‘Nonsense,’ Ben told him, stabbing in a dose with an auto-injector. He had enough of them in the medical kit to euthanize a horse. Saleem could have them all, if needed. ‘I’m not going anywhere without you. But there’s no hurry. We got away from them. Let’s sit here for a while and rest. Then you and I will carry on together.’

Ben sat down next to him in the dirt with his back against a rock. He took out his cigarettes and Zippo and lit up two, one for him, one for the dying man. They sat in silence, watching the sun disappear behind the mountains and the shadows of the standing rocks grow longer and deeper. The morphine kicked in quickly and Saleem soon looked relaxed, almost restful, eyes closed. In the fading light his blood looked almost black against the rocks.

It wasn’t easy, sitting here biding your time waiting for a man to slip away. Ben spent a few minutes reflecting on the fate of Operation Hydra, now come to an end even sooner than Goffin might have hoped for. Ben thought about the irony of naming it after a mythical creature with immortal powers and many heads that would grow back double in number when cut off. In reality their operation had had only one. And now that it was well and truly sliced off, it wasn’t going to grow back. He remembered what Carstairs had said: fail and you’re on your own. No back door out of the place, every man for himself. How true the colonel’s words had been. As for Spartan, whoever he was, now he was on his own too.

The darkness fell quickly, a pale moon rising. Saleem never spoke again. By the time Ben had finished his third cigarette, his silent, inert companion had drifted off to another place. Ben checked his pulse, found nothing. He looked sadly at the dead man, wishing he could bury him and Buchanan. But their remaining kit didn’t include so much as a folding military shovel, even if the iron-hard ground could have been dug.

Ben considered the task ahead of him. With the mission dead, along with the men and resources he’d hoped to enlist for his own purposes, now he faced a long and dangerous journey across the Afghan wilderness with no transport, no backup, facing much worse odds than before. But that couldn’t deter him from his objective of finding Madison Cahill and bringing her home. If he died trying, then so be it. Had to happen sometime.