Ditched

“This can’t be fucking right!” said Lance Corporal Michael Scott, checking his map for the umpteenth time.

“I can assure you, Scott, that it fucking is,” responded his colleague, Private Damien Stone. He nudged the other man, pointed to a place on his own map, then raised his arm and indicated a rise in the ground in the near distance.

“See, that’s that long barrow, so we are in the right place.”

Looking at the barrow—one of the many on Salisbury Plain—then down at the map, and finally at his compass, Scott had to agree.

“So where the fuck are they, then?”

Stone had no answer for that one. He looked up into the lightening sky, which in the distance was being slowly tinged with pink, but saw no sign of their pick-up helicopter. Straining to hear even the faintest sound of rotor blades, Stone remained silent. Hearing nothing, he shrugged.

“Dunno. Perhaps we got the time wrong, or something?”

“I hope not, otherwise they’ve gone without us!”

“Nah. We’re early, if anything. The sun’s only just coming up.”

Sighing, Scott stuffed his map and compass into a pocket, and said, “Well, I guess we’d better find somewhere to shelter. I don’t like the look of that.”

The that he was talking about was an ominous-looking black cloud being buffeted in their direction by the wind, which was picking up rapidly.

“With you on that one.”

On an unspoken command, the two of them immediately split up and started to look around for somewhere they could keep out of the wind and imminent rain. It wasn’t long before Scott shouted out, and Stone immediately turned and headed in the direction of his colleague’s voice.

When Stone arrived, Scott had already removed his backpack and dropped it into the ditch he’d found and was striding down the slope to join it. Luckily, there’d been no rain over the past few days so the ground was dry. If the coming rainstorm ended up being heavy, it was entirely possible they’d get wet arses, but for now at least they’d be reasonably comfortable.

Following his colleague’s example, Stone shrugged off his pack. Turning, he saw that Scott was standing with his arms out, ready to catch it. Tossing it, he gave a curt nod of thanks before heading down into the ditch.

Once there, he saw that some scrub covered a couple of sizeable rocks, meaning that they would at least be able to sit down. It would have to rain pretty damn hard for the water level in the ditch to get as high as the top of the rocks, so they’d be all right until the chopper arrived.

He hoped.