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Here's the first page from the first draft of my novel, just for you!

It was five thirty in the morning after another sweat-drenched and sleepless night under a dirty mosquito net.

“Job’s in boss,” Corporal Gibbs shouted into her corner of the tent.

“Mmmf,” Zoë managed to grunt before rolling out of her cot and scrabbling for body armour.

Half an hour later and the lumbering six-wheeled Mastiff armoured truck juddered to a halt three kilometres up the main highway that ran past their patrol base.

They tumbled wearily out of the back and into the already searing heat of a Helmand Spring morning: herself, Corporal Gibbs, Lance Corporal Jackman and Corporal Hankin. The five-man search team were there ahead of them. The eight-man patrol who’d called in the counter IED team were crouched in firing positions across the road ahead.

The section commander, a chippy green-eyed Welsh Fusiliers corporal, was already talking to the search team Staff Sergeant, ignoring Zoë.

“Ma’am,” he finally acknowledged her presence, then immediately turned back to the Staff Sergeant.

“Thanks, Staff, I’ll take it from here,” she cut in, deliberately keeping her voice low to give herself an air of authority she never really felt. Despite her year at Sandhurst, her countless months of counter IED training, and more than two months already in Afghanistan, she still had to battle with continually being ignored.

She thought she saw the Fusilier corporal roll his eyes at Corporal Hankin, her own second-in-command, but she couldn’t be sure, and let it pass.

“Okay, corporal, explain the situation.”

He told her about the veering tyre tracks, which suggested local vehicles were deliberately avoiding a certain stretch of road.

She nodded, resisting the urge to chew her left thumbnail as she listened.

She looked beyond the roadside at the fields of dun and beige whispering towards the purple smudge of horizon.

Two and a half months ago, when she’d arrived in Helmand, these fields were red, a gash of poppies running right through the Green Zone. It was just over a month since the petals fell to earth, and three weeks since the harvest began. Until yesterday, the fields were full of Afghanis, entire families painstakingly slicing each seed pod with a razor blade and scraping off the opium resin with a spoon. The ‘jingly trucks’, lorries painted like gypsy caravans, took the opium harvest away, north up the highway. Yesterday the fields were empty.

Everyone said it would kick off once the harvest was in. Things were getting interesting, just as she was due home on mid-tour R&R.