NATO Standard Nightmares

The Edge of Control

The radiator in the corner of the room clanked with the rhythmic, agonizing persistence of a dying Challenger tank engine, spitting out just enough lukewarm heat to make the peeling floral wallpaper smell faintly of damp plaster, stale tobacco, and accumulated regret. Outside, the relentless North Yorkshire rain battered against the single-pane window, a bleak, freezing November downpour that turned the neon sign of the kebab shop across the street into a smeared, bloody smudge of red light across the cracked glass. It was Sunday evening in Darlington, and the world outside was a miserable, freezing wash of grey and black.

Sergeant Mark Davies—known to every miserable, mud-soaked bastard in 1st Battalion, The Green Howards as ‘Rhino’—sat on the very edge of the sagging mattress, his hands gripping the cheap, imitation-brass bedframe so hard his knuckles were entirely white. Every muscle in his massive, battered rugby-prop frame was locked in a state of absolute, excruciating tension. His jaw was clenched so tight his teeth ground together, the muscles feathering along his thick neck and the heavy, perpetual shadow of stubble on his jawline.

He was losing his grip. He was a man who prided himself on control, on the rigid, uncompromising discipline that had kept him and his men alive through the absolute worst, bloodiest clusterfucks the Balkans had to offer in the mid-nineties. He was a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer, the terrifying, immovable object at the head of Section 4. But right now, that legendary discipline was rapidly dissolving into the cheap, threadbare carpet of a cash-only, no-questions-asked bed and breakfast an hour’s drive away from the suffocating reality of Catterick Garrison.

Between his heavily muscled thighs, Corporal Victoria Lawson—Vic to the lads, a walking, talking court-martial waiting to happen—was systematically dismantling his sanity.

She was on her knees on the faded rug, her blonde hair, usually pinned and scraped back so tight under her Royal Army Medical Corps beret it looked painful, now falling in a chaotic, glorious cascade over his thighs. The sensation was blinding. The wet, slick heat of her mouth, the rhythmic, agonizingly slow pull, the scrape of her manicured nails against the hard, scarred skin of his hips—it was a coordinated, tactical assault on his nervous system. Mark threw his head back, staring blindly at a water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like a map of the Falkland Islands, his breath coming in ragged, harsh gasps that sounded entirely too loud in the dingy room.

He was right on the absolute, jagged edge. A few more seconds, one more shift of her tongue, and he was going to snap completely. He could feel the pressure building, a frantic, desperate surge in his blood that completely overrode his brain.

“Vic,” he grunted, his voice a gravelly, half-strangled warning that vibrated deep in his chest. “Vic, stop.” She didn’t stop. She just hummed against him, a wicked, vibrating sound of pure insubordination, and picked up the pace, her hands sliding around to grip his arse, pulling him deeper into her mouth.

“Fuck’s sake, woman,” Mark swore, his control finally shattering. His hands released the bedframe to drop heavily onto her bare shoulders. His palms were massive, calloused from years of gripping freezing SA80 rifles and hauling wet webbing, and they engulfed her skin. He gripped her tight, his fingers pressing into the surprisingly dense muscle of her deltoids, and hauled her upward with a sudden, brute-force heave.

Vic let out a sharp gasp, half-annoyed and half-amused, as she was dragged up from the floor, her knees sliding against the cheap carpet. Mark didn’t let her go. He pulled her flush against his chest, wrapping his arms around her waist and dragging her onto his lap.

She straddled his thighs, letting out a breathless, husky laugh as she settled over him. Mark just stared at her, his chest heaving, his heart hammering a frantic, adrenaline-fueled rhythm against his ribs.

God, she was absolute ruin.

