Ben knew that was all he’d get out of him. He relented and said nothing more. The briefing over, Goffin and Buchanan conferred quietly in one corner while Cale, Dixon and Meadows headed for the kitchen to brew coffee and rehydrate some of the MREs, meals ready to eat, from the kit. ‘Shredded beef in BBQ sauce,’ Cale was complaining. ‘Great. I was hoping for rat stew.’

‘I don’t give a monkey’s, pal,’ Dixon grunted. ‘I’m so famished I’d eat a pickled fucking camel from the feet upwards and finish off with the tail.’

‘Might be able to pick one of those up at a local market,’ Cale said. They bantered on like that, but Ben tuned out and went into the second bedroom where they’d piled the equipment, partly to check the bags and partly to be alone with his own thoughts.

They had just under an hour to kill before they’d be on the move again. Ben grabbed a mug of the tasteless coffee and swallowed some of the high-caloric, high-sodium offal paste that the army termed food. Eat when you can, rest when you can, was an old military adage. The resting part would have been welcome, but it was hard to relax whilst being treated to Goffin’s loud disparaging views on the situation in Afghanistan as he spread himself out even wider on the sofa and held court to his captive audience.

‘I mean, take a look around you,’ he scoffed. ‘Can anyone truly say this country hasn’t always been an unstable shithole, right from the start? Hardly qualifies to be called a nation at all. Just a chaotic collection of disparate tribespeople speaking thirty different languages, which is three times the number of paved airfields they’ve ever managed to build in their whole stupid country. Same as they’re all as poor as shit because they’ve never had the wherewithal to cultivate more than a tiny fraction of their land, even though it’s bigger than England and France put together. Even then the only crop they can produce worth a damn is opium. Half the population’s got TB and the rest are either starving or fucked up with malaria. Anyone who makes it past age fifty is so old and decrepit they might as well be dead. What a dive,’ he went on, digging deeper into his theme with a look of pure contempt on his face. ‘Look what it’s cost us, this half-arsed wasteland that doesn’t even have any proper borders. You couldn’t tell who was winning the war, because the slippery bastards could just flit in and out of the place, disappear off into fucking Pakistan whenever they pleased. And now look at them, strutting around like they own the place.’

Ben said, ‘They do own the place.’

Goffin’s flow was broken as though someone had kicked him up the backside. ‘What did you say?’