Dust of Babylon

Tactical Overview

Southern Iraq. April 2003.

The air at Tallil Airbase did not just feel hot; it felt aggressively, personally vindictive. It tasted of vaporised aviation fuel, incinerated plastic from the shit-burn pits, and a fine, microscopic dust that coated the teeth and scratched the back of the throat like crushed glass. It was the kind of heat that made a man feel as though he were breathing through a wet wool blanket.

Captain Declan Hayes of the SAS Mobility Troop sat on the blistered bonnet of his beloved Pink Panther Land Rover 110, currently regretting every life choice that had led him to this miserable patch of sand. He was two months into his tour, and the boredom was beginning to set in like rot. War, Dec had long ago realised, was ninety-nine per cent agonising, sweat-drenched waiting, punctuated by one per cent of sheer, unadulterated terror. Right now, they were firmly entrenched in the ninety-nine.

He reached up, wiping a mixture of sweat and grit from his forehead, pushing back a mop of messy, sun-bleached blonde hair. At thirty-four, Dec was entirely used to getting his own way. He possessed the kind of carved-from-marble, symmetrical aesthetics that usually made things exceptionally easy for him back in Hereford. He had striking, bright blue eyes, a roguish, asymmetrical smirk, and a densely packed V-taper torso currently suffocating beneath his desert smock. The faded black-and-grey ink of his sleeves peeked out from where he had recklessly rolled up his uniform against regulations. He knew he looked good. He knew it worked on women. It was a universal skeleton key he had used his entire adult life.

Except here. Except with her.

The Motor Pool

“Boss, I’m telling you, this Bowman is entirely, unequivocally fucked,” a lyrical, highly agitated Welsh voice drifted over the noise of the revving engines.

Dec blinked, dragging his attention away from the medical tents across the compound. He looked down at Trooper Gareth Llewellyn—‘Gobs’ to absolutely everyone—who was currently wrestling with the massive, temperamental Bowman radio unit strapped to his back.

“It’s not fucked, Gobs,” Dec drawled, his voice a smooth, deep Estuary English purr that betrayed his comfortable Home Counties upbringing. “You just don’t know how to treat her right. You have to caress the dials. Buy her a drink first.”

“I’d buy her a pint of cyanide if it’d get a signal,” Gobs muttered, kicking the thick tyre of the Land Rover. “I’ve got nothing but white noise and American logistics chatter. I can hear some Yank complaining about a shortage of Pop-Tarts, but I can’t reach HQ. We’re fifty miles from the wire and if the shit hits the fan, I’m going to be throwing rocks at the enemy.”

“Stop whingeing, Sparks,” came a low, gravelly voice from the gun turret. Winnie, a mountain of a Geordie who looked like he ate protein powder dry, was aggressively racking the charging handle of the.50 calibre machine gun. “If the radios go down, you just scream really loud in Welsh. That’ll scare the insurgents off. Or confuse them to death.”

“Piss off, you great northern ape,” Gobs shot back.

Dec tuned them out. His lads—Nomad Troop—were surviving the soul-crushing monotony through a steady diet of relentless squaddie banter, gallows humour, and stolen American caffeine. Smudge, their designated scrounger and mechanical genius, was currently underneath the rear axle of the second Landie, fixing a blown suspension strut with duct tape, a spanner, and pure, unfiltered spite.

Dec loved his troop. He would burn the world down for them. But right now, his attention was completely monopolised by the flap of the main medical clearing station parting across the dusty thoroughfare.

The RAMC Corporal

Corporal Roxanne Tyler stepped out into the blinding Iraqi sun.

Dec felt that familiar, heavy kick of adrenaline hit the base of his spine. It was the same spike he got just before blowing a door off its hinges, only significantly more distracting.

She had been in theatre for four months, two months longer than Dec, and she looked like she owned the miserable place. She was, without a single shadow of a doubt, the most devastatingly beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. She had a lethal, sharp-angled bone structure, piercing green eyes that missed absolutely nothing, and an extreme, unapologetic hourglass figure.

But it was her mouth that drove Dec entirely insane. She had impossibly full, pillowy lower lips—the kind of absolute, filthy, weaponised blow-job lips that had no business existing on a military base, let alone in the middle of a combat zone. Every time she clamped those lips around a cigarette or pressed them together in utter disdain at something Dec said, his brain effectively short-circuited.

And then there was the rest of her.