In her standard-issue, woodland DPM fatigues, Vic was a distraction that the entire battalion tried and failed to ignore. Naked in the dim, red-tinted light of a Darlington B&B, she was a localized catastrophe. She had the kind of lush, hourglass curves that belonged painted on the nose cone of a 1940s Lancaster bomber, the sort of exaggerated, lethal femininity that could genuinely derail a fucking train. But it wasn’t soft. Under the smooth skin, she was built with the taught, unforgiving reality of a combat medic who had to carry half her own body weight in gear. She had perfectly formed, feminine abs, the result of endless, punishing tab marches across Feldom Moor with a fifty-pound medical bergen strapped to her back. The taut muscle of her stomach tapered down into a sharp, flawless V-line that pointed straight toward complete and utter destruction.

And then there was her chest. A heavy, gravity-defying bust that she constantly and bitterly complained about. She’d spend half a patrol cursing the Quartermaster for the way her tits violently disagreed with the rigid, unforgiving straps of standard infantry webbing, constantly threatening to tape them down with black nasty tape just to get the canvas to sit flat. Mark, on the other hand, was utterly, helplessly obsessed with them. They were full, pale, and tipped with flushed peaks that reacted instantly to the freezing draft bleeding through the poorly sealed window.

He reached up, his rough hands tracing the curve of her waist, dragging his thumbs upward to cup the heavy undersides of her breasts, his thumbs brushing over her nipples.

“You’re a bloody menace, Corporal,” he muttered, his Northern accent thick and rough with desire, leaning in to bite gently at the crook of her neck.

“You’re a lightweight, Sergeant,” Vic shot back instantly, her voice a husky, taunting whisper. She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed his broad shoulders, her nails biting into the thick slabs of muscle along his collarbone, and sank her hips down.

Mark let out a harsh, guttural sound as she took him in. It was a perfect, frictionless slide that immediately set his blood on fire all over again.

Vic threw her head back, her bright blue eyes squeezing shut, her lips parting in a sharp gasp. Then, she opened her eyes, fixed him with a fierce, challenging glare that he usually only saw when she was aggressively arguing with Gaz over a game of pool in the NAAFI, and began to move.

She rode him with the same aggressive, relentless energy she applied to absolutely everything in her life. It wasn’t slow, and it wasn’t gentle. She moved her hips with punishing speed, slapping flush against his thighs with every downward thrust, riding him like she was a jockey in the final, desperate furlong of the Grand National and he was the only thing standing between her and the finish line.

“Jesus Christ, Vic,” Mark swore, his hands snapping to her hips, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her thighs to try and anchor her, to control the brutal, frantic pace she was setting.

It was a completely useless gesture. He couldn’t control her here any more than he could control the weather over the Brecon Beacons. She leaned forward, her heavy breasts swinging and brushing against the thick hair of his chest, her hands moving to fist in the short, military-cropped hair at the back of his head. She kissed him, an open-mouthed, bruising collision of teeth and tongues that tasted like mint toothpaste, cheap beer, and raw desperation. Mark kissed her back with feral intensity, his tongue plunging into her mouth, his massive hands squeezing her hips, pulling her down harder against him with every chaotic, slamming thrust.

The ancient bedframe screamed in metallic agony beneath them, hammering a relentless, rhythmic tempo against the thin plasterboard wall. Mark didn’t give a shit if the bloke in the next room heard them. He didn’t give a shit about the impending deployment, the miserable North Yorkshire rain, or the terrifyingly fragile nature of their secret. For the next ten minutes, the entire universe was reduced to the four dingy walls of this room, the smell of her sweat, the blinding heat of her body, and the absolute, consuming reality of Victoria Lawson.

When the climax finally hit him, it was like taking a physical blow to the chest from a riot shield. He locked his jaw, burying his face in the crook of her neck, his massive arms wrapping around her like a vice, crushing her against him as his hips snapped upward for one final, devastating thrust. He emptied into her with a long, shuddering groan that he tried and failed to bite back, his entire body trembling violently with the sheer, overwhelming force of it.

Vic collapsed against him a second later, her own climax rippling through her in a series of sharp, breathless stutters that clamped her tight around him. She slumped forward, her slick, sweat-drenched forehead coming to rest heavily against his collarbone, her chest heaving as she fought to drag air back into her lungs.

