‘It was the humane thing to do,’ Wolf muttered.

‘Screw these bastards,’ Liebowitz said, fixing his own target with the big fifty-calibre rifle. Its enormous carrot-sized conical bullets couldn’t hope to defeat thick plated tank armour, but they could slice through a normal vehicle like a hot knife through butter at a thousand metres and more. He fired a shot that found its mark almost before it had come hurtling out of the rifle’s muzzle brake at over 3000 feet per second, ruptured the fuel tank on another of the technicals and blew it apart almost as authoritatively as Ben’s mortar round.

Liebowitz worked the bolt and was scanning the killing ground for another target when, a heartbeat later, the next blast from the armoured car tank turret let rip and its missile came whooshing in. Ben barely had time to yell, ‘Incoming!’ and lie prone shielding his face, before it struck just a few feet above the mouth of the cave, with an impact even more devastating than the first, rocking the ground under them and resonating through the solid mass of the whole escarpment. Fire and smoke rolled over them, searing heat and more thick, choking dust that powdered their hair white.

‘A little closer that ti—’ Wolf started saying. Before the last word was out of his mouth Ben heard a loud crack and an ominous rumble from above. He twisted his head upwards just in time to see the avalanche of rocks coming down on them. The tremor from the missile strike had caused an overhanging ledge high above them on the face of the escarpment to fracture off and then calve sheer away, shattering into pieces as it came tumbling down the rock face.

The men below scrambled to get out of its path just in time – except for Liebowitz, who wasn’t quick enough. The huge, spinning, bouncing boulders, some of them as big as a family hatchback, came down right on top of him, burying him under stone and dirt five feet deep. As the dust cleared Ben and Wolf ran to dig him out, joined by the prince; but the sight of the bloody, torn arm jutting out from under a massive lump of rock told them there was little point in trying to save him.