‘You’ve still got time to change your mind. Switch to Plan B. Step on the gas and we could be in Scotland in eight hours or less. No more sneaking around. Gloves off, hit these fuckers hard and fast and get your lady out of danger. I’m just saying, think about it.’

Ben had thought about little else all night. The unbearable urge to do exactly what Wolf was talking about was burning holes in his heart like a drip-feed of acid. But he couldn’t take the risk. His throat was tight as he replied, ‘There is no Plan B, Jaden, so don’t tempt me. I have no idea how many men are watching her, how close they are and how many more could be stationed all around the village waiting for me to turn up. I have to assume she’s in their crosshairs at all times, and that they can kill her in a split second if they so much as catch a whiff of trouble.’

‘There’s two of us now,’ Wolf said. ‘We’ve done it before.’

‘And been beaten before. Remember Yemen.’

Years earlier, an American photojournalist called Hal Simmons had been taken hostage in Yemen by Al Qaeda fundamentalists, who were keeping their prisoner deep inside a maze of cave tunnels and issuing threats to execute him if the USA refused to release ten captured terrorists from Guantanamo Bay. With time running out before the execution deadline, Ben and Wolf had been among the joint SAS and Navy Seals task force deployed from an air base in Djibouti to rescue him. Just weeks earlier, the same team had successfully recovered two Turkish hostages in a helicopter-borne assault on a fortified stronghold in the Shabwah region of the country, and official hopes were high that they could pull the same trick off again. Intelligence reports suggested that only a handful of Al Qaeda fighters were guarding the cave complex.

But as the Special Forces operatives penetrated the tunnels, they swiftly discovered that the enemy capability was far higher than expected. During the ensuing ferocious firefight, Simmons’ guards had decided to cut their losses. Ben’s unit had come across the decapitated body of Hal Simmons several hours later. A gruesome and harrowing reminder that even the most highly trained elite soldiers in the world were not invulnerable to failure.

Wolf grimaced. ‘Yeah, I remember Yemen. Bad break.’

‘I’m not letting the same thing happen to Grace, just because I decided to play the hero and go storming in like Flynn with no knowledge of what we’re up against,’ Ben said. ‘As I see it, getting to Abbott is our best option, if we’ve any chance of finding a way inside this witch cult or whatever the hell it is. We’ve bought ourselves a little time and I intend to use it.’

‘It’s your call,’ Wolf said. ‘I just hope it’s the right one.’