Tonight, thanks to his supply of task force MREs, Ben had the luxury of cold beef stew, cold rice pudding and cold drinking chocolate mix: nutritious and even quite palatable once you got used to it, but a shock to the system after being used to the culinary comforts of Le Val all these years. Perhaps the soft life was getting to him, he reflected. Maybe this experience was just the thing he needed to keep his edge.

Hard routine also meant that you could leave no trace of your presence behind, which included bodily waste. If ground conditions made it difficult to bury deep, you took it with you, stashed in your Bergen. Any young trooper who’d wanted to join the SAS for the glamour and romance of it soon learned the nitty-gritty realities of their chosen way of life.

After dinner and a final observation check, Ben crawled into his tiny tent and lay there for a long while listening to the wind ruffling the canvas, his pistol ready for instant use should an unexpected visitor happen to come by. In time his eyes closed and his body relaxed, but he was never fully asleep and his senses were sharply attuned to the tiniest sound that could signal danger. The dreaming part of his mind imagined that he found Madison and a bunch of her friends partying at a luxury mansion in the mountains. She was wearing a long, black, backless, strapless evening dress and holding a crystal flute of champagne as she turned to him, standing there in his filthy bedraggled robe with his weapons and ammo belts, and demanded indignantly, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He was lost for words and dumbstruck; then when he looked at her more closely he saw that her face was a skull.

Some dreams are difficult to go back to sleep after.

He was packed up and on the move again long before the first fiery rays of dawn peeked over the crags to the east. In an ideal situation, a Special Forces unit behind enemy lines might have chosen to move only under cover of darkness and stay hidden during the daylight hours, allowing more time for rest and recuperation. But with so much distance to cover and his shockingly vivid dream still haunting him, he felt impelled to keep going as fast as he could.