‘I’m okay,’ Scraggs muttered. ‘I’m okay.’ But when battle-wounded soldiers said that, they were often anything but okay. Ben tore open his tunic and saw where the bullet had struck, scouring his chest quite deeply. There was a lot of blood but the damage was all muscle tissue, no deep penetration, no major vessels ruptured and no ribs broken as far as Ben could tell. ‘Lie still,’ he told him, shoving him behind the safety of the rocks.

‘Let me fight, mate,’ Scraggs rasped, struggling to get up. Ben pushed him back down, gently but firmly. ‘Don’t move. You’re going to be okay.’ Scraggs nodded and closed his eyes.

Ben wiped Scraggs’ blood from his hands and returned to his mortars. A few yards away, Wolf was still churning up the scenery with the Maximi. But as the armoured cars and infantry elements crept closer up the hillside, Ben realised they must have picked up on Wolf’s muzzle flash and targeted his position, directing focused heavy fire his way. Wolf didn’t give a damn. He kept hammering relentlessly, his arms shaking like a motorway worker’s pounding concrete with a pneumatic drill, empty cases showering in a heap beside him. Ben was afraid that if Wolf didn’t duck under cover, a bullet would catch him sooner rather than later.

He yelled, ‘Jaden! Down!’ But Wolf either was on too much of a roll to be paying attention, or he simply couldn’t hear anything above the constant ear-splitting roar of the Maximi.

Now one of the armoured cars seemed to have stopped firing from its main heavy machine gun, as though something had malfunctioned or it was out of ammo. The turret hatch flew open and a turbaned figure appeared head and shoulders out of it, going to man the 7.62 light machine gun that was his secondary armament. He opened fire on Wolf, and Ben’s fear was realised as a well-aimed storm of bullets kicked up a cloud of dust around Wolf’s position.

There was a loud clack as a round struck the Maximi, followed almost simultaneously by a yell. Wolf’s fire suddenly stopped. Ben saw him slump over. He yelled out his friend’s name again. ‘Jaden!’

No reply from Wolf. He wasn’t moving.

Chapter 48

The turret’s light machine gun was still laying down so much fire on Wolf’s position that there was no way Ben could run to his friend’s aid. Heart thudding with anxiety, he angled his hot mortar and dropped another rocket into the smoking tube. The projectile soared up, arced over and down, and by a combination of extreme luck and great skill landed directly into the armoured car’s open hatch.