Midnight came and went. Ben had spent much of his life in that still, contained state of mind that comes before an action. He was calmly experiencing it now, even though he and Roth would be no more than observers. He knew that the GIGN unit members would be going through the same mental preparation at this moment.

And then it began.

At ten minutes past midnight, a large black Renault Sherpa light assault vehicle came roaring down the street and pulled to a sharp halt outside the house. ‘Here we go,’ Roth muttered.

They watched as the doors burst open and men in black jumped out, swiftly entered the gate and took their positions around the front door. The GIGN had come heavily equipped in full tactical gear, body armour and tactical helmets with goggles and respirators, automatic weaponry fitted with launchers for stun grenades. In appearance they were virtually indistinguishable from an SAS, Delta or Navy SEAL assault team, and they moved with the same highly trained fluidity. The point guy was armed with a breaching shotgun, ready to take out the door with frangible buckshot if his colleague with the battering ram didn’t breach it fast enough.

They were through in a heartbeat. Effortless. Smooth. Unstoppable. The black-clad figures swarmed inside the hallway. There were loud muffled thumps from the house’s interior and brief flashes lit up the windows as the raiders let off their nonlethal munitions, designed to incapacitate the target with disorientating noise and blinding light.

As quickly as the assault had kicked off, everything went suddenly quiet. It looked as if it was over.

And then, even more suddenly, it was only just beginning.

A violent explosion fifty times louder than the pop-pop of the stun grenades rocked the house and blew out the windows and front doorway in a massive mushrooming eruption of flame. One GIGN team member standing by the entrance was knocked off his feet by the force of the shockwave. His colleague who’d been a step closer to the doorway was engulfed in the fireball. The blast illuminated the street like daylight. Then most of the street-facing section of the roof of the house crashed inwards, the wall collapsed into rubble, and the explosion became a roiling inferno.

Roth yelled, ‘Holy shit!’

Ben hadn’t seen it coming either. And nor had the assault team. Half of them were still inside the blazing building. At least one had been buried by the collapsing wall. Several more were on the ground and not moving – stunned, dead, Ben had no idea. The ones still on their feet were in total disarray, stunned and panicked. No amount of training can prepare anyone for walking into a high-explosive-incendiary bomb ambush. Either the terrorists had known the raid was coming, or they kept some kind of home-made device on standby at all times just in case.