NEO stood for Non-combative Evacuation Operation. Which didn’t at all seem to Ben like the kind of thing Jaden Wolf would have got himself involved in. ‘I thought you were living the good life in Spain.’

‘I was,’ Wolf replied. ‘Chilling out in the sun, enjoying the local food and wine, learning to play the guitar and not having too much to do with the world. Believe me, the last thing I’d ever dreamed of doing was to get back into this game. But you couldn’t ignore what was going on.’

Wolf described his rage and upset at the US leaders’ apparent willingness to just walk away from so many stranded civilians, leaving them totally at the mercy of the brutal new regime. ‘While the politicians and all these generals were yakking on about a controlled withdrawal, meanwhile the Taliban were killing left, right and centre. Stringing people up from choppers, cutting their heads off, slicing out tongues, sending women back to the Stone Age and pitching gays off rooftops. We thought this place was bad, last time around, but it’s got a hundred times worse now. And the western media were just ignoring it.’

‘Cut back a couple months before the shit hit the fan,’ Holt said, ‘a lot of folks could see what was coming. Veterans like us who knew the score, knew what kind of a nightmare scenario was about to land on the country, Kabul especially. A bunch of us started getting together, first on social media and then by phone and email. None of us believed that the switchover would take months or a year to happen. Anyone who’s ever gone up against these guys knew they’d sweep in faster than a goddamn Blitzkrieg.’

‘Right, and so we decided that something had to be done,’ Wolf said. ‘These bastards couldn’t just be allowed to have a free hand.’

Ben was looking at his old friend and wondering at the change in him. Here was a man who, after quitting a stellar military career, had gone into business as a professional gun for hire, making stacks of cash killing whoever he was told to. His only rule had been: no women, no kids. Anyone else, you wouldn’t even have seen him coming.

But Ben had always known that somewhere deep inside, Jaden Wolf’s heart was as golden as those flashing custom-made teeth of his. That side of him was completely out in the open now, and combined with his warrior capability that made him an extremely effective weapon in the fight against injustice and tyranny.