‘I’ll eat when everyone else has eaten,’ he replied. ‘That way I know there was enough to go around.’

‘Bless you,’ says Father B. ‘Jesus said, “Let the children be fed first”.’

‘Mark 7:27,’ Ben said.

‘You’re pretty good with those Bible references,’ Madison said. ‘Maybe you missed your true vocation.’

‘Maybe I did. Where’s Richard?’

‘Last I saw, he was taking food to Safiya. Her ankle’s better but she’s still resting. That prince isn’t such a bad guy, you know. He’s gentle and kind of sweet.’

‘Just the attributes needed to rule a country,’ Ben said.

‘You guys should go easier on him.’

Ben looked over at the group of children sitting outside the cave entrance enjoying their food, almost twenty of them. ‘I think they should go back inside. They’re too visible out here.’

‘They need to get a little bit of sunshine on their bodies,’ Madison said. ‘Can’t be cooped up inside a dank, dark cave the whole time.’

‘It’s not safe out here.’

‘You worry too much.’

Soon afterwards Holt and Baldacci came up in the Humvee, bringing the last of the supplies from below with Nielsen following in the heavy truck. The Pathfinders had finished building the rock and branch hide, and now they were able to tuck the two vehicles away out of sight. Ben and Holt were satisfying themselves that they were well enough hidden when Wolf trotted over to say they’d found another, slightly smaller, grotto adjoining the main one that would serve to house the men. It even had a natural chimney of sorts that would funnel smoke pretty much unseen up through a deep crack in the rock. Wolf grinned. ‘We’ve put Hank to work digging a latrine.’

‘How long do you think we can stay here?’ Holt asked when Wolf had gone off to help Baldacci lug gear into their new quarters.

‘Not long,’ Ben said. ‘I reckon we need to hunker down for the rest of the day, maybe twenty-four hours at most, until we know for sure the coast’s clear. Then I think we should harvest the rest of the livestock down there, top up our water and get rolling. If we jettison all our non-essential kit, prune the ordnance down to personal weapons and a ration of ammo for each man, we might be able to cram all the kids into the truck.’

‘They’ll be like sardines in there,’ Holt said.

‘It’s only for about a thousand miles of wilderness, with no safe roads and troop patrols at every turn,’ Ben said. ‘When you got into this, Chris, you must have thought about what would be involved in getting out.’

‘We hadn’t bargained on having to transport so many,’ Holt said. ‘What about the Pathfinders?’

‘They’ll have to ride on the roof, the ones we can’t fit into the Humvee.’