Then Francine had to pull back to reload, and Madison took over with her AK, targeting a group of five fighters hunkered down behind the wreck of the overturned technical, all shooting continuously. Madison’s return fire stitched a ragged line of holes up the side of the vehicle until it found its mark and one of them went tumbling back with a short scream. Now she’d found her aiming point she loosed off another burst that silenced two more of them, and the last two fell into retreat along with dozens of their comrades driven back by the determined fire coming from all along the foot of the escarpment.

But not for long, because just as the tide of the battle seemed to be turning in the defenders’ favour, the attackers were hellbent on coming back strong. Now the second of the three armoured cars had succeeded in making it almost to the top of the hillside, across to the southern end of the escarpment where the incline was a little gentler. The southern end was also where Ben had instructed the Pathfinders to build the rock and branch hide for the Humvee and truck. He sprinted back towards his mortar position in the hope of deflecting its attack, but too late: the armoured car’s grenade launchers and heavy machine gun opened up, destroying the Humvee and riddling the truck with bullets before its weapons swivelled across to blast a line of craters in the face of the escarpment, threatening to cause another rock slide like the one that had buried Liebowitz.

Pinned under cover for the moment, Ben could only watch as the armoured car kept rumbling closer. But then its driver, revving hard, overconfidently ventured onto a part of the slope where the incline was much steeper. The vehicle tilted back on itself a degree further than its centre of gravity would allow, and slowly toppled over backwards with a crash to lie there helplessly capsized like an overturned turtle, trapping the men inside.

Two monsters down. Ben heard cheering from behind him. Then he saw Hank Schulz appear as if out of nowhere, leap up on a rock and start firing at its exposed underbelly like a man demented. To no avail, because the thing was clad underneath by thick armoured plates to protect from landmine blasts, and Schulz should have known that. But before the man came to his senses to realise he was just wasting his fire, a sniper’s bullet from the distant ruins of the orphanage took away the left side of his skull in a pink mist and he fell dead among the rocks.