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 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?”

“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, they immediately split up and started to look around for somewhere they could...