They did find them, a few hours later and thirty kilometres to the north of the devastated Shinwari village. Or at any rate, one of the smaller groups into which Ben had rightly guessed the original raiding party of forty or fifty fighters had split up in order to forage over a wider area. Perched on an elevated ridge some three hundred metres away, Ben was able to count eighteen figures sitting around a camp among a ring of vehicles. He passed the binocs to Holt, who made his observation before passing them on to Wolf. ‘I make it eighteen too,’ Wolf said.

‘There’s your gun shop, brother,’ Holt told him. ‘These fuckers are laden with enough hardware to start another war. When they’re done massacring innocent civilians, that is.’

‘And all we have to do is walk down there and take it from them,’ Wolf said.

‘You think if we asked nicely—?’ said Nobby Scraggs, watching the camp through the scope of his sniper rifle in the bushes nearby.

‘Wouldn’t be the same,’ Wolf said.

‘You don’t need me to tell you, guys,’ Holt said. ‘None of them can be allowed to get away from us. Only takes one to run for help, and next thing we’re overrun here. So no quarter, and we’ve no use for prisoners either.’

‘Sounds okay to me,’ Wolf said.

Wasting no time in case the enemy got back on the move, the eight-man team stalked invisibly down from the ridge and spread out in a curving line to engage their targets at closer range. Once they were in position their intersecting arcs of fire would leave their opponents no way out, nowhere to run and very little possibility of mounting any kind of counter-attack. For this kind of exercise, the deadly combination of speed and surprise could enable a small unit of highly trained operatives to take out a far superior force with devastating efficiency. And all eight were experts at the job. Even Ben might have had difficulty spotting his companions as they advanced stealthily into position, using every rock, dead tree and clump of bushes that could screen their approach in exactly the same way that a lioness will stalk as close as possible to a herd of grazing antelopes before unleashing the explosive energy of her attack.

The enemy didn’t move. As Ben drew soundlessly closer he could hear them talking and laughing, more like a bunch of friends relaxing after a sports match than a band of raiders fresh from the slaughter of scores of innocent men, women and children. He could smell what they were smoking, too; while Taliban leaders theoretically cracked down on dope use as fundamentally against their religion, meting out all kinds of harsh punishments, many of their fighters smoked it anyway. The aroma drifted on the wind with their unsuspecting laughter. In a few moments, they wouldn’t be laughing any longer.