His radio retched: it was NCO Pfeiffer, the commander of the search team, asking to speak to him in person. Chris left Sergeant Abdullah in the marketplace with the other Afghans and started to make his way over to the compound that was being searched. To get there, he had to walk over a small embankment leading out of the centre of the Kalay. The ground here was sufficiently raised for Chris to look over the wall of one of the outlying compounds. There, oblivious to his appearance, was a bareheaded woman in her thirties carrying a bucket of water across a courtyard. Before he could even process why this sight was so surprising, Chris had a shock of voyeur’s guilt – a sense of having committed a violation, as if he’d glimpsed the woman not just bareheaded, but naked. He realised that this was the first time he’d seen the face of an adult Afghan woman. The young girls went everywhere bareheaded: they were often strikingly beautiful and even more brazen than their brothers about approaching patrols to demand sweets and pens. But at the cusp of puberty, the gender vanished. It was rare even to see females in burqas outside their compounds. And somehow, Chris thought with alarm, he had absorbed – in just four weeks – the values and taboos of this godawful country to such an extent that it now felt wrong to look at a woman’s face.

He was so preoccupied with thinking about all this that as he neared the compound where his men were, he cut through a gap in a wall. As soon as he’d done so he stopped, horrified at his own stupidity. This certainly wasn’t the route his troops had taken with their metal detectors.

He made to walk backwards – and immediately put his foot on the pressure plate he’d just stepped over. There was just time, before the explosion, for another rush of shame and self-reproach. What a basic fucking error!

And then he seemed to be jumping upwards with enormous power as some strange dark object flew past him to hit the compound wall behind his head, and then he was on the ground, and because of the jumping and the loud noise he understood that there had been an explosion. He wasn’t in pain, though, so perhaps he’d just been spectacularly lucky.