‘What started as just a few of us sharing our frustrations by email soon started snowballing into a bigger and bigger cooperative international effort,’ Holt went on. ‘We were able to make connections with some US government officials, non-governmental organisations and heads of aid charities who weren’t happy with the situation either. Before we knew it, we had a list of people inside Kabul who’d be active targets of the Taliban when things got bad. A few dozen names soon turned into thousands. Meanwhile things were coming together real quick and we’d set up a forward operating base in Abu Dhabi. At that stage, our only aim was to help get as many people out as possible, while the US planes were still able to fly in and out of Kabul. But we weren’t the only ones moving fast. Within a week of taking control, the Taliban had over a hundred and fifty checkpoints all through Kabul and tightening their grip more each day. We were up against the clock.’

‘It’s the same story for me as for all these guys,’ Wolf said, nodding towards the others. ‘Next thing I knew, I was one of this gang of ex-military flying out to Abu Dhabi to lend our support. From there we travelled into Kabul and started locating as many of the names on our list as we could, and getting them out before the country shut down completely. We’d be sneaking dozens at a time from safehouses all over the city and getting them to the airport any way we could. My job was to scout out new ratlines we could use to move them under the noses of the Taliban without being detected. We used ladder trucks to get people over the fence, even crawled through sewers.’

Ben asked, ‘How many did you evacuate?’

‘Over four thousand, within less than two weeks,’ Wolf replied with a note of pride. ‘A lot of whom had a pretty strong chance of dying violently if we hadn’t got them out PDQ.’

‘I’m amazed,’ Ben said. And he wasn’t kidding. The numbers were astonishing. When he’d worked as a kidnap rescue operator he’d been getting people out of trouble in ones and twos. Wolf was talking about entire planeloads of them.

That wasn’t all Ben was thinking as he sat here listening to this. He was acutely aware that while all these events had been unfolding, he’d been spending his time in a state of blissful distraction with Abbie Logan. He thought about Jeff’s anger at what he’d been seeing on the news, and his own lack of interest at the time. It made Ben feel ashamed that he hadn’t got involved sooner. And it made him proud of his friend Jaden’s selflessness and courage. He asked, ‘What happened to all those people?’