Travelling on foot behind enemy lines is a specialised skill that SAS men train long and hard to perfect. In this instance, the whole damn country was behind enemy lines. Ben needed to move quickly, quietly and undetected, and as his own point man he’d have to remain ultra-vigilant the entire time, maintaining constant 360-degree awareness of any possible threat. Clouds drifted across the face of the moon, creating deep shadows where he felt safe and in his element. He picked his way steadily along through the darkness, always staying below the ridgelines of the hills to avoid creating a man-shaped silhouette that could be spotted a long way off.

After six hours of steady walking, high among the foothills with the forbidding presence of the mountains looming close by, Ben stopped to make his first night’s camp. He’d picked his spot carefully, a textbook OP like an eagle’s nest high up in the rocks with a perfect all-around field of observation and fire. Close by his tent the Maximi was set up on its pressed-steel bipod with a fresh belt loaded and ready. In SAS jargon an unexpected encounter with the enemy was called ‘getting bumped’. If Ben got bumped up here, he could defend his position against a far superior force. By the time the ammo ran out there’d be a few hundred dead enemy combatants strewn all over. If they still kept coming after that, he’d fight with his knife, with rocks and stones and his bare hands if he had to. Would they get him? Probably, but they’d pay a heavy price for it.

He unpacked his first night’s rations. Until he could be sure he was safe he’d be on hard routine, which meant no campfire was allowed. It was a chilly night and the warmth would have been welcome, but a fire was a beacon easily visible for miles around, while the smell of cooking could travel on the wind for long distances and alert an enemy to your presence. Whatever you ate on hard routine had to be eaten cold, sometimes raw. Survival was about sustenance. On one combat tour of Afghanistan, Ben had lived for seven straight days on powdered milk and sugar. On a couple of other occasions, a dinner of uncooked goat flesh had seemed like a Michelin five-star gourmet treat to him and his hungry men. If you needed to hunt for meat, you tried to catch your food with a snare and dispatch it with your knife, rather than risk giving your position away with gunfire.