‘Forget the children,’ Carstairs snapped, digging in. ‘That’s completely out of the question. Are you out of your mind?’

Richard held out his hand for the phone. ‘Let me talk to him again.’ He took the phone from Ben, and without giving Carstairs a chance to speak, he said, ‘Now listen to me, you horrible little dirtbag. If you don’t shift your fucking arse to do exactly what my friend Ben tells you to do, then you can forget about me, because I’m not coming back at all. And I mean it.’

Carstairs blustered as best he could, but the prince was leaving him no choice. Defeated, he sighed, ‘Let me call you back.’

‘Well done, Princey,’ Wolf said, clapping Richard on the back. ‘Maybe you won’t make such a shitty king after all, when your time comes.’

Carstairs called back very soon afterwards. A lot had happened during those few minutes. Sounding as he didn’t quite know whether to laugh or cry, he informed Ben that it had been arranged for a Chinook with RAF fighter support to come and pick them up at their chosen location within the next few hours. Apparently, some things were worth risking a major international incident over.

‘Amazing what you can get done with the right connections,’ Wolf commented. ‘Now what?’

‘Now we wait,’ Ben said. ‘And hope the soldiers don’t come back.’

Chapter 52

Hours passed. The setting sun made a spectacular blaze in the east that lit up the whole landscape in a final brilliant, incandescent flourish before nightfall, but nobody was watching. They bided their time with the unpleasant task of seeing to the bodies of Holt, Baldacci, Nielsen, Liebowitz, Schultz and the fallen Pathfinders.

The soldiers didn’t come back.

By the time evening had fallen and the mountain chill was setting in, the tribesmen had long ago mounted their horses and melted away into the hills. Two more hours dragged by before Ben and the others finally heard the distant thud of the Chinook in the night sky, its sound growing and growing until eventually the vast dark shape of the twin-prop helicopter was coming in to touch down on the gentler slopes near the orphanage, lights blinking, engines roaring, whipping up a dust storm from its huge rotors.

‘Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,’ said Nobby Scraggs, in a voice weak with pain and blood loss.