‘Probably only the repeatable bits,’ Ben said.

‘Come and meet the guys.’

Buchanan led Ben over to the rest of the group, and the next couple of minutes were spent on introductions. In addition to the task force commander, Bob Meadows, Pete Dixon, Will Yates, Rick Mackay and Mark Simms were all new faces to Ben, while Steve Cale, a little older than the rest, was someone he remembered from back in the day. Cale had been a perfectly capable operative – nobody who wasn’t would ever make the grade to join SAS – but Ben had never liked him for his brash, loudmouthed ways.

When the brief introductions were done with, Buchanan looked at his watch and said, ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest anyone who needs to should hit the head in short order, because it’s going to be time to roll.’

None of the operatives could be allowed to carry compromising identification with them, and so before he was allowed to board the aircraft, Ben had to surrender his wallet along with anything else in his pockets, even a till receipt that could pin him to a location. Knowing that in advance, during the car journey to RAF Northolt he’d secretly slipped the colonel’s business card into his cigarette pack. You never knew when such things might come in handy.

Carstairs had filled Ben in on a few more specifics before they’d parted. Back in the day an SAS unit would generally have been landed at the nerve centre of Bagram air base. The largest US military airfield in Afghanistan, it had been capable of housing over a thousand troops. Also within the ring-fenced compound had been the notorious Parwan detention centre where imprisoned Afghans had demonstrably been subjected to torture by the Americans. Afghanistan’s very own Guantanamo Bay.

But those glory days of the US occupation were at an end, and now the largely abandoned base was patrolled by Taliban fighters who had suddenly found themselves in charge of the biggest militia air force in the world. Meanwhile, the Bagram base wasn’t the only one that had suddenly become off-limits to allied landings. In Ben’s military tours of Afghanistan he’d sometimes been landed at a smaller base in neighbouring Uzbekistan. Now that that door had been slammed shut as well, the only viable way in was by parachute drop.

‘It’s been a while since you last jumped out of a plane,’ Carstairs had said, raising an eyebrow.

Which was true, although Ben had done a lot of crazier things since then. ‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ he replied. ‘No problems there.’