Hassad had returned to the vehicle and was looking straight at Porter. ‘Are you here to kill us?’

Porter didn’t so much as blink. ‘We just want a discussion.’

‘Then come,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk inside.’

Porter followed him across the crater. It was a walk of about thirty metres to the mineshaft, and they completed it in silence. As he walked, Porter was trying to make a mental recce of the layout of the place. Alongside the Mercedes, there were two other vehicles: a small Skoda Felicia, and a big Honda CR-V that had a couple of dents in its side. Close by, he saw a small, diesel-powered electricity generator that was obviously powering the place. He’d already seen a few men go in and out of the mineshaft, so he calculated there must be a whole platoon of Hezbollah fighters here. How many? I’m probably about to find out.

Hassad pushed open the doorway. The entrance to the mine opened up into a small, low room, with a single electric lamp at one side. The walls were composed of a sandy, stained rock, cut into deep grooves where the mineshaft had been sunk. Directly in front of them was a metal cage lift. Hassad slung the wire door open, and instructed Porter to step inside before he followed and pulled the lever. The lift started to drop: Porter judged they’d descended at least twenty-five or thirty metres into the ground before the lift came to a juddering halt.

As Porter stepped out, he could see a corridor leading into the interior of the abandoned quarry. Single-bulb electric lights were slung up on the low ceiling every twenty metres, but they did no more than cast a pale, murky light through the space. Hassad unhooked a gas lamp from the wall, turning up its light, and then starting to descend a rickety flight of wooden steps. Porter counted thirty steps down, twisting through a narrow channel carved into the rock. Glimpses of the copper could just about be seen in the walls. At the bottom, the space widened out into a cave, with six different tunnels leading off in different directions. In the centre, there was some broken and rusty machinery that must once have been used to cut out the ore and lift it up to the surface, but from the state of it Porter guessed it must have been years since the mine was worked. Some water was dripping through the roof. Hassad took the first tunnel, a sharp left from the bottom of the staircase.

The passageway was narrow, no more than four feet across, and only six feet high: it had been carved out of the rock to ferry the miners deep into the ground, and there was no room for more than one man to pass at the same time. One bloke with an assault rifle could hold this place against an army of men, Porter reflected grimly. They had chosen it with care. Even if the British did find out where Katie Dartmouth was being held, they could send in a whole battalion and still not have much chance of getting her out.