Hours went by. Madison fell asleep with her hands still clasped around her precious casket. Ben found his Gauloises in his pocket, a little crushed and soggy but still serviceable, and lit up. Holt was using a small pencil torch to study a map. Scraggs was contentedly nursing the last of his beer bottles. As the first rays of dawn were burning like battle flames behind the mountains, they paused to look back, and saw nothing but empty horizon in their wake.

‘I think we can break for coffee,’ Holt said, which was the most agreeable thing Ben had heard him say in a while. Holt seemed to have got over his foul mood from earlier. They radioed Wolf in the Humvee, and the two vehicles slowed to a halt and everyone climbed out, stretching aching limbs and rubbing their bruises from the descent down the mountain, the awoken sleepers yawning. The red dawn’s glow on the endless empty landscape around them, devoid of any kind of plant or animal life whatsoever, made it seem as though they were explorers on Mars.

‘I knew you’d get us out of there,’ Madison said with a beaming smile at Ben as the coffee started bubbling over the jet stove. ‘My hero.’ She bent towards him and kissed him tenderly.

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Ben would have replied, but he was too stunned by the kiss to speak.

‘Hey, where’s my kiss?’ Wolf said indignantly. ‘I’m a hero too, you know.’

‘Of course you are, Wolfie,’ she said. ‘Come here, then.’ Wolf stepped towards her like a man in a trance, received a noisy smacker on his cheek and turned as bright scarlet as the rising sun.

Ben and Scraggs looked at one another. ‘Wolfie?’ Scraggs said.

Coffee among the rocks, a tactical refuel from their jerrycans, and everyone seemed upbeat despite the fact that the jet stove had now completely run out of gas. But after a few minutes, Ben felt that uncomfortable tingle in his spine, his innate spider-sense telling him that something was wrong.

‘What is it?’ Madison asked as he snatched his binoculars and left her side.

‘Probably nothing,’ he replied. Or so he hoped. At the foot of a nearby rise, a cluster of large boulders had piled up probably eons ago to form a natural staircase. He bounded up them to a better vantage point, raised the binocs to his eyes.

And saw that his spider-sense had been right again.

The moment he spotted it, he knew that the dust plume far away on the horizon to the south-east was being made by the enemy truck convoy in pursuit. It was several miles off, but all the same their presence was an unsettling sight.