I leapt through the grass, feeling plants and insects stinging my skin and prying my shoes away from the mud with each step. Two of the others - Gunner and Senegal, I thought - overtook me, clattering down the hill with their arms outstretched, and I followed them without thinking, blocking the rest of the world from my head and concentrating on my feet and the ground directly in front of me. Soon, I couldn’t hear the Ferret - perhaps the lever had jammed and they were still trying to prise the gate open. I was running so fast that it took several strides before it hit home. I couldn’t hear the Ferret, but I couldn’t hear anything else either: no shots, no footsteps, not even my own breathing, which had been so strong just moments before.

I had gone deaf.

XVIII

XVIII

I began to slow down. The pain in my upper left thigh was sharpening with every step, and I was shivering with cold. It felt like I was losing my balance, and my face was sticky with sweat. My brain also needed to absorb what had just happened. Which was that all the noises that had been registering in my head moments before - the squelching of my feet in the rain-sodden earth, the buzzing of the mosquitoes around me, the machine-gun fire from the men in armoured cars trying to kill me - had, without notice, been replaced by complete silence.

I had never experienced true silence before. It had a rather frightening beauty to it: every detail of the world around me was intact - the rank swamp smell, the curtain of sky framed by darkened palm trees, the shapes of the other two men skidding down the slope away from me - but with one element removed, it seemed unreal.

What the hell had caused this? Surely not the sound of the gunfire - I’d heard plenty of that in my time. Hunger and fatigue, then? I suddenly remembered all those horror stories people liked telling in the basement bar after hours of agents collapsing of exhaustion or going mad in the field. That poor sod Carslake who’d started having headaches in the middle of an operation just outside Bangkok. He’d gone blind before finding a hospital, and the opposition had simply picked him off on the street. His corpse hadn’t been a pretty sight, by all accounts. Was that my fate, then? One second all my faculties intact; the next running through a soundless world towards oblivion?