Then at last they were clear of the city, with the open plains and looming arid mountains all around, and it was safe for the hidden passengers to come out. They met little traffic on the long, dusty highway, now and then a Taliban troop convoy with trucks overflowing with gun-toting fighters and the black and white flag fluttering behind them. Once they passed a column of M1 Abrams main battle tanks and armoured cars rumbling by in the opposite direction, covered in turbaned men all clinging on to the turret and sitting astride the gun. Then the road was clear again; they passed through a couple of tiny villages, one of them apparently abandoned, roofless tumbledown houses and chickens wandering about the empty dirt streets.

Ben sat gazing out of the window and thinking about Madison. He hoped she’d made it to her father’s lost city. What did she expect to find there? Ben was no archaeologist but he’d have bet that every ancient site in Afghanistan – the ones that hadn’t been razed completely to the ground by the Taliban in their drive to wipe out all trace of all that predated their revered Prophet – must long since have been looted six ways from Sunday and stripped clean of anything remotely of value by enterprising locals.

That wouldn’t stop her trying, of course. To risk your life for a bunch of crumbling old ruins seemed to him like a crazy thing to do. But then, apparently, a particular kind of craziness seemed to run in the blood of the Cahills. Ben couldn’t entirely blame them. He’d often reflected the same thing about the Hope family, with himself as the prime example.

‘Home again soon,’ Meadows said next to him, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Have to say I won’t be sorry to get this one over and done with. I hate this bloody country.’

‘It’s a hard land,’ Ben said. ‘That’s for sure. Three thousand years of constant war will tend to do that to a place. And to its people.’

‘You think it will ever get better?’

Ben smiled. ‘While men are in charge, I doubt it. Pretty much our greatest talent is for killing and destroying one another. It seems to be in our nature.’

‘Maybe we ought to let the women have a crack at it for a change,’ Meadows said.

‘Someone should suggest that idea to the current rulers. I’m sure they’d be up for it.’

‘Then again, maybe the women would be worse.’

‘You never know,’ Ben replied, thinking about Madison and her crazy ways.

Meadows grinned, then went quiet for a while. After a long pause he said in a more serious tone, ‘Why are we here?’

Ben didn’t understand. ‘You mean, who’s Spartan?’

‘I mean, why were we ever here. All this fighting over nothing.’