In the next fraction of a second, the young Iraqi woman activates the plunger switch she was clutching inside the folds of her robe, wired via a detonator to the heavy bundle of C4 explosive in the hidden backpack strapped to her stomach. Almost before the blinding flash and the deafening explosion the shockwave erupts like an omnidirectional shotgun blast, only several magnitudes more powerful. The violence of the detonation is stunning. The two-ton Land Rover shielding Ben and the young soldier is rocked nearly off its wheels. They’re showered by the glass of its shattered windows. A circle twenty metres across is engulfed in smoke and billowing dust.

Then it’s over, but the aftermath is only about to begin. The horror. The shock. The screams of the wounded and dying. Body parts of soldiers and civilians alike scattered in the dirt. Everything that isn’t on fire is spattered with blood. Ben is on his feet, heart racing, emotions numb. The boy he protected is unhurt. Many others haven’t been so lucky.

Ben runs through the smoke. His senses are in a turmoil of confusion and he wants to throw up. The sounds of pain and horror are muffled and masked by the ringing in his ears. An Iraqi man is rolling on the ground nearby. He’s been eviscerated by the hail of shrapnel from the bomb. He will not survive. Ben rips off his battledress jacket and covers the man with it and tries to talk to him, but there’s nothing he can do. The material of the jacket is instantly soaked with blood. Ben steps back and looks around him. Soldiers are yelling wildly and sprinting in from the edges of the scene to help anyone they can. In minutes, medic choppers will be on their way and this place will become an emergency field hospital.

Ben picks a path through the carnage towards the smoking crater and looks down at the torn, smouldering figure on the ground at the epicentre of the blast. Or two figures, because the woman’s body has been separated in half by the explosion. There is nothing left of her midsection. Her legs are mangled human wreckage in the dirt, peeled to the bone. The niqab has been torn away from her face, which has somehow remained untouched by the detonation. She stares up at Ben with dark, empty eyes. She would have felt nothing, experienced only a momentary white light as the explosion ripped her apart.

He wonders who she was. What was her part in all of this? Who convinced her to sacrifice herself in this cruel war that nobody can even understand?

Ben goes on looking down at the dead woman. Her sightless gaze seems to look straight back at him.

And then her eyes suddenly snap open and she opens her mouth to speak.

‘Bennnnn …’