‘How many were there?’ asked Wolf, whose Pashto was less fluent than Ben’s but still conversational. ‘Many,’ Hamza replied, spreading his hands. ‘Forty, fifty. Perhaps even more.’ Though, he admitted, he’d been hiding throughout most of the attack and hadn’t seen a great deal. He was only a weak old man, not like his cousin Samiullah who had managed to kill one of them with his Martini rifle, the single enemy casualty.

‘We saw the body,’ Ben said. ‘Where’s Samiullah now?’

‘They cut off his head,’ Hamza replied.

When the old man had shuffled off among the ruins to attend as best he could to his surviving people, Ben and Wolf walked back to the dead Talib’s corpse, relieved him of his weapon and ammunition and searched him for the other item they’d hoped they might find, and did. Ben turned on the radio handset and discovered it was tuned to a channel on which, through all the crackling and fizzing static and white noise, they could hear messages passing to and fro between what sounded like two, possibly three, roaming fighter units. Ben spent a few minutes listening in, gleaning what he could from the garbled back-and-forth chatter. ‘They’re active, all right. And they’re not far away.’

‘Could be important for us,’ Wolf said. ‘We need to tell Chris.’

They found Holt standing outside the village wall looking sickened and angry, restless to move on. Examining the radio from the dead fighter a thought seemed to come to him, and he turned to Liebowitz. ‘Doug, this is a different model from the ones we have. Any chance you can use parts from it to fix our sat phone?’

Liebowitz shook his head. ‘Sorry, bro. Has to be the same motherboard from an Iridium 9555 or you might as well try fixing it with auto spares.’

Holt said, ‘Shit.’ He spent a moment tuning in to the radio messages. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked Ben and Wolf.

‘Sounds to me like the raiding party that hit this place has split up into smaller groups,’ Ben said. ‘Keeping in constant contact using GPS to communicate their positions.’

‘Hunting for us, you reckon?’ Holt said.

‘They’re certainly all stirred up about something.’

‘Don’t you love being so much in demand,’ Wolf replied.

‘Except they ain’t gonna find us,’ Holt said with a dangerous smile. ‘We’re gonna find them.’

Chapter 24