‘Get their knives.’

The woman’s urgent whisper brought Mickey back to the here and now. Snapping off the amazement that had him frozen where he stood. He stooped, picking up a pair of wickedly sharp fighting knives from the close-cropped turf. Blades that had been intended for him and Wade. Following the woman into the bushes, he realised that he recognised her from the flight in. One of the so-called BATSUB personnel Cavendish had been so dismissive of. She pulled a spray bottle from a pouch on her belt. Handing it to Mickey.

‘Follow us. And spray this on the ground we pulled them across.’

Mickey and Wade followed the pair as they dragged the corpses across the open ground to the hotel’s fence. Mickey spraying a fine mist of something odourless across the grass behind them. They stopped at a gate in the property’s boundary. The woman taking the spray bottle back and using it to mist the grass around the corpses.

‘Enzyme mix. Digests the blood as if it was never there.’

A moment later the other two men Mickey had spotted on the flight in appeared out of the darkness. Each of them dragging another identically equipped body. Both riddled with bullet wounds. The man who seemed to be their leader nodded to Mickey.

‘Sorry we had to do that in front of you. Your night-time wandering didn’t give us much choice.’

‘Who the fuck are—’

‘All in good time.’ The other man held up a hand. ‘Alpha One to Bravo, immediate extraction. Team plus four hostile KIA. Location two.’

He listened to the return traffic for a moment before looking up at Mickey.

‘I know, you have a thousand questions. And you’ve got about a minute before we’re out of here. So you’ll get more out of us if I just talk?’

Mickey nodded.

‘What can I tell you? Not much. We’re freelance. Contractors. Paid to come out here, deal with these people and then fade back into the landscape. As in that old “we were never here” trope.’

‘Shouldn’t the regiment be doing this sort of thing?’

The other man shook his head.

‘That’s hot war stuff. Whereas this is a very cold war indeed. These poor dead bastards are probably equally deniable. We use ex-special forces; the Chinese just don’t give a shit. If they’d managed to slot any of us then HMG could happily deny any involvement. Having counted our men back in again with no losses. Although the boys who are about to pick us up are from the regiment. They’ve been tracking this hit team for the last couple of days.’

‘So they flew you in just to make the kill. But…’

The sound of car engines disturbed the night’s quiet. A pair of vehicles coming along the seafront road.