gonna give us shit over this, are they?
Nah. They want results, same as us. Better us than the Reds, right?
Surprised they signed off on this.
Guy’s been listed as KIA since ‘forty-four, man. What do they care?
He’s a good catch though, right? Where’d they find him?
Cold. Itchy. Hot. The taste of smoke lingers on his tongue. Hungry.
Time passes in the dark before cellophane flowers sprout at the yellow warmth of California sunshine, shining through the window pane.
What’s he at right now?
Uh, hold on. One-forty-one. Damn. It was one-thirty-eight a minute ago.
Give him another twenty milligrams and get him prepped for phase two.
Static on the radio. He knows the song, but he can’t remember the words.
And get that damned silly mustache off of him.
Metal scrapes his face. Pins and needles lance up his arms. A great golden dragon takes a deep breath, and blows smoke into his lungs.
It’s October 30th, 1978.
MI6 have selected a prodigious young SAS operator named Jonathan as the lead operator for their contribution to Operation Charybdis.
CIA analyst Ryan Jackson has been assured by the Secret Intelligence Service that he is absolutely qualified to lead the detachment, despite admitting in the same sentence that he is inordinately young for such a role. He has been described as a veritable prodigy, a rising star of the Regiment.
According to his dossier, he joined the infantry at the age of sixteen and is one of the youngest cadets to ever graduate the Royal Military Academy as a commissioned officer.
He speaks fluent German, Russian and Arabic, and has served with distinction in the Falklands, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. He's described as a peerless operator who commands the respect of his men- unusual for officers in the Regiment, who are usually looked upon as secondary to a more experienced NCO- and his psych evaluation notes with interest that he appears to prefer the company of enlisted men, eschewing the officer’s mess in favour of a pint with the lads.
A picture of physical health, he neither drinks nor smokes to excess. More importantly, his mind is sharp. Keen and analytical, his willingness to adopt unconventional methods pioneered by the Regiment’s counter-terrorism specialists and uncanny ability to develop and maintain links to foreign assets make him ideally suited to operations of this type.
He is a phenomenal tracker, a brutal hand-to-hand fighter, and a supremely skilled marksman even by the standards of the Regiment.
The only two indulgences he permits himself are the occasional Villa Clara cigar, and a broad handlebar mustache that has become his trademark over the years.
It’s May 5th, 1988.
Bravo Team’s leader, call sign Bravo Six, abseils down the side of the embassy, decked out in full black kit- a gas mask, hood, and black overalls- and lands on the balcony gripping an MP5 submachine gun. Within minutes, the blown-in windows of the embassy are belching smoke and CS gas.
The raid lasts seventeen minutes, and ends with five terrorists dead and one captured.
Two hostages have been wounded, and one killed- an embassy press attaché whose body was unceremoniously dumped into the street outside, the catalyst for the assault.
The sole surviving gunman attempts to hide among the hostages while they’re being searched. He is found, and dragged around the back of the embassy by a black-clad trooper who intends to execute him until Bravo Six seizes his shoulder and nods in the direction of the television cameras, at which point he thinks better of it.
It’s November 5th, 1996, and it’s a bitterly cold winter in Chernobyl.
The stock of the Barrett M82 bucks against Lieutenant Price’s shoulder. He’s taken wind speed and direction, bullet drop and even the Coriolis effect into account, but the shot is still just a little hurried.
The high-velocity round sloughs through Imran Zakhaev’s shoulder, spinning him around like a top and flinging him to the ground. Captain MacMillan reckons he saw the man’s arm fly off. Satisfied that shock and blood loss will do the rest, they exfil just before a Mi-24 Hind empties a salvo of missiles into the floor of the derelict hotel where they’d been laid up seconds prior.
The operation is MacMillan’s last. It’s not a gunshot or grenade that ends his career as a field operative, but a misstep as random and unlucky as any other battlefield injury. His knee is dislocated, hyperextending it and rupturing an artery. By the time Price has carried him to the extraction point, the medics aboard their extraction chopper can already tell that the damage is done.
Three years of surgeries and physical therapy ultimately leave MacMillan with one leg shorter than the other, and by the time he gets out the process has done what fifteen years of field work failed to do.
John visits his mentor in the hospital while he’s not on ops, smuggling in cigars and malt whisky, and refuses to accept a promotion to Mac’s old rank until the old man tells him he’s earned it, along with a favour that John won’t call in for another twenty-two years.
It’s 2011, and the world is in great shape.
Civil war in Russia, government Loyalists versus Ultranationalist rebels and fifteen-thousand nukes at stake. A coup d’etat in the Middle East culminates in an execution broadcast on international television, and intel is keeping an eye on the man responsible: Khaled Al-Asad.
So what’s the bad news, Captain Price wants to know?
His oppo is a Cockney jack-the-lad, formerly of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment and six years into the SAS. He’s never seen without a baseball cap, given to him as a tongue-in-cheek parting gift by a group of U.S. Marines while he was cross-training with them at Camp Lejeune, although he’s since swapped out the Stars and Stripes for a Union Jack patch. Whether he’s on ops or on the piss, earning his Parachute Wings at Camp Lejeune or running RTI drills at Hereford, he’s only ever known as Gaz.
We’ve got a new guy joining us today. Fresh outta Selection. His name’s Soap.