Porter started walking. The taller man was guiding him. Underneath, he could tell the ground was soft and sandy. Maybe they were out in the Syrian Desert somewhere. He could sense men all around him, and caught a couple of whispers, but no one was talking out loud. Within a few seconds, they had gone inside some kind of doorway. It was warm – he could sense the temperature change instantly – and he was being led along a corridor. He tried counting the paces: without being able to see anything, it was the only way of getting a sense of the size of the place. Thirty, he reckoned, which made the corridor only about twenty metres long. He started to be steered down a staircase. Ten, fifteen, twenty steps, he counted. That meant they were only one floor down, probably in a basement. Another corridor. This time they walked only about five metres. Then they stopped, and the man let go of his shoulder.

‘Can we lose the bloody blindfold now?’ snapped Porter.

He could hear his voice echoing around the cramped corridor: from the time it took his voice to bounce back from the walls, he reckoned it was just a short corridor, and at most a couple of rooms.

There was no reply.

Porter could hear the sound of a key being turned in a lock. Then a bolt being shifted back. Next, there was a sudden shove against him, and he was bundled into the room.

‘Getting your fucking hands off me,’ he snarled.

Another shove. This time Porter could feel four pairs of hands pushing him forwards. They were strong: the skin on the hands was gnarled and tough, like the sole of an old boot, and the muscles behind them were toned and fit. The force of the blow took Porter by surprise and he stumbled. His hands were flailing out desperately – the blindfold meant he still couldn’t see anything – and that made it even harder for him to regain his balance. His feet were already wobbling beneath him as the next thump hit him in the middle of the spine. A ripple of pain tore through him. A boot was crashing into his ankles. He could feel himself starting to fall. His arms reached out to grab hold of something, but there was nothing there apart from thin air. He was hurtling towards the ground. There was a moment of sheer terror as he realised he had no idea what he was falling towards: it could be hard stone, it might be shards of glass, they could have tossed him into a well to drown him. In a brief instant, he could remember his instructors in the Regiment telling him that one of the ways the Iraqis tortured their prisoners was to blindfold them, then push them downstairs, because the terror of falling without knowing where you were going was more than most men could bear. I can see their point, he thought grimly. He had thrown his arms around his face to protect it. In the next instant, his body was crashing into the ground. There was something soft and damp on the surface of the floor. Straw, maybe. And beneath that stone. He could feel some bruising on his knees and around his ribs where he had taken the worst impact of the fall, but apart from that he was intact. Nothing broken: he’d have felt the pain by now if a bone had snapped. He felt around. Whether the two men were still standing in the doorway, he had no idea.