Before the light faded completely, his first priority was to check his own wounds. He hadn’t felt them at the time; then again it wasn’t uncommon, in the heat of battle, for a man to sustain even quite serious damage without realising. He’d seen fingers blown off, ears sliced off and worse, with their victims perfectly unaware of it until later. Fortunately his head injury was just a small bullet graze, fairly bloody like all scalp wounds, but not even requiring a stitch. An inch lower, and it wouldn’t have been so trivial. The worst he might expect was a blinding headache for a while. The bullet that had nicked his arm had gone somewhat deeper. He applied some local anaesthetic from the med kit, sutured it up and wrapped it with a field dressing. Another scar to add to the collection that laced and crisscrossed his body, each one telling its own story.

Night had fallen fully by the time he’d finished attending to himself. He couldn’t risk using a torch or lighting a fire, for fear of their being spotted from a distance. Instead he groped around in the darkness as he turned his attentions to salvaging more essential supplies from the van. One of the most critical was the handheld GPS device that told him he was 144 kilometres from his objective in the Bamiyan Valley. A long way to travel, for one man alone. Each task force member had carried some MRE rations and a water canteen in his personal Bergen. There was some firelighting gear and enough two-man tents for all eight of them, though Ben would need just one for basic shelter on his long journey.

Along with the medical kit, part of their arsenal had survived as well. He still had his pistol, but he’d require something more substantial as a principal weapon. The handy, lightweight carbines were all gone and most of what was left, like the massive fifty-cal sniper rifle, the Stinger missile system and the Claymore high-explosive mines, was too heavy and cumbersome for a one-man foot expedition to carry along with all his own food, water and shelter.

But then, in the last holdall he checked, Ben found what he’d been hoping for. He’d been around guns and weapons for far too many years to get excited about them any longer. To him they were simply workman’s tools, as mundane and normal as a screwdriver or a claw hammer. But there was no question that some tools were far more effective for certain tasks than others. And this one was perfect for the job he had ahead of him.