Mark held her, his massive hands splayed wide across her bare back, his thumb idly stroking the deep indentation of her spine. For a long, silent moment, the only sounds in the room were their harsh, synchronized breathing, the rain lashing against the glass, and the distant, wailing siren of a Darlington police car entirely too far away to matter.

Ghosts in the Smoke

Ten minutes later, the violent energy had bled out of the room, leaving behind a heavy, comfortable lethargy. They were a tangle of limbs beneath the thin, aggressively floral duvet that smelled faintly of industrial laundry detergent. Mark was lying flat on his back, the cheap mattress sagging perilously under his weight, threatening to roll them both onto the floor. Vic was plastered to his side, her head resting squarely on the thick slab of his pectoral muscle, her right leg thrown casually over his thighs to anchor him in place.

An overflowing pub ashtray, nicked from the Black Bull down the road three weekends ago, was balanced precariously on Mark’s chest.

Vic reached blindly toward the battered bedside table, her fingers fumbling over a crumpled pack of Lambert & Butlers and a cheap plastic lighter. She pulled out two cigarettes, clamped them both between her lips, and sparked the lighter. The flint ground loudly in the quiet room, casting a brief, flickering orange glow over her face. She inhaled deeply, the tips of the cigarettes glowing cherry red, before pulling one from her mouth and pressing it between Mark’s lips.

“Cheers, love,” Mark rumbled, taking a deep drag. The harsh, metallic taste of the cheap tobacco flooded his lungs, mingling perfectly with the dense, humid smell of sweat and sex that filled the tiny room.

“Don’t call me love, you sound like my bloody dad,” Vic muttered, blowing a thin stream of gray smoke toward the water-stained ceiling. She shifted her weight, making herself heavier against him, her fingers idly tracing the faded, jagged scar that cut across the left side of his ribs—a parting gift from a piece of mortar shrapnel in a Bosnian ditch four years ago.

Mark just hummed, ignoring the complaint. He shifted his arm, wrapping it tighter around her bare shoulders, his massive hand coming to rest possessively over the curve of her hip. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. Even now, fully sated and utterly exhausted, the physical need to maintain contact with her was an overwhelming itch he couldn’t scratch. He dragged his thumb back up her flank, letting his hand settle comfortably just beneath the heavy curve of her breast.

“You’re obsessed with them,” Vic noted dryly, looking down at his hand. “Honestly, Rhino, it’s a bit tragic. They’re just tits. Heavy, annoying, back-breaking tits that make carrying a Bergen a literal nightmare. I swear to god, if we go to war, I’m going to end up suffocating myself trying to go prone.”

“They’re a bloody national treasure, is what they are,” Mark replied deadpan, not moving his hand an inch. “If the Ministry of Defence had any sense, they’d classify ’em as tactical assets. Stun the enemy at twenty paces. We wouldn’t even need to fire a shot, just send you out waving them about and the Serbs would surrender.”

Vic snorted, a sharp, unladylike bark of laughter that vibrated against his chest. “Bollocks. If the MoD knew about them, they’d try and paint ’em green and issue ’em a serial number. Probably charge me a hundred quid in deductions if I lost one.”

Mark chuckled, the sound a low, rumbling vibration deep in his chest. He turned his head, pressing a lingering kiss to the top of her blonde head. Her hair smelled like cheap hotel shampoo and the lingering, metallic tang of rifle oil, a scent that was so intrinsically her that it made his chest physically tight.

He closed his eyes, taking another slow drag of the cigarette. The brief moment of humor faded, replaced by the heavy, suffocating weight of reality that always crept in during these quiet moments.

He held her tighter, almost unconsciously. He was thirty-four years old, a seasoned veteran of two brutal wars, a man who had seen friends blown to pieces and enemies do things to civilians that would make the devil himself vomit. He had seen the absolute worst humanity had to offer. Yet, the only thing that genuinely terrified him, the only thing that could make his heart rate spike with pure, unadulterated dread, was the woman currently using his chest as a pillow.

