While they were attending to the child, Holt, Scraggs and the others gathered around Wolf to hear his report on their exploratory recce of the village. ‘What about food?’ Schulz kept asking urgently, too famished to care about anything much else. ‘Did you find anything to eat down there?’

‘There are some goats running loose nearby,’ Wolf told him. ‘They’re domesticated, so they won’t go far. We’ll go back later and harvest a couple, okay?’

‘Why not now? We’re fuckin’ dying here, dude.’

‘Because we have more important things to deal with, Hank,’ Wolf said in a smooth but dangerous voice.

It wasn’t long before little Safiya was persuaded to guide them up to the cave where she’d been hiding with Mère Blanchet and the other children. They didn’t yet know if the Humvee would make it over the terrain, so it was decided that they’d make the hike on foot. The child rode piggy-back on Ben’s shoulders as, together with Madison, Wolf, Holt and Baldacci, they set off up the hillside. Father Bugnolio insisted on coming too, and to his credit, so did the prince. There were no smart quips from Wolf this time. He was as hard-faced and serious as he’d been back in his days as a hired assassin.

It was a twenty-minute trek up the barren hillside, winding up and up through the rocks until the cliff face of the escarpment loomed high overhead. Without Safiya’s directions they might never have found the entrance to the cave, just a narrow fissure at the foot of the cliff that they had to squeeze through one at a time but which opened up after a few yards into a much larger chamber. ‘That way,’ Safiya said in Pashto, her little voice echoing against the rock walls. Ben went first, the child ducking her head to avoid the low ceiling, her arms wrapped around Ben’s neck. Madison followed second in line, and Wolf brought up the rear.

‘It’s a real warren in here,’ Wolf muttered as they wound their way deeper and deeper by torchlight. One twisting shaft branched off into another, then another, a veritable underground maze dating back to the mists of prehistory, carved out by successive ice age after ice age, lying almost completely undiscovered until now. Their beams were yellowing as the batteries faded, but they could still see enough to make out the weird rock formations, stalagmites and stalactites around them.

‘This is amazing,’ Madison murmured, gazing around her. Her own torch was fading badly, casting a dim trembling pool over the walls. ‘I’ll bet these poor kids are the first people to have set foot in here for a million years.’

Then she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at something in the deep, dark shadows that Ben had walked past without noticing. She made a strange gulping sound.