The phone in the breast pocket of his jacket buzzed. Al-Hussain leapt to his feet, clasped the rifle to his chest and headed across the roof. The two spotters looked up at him, their mouths open. ‘Run!’ he shouted, but they stayed where they were. He didn’t shout again. He concentrated on running at full speed to the stairwell. He reached the top and hurtled down the stone stairs. Just as he reached the ground floor a 45-kilogram Hellfire missile hit the roof at just under a thousand miles an hour.

Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd stared at the screen. All he could see was whirling brown dust where once there had been a two-storey building. ‘Did we get them all?’ he asked.

Two airmen were sitting in front of him in high-backed beige leather chairs. They had control panels and joysticks in front of them and between them was a panel with two white telephones.

‘Maybe,’ said the man in the left-hand seat. He was Steve Morris, the flying officer in command, in his early forties with greying hair. Sitting next to him was Pilot Officer Denis Donoghue, in his thirties with ginger hair, cut short. ‘What do you think, Denis?’

‘The sniper was moving just before it hit. If he was quick enough he might have made it out. We got your two guys, guaranteed. Don’t think they knew what hit them.’

‘What about IR?’ asked Shepherd.

Donoghue reached out and clicked a switch. The image on the main screen changed to a greenish hue. They could just about make out the ruins of the building. ‘Not much help, I’m afraid,’ said Donoghue. ‘There isn’t a lot left when you get a direct hit from a Hellfire.’

‘Can we scan the surrounding area?’

Morris turned his joystick to the right. ‘No problem,’ he said. The drone banked to the right and so did the picture on the main screen in the middle of the display. The two screens to the left of it showed satellite images and maps, and above them was a tracker screen that indicated the location of the Predator. Below that was the head-up display that showed a radar ground image. But they were all staring at the main screen. Donoghue pulled the camera back, giving them a wider view of the area, still using the infrared camera.

The drone was an MQ-9, better known as the Predator B. Hunter-killer, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems at a cost of close to 17 million dolalars. It had a 950-shaft-horsepower turboprop engine, a twenty-metre wingspan, a maximum speed of 300 m.p.h. and a range of a little more than a thousand miles. It could fly loaded for fourteen hours up to a height of fifteen thousand metres, carrying four Hellfire air-to-surface missiles and two Paveway laser-guided bombs.