She slumped to the floor, as if her tired legs simply couldn’t support her any longer. Bowman left her by the stairs and climbed back up to the roof, his weary muscles making one last effort.

On the rooftop, Mallet was busy giving fire orders to D Squadron. Bowman heard him directing them onto targets from his vantage point high above the action. Webb crouched beside him, a blood-speckled field dressing wrapped around his head. There was shit everywhere. Smoke wafted up from the warped barrels on the two Gimpys. The acrid tang of gunpowder hung in the air. Bowman dropped low beside the parapet and looked down.

The battle was almost over.

Pockets of rebels were fleeing in every direction. The men of D Squadron had swept right across the field of fire, dominating the ground. One of the Jackals had taken up a support-fire position on the east side near the pagoda. The second Jackal was still mopping up resistance to the south. A third vehicle had sheered round the back of the estate and swung round to the west of the mansion. Both the Jackals on the east and west side had Browning .50 calibres mounted on top instead of grenade launchers. Otherwise known as the ‘relish’, because that’s what a human body looked like after you put a burst into it. A section of the fencing to the east had been flattened, and Bowman realised that the Jackals must have bombed in from that direction, crashing through the flimsy chain-link mesh. The guys on foot would have debussed from their transport trucks somewhere further up the main road before moving forward with the support vehicles.

As Bowman looked on, the soldiers picked off the last dregs of resistance. Half of the guys had advanced west from the pagoda. The other half had attacked from the ornamental garden. Caught between the Jackals and the assault groups, the remaining few rebels were brutally cut down, some of them ripped limb from limb. Most of them were killed before they had a chance to escape. Those further back from the struggle turned and fled up the clearing towards the main road. They ran straight into an ambush set up by one element of D Squadron. Several of the rebels tried to resist or return fire. They were swiftly dropped. The rest threw down their weapons and surrendered.

In less than a minute, the rebels had been completely routed.

To the west, through a gap in the woods, Bowman spied four tiny figures jumping into a white Toyota Land Cruiser. The wagon took off west down the main road, wheels throwing up clouds of dust.

A posh clipped voice came over the open comms network. The OC of D Squadron, Bowman realised.

‘One of our fellows has just seen a vehicle speeding away,’ the OC reported. ‘Land Cruiser. Four passengers, he says. Pale-skinned. Any idea who that might be?’