‘You’re sure?’ James asked.

Bruce cracked a big smile. ‘Not dying, not getting caught,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t need suicide pills. We’re all gonna be fine.’

35. BORDER

James picked up a final electronic chatter report just after 1400 hours. There were plenty of phone calls, e-mails and texts from workers at the damaged well, indicating that someone was coming to repair the damaged pump controllers within a day or two.

The bad news was that no signal had been received from the two listening devices placed on top of the well control room and the assumption was that they’d been damaged by the unexpectedly powerful EMP generator, or heat from the fire.

The team’s ride south was a thirty-seat passenger coach, whose owner/driver used it for an irregular bus service into Syria. It arrived empty and they spent a quarter hour loading packs, microlight planes and partially dismantled dirt bikes into the luggage hold.

They set off with an exhaust plume some way behind the latest emission standards. Rather than head straight for the border, the coach stopped on the edge of town, collecting four bearded men. A second stop brought a single Arab passenger, dressed in amber-tint sunglasses.

The first stretch south was through smallholdings and recently harvested cotton fields. As they got closer to the border with Syria, shelters made from scrap wood and plastic sheeting began to appear in fields along the roadside. These were occupied by some of the two million refugees who’d fled Syria during the civil war. The closer they got, the more refugees they found, along with wafts from their refuse heaps coming through the air conditioning.

The last stop in Turkey was at a properly organised refugee camp, with lines of identical white shelters marked with the Red Crescent logo. An Arab TV crew boarded the coach, followed by five smartly attired men. They filled most of the remaining seats as a group of porters rammed the cargo area with pallets of food and medical supplies, leaving the driver with a fight to lock down the luggage doors.

The border crossing was heavily manned on the Turkish side. Two dozen troops backed up the customs officers, with tanks parked on either side of the road in case of trouble. The queues of vehicles trying to enter from Syria stretched to the point where the road disappeared into haze, and the land on the Syrian side was a mass of human tragedies. People who’d been refused crossing and had nowhere else to go.