The huge explosion neatly flipped the Hind onto its back. The mighty rotors fragmented into great scythes, dismembering most of the watching Kopassus troopers in an eye-blink. Then the fuel tank ignited, turning the stricken aerial battle tank into a furious pyre.

A groggy Alatas awoke to find himself paralysed and ablaze. He began to shriek as the flames engulfed his flesh, hissing and spitting. The last thing he saw was an exquisite slender tongue of liquid gold running along the upturned cabin roof before, mercifully, the rest of the Hind’s munitions went up in an almighty roar.

Swimming virtually blind beneath the choppy white water, Nash had just exhaled when his rebreather cut out. It was rotten timing, for against the deep rumble of the cataract plunging into the sinkhole, it was impossible to know whether the maddened Afrikaner was still shooting, or awaiting his opportunity. With teeth clenched, Nash cautiously stuck his head above the surface, just in time to see a massive fireball ripping right across the top of the sinkhole. He flinched as a smoking chunk of wreckage spun crazily through the air, before realising it was the remains of the gunship.

‘Go, Frank!’

The heady rush of savage ecstasy ended just as abruptly. Frank and Mia were still up there. If they were still alive, how was he going to reach them?

Movement on the sinkhole wall drew his eye. It was Boerman. Climbing up the line of the block and tackle, faster than humanly possible, he looked like an albino gorilla fired up on crystal meth, driven by the much more addictive need for revenge.

With the gantry out of reach, Nash looked around frantically for another way up. The sinkhole lip was still a good fifty metres above him, and there were no ropes reaching down to the water. That only left the submarine.

Swimming hard on the surface against the drag of his gear, he hauled himself up on the rearmost anti-aircraft gun, now just above the waterline. Unharnessing the rebreather, he realised a bullet had shattered the oxygen sensor, and flung it aside.

Above him, the submarine rose at its crazy angle. At least atop the long hangar section there were plenty of handholds.

He had climbed perhaps a dozen metres when an insane roaring, audible even over the crashing waterfall, made him stop and look up.

‘Nash! Nash! Nash!’

On the crumbling sinkhole edge, mighty arms raised like twin columns, Boerman held Mia’s supine body high above his head. At least Nash thought it was her body, for when Boerman shook her in his fury, he saw her legs kick as she fought for balance. Nash lurched from desolation to despair. The madman was going to fling her down and dash her to pieces on the logjam, and there was not a single thing he could do beyond reach out in supplication.

But the crazed Afrikaner had other ideas.