‘Knowing my luck I’ll get clipped tonight,’ he said, with a rueful half-grin.

‘Howay, man,’ said Skelton. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? Twenty years of dickheads shooting at you, and you’ve never had a scratch, bar that fucking Action Man scar on your chin. And even that’s just made yous a fanny magnet. Your luck, you’d jump into a barrel of shite and come out clean.’

‘Aye,’ said Carr. ‘I’m only kidding. If either of us get clipped it’s all went south, that’s for sure.’

That was true: at their level of seniority, John Carr and Geordie Skelton would not even be entering the target building. Grizzled old men like them would hang around at the back with the Squadron HQ element, directing the whole thing, while the young guys did the business.

The building in question was a pale grey, two-storey villa to the south of Masafi Street, in the hard-core Sunni suburb of Dora, on the southern bank of the meandering Tigris. Two hours ago, Carr had delivered the briefing – the last he would ever give – and had watched the blokes poring over the aerial photographs of the area, until every man-jack of them knew the place intimately. Each of the multiple assault teams had gone over its individual tasks, step-by-step, ensuring that they knew exactly which rooms each of them would clear, who would go through which door, what their limit of exploitation would be…

Nothing was left to chance: that was the only way to make sure – or as sure as possible – that you walked back out of the room you’d breached.

As ever, the intelligence picture was imperfect. The informant – who had been promised a lot of US dollars, a new ID and six seats on a US Air Force Globemaster out of Baghdad for himself and his family – was confident that Joker would be at the premises this evening, preparing a giant improvised explosive device for an attack on civilians in the central Shia district of Sadr City. What he could not say for sure was how many of Joker’s lieutenants and underlings would be there.

Carr thought back to the conversation he’d had with the spook who had provided the intelligence for tonight’s target.

‘We want them alive,’ the spook had said, looking down his nose at the thickset Scot – a difficult thing to do, given that Carr was a good six inches taller than he. ‘Especially Joker.’

Carr had shrugged. ‘Is that so?’ he’d said, with a smile. ‘You cannae even tell me what we’re up against.’

‘It’s very important,’ the intelligence officer had said.

‘Really?’ Carr had said. ‘Well, you’ll get him in whatever state he comes out of that building.’

And he’d stared directly into the eyes of the spook, until the man had been forced to look away. ‘But we need…’ he’d said, almost plaintively.