His bright blue eyes stared past him as if with a faint look of surprise that they were meeting like this. Blood oozed from a deep gash across his throat, still warm, the front of his T-shirt sodden. Tom thrust his fingers into the wound, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. While he was lifting weights just a few metres away, Dave must have bled out. Tom embraced his friend, then laid him down again. There was nothing he could do. He removed his wallet for safekeeping and drew down his pistol. There was no doubt the smoke was from an aircraft on the tarmac that had been hit. His first thought was a mortar attack from outside the fence. But now he could hear small-arms fire, followed by a prolonged burst from a machine-gun. This wasn’t from outside. And tracer bouncing skywards confirmed it. This was a ground assault – an attack from inside.

Chapter 6

6

Tom approached the USAF command tent from the rear. Inside, it was filled with a choking cloud of dust from a freshly exploded grenade. There were two dead, their body armour only half on, and a bloody trail where a third had crawled a few metres before succumbing to his injuries. There was nothing he could do for them. And there was firing outside. He ducked out, flattened himself against the Hesco wall and got his first sight of the insurgents. Two hundred metres away, a dozen or more were advancing on the next aircraft. They looked like ANA; one was carrying an RPG launcher, another lugging a heavy machine-gun.

Tom darted forward, staying parallel but out of their line of sight, heading towards a maintenance hangar. A bullet zinged over his head, which could only have come from the hangar.

‘I’m a Brit!’ he yelled, into the darkness.

Inside, a bunch of night crew, mechanics and supply clerks were holed up behind tool cabinets, the muzzles of their rifles trained on the doors. What the fuck were they doing, crammed together like sitting ducks? The walls of the hangar were no more than thin aluminium sheeting. If their attackers felt like it, they could just dump a few rounds on them and they’d be gone.

A dazed-looking mechanic lifted his head from behind a pile of tyres. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

These guys packed wrenches and wielded power drills, but as US Marines they were also trained in basic infantry tactics. There wasn’t much time to think. The camp’s size was also its weakness: the base operations centre was at least two miles away. The staff there could well be oblivious. By the time a response team was on site the insurgents would have done their worst. The other question troubling Tom – where had they come from? Was this really an insider attack, or just designed to look like one?