Her reply came in strained, venomous Mandarin. He didn’t need to understand the language to know she was not being cooperative. He withdrew. She gasped, spitting blood.

The special forces operative had been trained to resist torture, as he had. It was impossible to hold out for ever – sooner or later, everyone broke – but he doubted he could bring her to that point in just twenty-seven minutes, even if she lived that long.

He straightened for another look at the panel, only to wince at the pain in his own chest. At least three rounds had hit him. Their journey through the soldier’s body had robbed them of most of their energy, but they had still had enough force to tear into his flesh. His clothing felt sticky – he was bleeding. He needed to see how badly he had been hurt; he couldn’t afford to pass out halfway through disarming the nuke. He turned towards the light—

Wu stabbed at the keypad. A bleep as her finger hit a button. She tried to enter the last digit – only for Eddie to crack his empty gun against her forehead so hard it slammed her into an unconsciousness from which she would never emerge. ‘That’s for hitting my little girl, you fucking bitch.’

He dropped his weapon and retrieved hers, using its light to examine his wounds. Three bullet hits; two were painful but relatively superficial, buried in his pectoral muscles. The third was deeper, having tunnelled into the flesh at the left side of his chest beneath his arm. Every movement produced a sharp, burning pain.

All he could do for now was endure it. He squeezed his arm against the injury to compress it, grimacing as nerve endings flared, then turned back to the cylinder. Bomb defusal – including various nuclear devices – had been part of his SAS training, and it wasn’t the first time he had been face to face with a live nuke. He still had a large scar from the crude but effective method he’d used to prevent another from exploding: jamming his arm into the explosive-propelled piston acting as a detonator.

He pulled away the canvas. That approach wouldn’t work this time. He didn’t recognise the bomb type, and the drum containing the warhead was sealed by heavy-duty bolts and screws with special star-shaped slots that a normal screwdriver would be unable to turn. The only apparent weak point was the detonator itself, the box on the cylinder’s side. It too was attached by non-standard screws – but there was a narrow gap where its case was not quite flush against the bomb.

He shone the light inside. A skein of wires was visible a couple of inches in, entering a small hole in the bomb casing. Could he cut them?