Then, before anyone had time to speak, the second thing happened. Which was that the radio suddenly began to fizz and splurt, and the voice of Hank Schultz came out of the speaker, tinny and crackly but distinctly heard by everyone inside the grotto.

‘Uh, guys, looks we got some activity to the north-west. A lot of activity. I’d say it’s our Taliban buddies again, for sure.’

Ben snatched up the radio, thumbed the talk button and said, ‘Copy that, Hank. How many are there?’

The crackly reply came back a moment later, ‘Looks like, uh, all of ’em.’

Chapter 46

They hurried outside, blinking after the darkness of the cave and shielding their eyes in the late afternoon sun. The sight that greeted them in the valley below was no surprise. From the high ground at the foot of the escarpment they watched the Taliban troops came rolling in over the ridge, from the direction in which their scout had run off.

It wasn’t just Schulz who had been right in his reckoning. Ben’s own fears, voiced by Wolf, were confirmed. The dispersed enemy units that had been hunting them across the wilderness all this time had now come together en masse. Through his binoculars Ben was able to count eight heavy troop trucks and no fewer than three Guardian armoured cars. Two of those massive fighting vehicles were identical to the single one Ben and his Operation Hydra team had faced in Ghurdak, which had been formidable enough on its own. The third was even worse news, because as Ben could clearly see even from this distance, it was one of the US military’s more heavily armed variants, fitted with a larger weapons turret mounting a low-pressure 90mm cannon: in effect, a small tank on wheels rather than tracks.

‘Oh, what jolly fun,’ Wolf commented, observing through his own glasses. ‘They’ve brought all their new little toys to play with.’

Then it got even better, because scanning back towards the ridge Ben could make out that the three monsters and the long line of troop trucks were joined by a large number of the Taliban’s more traditional, pre-arms bonanza, technical pickup trucks mounted with heavy-calibre machine guns and rocket launchers. On and on they came, appearing over the crest of the ridge in an apparently never-ending procession, until finally the last one was in sight and Ben could count fifteen in total. Four or five men to a pickup, plus eight times maybe twenty four soldiers per truck, plus the crews of the Guardians, added up roughly to a fighting force of some two hundred and seventy-five men. Meaning that Ben and his group were outnumbered more than ten to one; and that was by no means taking into account the enemy’s vastly superior firepower.

‘That’s a lot of heavy artillery,’ Holt said.