As they watched and waited, the vehicles converged on the buildings and all parked up together in a great dust cloud. Through binoculars Ben counted twenty-seven men getting out of their vehicles and entering the largest of the buildings. They were clad in the familiar rag-tag garb of insurgents, most with heavy ammunition bandoliers draped around their bodies, some with chequered headscarves, all of them armed with the usual mixture of mostly Soviet weaponry. Among them, about Ben’s height, well built and handsome, wearing a combat jacket and cotton knit cap, was the notorious young jihadist who was rapidly rising up the ranks and of whom there was only one known photograph, Nazim al-Kassar. The man himself, in the flesh.

As Ben had worried, the American intelligence report was somewhat off the mark. Twenty-seven men was a much larger force than they’d anticipated. It would make capturing the leaders much more difficult, since they were sure to put up a fight. One of Ben’s SAS troopers, a Yorkshireman called Jon Taylor, was equipped with a launcher loaded with stun grenades. If Taylor could punt two or three of them in quick succession through the building’s window, there was a decent chance of incapacitating enough of its occupants to be able to storm the place and bring off a clean mass arrest. If not, the task force might have a hot morning’s work ahead of them.

The soldiers waited for all the men to enter the building, then for thirty minutes longer, for whatever strategic discussions they were engaged in to get well underway in a sense of security. Then the signal was given to move in and commence the assault.

And that was when it all went horribly bad. Taylor was twenty metres from the building and on the verge of launching his first grenade at the window when Ben saw an incoming RPG round streaking towards them from the edge of the rocky basin. Before he had time to yell a warning, the rocket-propelled warhead blew a crater right under Taylor’s feet, killing him instantly. Within instants, the air was thick with heavy machine-gun fire coming at them from all sides, and Ben knew the American intel had been even worse than previously thought. Task Force Red had been misled. A third contingent of militants had been en route to the meeting when they’d spotted the soldiers and opened fire from hidden positions all around the rim of the plateau.

Under aggressive attack, Ben’s unit found whatever cover they could and fired back. But then several of the insurgents inside the house came swarming out, shooting as they came. The task force were pinned between two enemy factions, with no longer any option but to fight their way out.