He let it go, because there was so much more he wanted to know. But the strange feeling of déjà vu kept haunting him. Even Warner’s voice, his slurred exhaustion doing little to mask the received pronunciation and speech mannerisms of a public school education, sounded oddly familiar.

Sitting there slumped wearily in the darkness Warner explained what their unit was doing here in Afghanistan. They belonged to the Pathfinder Platoon, part of the 16th Air Assault Brigade, a unit Ben knew very well. The Pathfinders operated as a slightly less elite adjunct to Special Forces, though their training regime was almost every bit as tough. They played key roles in reconnaissance and scouting operations, skilled at air insertion and penetrating deep behind enemy lines. Like the SAS and its sister regiment, Jeff Dekker’s old unit the SBS, the Pathfinders often found themselves deployed on operations of a more shadowy, less official nature.

And as Ben now learned, this was one of those.

Warner and his twenty-man unit had been dropped into Afghanistan almost a month earlier, on a mission to help subvert the burgeoning alliance between its new rulers the Taliban and the Chinese government: an alliance that was deeply concerning to the suits in Whitehall and generally considered a potential disaster both politically and militarily, with regard to any future attempt to resecure the country from what they had hoped was just a temporary state of affairs. Warner explained that given the sensitive nature of the operation, they’d been working along with an MI6 agent.

‘Where is he now?’ Ben asked, thinking of Goffin. These damn spooks were everywhere.

‘Dead,’ Warner replied. ‘Along with another seven of us. No, nine now,’ he corrected himself with a haunted look. ‘Jesus Christ. Bobby Draper was a good friend of mine.’

‘How were you supposed to mess things up with the Chinese?’

‘By staging a false flag attack,’ Warner said. ‘Or that was the plan, at any rate. Staunton – he was the MI6 chap – was helping us liaise with a tribal militia group whose purpose was to carry out a strike against Chinese officials on a scouting trip for mineral resources. Our job was to escort Staunton into the mountains to meet with the tribal leaders and negotiate a deal with them.’

Warner shrugged resignedly. ‘It was simple enough, really. All it took was to persuade them to pose as Taliban fighters, which they could have done pretty convincingly, for a price of course. That was Staunton’s area. Then with our support, we’d have set up an ambush and popped off a couple of their ministry people, scared the wits out of the rest, and caused a shitstorm of bad relations between Afghanistan and China that the Whitehall boffins then thought they could exploit for their own purposes. The usual bullshit political game, you know how it goes. But it never got that far, or anywhere close.’

‘What went wrong?’ Ben asked.