‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Ross,’ the clerk said, studiously avoiding eye contact with the foreigner. ‘Sign here, please.’ Kale signed the form and the clerk copied details from the passport before handing it back with a key. ‘Room twenty-two. Second floor.’ Kale crossed the dark hall to the old-fashioned elevator and pulled open the wrought-iron gate. The clerk watched him disappear as the cage moved slowly upwards, and he shivered. Perhaps it was the cold air that had come in with the stranger.

Kale’s room was drab and bare and smelled stale. The short narrow bed sagged in the middle. He dropped his bag by a cracked porcelain washbasin and lay back on the bed, lighting a cigarette.

He closed his eyes and smelled again the cordite and the dust that had stung his nostrils that scorching day on the Arabian Peninsula so many years before. The sergeant, a heavy ignorant man, shouting above the bursting of shells – a vivid image that had recalled itself often. The soldier beside Kale was dead, a man whom he barely knew. Soon the flies would settle on the body, feed on the wounds in the heat of the sun. Kale was sweating, pricked by fear and by heat. The whitewashed walls of the village had been reduced to rubble by the shelling from the rear. And still the rebels refused to move. Ragheads with Russian rifles. Kale crouched in the crater, his eyeline at ground level, trying to pick out the surviving figures in the smoke and dust that billowed out from the destruction. Five men from his unit had already moved a hundred yards out to his left and were trying to circle the north side of the target. The clipped tac-tac-tac of a machine gun came from not too far ahead and Kale saw two of the soldiers fall. This time the shots had not come from the enemy marksman who was so successfully keeping them pinned down.

‘For Christ’s sake give the bastards cover!’ the sergeant was bawling. Kale moved up, head and shoulders above the crater, his mouth dry. Again the machine gun sounded and this time Kale saw the rebel, moving through a gap in the wall to his right. He sighted fast and fired. The figure dropped in the dust. The gap had been no more than three feet, maybe two hundred metres distant. Almost at once a bullet struck the rim of the crater and threw up dust and rock splinters in his face. Kale pulled his head down sharply, blinking furiously as the dust stung his eyes. ‘Get that damned bloody sniper for Christ’s sake!’ the sergeant was shouting further along the line. ‘We can’t move till we get him.’ But he was not firing himself.