Ben was deep in troubled reflections of his own, when he wasn’t concentrating on pushing the Humvee over some of the most challenging off-road terrain he’d ever had to negotiate, or glancing in the mirror for signs of the dreaded dust plume in their wake telling them the pursuers were back. The strange sense of doom that had preoccupied him the night before now seemed to grow more intense in his mind, brought to the forefront of his thoughts by the hypnotic rumble of the engine and the endless emptiness of the landscape. So much of his life had been spent sitting on troop planes, in helicopters, in trucks and vehicles just like this one, thousands of miles away from home; interminable hours, days, weeks on end totally immersed in the immediate, stark, sometimes terrifying, nearly always extremely risky, reality of whatever task happened to be at hand. And yet all through that time there had always been the sense that this environment in which he found himself wasn’t all that existed – that the outside world was still there, waiting for his return, if he survived long enough to go back to his life.

Now was different. The metaphorical ring of steel he’d imagined slowly coiling around him last night as they’d made their escape from the temple seemed to be closing in steadily more tightly all the time, making him feel increasingly trapped, hemmed inside an inescapable claustrophobic space from which all the air was being sucked and all the conceivable channels for escape had been systematically blocked off one by one. With each new day in this barren, unforgiving no-man’s land, the world he’d known before – Le Val, his friends, his beloved dogs, the fields and the trees, the ivied ruins of the ancient church in the woods, the nearby ocean, all the favourite old haunts where he loved to spend time, the whole life he’d made for himself in that beautiful place – seemed further and further away, receding to a tiny point in the rear-view mirror of his mind, until he was afraid it might just shrink away altogether and disappear, as though it had never been more than a dream.

He’d never experienced a feeling quite like it until now, and it unsettled him to his core. He understood what it was. For the first time in his life, he was truly, deeply afraid, almost to the point of conviction, that he wasn’t getting out of here. It wasn’t his own mortality that frightened him. It was the thought of what it might mean for the person sitting close by, the person who was depending on him for her safe return home. The person he was beginning to realise he cared about much more deeply than he’d thought.

As if on cue, the sound of her voice broke into his worrying reflections, jerking him back to the present moment.