That first exchange had only been the opening salvo. Now the battle began for real, everyone firing off their weapons as fast as they could work them, a huge uninterrupted noise filling the air, so thick and so loud that it seemed to snatch the breath from their lungs. Glancing down the hillside with bullets smacking off the rocks all around him, Ben saw the two conventional armoured cars rolling closer up the slope to deploy their heavy machine guns at shorter range, supported by the technicals all hammering away with their own automatic weaponry. He got another mortar round off, then another in quick succession. The first did shocking carnage to a group of soldiers as they leaped down from their troop truck to run for cover. The second exploded harmlessly at the front of one of the armoured cars.

In the midst of the chaos, Ben was sharply aware that the big 90mm cannon was staying oddly silent. He knew that Muhammad Omar Nabi could easily order the gunners to keep blasting away at the escarpment until the cave entrance was totally sealed off, entombing everyone inside, and everything around it was pummelled to destruction, not a single man left alive. A worrying enough scenario, but Ben didn’t think that it would happen, because his instinct told him that the Taliban commander was bluffing. The tank was just for show and intimidation; it was simply too much gun to deploy when you were trying to capture such a prize hostage alive and in one piece.

And so, Ben was pretty sure this fight would be decided the hard way, mano a mano, by small arms combat. The foot soldiers who had managed to race from the trucks under cover without getting mown down by the relentless fire coming down the hillside were now threading their way up the slope from rock to rock, shooting as they came, a withering counterfire that made it almost suicidal to stick your head above the rubble to shoot back. One bullet passed very near to Ben’s left ear, then another almost grazed the right side of his ribs – he felt the shock as it went by – and he looked down to see the hole in his baggy tunic. Close one. With barely a moment’s hesitation he let off another mortar, watched its flight and felt a surge of triumph as it exploded just a few feet in front of Nabi’s vehicle, making the commander jump to safety.

Ben’s good feeling was short-lived as Nobby Scraggs, who’d been crouched close by avidly tearing open a fresh crate of mortar rounds, suddenly keeled over backwards, clutching at his chest, his face twisted in pain. Ben crawled across to him on his hands and knees. ‘Nobby!’