It was a dangerous, pathetic vulnerability, and he hated it.

His mind, entirely unbidden, dragged him back to a Tuesday afternoon three years ago. The smell of the smoke in the B&B briefly morphed into the smell of lavender floor cleaner and fresh paint. It was the smell of the pristine semi-detached house in married quarters he had paid for, the house he had returned to two weeks early from a grueling six-month tour in the Balkans.

He remembered the utter, crushing silence of the hallway. He remembered the pair of familiar, mud-stained boots sitting by the front door—boots that didn’t belong to him, boots that belonged to his younger brother, Liam. And then, the bedroom door opening.

Sarah. His wife. The woman he had loved with a stupid, blinding, pathetic devotion since he was nineteen years old. She had walked out onto the landing, her face draining of all color, her hands instinctively flying up to cover a belly that was swelling with a five-month pregnancy. A pregnancy that, given he had been sleeping in a freezing trench in Sarajevo for the last six months, was physically impossible to be his.

Liam had walked out a second later, shirtless, wiping sleep from his eyes, freezing like a deer in the headlights when he saw his older brother standing at the bottom of the stairs, still carrying his military bergen.

Mark hadn’t shouted. He hadn’t thrown a punch, even though every muscle in his body had screamed at him to tear his own brother apart with his bare hands, to beat him until the bones in his hands shattered. He had just stared at them, feeling a cold, absolute void open up in the center of his chest. He had turned around, walked out the front door, and never went back. He had signed the divorce papers via a military solicitor, cut all contact with his civilian family, and moved all his possessions into a single, bleak room in the SNCO block at Catterick Garrison.

He had married the regiment. The British Army didn’t love you, but it didn’t lie to you either. It gave you orders, it gave you a rifle, and it gave you a purpose. It was a brutal, transactional existence, but it was safe. There were no surprises in a firefight. You knew who wanted you dead.

And then, Victoria Lawson had been attached to his section.

She was loud, she was utterly disrespectful of authority, she swore like a docker, and she possessed a physical beauty that made his teeth ache. For the first year, he had ignored her, treating her with a cold, dismissive harshness that bordered on genuine cruelty, desperate to keep her at arm’s length. He was the Ice Man. He didn’t feel, he didn’t care. But the armor had cracked. A stolen glance over a map table in the rain, a shared, pitch-black joke while sheltering from mortar fire, a moment of sheer, breathless panic when she had dragged a bleeding Gaz out of a kill-zone while Mark laid down covering fire.

The first time they had slept together, drunk on adrenaline and cheap whiskey in a broom closet after a regimental dinner, he had told himself it was a one-off. A mistake. A release of tension between two soldiers.

A year later, he was lying in a Darlington B&B, secretly funding weekend getaways, risking his rank, his pension, and her entire career, completely, hopelessly addicted to a woman ten years his junior.

“You’re thinking too loud, old man,” Vic murmured, her voice pulling him violently out of the memory. She reached up, her fingers smoothing over the deep furrow between his eyebrows. “I can hear the gears grinding from here. You’ll give yourself a stroke. What is it? You worrying about your pension?”

Mark blinked, focusing on her face. Her blue eyes were watching him with that sharp, perceptive intelligence she usually hid behind a wall of ladette banter. She knew him too well. She always saw right through the Sergeant Davies persona.

“Just thinking about the kit list,” he lied smoothly, his voice dropping back into the gruff, authoritative cadence of the squad leader. “Wondering how many of those useless twats in my section are going to ‘forget’ their spare batteries for the night vision.”

Vic saw right through the lie, but she let it slide, settling back against his chest. “Coop will remember his. Gaz will forget his, but he’s packed eight cartons of duty-free Benson & Hedges instead, so he’ll just barter for them with the signals lads. And Tommo... well, Tommo’s practically a foetus. He’ll probably pack a teddy bear and forget his bloody rifle.”

