Wolf’s little fighting force and its additional new member made their camp in the dry river gorge that night, relaying one another in pairs to climb up to the higher ground to keep watch while the others rested. By dawn, with still no sighting of any patrols across a wide expanse of the horizon, they’d refuelled their vehicle, gathered up their kit, erased all trace of their camp and were ready to set off again.

The river bed wound along between the steep canyon walls until its course bent away from theirs and a rocky path led them back up onto higher ground, moving steadily north-westwards. Ben rode up front in the now slightly more crowded Humvee with Wolf at the wheel. Using a noisy motor vehicle behind enemy lines involved a lot of risk, but when there were great distances to cover the trade-off with increased visibility was sometimes considered worthwhile. Nonetheless the tension among the men was high as they constantly halted at every blind rise and before venturing into any exposed open ground to creep forward on foot to a vantage point to check the coast was clear. It was a laborious, tedious stop-start process, but it was the only way to avoid blundering straight into a surprise face-to-face encounter with the enemy.

Ben and Wolf were returning to the Humvee after about the eleventh or twelfth such stop when Ben paused, cocked his head towards the west and said, ‘Hear that?’

Wolf nodded. His hearing was almost as acute as Ben’s, and though nothing lived or moved anywhere across the vast rocky bowl of the landscape he, too, had picked up the sound of distant gunfire, drifting so faintly on the breeze that they’d have missed it from inside the vehicle. ‘Coming from that direction. Trouble?’

‘Could be,’ was all Ben said. Back at the Humvee he stowed his weapon in the footwell with its ammunition belt trailing on the floor between his feet, and they carried on.

‘You’ve no idea how glad I am that you brought this thing along,’ Wolf said with a nod towards the Maximi. ‘Especially all the spare belts, even if they are a bastard to lug around. We’ve been getting just a little too short on ammo for comfort. In fact, after that last bump we had before we found you, we’re down to just a few mags per man.’

‘Still nowhere near enough,’ Holt said. ‘We’re gonna need a hell of a lot more, where we’re headed.’

‘Maybe we’ll find a gun shop on the way where we can stock up,’ Wolf joked.

‘This ain’t Tennessee, bro. We’ve as much chance of finding a Radio Shack with the parts for the sat phone.’