No such luck. All through that morning, through the hot, dusty afternoon and into early evening their little convoy seemed to be the only thing that existed in the barren wastes of Afghanistan. Wherever the remnants of the Taliban raiding party had gone, they were far, far away by now; and nor was there any sign of other patrols. Going by the GPS and Ben’s old map, the Zakara site was only a few kilometres away now as another day started drawing to an end. The final leg of the journey had carried them up and up onto higher and higher ground, tracking along rocky inclines that were filled with endless hairpin bends and sometimes so steep that the vehicles growled along at a crawl in first gear and all the kit slid to the rear. The final slope was so steep that it seemed touch and go whether they’d be able to ascend it. Most civilian vehicles, especially with civilian drivers unschooled in the dark art of tackling the most extreme off-road environments on earth, wouldn’t have achieved the climb, and even so it was a struggle.

At last, with the blood-red colours of sunset filling the eastern sky, they rolled to a halt at their destination. Before Holt could say, ‘Well, this is it, man,’ Ben was already out of the vehicle. He walked a few steps and stopped, gazing about him. The cold wind whistled in his ears. They had climbed several thousand metres to the flattened-out top of a mountain plateau with a dramatic drop below them and vast sweeping views for hundreds of kilometres around, broken only by a tall ridge rising up from the northern edge of the plateau and the massive peaks in the distance, their snowy caps pink in the sunset.

And so this was Rigby Cahill’s dream, his obsession. The site of the ancient lost city of Zakara. If Ben had been a general or an emperor in those bygone times, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of men at his command, he would have considered this a perfect place to build a fortified city. Just standing here surveying this epic panorama conveyed an incredible sense of power and invincibility.

For Ben, though, it also conveyed a sense of emptiness that bordered on despair. Because there was nothing here. Nothing, and nobody. Just a few broken, crumbled remnants casting long shadows across the ground that barely even suggested anything had ever stood in this place, or that any living soul had ever set foot here, aside from the odd mountain goat.

Hearing the crunch of steps over the wind he looked around to see Wolf walking over from the vehicles, where the others were standing in a group talking in low voices and throwing glances his way.