The military did its absolute best to strip away femininity, forcing everyone into the same shapeless, oversized desert DPM camouflage and the horrific, rigid ceramic plates of the Enhanced Combat Body Armour. The ECBA was a torture device designed for flat-chested men. On Rox, the armour was an exercise in structural tension.

Dec watched her walk, unable to look away, utterly obsessed with the mechanics of it. Even strapped down tight under the heavy Kevlar and ceramic plates, her chest defied the uniform. With every militant, purposeful stride she took across the uneven dirt, he watched the heavy, hypnotic bounce of her generous bust fighting against the rigid vest. The webbing straps dug into her waist, accentuating the dramatic flare of her hips.

She moved like a predator. There was no hesitation in her step, no wasted energy. She was cold, sharp, and entirely terrifying. The American Marines and logistics crews stared at her like she was a mirage—the ultimate, unattainable unicorn of Tallil Airbase. They threw themselves at her daily, offering up care packages, M&Ms, and terrible chat-up lines. Rox dismantled them effortlessly, using a blistering South London sarcasm that left the Yanks laughing, humiliated, and even more obsessed.

But Dec wasn’t an American logistician. He was a Captain in the Special Air Service. He was used to women melting into a puddle the second he flashed that roguish smile.

Roxanne Tyler did not melt. She froze him out with a clinical detachment that made him want to drag her into the nearest empty tent and spend three days proving her wrong.

Approaching the Fortress

“Careful, Boss,” Smudge muttered, sliding out from under the axle, wiping a streak of black grease across his forehead. “Your tongue’s hanging out. Going to get sand on it.”

“Shut it, Smudge,” Dec murmured, not breaking visual contact as Rox approached a pallet of medical supplies near their staging area. “I’m merely observing the allied assets.”

“You’re borderline stalking the allied assets,” Gobs corrected, adjusting his headset. “She’s not interested, Dec. Face it. For the first time in your charmed, private-school life, a bird has looked at you and thought, ‘Nah, I’d rather not.’"

“She’s playing hard to get,” Dec insisted, hopping down from the bonnet of the Land Rover, his boots crunching in the dirt. He straightened his smock, feeling the heavy weight of his sidearm against his thigh. “She’s RAMC. Probably just intimidated by the badge.”

Winnie barked a massive, booming laugh from the turret. “Intimidated? Boss, I watched her manually re-pack a bloke’s bowels back into his abdomen yesterday while eating a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She’s not intimidated by you. She thinks you’re a twat.”

“Watch the rank, Winnie,” Dec grinned, though there was no real heat in it. “I’m going over there.”

“Write us a will before you go,” Smudge called out. “I want your CD player when she murders you.”

Dec ignored them, rolling his shoulders to settle the heavy weight of his own ECBA. The heat was climbing past forty degrees Celsius, but as he closed the distance between himself and Rox, the temperature seemed to spike even higher.

She was standing over a crate of saline IV bags, a clipboard in one hand, aggressively ticking off inventory. Up close, the effect she had on him was even worse. A few stray strands of blonde hair had escaped her messy bun, sticking to the sweat on the back of her neck. Dec had an overwhelming, highly inappropriate urge to lean down and lick the salt off her skin.

The Rejection

“Morning, Tyler,” Dec said, leaning casually against the stack of wooden crates, crossing one heavy desert boot over the other and deploying the smile that had broken hearts across three different continents.

Rox didn’t look up. She flipped a page on her clipboard. “Captain Hayes. To what do I owe the displeasure? Has one of your apes managed to shoot themselves in the foot again, or are you just over here to block my sunlight?”

Her voice was absolute perfection—a sharp, uncompromising South London clip that cut through his posh Berkshire drawl like a scalpel.

“Just making sure the medical corps is properly supplied,” Dec said, dropping his voice a fraction of an octave, letting it scrape low and intimate. “We’re pushing out into the deep desert later. Need to know I’m in good hands if I take a stray round.”

Rox finally stopped writing. She turned her head slowly, her startling green eyes locking onto his. She looked him up and down, taking in the messy blonde hair, the broad chest, the meticulously rolled sleeves showing off the tattoos. She looked at him the exact same way she looked at a defective tourniquet.

“If you take a stray round, Hayes, I’ll toss you a bandage and tell you to walk it off,” she said, her voice deadpan. “I save the good morphine for the soldiers who actually need it, not the Ruperts who spend two hours a day doing their hair in the wing mirrors of their Land Rovers.”