Mark let out a short, cynical laugh. “If Tommo drops that Clansman radio one more time on exercise, I’m going to use it to beat him to death. I swear to god. The lad’s a walking disaster. He looks like a stiff breeze would knock him over.”

“He’s nineteen, Mark,” Vic said softly, tapping her ash into the pub ashtray on his chest. “He’s terrified of you. You look at him like you’re trying to calculate how much meat you could butcher off his bones for a stew.”

“That’s ’cause I am,” Mark replied darkly, taking a drag of his cigarette. “Fear keeps ’em alive, Vic. If he’s more scared of me than he is of whatever we’re facing over there, he won’t freeze up when the shooting starts. And out there, freezing up means coming home in a bag.”

The Accursed Deployment

The conversation naturally drifted, as it always did, back to the looming, oppressive shadow that was hanging over their weekend. Monday morning. The end of the fantasy.

“Flight’s out of Brize Norton at 0400 hours on Tuesday,” Mark said, his voice flat, staring at the ceiling, mentally running through the logistics. “Means we parade at the armory by 2300 on Monday. Draw weapons, draw ammo, sit around for five hours doing fuck all. It’s going to be a miserable bloody night.” “C-130 Hercules?” Vic asked, pulling a face of utter disgust.

“Aye. Strip seating, freezing cold, and it smells like a portaloo that’s been set on fire. The luxury travel the taxpayer provides for the glorious infantry.” Mark took a final drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out viciously in the ashtray, moving it to the bedside table so he could pull Vic closer. “We’re heading straight into Camp Slim Lines in Pristina. Handover from the Royal Welsh.”

Vic shivered, though the room wasn’t cold anymore. She rubbed her arms. “I heard it’s a right shitshow over there at the minute. The snow’s already hitting the mountains. The lads in the medical corps who are rotating back said the trench foot cases are through the roof. The mud is knee-deep in the valleys. They’re running out of dry socks in the stores.”

“It’s the Balkans in November, Vic. It’s not supposed to be a package holiday to fucking Tenerife,” Mark said, his tone sharpening instinctively at the mention of the tactical reality. “We’re doing framework patrols. Long tabs. Heavy bergens. And the brass are talking about pushing us right out to the Albanian border. The Prokletije range.”

“The Accursed Mountains,” Vic muttered, reciting the translation with a grimace. “Sounds like a delightful place for a stroll in the dark. Why are they pushing infantry that far out? I thought the KLA boys were supposed to be behaving themselves now the war’s officially over.”

“Smugglers,” Mark grunted, shifting his weight so he could look down at her. “Weapons moving across the border. Rogue paramilitaries that didn’t get the memo that peace was declared. And we’re the poor bloody infantry sent out to politely ask them to hand over their AK-47s. It’s going to be a massive, freezing, pointless ache in the arse. We’re going to be wet, cold, and tired for six solid months.”

He looked at her, his eyes tracing the soft line of her jaw, the slight smudge of mascara under her eyes. The thought of her out there, slogging through freezing mud, carrying a med-kit that weighed almost as much as she did, surrounded by desperate men with guns, made his chest tighten with a savage, protective instinct he couldn’t afford to have. It was a massive liability. A platoon sergeant couldn’t favor his medic over his riflemen. But looking at her now, he knew he would burn the entire battalion to the ground to keep her safe.

“You stick close to the section, Vic,” he said, his voice dropping the banter entirely, becoming deadly, terrifyingly serious. “You don’t wander off. You don’t play the hero. If we take contact, you drop into the dirt and you let Gaz’s gun do the talking. You don’t move until I tell you to move. You understand me?”

Vic rolled her eyes, but there was a softness in her expression. She knew he wasn’t pulling rank; he was terrified for her. “I’ve done this before, Rhino. I was in Bosnia. I know how to eat dirt. I’m not some fresh-faced private who’s going to panic at a loud noise.”

