Ben paused at the door, steeling himself for another round of his friend’s irascible moods, then opened it and went in.

Jeff was sitting there with his mug, his blanket, and an angry scowl that softened only slightly as Ben walked into the room.

‘What’s up?’ Ben asked.

Jeff jabbed an accusing finger at the screen. ‘Oh, you should see this, mate. Things are going from bad to worse out there. Those stupid bloody bastards couldn’t have made a bigger balls-up of it if they’d done it on purpose.’

Chapter 2

‘I don’t want to see it,’ Ben said, deliberately averting his eyes from the television. But even without taking in the images on the screen he knew exactly what Jeff was talking about. Ben hadn’t been so tied up with Abbie Logan these last few weeks as to be blind to what was going on in the rest of the world. Specifically, the political situation that had been rapidly, and disastrously, unfolding in a particular part of the world that Ben happened to know very well.

It was always the same tired old story. Every time a large-scale military operation stood down after months or even years of presence in a foreign country, even when the campaign had been more or less successful the withdrawal necessarily created scenes of absolute chaos, both among the bewildered civilians and even among the troops, who often had little clue what was going on. And in this particular case, the situation was far, far worse, because the campaign had been going on for a long, long time and been anything but successful.

After two decades of the most unproductive and costly war since its humiliating retreat from Vietnam some forty-five years earlier, the US army had finally withdrawn from Afghanistan. As many had predicted, it was an inglorious ending to a largely worthless campaign. Though US leaders had been mooting the pull-out for years and had had any amount of time to prepare adequately, in the event they’d managed to botch things so badly that a large number of fellow Americans and their allies, men, women and children, had been left stranded at the mercy of the country’s new rulers. And as everyone had known and feared would happen, those new rulers were the Taliban, a hardcore fundamentalist regime that had grown up out of the complex and conflicted military and political situation of recent decades. The whole damn picture was so muddied by covert CIA and other shadowy intelligence influences, secret allegiances and under-the-table political dealing that it had become an inextricable mess. Ben doubted that anyone would ever know the real, whole truth. And he certainly wasn’t interested in trying to figure it out.

Looking perplexed by Ben’s reaction, Jeff snatched up the TV remote and hit the mute button. ‘Why don’t you want to see it?’ he asked in the sudden silence of the room.