They all took their places back inside the lorry. The three men in the cab nodded to one another. Abbud slammed the stick into gear, veered towards the gates and accelerated hard.

The security guy in the little hut by the gate was a man close to retirement age, with a white moustache. He looked round, then stared open-mouthed as he began to realise that the eighteen-wheeler roaring towards him wasn’t going to slow down.

Less than two seconds later, the security guy became the first official casualty of the water treatment plant attack. The lorry hit the barrier and went tearing through with a crash of rending steel and wire. It flattened the security hut with the man inside it and rolled on through the debris, trailing bits of crumpled wreckage that scraped and sparked on the concrete.

Nazim yelled at Abbud to keep going, which Abbud did, aiming straight at the reception building. A woman dressed in a trouser suit, maybe an administrator, was running out of the building in shock at what was happening outside, joined by a couple of other personnel. She froze in the doorway, unable to move, paralysed by disbelief. Abbud did not steer away from her or take his foot off the accelerator. Slaughter him with your knife, or smash his head with a rock, or run him down with your car.

She was still standing directly in their path and seemed to lock eyes with Nazim half an instant before the lorry ploughed into the building and mowed her down under its wheels. The glass doors and windows caved violently inwards and forty tons of eighteen-wheeler forced deep inside, crushing and pulverising everything in its path before it came to a grinding halt. Then Abbud crunched the gears into reverse and backed out. The windscreen was opaque with cracks and blood spatter. Nazim grabbed his weapon and said, ‘Let’s go.’

The three of them kicked open the dented cab doors and jumped out into the carnage. Nazim shot one of the screaming employees who’d been crushed only half to death. Not out of mercy, but because the screaming grated on his ear. The terrorists inside the trailer rolled open the shutter and a few leaped out, the rest staying inside with the cargo and the hostage.

More security personnel, who had been enjoying a mid-morning coffee break when the attack began, now came running. They took one bewildered look at the crashed lorry and the armed terrorists and flew into disarray. One of them gamely stood his ground and even managed to snap off a round or two with his pistol, but his shots were wildly off target. Dariush pinned him in his sights and gunned him down like scything weeds.