Things were getting critical now, because the limited amount of ammunition the task force had been carrying in their magazines and on their persons was fast running out and there was no question of retrieving more ordnance from the vehicles. Meanwhile the Taliban fighters, emboldened by their crushing numerical advantage, came pressing on. Their battle cry Allahu Akbar! could be heard shrieking wildly over the chaos of gunfire as eight, ten, a dozen men appeared from behind the buildings thirty metres up the street, bullets splatting from their American assault weapons. Seeing Cale lying there prone in the open they sprinted towards him, apparently unafraid of his return fire that took two of them down as they ran. The dust from their bullets was flying up so thick around him that he was barely visible, but Ben heard him cry out as he was hit again and again. One arm now lay useless on the ground but he kept firing one-handed. A fool, maybe, but a damn brave one.

Ben broke cover from behind the van and raced across the street, shooting as he went, grabbed Cale by the collar and started dragging him towards the corner of the house, from which Buchanan and Dixon were laying down a covering fire. Ben didn’t know if he was going to make it, but he had to try. With the dead weight of Cale’s body in one hand and his rattling gun in the other he felt a bullet whip past his cheek and another tear through the loose folds of his kameez. He fired back without aiming, a burst that stitched two more of the Talib across the chest and they collapsed mid-stride, falling over each other in a dead heap.

He was almost at the corner now. Buchanan and Dixon were hammering a relentless stream of firepower down the street that broke the enemy advance, killed three and sent the others into retreat.

For a heartbeat, it looked as though they could win this.

Then that changed. A grenade came whooshing from up the street and hit the white van, blasting it into flames. At almost the same moment, more enemy fire was coming from the opposite direction, from behind them, targeting the corner of the house at an angle that exposed them right out in the open. Dixon let out a grunt as though he’d been about to say something; then Ben saw the blood spouting from the side of his neck. Dixon staggered against the wall and slid to the ground, fatally wounded. Bullets thunked into his chest and face and peppered the wall around him.