All through the next day, and all through the next after that, the rain kept sheeting down. A waterproof military poncho and a decent Boonie hat might have helped keep the worst of it off, but Ben had neither. The best thing he could say about the weather was that it allowed him to refill his depleted water bottles. Like a drowned rat he plodded endlessly on, hour after numbing hour, following his course, blinking the water out of his eyes, squelching in his boots with his heavy pack chafing his shoulders. Lack of sleep and the need for a warm meal were beginning to wear him down. The small voice in his head that had started tempting him to stop and rig up a shelter grew steadily more persistent, until even he had to admit that he didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this. Still nothing around him but rock, mountain and sparse, wind-beaten scrub vegetation for as far as the eye could see, not another living soul to share the empty landscape with him.

Ben thought of the many armies that had been defeated by the cruel harshness of this land. The British Empire’s Afghan invasion forces of the nineteenth century had lost far more men to cold, starvation and disease than had been killed in battle. Likewise, the Soviet troops a century later had suffered terrible hardship in the pitiless Afghan wilderness, as bad as anything the Red Army had experienced during World War II. Even the toughest of men sometimes reach the limit of their endurance.

Not him, though. No damn way. He gritted his teeth, refused to cave in to weakness and soldiered doggedly on. Two hours’ rest that night, then off again. Sometime before dawn the rain had stopped and a red sunrise peeped over the mountains, promising a better day. And maybe it would be, allowing him to pick up his pace. He’d covered a great distance, and kept telling himself that his destination was getting closer with every step. But he was getting weak now, and he knew it.

It was in a narrow, craggy mountain pass late that afternoon that he met the temptation that finally broke his resolve. The young curly-horned ibex goat had been rooting around in some bushes when it was startled by his approach. Ben was as surprised as it was; but then when the animal made the mistake of hesitating just a moment too long before bounding off into the rocks, he drew his pistol and shot it in the head without compunction. The rolling echo of the gunshot boomed all around the mountain pass. He was too dizzy with fatigue and hunger by now to care if anyone had heard it. If the Taliban decided to come for him now, at least he’d face them on a full stomach.