Another reason he disliked this whole exercise was that there were no guarantees that the risk would pay off, especially in Third World countries and even more especially in remote areas like this. You had to assume that the vehicle might be broken down, lacking fuel, sitting on flat tyres and not run for years, with a dead battery and chickens living in it. But before you could even get close enough to verify whether or not the thing was usable, you’d have to get past any number of obstacles and hazards. Any villager you might accidentally happen to run into could raise the alarm, or perhaps even grab a weapon and open fire on you.

But the biggest headache of all was dogs. Which of course was the reason why they were so popular – Ben’s own place at Le Val had always been guarded by a roaming pack of German shepherds, the most acutely aware sentry ever created. As SAS soldiers knew all too well, trained attack dogs would just creep up on you without a sound and then rip into you. But any old farmyard mutt could just as easily deter an intrusion by barking its head off, even if it was tethered up.

So when a deep-throated woof-woof-woof started up as Ben got within ten feet of the yard wall and a man’s angry voice from inside the house yelled in a dialect of Dari, ‘Shut up, you stupid bastard animal’ or words to that effect, he knew he’d have to abort. As the dog went on barking furiously, a light came on in a window and a bearded face peered out, Ben reluctantly slunk away into the deep shadows and started making his way back towards his camp location. Win some, lose some.

On his return journey to the camp, a thin slanting rain became an icy cold deluge that had soaked him to the skin by the time he crawled into the hastily erected shelter of his tent. It took all his willpower to resist the urge to make a fire to warm himself and dry his clothes over. The ground was too hard and stony to dig out the kind of Dakota fire pit he’d been taught to build in survival training, designed to keep the light and smoke to a minimum. Instead he lay there shivering for an hour before he gave up on the idea of sleep, struck camp for the second time that night and moved on.