He needn’t have worried. They were attentive, leaning forward to listen and laughing in all the right places, as he took them through a few highlights of his life in the SAS. And when he moved on to describing the men he had met on the Invicta campus, whose lives had been turned around by Rolt and his programme, there was a reverent hush. From there, he pulled no punches in his description of the hostel bombing. If this was what it took for Rolt to get his money, then why not go for it? If there was one thing that would surely clinch it, it was this.It almost alarmed him how easily it came to him, finding the words that could mesmerize the audience. Was this how the politicians did it? The hate preachers? And all the time in another part of his brain he was asking himself what any of this had to do with Invicta. The questions were piling up. And as his eyes drifted from face to face he caught sight of a figure at the back of the room, leaning against a pillar: just the man who might have some of the answers.

Chapter 46

46

‘Hey, partner.’ Kyle Pope eased himself away from the pillar and stepped forward. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns . . .’

‘Who does that make me, Ingrid Bergman? And, by the way, you’re no Bogart.’

‘Didn’t think you’d recognize me.’

Tom punched his shoulder and was enveloped in a big man-hug. ‘I’d smell you a mile off.’

Even with the mirror Aviators and the chin-muffler beard, there was no disguising Kyle Pope. Six feet four in his bare feet, he had towered over his adversaries in Iraq. Yet his black eyes and olive complexion, from Tartar stock somewhere on his mother’s side, gave him a look of the universal citizen, and an almost legendary capacity to blend in. When you were in a minivan stuck in the middle of a traffic jam in Baghdad, he was the one you wanted to keep close to. The man led a charmed life, a major reason Tom was still alive.

‘Nine years – Jeez, where did they go?’

The joint SAS-Delta Force assault had been on a compound in Ramadi, about a hundred klicks west of Baghdad. Local resistance was anticipated, so Delta operators in tracked and turreted Bradleys had mounted over-watch. The intelligence had told them the house was occupied by a large extended family so casualties had to be minimized. House clearing was second nature in the Regiment. Tom had practised this sort of drill ad nauseam with live-fire exercises in the Killing House back at Stirling Lines. The trick was to be confident enough to fire without hesitation, yet spare the innocent. Flimsy, rusted metal gates protected the entrance. But before they were through they were met with a hail of fire from the upstairs windows and he was hit in the thigh.