Now the footsteps and voices came closer, until they were just beyond the door. Ben nodded to Roth. He raised a finger to his lips, telling Jafari to stay quiet. Then he waited for the door to swing open.

The two men who pushed through it were having a conversation in Arabic. Which, as was immediately apparent, was their native language. The two other features they had in common were their straggly black beards and the short, stubby Kalashnikovs casually slung over their shoulders. One man was short and fat, the other tall and thin. They stepped out into the passage, their movements jerky under the flickering light. The fat one laughed at the joke the thin one had just made. Then the laugh suddenly died on his lips and their smiles fell as Ben stepped out from behind the open door and Roth emerged like a jungle predator from the shadows, with the stone-killer blank eyes of a Delta Force ninja assassin.

Jafari broke away from Ben and yelled in Arabic, pointing at his captors, ‘They kidnapped me! Kill them!’

His colleagues would have been happy to oblige him, but the element of surprise was on Ben and Roth’s side. The two terrorists barely touched their weapons before the brief muted chatter of the MP5s filled the passage. Ben’s triple-stitch burst punched a tight vertical group of holes in the fat guy’s heart. The first of Roth’s rapid two single shots ripped into the thin guy’s chest and the second to the head, before he even started to fall. The perfect double-tap, expertly executed. The two men slumped silently to the floor and lay still under the stop-frame flicker of the light.

‘Nothing like slick teamwork,’ Roth said.

‘Nice double-tap,’ Ben commented. ‘Anyone would think I trained you.’

‘Smartass.’

Jafari stood for a moment, staring in dismay at the corpses of his associates. Then he started to back away, but Roth grabbed him by the neck and dragged him down to his knees, grinding the fat silencer tube of his weapon into Jafari’s neck. ‘Now it’s your turn, A-hole.’

Ben wasn’t having that. He slapped down Roth’s gun. ‘No. We need him.’

‘He has it coming.’

‘We all have it coming,’ Ben said. ‘But it’s not time for him to find Paradise just yet.’ He asked Jafari, ‘How close are we to where they’re keeping the Segal woman?’

‘Close,’ Jafari mumbled, sweating.

‘Lead us to her,’ Ben said. ‘Any more tricks, I’ll castrate you myself.’

‘And then we’ll get to work on you,’ Roth growled.

Before moving on, they quickly relieved the dead men of their weapons, unloaded the two Kalashnikov magazines and dumped the loose ammo down a ventilator shaft. Depriving the enemy of useful ordnance was a top rule of Special Forces combat operations.