Dec chuckled, stepping a fraction closer. He could smell her—a mix of sterile iodine, cheap military soap, and something deeply, inherently female that made his blood hammer in his ears. He let his gaze drop, just for a second, to that incredible, sinful mouth, and then lower, helpless against the gravity of the way her chest strained against the top edge of her ballistic plate.

“You wound me, Tyler,” he murmured, letting his voice scrape low just to test the waters.

Her eyes narrowed to incredibly dangerous slits. “It’s Corporal Tyler to you. Or ‘Medic’ if you’re bleeding to death.”

“Come on, Rox,” he pushed, stepping into her personal space. The top of her head barely reached his chin, but she held her ground, radiating absolute hostility. “You’ve been giving me the cold shoulder for two months. I know you feel the tension. I can see it. Let me take you to the NAAFI tent tonight. I managed to scrounge some actual decent coffee. Not the sludge they serve in the mess. We can sit, talk, maybe figure out why you’re so determined to hate me.”

Rox let out a short, breathy sigh. She tapped her pen against her clipboard. For a second, Dec thought he had cracked the ice. He watched those incredible, thick lips part.

“Listen to me very carefully, Declan,” she said quietly, her voice dropping to a low, lethal murmur that sent a shiver straight down to his groin. “You are thirty-four years old. You are undeniably pretty. You are entirely used to women throwing their knickers at you because you’re SAS and you have good bone structure.” She stepped forward, jabbing a rigid index finger directly into the centre of his chest plate. “But I am not one of the girls back in Hereford. I do not care about your Land Rover. I do not care about your tattoos. And I certainly do not care about your bloody coffee.”

Dec held his ground, his smirk faltering just a fraction, replaced by genuine, burning fascination.

“I am here to do a job,” she continued, her green eyes boring holes into his skull. “I deal with torn limbs, sepsis, and screaming men who want their mothers. You are a distraction. You are an arrogant, preening, egotistical distraction who thinks this entire war is just a backdrop for your own personal action movie. So, no. We are not getting coffee. We are not talking. And if you stare at my tits one more time, I will legally declare you a casualty and practice my surgical tracheotomies on your throat without anaesthetic. Are we clear?”

Dec stood there, utterly paralysed. He had been rejected before, but never with such clinical, devastating precision. He looked at her flushed face, the fury in her eyes, the heavy, rapid rise and fall of her chest inside the restricting armour.

God, he wanted her. He wanted her so badly his teeth ached.

“Crystal clear, Corporal,” he managed to say, his voice thick.

“Good,” Rox snapped. She turned on her heel and marched back toward the medical tent, the heavy bounce of her hips a final, punishing taunt.

The Gathering Storm

Dec stood by the crates, watching her walk away. He couldn’t help it. She was a fortress. She was impenetrable.

And Declan Hayes had never been able to resist a siege.

“Shot down in flames!” Winnie yelled from the Land Rover, his massive laugh echoing across the motor pool.

“Absolutely obliterated,” Smudge agreed, tossing a spanner into the dirt. “I think she actually took a piece of his soul that time.”

“Shut the fuck up, the lot of you,” Dec growled, turning back toward his men, though the smirk was already creeping back onto his face. He hopped back onto the bonnet of the Pink Panther, staring at the closed flap of the medical tent.

The sky above Tallil was beginning to darken, the bruised, violent orange of an incoming shamal—a massive desert sandstorm—gathering on the horizon. The air pressure was dropping, making the heat feel even more oppressive, heavy, and pregnant with static electricity.

Dec pulled a crumpled pack of American cigarettes from his webbing, lighting one and drawing the harsh smoke deep into his lungs. He exhaled slowly, watching the storm roll in, his mind entirely consumed by the image of green eyes and blow-job lips.

He didn’t know it yet, but Roxanne Tyler’s coldness, her precision, her utter lack of fear—it wasn’t just battlefield fatigue. There was something undeniably different about her, something that made his obsession burn even hotter. And it was an obsession that was about to drag Declan and his entire troop into a nightmare beneath the desert.

But right now, sitting in the heat, the dust, and his own bad decisions, Dec’s only tactical objective was figuring out how to break the ice queen.

I’ll wear her down, he thought, taking another drag of the cigarette. Give it time. Nobody is that cold forever.