Through the same grapevine that had fed him the inside track on ISIL activities, Ben happened to know that Roth had gone on to greater glories after Operation Citation. Promoted to captain, he’d served another twelve years with Delta. His long career had hit a peak in October 2013 when, as part of the Juniper Shield operations in North Africa, his undercover team had successfully captured Abu Anas al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda member on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, in Tripoli. Then a couple of years later, in May 2015, Roth’s unit had carried out a raid on Deir Ezzar in eastern Syria, targeting the financial operations chief of ISIL. The target had been killed in the ensuing firefight, but Roth’s guys had captured his wife along with a cache of ISIL operational records and plans that had proved a goldmine for the intelligence spooks.

Or so Ben had heard, at any rate. Like the SAS, Delta worked so much in the shadows that nobody really knew anything about their activities, or couldn’t talk about them if they did.

One thing Ben was fairly certain of was that the Deir Ezzar job had been Roth’s last hurrah with US Special Ops. Shortly afterwards, having survived a decade and a half at the top of his profession without having taken so much as a scratch, he’d quit. Not to spend the rest of his life golfing in Florida, nor to retire to Italy to grow tomatoes like Ben’s old SAS comrade and mentor Boonzie McCulloch. Instead, Roth had opted for the path that many men of their level of training and expertise took, and slipped into the murky world of PMC. Which was short for Private Military Contractors.

In one word, Roth became a mercenary. Still employed, for the most part, by the same US government he’d served in his previous career, but working for much bigger pay cheques. The real money was in fighting wars so dirty and secret that nations like America and Britain wouldn’t even involve their blackest, most covert SF operators for fear of getting caught in the middle of an international flap.

He had heard nothing of Roth in years. As far as he knew, though, the American was still in the PMC game – if he hadn’t met a bullet in some squalid little conflict nobody was supposed to know about.