An exploding mortar bomb within a confined steel capsule was virtually sure to kill or at least severely disable anyone inside. Fire erupted from the hatch. The gunner’s head and arms were separated in the blast and his weapon instantly fell silent. The armoured car lumbered to a halt, burning fiercely and belching smoke.

Fearing the worst for Wolf, Ben raced over to where he was lying slumped behind the overturned Maximi and got there at the same instant as Holt, who’d seen Wolf get hit and come running. A bleeding gash had torn Wolf’s forehead from a piece of his weapon’s bipod that got blown away by the bullet strike and caught him on the head, but otherwise he was unhurt and only momentarily stunned.

Ben folded up the remaining bipod leg, rested the Maximi’s smoking hot barrel in a cleft between two rocks and directed a sustained blast of fire at another technical that had dared to come racing up the hillside in a wild attempt to make it all the way to the top. The technical’s windscreen dissolved in a bullet-shattered opaque mess, spattered red from the driver’s blood, and the vehicle crashed into a boulder and rolled back down the hill, tumbling over and over and flattening three foot soldiers on its way down.

That was when Ben happened to glance across to his left and saw to his horror that Madison, against his wishes, hadn’t stayed long in the relative safety of the cave. Nor had Francine Blanchet. The two women had managed to get themselves wedged behind reasonable cover a few metres from the edge of the hillside, where they were taking turns shooting at the enemy fighters working their way up the slope. Francine was well practised with the battered old Russian SKS that had once belonged to her brother, though she was so tiny that she looked like a child with the big semi-automatic rifle’s wooden stock clenched against her shoulder, its snappy recoil making her whole body quake. One running figure collapsed on his face as he tried to scurry from rock to rock forty metres away. Another instantly appeared to take his place, firing wildly as he came. Francine kept her calm as bullets ricocheted all around her, took careful aim, and next thing the fighter was crumpling to the ground, clutching at his blown-open thigh.