Like the rest of the team Ben was wearing a mic and earpiece through which Holt’s command to fire would come once they were all settled in position. A patch of thorny shrubs acted as the perfect cover in which he silently, discreetly set the Maximi machine gun down on its bipod, stretched out prone behind it, lined his sights up to his target and let his muscles relax and his breathing slow. ‘Hope in position,’ he whispered softly into his mic. ‘Copy,’ came the whispered reply.

The enemy were still chatting away without a care in the world. Ben thumbed off his weapon’s push-button safety and waited for Holt’s command. In these moments, time seemed to go by very slowly. He wondered how the rest of his companions felt about what they were about to do. For some of them, this attack might feel at least in part an act of revenge for the slaughter of the Shinwaris. Wolf had spoken very little since leaving the village, preoccupied with his own brooding thoughts; Ben sensed the rage inside him, building up in pressure like a volcano ready to blow.

For Ben himself, he saw the cold, brutal killing he was about to take part in as a necessary part of achieving his own ends, the first goal in that process being to procure enough enemy arms, ammo and supplies to see them through whatever lay ahead. He might snatch away the life of an enemy with ruthless efficiency, but he took no pleasure in gunning down a fellow human being, especially one who was a sitting target, and the aftermath of combat had always left him with a feeling of deep sadness.

As Holt’s order to fire came through his earpiece there was no longer any room for such thoughts. At the exact same moment that the field of fire erupted into noise and destruction, Ben squeezed his trigger and felt the weapon judder against his shoulder like a live thing, spewing a golden arc of spent brass from its ejector, hammering its high-velocity stream of bullets into the bodies of his targets. No quarter, no hesitation, no fire wasted on the vehicles with their precious cargo of ordnance and supplies. And no chance of escape for the men in the camp.

The fighters leaped up in alarmed panic as their world exploded into chaos, but very few of them were able to deploy their weapons, let alone run for cover, before they were mowed down by the intersecting hail of gunfire. It was a textbook kill carried out by seasoned professionals. Hard, fast, methodical, absolutely efficient; and after such a long, tense build-up it was all over in seconds. By the time Holt’s order to cease firing came over the radio there were eighteen dead Talibs on the ground, none of them more than two or three steps from where they’d been sitting comfortably only seconds earlier.