“I mean it, Victoria,” he growled, using her actual name—a rarity that always made her breath hitch. He shifted, pinning her beneath him, his massive frame caging her in against the mattress, his weight a comforting, oppressive blanket. “It’s not Catterick out there. It’s not a training exercise on the moors where we can just call an ambulance if someone twists an ankle. Those mountains are massive, they’re isolated, and if the shit hits the fan, backup is hours away. The Clansman radios barely work in the valleys. We’re going to be entirely on our own. You stay behind my rifle.”

Vic reached up, her hands cupping his rough, unshaven cheeks, her thumbs smoothing over the coarse stubble. “I know, Mark. I know.” She smiled, a small, sad curve of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’ll be a good little corporal. I promise.”

The reality of Monday morning was suddenly sitting heavily on both their chests, a suffocating weight that ruined the air in the room. The second they stepped out of this B&B and drove back through the gates of Catterick Garrison, the illusion was over.

Mark would become Sergeant Davies again. The ‘Ice Man’. He would walk past her in the NAAFI without so much as a nod. If she spoke to him on parade, he would bark at her to stand to attention. At the regimental dinners, he would ignore her entirely, leaving her to drink with the junior ranks while he drank with the older Sergeants. He would treat her with the exact same harsh, uncompromising distance as the rest of the unit, burying every ounce of affection beneath layers of institutionalized armor.

It was the only way to survive. If the lads in Section 4—Coop with his sharp, cynical eyes, or Gaz with his loud mouth—even caught a whiff of the truth, the rumor mill would destroy them both. Vic would be branded a slag who slept her way up the chain of command to get out of guard duty, and Mark would be stripped of his stripes, court-martialed for fraternization and abuse of authority, and kicked out of the only home he had left.

“I hate it, you know,” Vic whispered into the quiet room, her thumb tracing the line of his jaw. “The way you look right through me when we’re in uniform. Like I’m just empty space. Like I don’t mean a bloody thing to you.”

Mark closed his eyes, a muscle feathering in his cheek. He hated it too. It felt like tearing off a piece of his own soul every time he had to deliver a cold, dead-eyed stare to the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. It made him feel like a coward.

“It keeps you safe,” he said hoarsely, opening his eyes to meet hers. “It keeps you in the army. It keeps us hidden. If command finds out, they won’t just move one of us. They’ll make an example of us.”

“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, you massive, stubborn prick,” she murmured, though there was no real malice in it. She pulled him down, burying her face against his chest, her arms wrapping tightly around his waist.

“I know,” Mark whispered, his voice cracking slightly.

He leaned down, burying his face in her neck, inhaling the scent of her like a drowning man taking a final breath of air before the water closed over his head. He kissed her skin, a desperate, lingering pressure that conveyed everything he couldn’t say out loud. “I know it does. I’m sorry.”

He shifted his weight, kissing her jaw, her cheek, and finally her lips. The kiss was slow, heavy with the impending doom of their reality. The conversation had killed the relaxed afterglow, replacing it with a frantic, clinging need to make the most of the few hours they had left before the woodland camouflage uniforms went back on and the world of the Green Howards reclaimed them.

“Stop talking about the bloody army,” Vic breathed against his mouth, her hands sliding down his back to grip his hips, her fingernails biting into his skin, pulling him flush against her again. The spark was reignited instantly, fueled by the desperation of their ticking clock. “You’ve got me until Sunday afternoon, Sergeant. Try and make yourself useful.”

Mark didn’t need to be told twice. The brutal, freezing reality of Kosovo, the miles of mud, the threat of weapons smugglers, and the terrifying, ancient isolation of the Prokletije mountains could wait for Monday. The Accursed Mountains and whatever nightmares hid within them were a problem for another day. Right now, there was only the dingy room in Darlington, the rain lashing against the window, and the woman beneath him. He kissed her hard, his hands roaming over her body with renewed, possessive urgency, determined to burn this memory into his brain to keep him warm when the freezing Balkan winter finally swallowed them whole.