He’d run through the plan one final time with Skelton and McMullen, and the three men had cleaned their weapons, checked their ammo scales, and loaded themselves down with every round they had left. They’d run through a lot of ammunition the previous night, and another firefight like that would leave them perilously short.

It was to be avoided at all costs.

He glanced at the rear truck. Mahsoud was unchanged, and Carr would not have bet a great deal on his seeing home again. The two women had crashed completely, now – the exhaustion and relief had overwhelmed them, and both had surrendered their lives to fate.

Just before the sun sank over the horizon, he sent the sched to Nicholls.

And then, as the pale blue sky darkened and turned deep orange in the west, they mounted up and started south.

Twice, they saw the lights of vehicles moving some way off to their flank, but they were not close enough to warrant stopping and Carr just pushed on.

In the event, they reached the target area without encountering anyone.

There they halted, a hundred metres short of the road.

It was just after 10:00hrs.

Over to the east, they could just see the dark mass of the small town of Al Fuqaha. There was one light on in the whole place, and it was extinguished not long after they arrived.

Ahead of them, a wide, flat, straight strip of asphalt stretching left and right for several klicks.

If Carr had had time on his side, he’d have watched the highway and tried to establish something close to a pattern of life, but with three guys and a kilometre of road to clear, and only four or five hours to play with, he didn’t have that luxury.

So, after a quick scan of the area, they moved straight to the place on the ground where the lat and long marked the start of the strip, a couple of hundred metres before the point where the pilot would actually touch down, and began putting out the markers on either side of the road.

A couple of times, they removed debris – some unidentifiable strip of aluminium, a sizeable chunk of rock that had somehow found its way into the road – but, other than that, it was perfect for the job.

‘This is fucking ideal, man,’ said Skelton, over the comms, as they reached the end. ‘They’ve got better roads than ours.’

Carr smiled, and indicated to Kev McMullen that he should pull off into the desert.

The A400 was going to have to turn, and that would mean leaving the asphalt. He’d have liked to use a penetrometer to test the ground, but he didn’t have one, so the best they could do was to drive the vehicle out on the northern side and see what happened.