For those who’d never been there, it was easy to scoff at and dismiss as trite the notion of a ‘band of brothers’. But those who had been through the terror and the exhilaration, witnessed the raw brutality of mankind’s most destructive and pitiless endeavour, watched their comrades being maimed and killed and put themselves on the line right along with them, knew that that sense of kinship was the core experience of combat. The willingness to lay down your life to safeguard those of your brothers in arms was, ultimately, a form of love – one that forged some of the most intense and indelible bonds known to the human condition.

Ben was one of the minority of people who understood what that really meant. And so was Jaden Wolf.

Wolf was a few years younger than Ben, who had first met him as an intense, raw-boned twenty-three-year-old still fresh from his ascension from the Royal Marines to the hallowed ranks of UK Special Forces’ most elite unit, 22 SAS. Many young troopers from all throughout the British Army dreamed of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge with its Who Dares Wins motto; few of them dared to pit themselves against the bone-crushingly, soul-destroyingly arduous selection process, and fewer still, far fewer, ever made it through to achieving their goal.

For young Jaden Wolf, the journey to the regiment had been a particularly gruelling one, marked by failure, cruel disappointment and injury. On his first unlucky attempt to pass the notorious endurance phase of the twice-yearly selection course he’d slipped on ice, knocked himself unconscious, almost frozen to death in the mountains of the Brecon Beacons and had to be stretchered out with acute hypothermia, concussion and a badly dislocated shoulder, earning himself an automatic RTU by failing to finish. Though he’d been by no means the only candidate to have to return to his unit with his tail between his legs, he felt the humiliation deeply and spent the next year nursing his injured pride and training like a maniac before trying again.