The stranger lowered his rifle, took his hand off the pistol grip and reached up to pull down his face covering and remove his turban. His features were grimed with dust and heavily bearded, but Ben couldn’t have recognised him more completely if he’d seen him just yesterday. The stranger, suddenly not a stranger any longer, broke into a broad smile, and the sunlight sparkled gold and platinum off his teeth.

‘Hello, Ben.’

‘Jaden?’ It seemed surreal. Maybe he was still dreaming.

Jaden Wolf laughed. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, eh? Well, well. This is the part where we both ask each other the same question: what the fuck are you doing here?’

Ben had known, worked with, and occasionally found himself up against, some of the toughest, hardest and most ruthlessly efficient killers in the world. Few of them, if any, could compare with Jaden Wolf, probably the most dangerous man Ben had ever met. Ben was also one of the few people lucky enough to be able to call him a friend.

Wolf had been a young recruit to 22 SAS when Ben was already a major. The gold and platinum teeth were the result of a nasty accident Wolf had suffered during the endurance phase of his selection test in the Brecon Beacons. The last time their paths had crossed in the middle of nowhere had been in Spain, when Wolf was on the run from a shadowy cabal who’d employed him as a professional assassin and later tried to eliminate him. That meeting had been no coincidence, because Ben had been the one they’d blackmailed into carrying out that elimination.

Then the last time Ben had seen Wolf had been at a manor house in England, when the pair had teamed up with Jeff Dekker, Tuesday Fletcher and a former SBS man called Reaper Rigby to turn the tables on the cabal and send them to hell. After that, Wolf had returned to Spain with the intention of enjoying a quiet existence as far away from trouble as he could get, making a little home for himself in some remote rural haven and learning to play the guitar. Wolf had fallen in love with the country many years earlier and he was living the dream. Ben had never expected to see him again.

And now here he was. The same old Wolf, dressed to kill and back in his natural element.

‘Before you ask,’ Wolf said, ‘I’m not on my own. You should come and meet the guys.’

Even more confused, Ben asked, ‘What guys?’

‘You remember Nobby Scraggs?’

‘Of course I do. Heard he left the regiment to take up security work on the oil fields in Oman.’