‘Of kos!’ Babo agreed. ‘Plis, yu bringim tu.’

Magnanimously, he offered them several bars with a wide gap-toothed grin.

But Nash’s sharp eyes were on two fast-moving dots coming up the gorge.

‘Helikoptas,’ he barked. ‘Hide!’

With the Hoosenbeck raging at their backs, the closest available cover was the belt of living trees in the lee of the southern wall of the gorge. A giant fig at the very base of the cliff seemed to offer the best protection and, along with most of the OPM men, Nash and Mia made a dash for it through a waist-high carpet of ferns. The fig’s huge and twisted trunk was like a four-storey building, supporting a scaffold of massive grey branches which spread the majestic green canopy above them. Throwing themselves down between thick buttress roots, they cautiously looked back.

The lead machine was a large olive-green Bell 412 transport, with a red and white insignia on its nose. As it banked in a tight curve over the sinkhole, Nash felt his skin crawl, for stencilled on its flank in prominent white letters was the name General W. Suyanto. The second helicopter was another Mil-24 Hind gunship, and it opened fire immediately.

The violence of its Gatling gun was tremendous. Several OPM men weighed down with too much booty were cut to pieces. From the other side of the fig tree, Babo bravely stood up and opened fire with his AK-47, but the Hind was indifferent to the rounds sparking off its flanks. Meanwhile, General Suyanto’s Bell hovered just above the old camp, apparently enjoying the show.

‘Evil bastard,’ growled Nash, wishing they had the weapons to fight back.

The Hind targeted a small group of OPM men crouched behind a sizeable tree further downslope. Unable to puncture the trunk, the pilot unleashed a salvo of hissing rockets, which brought the whole tree crashing down in an orange ball of flame.

As the shrill screams of the dying filled the air, Nash knew they would be next. And while the thick buttressed roots of the fig might offer some protection from bullets, it would not protect them from high explosive.

High explosive – but didn’t they have their own?

Crouched beside them was the teenager who had first spotted them, shivering in fear, his old Lee–Enfield forgotten. Nash snatched it up and worked the bolt.

‘Get down!’ he screamed at the top of his lungs. ‘Everybody, get down!’

Unceremoniously, he rested his knee in the small of Mia’s back to keep her there.

It was Uncle Frank who’d taught Nash how to shoot – out on the Douglas family’s station near Mukinbudin – with an old .303 Lee–Enfield that left his shoulder black and blue, knocking out bottles, cans and, once, a feral piglet, which he’d felt bad about.