There was no way, none at all, they were going to let the attackers reach the children. The fighting inside the closed space became vicious and desperate. With no room to manoeuvre a rifle or carbine, they used their knives. Slash, stab, chop; a furious exchange with no quarter given or expected. Ben felt a cold steel blade split the flesh of his shoulder and drove his own hard into the throat of the man who’d sliced him. That man went down with a bloody gurgle. Another right behind him, coming up with a wicked curved dagger that flashed in the semi-darkness. Ben dodged the cut, broke the man’s wrist, head-butted another, floored yet another with a savage kick to the knee and crushed his throat. A smooth, flowing sequence of brutal, almost instinctual, violence that he’d spent much of his life perfecting. For an instant he found himself cut off from Wolf and Holt and surrounded by hostile bearded faces whose eyes gleamed with hate in the murky light. A pistol shot sounded deafeningly close by and the bullet ricocheted off the cave wall. Then suddenly in the confusion he sensed a new presence at his side, and something long and bronze-coloured gleamed in what little light penetrated the tunnel as it swung towards the bodies of his assailants. The chopping sound of steel biting into flesh; a scream; then the attackers were being driven back again towards the cave mouth – and there was Madison beside him, clutching the sword she’d taken from the skeleton of the ancient Greek warrior, swinging ferociously left and right with all her strength and energy.

Then Wolf, Holt and Baldacci were with him too, and they chased the retreating invaders back into the wider section of the tunnel where Ben, snatching up a fallen pistol, was able to shoot down three of the ones brave enough, or foolish enough, to try to stand and fight.

Now the cave mouth was clear, except for the bodies that lay strewn all over the rocky ground. The sudden silence in the aftermath was deafening as they stood there breathing hard, jangling from the intoxicating adrenalin rush of close quarter combat.

‘We did it!’ Madison yelled. ‘We beat them back!’

‘Maybe for the moment,’ Ben said. His new pistol was a US-issue M9 Beretta. About a dozen rounds in the mag. Good enough. He jammed it in his belt.

‘Ben, you’re bleeding.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he replied. He barely felt the pain.

Her hair was as wild as her eyes and there was blood on her face, but it wasn’t her own. The bronze sword in her hand was bent out of shape from the fierce blows she’d dealt out. ‘Came in handy,’ she said.

‘That’s the second time you’ve saved my life,’ Ben told her.

‘I’ll settle for a cold beer in repayment, when we get out of this.’

‘It’s a date.’