The Fiat pushed on into the darkness. Nobody was speaking. Porter was scanning the road ahead, keeping a watch out for more Hezbollah patrols. There were miles of empty countryside, broken only by the occasional small village. He saw some vans go by, and a couple of private cars. At one point he saw a truck full of Hezbollah fighters, their arms bristling with weapons, but they paid no attention to the van. As the countryside rolled by, Porter was thinking, planning. The pain in his mouth was terrible, the jawbone aching in a dozen different places, but he knew he had to concentrate on what happened next. With any luck, in the next couple of hours they would get across the border into Israel. But could they get in touch with the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, or would that just alert Collinson?

‘Does Sky have a correspondent in Tel Aviv?’ he said to Katie.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Jamie Breakton. You’ll get him at the Tel Aviv bureau. If he’s not answering, I can call the Fox News bureau, or The Times’s guy.’

‘Then we’ll ring him just as soon as we get over the border.’

Katie pushed her burka aside, and Porter saw her face for the first time in hours. There was still a starved, vacant appearance to her eyes, but her strength and confidence were steadily recovering.

‘The sooner we get this story on the air the better. The reason is, we can’t trust the British government, not with that fucker Collinson on the loose,’ said Porter, shaking his head. ‘Get Sky News to pick us up rather than the embassy, and we’ll be OK. If Collinson wants to shoot us, then he’ll have to do it live on TV.’

‘He wouldn’t –’

‘He bloody would,’ Porter snapped. ‘He’s already tried to kill us twice. Me, three times.’

The town of Beit Yahoun loomed up in the distance. A few lights, and some smoke rising in the air were all there was to mark it out from the rest of the desolate landscape. Porter saw the road sign, and then the outskirts of the place itself. The road worsened as they pulled into the first street leading down towards the demilitarised zone. The tarmac was cracked in so many places it might have been better to get out and complete the trip on foot, Porter thought. Along the way, there were the remains of houses, but they had been shelled virtually to oblivion. All that was left were the foundations, and the heaps of rubble that had collapsed into them. There were no street lights working, but about a mile away there were some streaks of neon shooting up into the night sky.

‘The demilitarised zone runs for about a mile to the west of here,’ said Hassad. ‘Get into there, and we’ll be OK.’

‘Any checkpoints?’ asked Porter.

Hassad nodded. The strain was evident in the man’s eyes, Porter noted. He was delivering them to the border, just the way he promised. But now he was up against his own people, and you could tell that troubled him. ‘One, and it’s heavily guarded,’ he replied. ‘But we got through the last one, so we have to hope for the same again.’