Moving quickly on, they found a rear service entrance to the main building and filtered inside, pistols ready. Ben had been hoping for two effects of his surprise diversion attack. Firstly, that it would disorientate and unnerve the enemy and scatter them through the castle as they responded to go hunting for their attackers. By Ben’s reckoning he could expect to encounter eleven armed men in all, including Hacker. His second expectation was that their military training would have impelled them to split up into two- or three-man teams. From the enemy’s point of view, the tactic gave them a better chance of flushing out the intruders they would by now expect to be invading their fortress. From Ben’s, it also made it easier for him and Boonzie to deal with them, one team at a time.

It wasn’t long before Ben’s plan turned out to have been right. As he and Boonzie pressed into the pitch blackness of the castle’s interior they soon encountered the first attempt at resistance. It came in the form of a pair of bobbing tactical weapon lights that suddenly became visible at the head of a long, broad corridor and came slowly their way, sweeping left and right as the two men holding the weapons to which they were attached searched for living targets in the darkness. Ben had expected Hacker’s Dishonourable reinforcements to come heavily tooled up, and this was no surprise to him.

Instead, the surprise was all theirs. Because while weapon-mounted lights offered the user a fine advantage in night-time combat, they also presented the major disadvantage of giving your opponent something to aim at in the dark. And for the SAS, the dark was their element of choice.

The four pistol shots ripped out of the shadows like a single staccato burst from a submachine gun. The two lights faltered and the murky figures behind them crumpled and thumped to the floor. Ben and Boonzie closed swiftly in. One of the fallen men jerked and struggled on the floor, not yet dead. Ben shot him in the head and he went limp. No time for mercy.

Neither of the corpses was Hacker. One had a missing ear, the other a patch over his left eye. A pretty twosome, bringing Ben’s mental tally of enemy casualties to a total of six so far, with nine more to go.

‘Just like auld times, eh?’ Boonzie chuckled softly at Ben’s shoulder. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Ben was about to reply when the one-eyed dead man’s phone suddenly started to vibrate in his pocket. Ben hesitated, then crouched down to pick it up and answer the call. He stayed silent as a deep, rumbling voice that wasn’t Hacker’s said, ‘Socket? We heard gunfire. What’s happening? You find him yet?’

Ben answered, ‘No, I found Socket. Now I’m coming for the rest of you.’