It was sunrise as James stepped out of a motor launch, wearing the bottom half of a flight suit, a baby-blue hospital-issue T-shirt and a precautionary foam neck brace. After thanking his Spanish captain, James yawned for a night’s lost sleep as he strode up a gentle hill.

He sighted Tovah on her morning run, but she was beyond shouting distance. Everyone else was apparently sleeping off the drama of the night before. Too agitated to sleep, James stepped into the hostel’s admin building. The bloodstained stretcher Kerry had been carried on and the medical pack had been abandoned just inside the door. He crossed to a large, slightly shabby office which he’d been using to plan the upcoming mission with Tovah.

A big map of northern Syria and its four-hundred-kilometre land border with Turkey was spread across two desks pushed together. Stickers had been applied, showing IS-controlled oil wells and green dots indicating possible locations of the two kidnapped oil technicians, based upon electronic chatter picked up by the UK–US-controlled Echelon electronic communication monitoring system.

But James was more concerned with his girl than his mission. He flipped his laptop open and placed a video call to the British military’s medical emergency centre, which was based at RAF Northolt, west of London. He was pleased to recognise the duty lieutenant he’d spoken to several times overnight.

‘What’s the news?’ James asked.

The lieutenant tapped at a keyboard for a few seconds. ‘Patient Chang landed at 0607 hours. Taken under sedation to the Harlow military hospital where she’s scheduled for surgery at 1100.’

‘Great,’ James said. ‘Did you get all the scans and X-rays from the Spanish hospital?’

The lieutenant made a few more keyboard taps. ‘Imaging’s all here, along with some very detailed notes. Much better than you’d get from a British doctor.’

‘Good stuff,’ James said. ‘What about her ward and stuff, so I can contact her, or send flowers after the op?’

‘That will be assigned after surgery. If it comes through before my shift ends, I’ll email you the details.’

‘Fab,’ James said, stifling a yawn as he hung up.

He spun his office chair and looked at the map, wondering how they could reconfigure the mission to deal with the loss of Kerry. But Tovah was a former Israeli commando and microlight aviation expert, and Capstick was ex-Australian special forces. So while James was officially in charge of the rescue mission, he’d taken their advice at every stage and decided to set up a meeting with the pair after breakfast.

Missing a night’s sleep was never a good thing, but based on past experience James found staying awake and toughing it out for a day a better option than sleeping half the day and throwing out his body clock. And if he was going to stay awake, he’d need caffeine.