The waterboarding had silenced him, perhaps even killed him. She considered this. How she felt about him being dead. She’d thought – no, imagined it for such a long time. The last breath he took symbolized for her the first breath she might take of her new life.

Or so she had believed.

Her previous life rushed up to meet these thoughts. She was a medic. She was there to save lives, not take them. All the bodies she had tended, all the terrified eyes that had looked into her own. All the trembling hands she had held.

It’s okay, soldier. I’m here. Her internal voice reminded her of her words of comfort.

But she and Sugarboy had decided that the only way to get out of this was for him to die. It was the only way to be free. He was the prison she carried with her. Even thinking of him brought back the smell and the horror of what had been done to her there.

The problem was she’d always assumed that Sugarboy would be here with her. And Sugarboy was dead.

The horror of that hit her again. Sugarboy was gone and that meant the decision had to be hers and hers alone.

A spluttered cough from below brought her abruptly back to the present, and the reality that he wasn’t dead. Not yet. She took her torch and directed it into the hole. The sand had shifted and re-formed round him, just as it had done round their camp in Afghanistan. Running the torch over his hooded head, she saw him flinch, but he said nothing.

She had vowed to shut him up, and it appeared she had. Where was his cajoling voice, his psychological manipulation of her thinking, her very being?

Fear reappeared, surging through her like electricity.

Her plan had worked up to this point, but what would happen now? Her imagined success, she acknowledged, had unnerved her, making her query her actions.

That’s what always happened in his presence. He had been the unquestioned leader of their enterprise. How had that happened? Even Sugarboy, after they’d been released, had willingly gone along with the plan he put into action.

But that was before I told Sugarboy what he’d done. Told him in detail. Every word, every time he’d forced me to do what he wanted.

She was wet from the relentless creep of the incoming tide and the constant spray from the running water above. But she wasn’t shivering because she was cold, she was shivering because she was afraid. Afraid of what she was capable of. Of what she was incapable of.

He moaned a little, as though in sympathy.

Why had he not fought his way out of the net? Where was his knife and why had he not used it? One cough turned to three as he struggled to raise himself up.