Nash took a bead on the bright yellow roll of det cord. He knew pentaerythritol tetranitrate exploded, rather than burned, at unbelievable speeds of more than 6500 metres per second.

‘This one’s for you, Frank.’

As the Hind turned towards them, Nash squeezed the trigger.

The detonation was instantaneous – a ball of brilliant light, followed a millisecond later by an all-encompassing deep whump that sucked the air right out of his lungs. The ground seemed to contract, then expand. Above them, giant branches flexed like sap wood and snapped. Nash pulled Mia to him as the debris began to fall, a maelstrom of steel and rock, and half a million cubic metres of displaced water. Huge weights of ragged steel whizzed through the air like a meteor shower. Rocks the size of basketballs peppered the ground like hail. Bludgeoned and severed branches began to crash down on top of them. A half-tonne lump of stone shook the ground five metres away. A branch the size of a tree fell directly across them, but the mighty buttress roots took the impact.

When things finally stopped falling, a thin, high-pitched whine continued to drill inside Nash’s head. Mia clasped her hands around the side of his face and yelled ‘Are you all right?’

To his great relief, he could still hear her.

Crawling on hands and knees, they extricated themselves from the shattered remains of the fig and emerged into an alien landscape. For half a kilometre, not a tree or shrub remained unscathed. It had been – in Boerman’s parlance – erased.

What was left of the I-403 now dotted the landscape for as far as the eye could see. Most were fragments, no bigger than a toaster, although embedded above their heads in the severed trunk of the mighty fig was the mangled remains of an anti-aircraft cannon.

Nash was stunned to see the force of the explosion had ejected three quarters of the water in the sinkhole, and enlarged it by a third as the sides caved in.

‘Do you see how fast it’s filling back up?’ Nash marvelled at the Hoosenbeck overflow pouring unabated into the expanded sinkhole. ‘The explosion must have sealed off the exit passage.’

One by one, the surviving OPM men appeared, looking shocked, stunned and relieved. Babo came over to Nash and embraced him.

‘Tenkyu,’ he said gravely. ‘Man bilong pait.’

‘He says you belong in a fight.’

‘Tenkyu.’ Nash smiled. ‘Please tell him I would like to try and find my friend.’

They searched for half an hour, and although they checked numerous body parts, there was no sign of Douglas. The only object relatively unscathed was the melted mass of gold bullion, flung several metres from its original position. Nash was about to give up, when he spotted something small and white, gleaming in the mud.

‘Don’t tell me that’s his teeth!’

Mia screwed up her face as Nash slid them into her top pocket.