Another quality Ben had liked in him, even though it was a decidedly non-military one, was the caring attitude he showed towards animals. On one occasion, when Ben’s unit entered a remote Iraqi village while hunting renegade Islamist insurgents, the SAS troops had found a tumbledown building that they initially suspected housed a cell of enemy fighters, only to discover that it was being used as stabling for a small herd of horses and mules, all of them badly undernourished and living in filth. He remembered Wolf’s disgust and anger at the appalling condition in which the poor beasts were being kept. After giving their keeper a severe dressing down, the young trooper had personally seen to it that the animals were cleaned up and given food and fresh bedding. When it came time for the unit to move on, Wolf was reluctant to leave the horses behind.

Wolf’s love of animals hadn’t always earned him the admiration of his superiors, however. Eighteen months after the horse incident, Wolf had returned from two weeks’ leave with a leg in plaster, the result of having thrown himself in front of a car to save a dog from being run over. Anyone who loved Man’s best friend that much had to get Ben’s approval – but the SAS top brass were not amused. A critical mission that had been months in the planning very nearly got screwed up as a result of Wolf’s having to be replaced at short notice, and he faced disciplinary action for turning up for duty half crippled. Only when Ben had intervened in the matter to plead his case had Wolf been spared from administrative punishment.

It wasn’t so long after that affair that Ben’s own military days drew to a close. After thirteen long and sometimes difficult years he finally quit the regiment to pursue his solo career, implementing his skills in service of innocent victims of the kidnap and ransom industry. Some time after, he’d heard through the grapevine that Wolf had quit, too, though nobody seemed to know where he’d gone afterwards.

Ben had always wondered where Wolf might have ended up. A lot of ex-SAS guys drifted into high-level security work, getting paid fat tax-free dollars for consulting on oilfield protection in the Persian Gulf or keeping VIPs safe from the bullets of assassins. Others went the less salubrious mercenary route, enabling the rulers of tin-pot nations to overthrow and butcher their neighbours, or sometimes to persecute and oppress their own citizens. A smaller minority became employed by secretive government agencies at home or abroad, doing work that was no less dark and dirty but highly lucrative. Some stayed in contact with their old army pals. But Jaden Wolf seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Now, it seemed that Ben was about to catch up once again with his former comrade.

If only he could find him first.

Chapter 7