And now the old Bedouin… That was a bad fucking omen, thought McMullen. He knew that John Carr was right, as he usually was – shooting the old geezer would have been wrong – but it was still major bad karma that someone knew they were here.

An image kept intruding into his mind: himself, lying bleeding out in the sand.

He knew he was being irrational; but he also knew that if he hadn’t needed the money he would have fucked this one off.

Not that he was going to admit any of this to John Carr, a man in whose eyes he had never seen so much as a hint of fear.

‘Yeah, I’m good, mate,’ he said, glancing over, with a smile that he was sure looked strained. ‘Never better.’

‘We’re all thinking the same thing, Kev,’ said Carr. ‘But worrying’s for women and children. You were at the top of my list. You wouldn’t have been if I didn’t think you were a good hand.’

He meant it, too: Kevin McMullen was a warrior of the highest order, brave to a fault, and as game as they came.

‘We’ll be in and out,’ said Carr, ‘and they’ll never see us coming or going.’

McMullen nodded and grinned, but, not for the first time, he wondered at his old squadron sergeant major’s apparent ability to read minds.

If anything, it spooked him even further.

‘I’m okay, John,’ he said, more firmly. ‘Seriously. I’m fine.’

Carr slapped an insect on his arm and dropped it out of the window.

‘How’s the family?’ he said. ‘Must be about time you knocked the missus up again?’

‘Four’s plenty,’ said McMullen. ‘Trish would have liked more, but we can’t fucking afford it, so I had the snip.’ He laughed. ‘She’ll be on at me to have a reversal when I bank the cash from this.’

‘Is your oldest still going in the Mob?’

‘He’s talking about it,’ said McMullen, staring out to his left. ‘His mum’s against it, obviously. Says if he’s going to join up, he needs to go to uni first, then Sandhurst, and go in as a rupert.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Carr, shaking his head.

‘I know. I’ve told him, Para Reg as a Tom, or he can fucking forget it. But I don’t know if he’s got it in him.’

‘Of course he’s fucking got it in him,’ said Carr. ‘He’s got Trish’s genes.’

Kevin McMullen chuckled, but a mental picture of Richard – at sixteen already three or four inches taller than his old man, a good-looking boy who’d got straight As in his GCSEs, and had the world at his feet – slipped into his brain.

He had a sudden feeling that he’d never see him again – nor Hope, nor Emily, nor little Georgia.

Nor Trish.