‘They can.’

  ‘Then understand this. If Holroyd gets his way, every single person at Spearpoint is implicated. What you hear within those four walls goes no further if any of you want to stay in a job.’ He nodded at Cadogan. ‘I have arrangements to make,’ he said. ‘Let me know immediately if the situation changes.’

  Cadogan’s eyes narrowed as Hammond’s screen went blank.

  Dawn.

  The unit’s body clock was all messed up, so they had risen before the sun. Not that any of them had fully been asleep. Cole’s dozing had been restless, occasionally muttering something in his disturbed half-slumber. Tony and Dexter had been wide awake, eyes pinned open, staring at the ceiling.

  Waiting.

  Cole had sat up suddenly. Stared around the room, as if momentarily unsure where he was. ‘I need a piss,’ he muttered, and staggered sleepily towards the door and out.

  Tony and Dexter sat up. Tony switched the light on. He looked askance at Dexter, who nodded. Dexter pulled off his T-shirt to reveal his muscular torso and full sleeve of tattoos. He removed his boots, then made a clicking sound to Baron and opened the door. The dog understood the unspoken instruction perfectly: it stood up from where it was curled at Dexter’s bed still wearing its ops vest, and took up position in the corridor. Dexter rummaged around in his pack and pulled out a pair of plastic SOCO gloves, which he folded carefully and put into the pocket of his camo trousers. Then he removed a spare pair of trousers, which he slung over his shoulder.

  ‘You know what to do?’ Tony said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Dexter left, leaving the door slightly ajar. Tony heard him tell Baron to stay before he turned left down the corridor towards the washrooms.

  Tony’s Sig was holstered on a small table by his bunk. He sat on the edge of his bed, took the weapon out of its holster and removed the magazine. He cocked the empty weapon. Fired it. The mechanism felt perfect. He cocked it again just as the door opened and Cole entered.

  Cole stood in the doorway. Stared at Tony, who was holding the weapon up at him. Hesitated.

  Tony smiled. ‘Relax, buddy. What you think I’m going to do? Nail you?’

  He squeezed the trigger. The mechanism fired with an empty click.

  As Cole entered the room, Tony lowered the weapon again. Examined it. ‘Fucking thing doesn’t feel right,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Cole said, sitting on the edge of his bunk.

  ‘Ah, I dunno. Sticky. Here.’ He handed it by the barrel over to Cole. ‘You’re the firearms guy. What do you think?’

  Cole didn’t take it for a moment. Then he shrugged and grabbed the handle. He cocked and discharged the weapon several times. ‘Feels okay to me,’ he said. ‘Chuck us the magazine.’

  Tony did exactly that. He watched silently as Cole examined the lip of the mag for dents, then loaded it into the Sig. He cocked and released the handgun another couple of times. ‘Sweet as,’ he said. He cocked it for a final time, made it safe and then handed it back to Tony, who had just stood up and was walking to the far side of the room.

  ‘Thanks, mucker. Stick it on the bedside table, will you?’

  Cole gave him an evil look, clearly unimpressed at being spoken to like a lackey. But he did as Tony asked.

  ‘Nice one,’ Tony said. He was standing by the door now, and he could see Dexter waiting just outside. The SOCO gloves were on, but he was no longer carrying the spare camo trousers.

  They locked gazes. Tony nodded.

  It happened in seconds. Any longer and Cole would have had the opportunity to fight back. Dexter entered the room. Marched straight up to the bedside table. Took the weapon in one gloved hand. Checked that it was cocked. Clicked off the safety. Closed in on Cole who was still sitting on the edge of his bed. Put the gun to his unit mate’s right temple. Fired.

  There was no suppressor. The weapon gave a full retort as the slug slammed into Cole’s head. The result was catastrophic. At least a third of the skull blew away, scattering a gruesome cocktail of hair, bone and brain matter over his bunk and the wall against which it sat. Cole crumpled sideways on to the bed in an instant, his death sudden, heavy and mundane. Dexter immediately dropped the weapon, fresh with his victim’s prints, on the ground where it would have naturally fallen had Cole administered the shot himself.

  Blood poured heavily from Cole’s skull and soaked quickly into the mattress on his bunk. The splashback had been limited but not non-existent: there were spots of red on Dexter’s SOCO gloves and spattered on his torso and camo trousers.

  ‘Get in the shower,’ Tony said. ‘Hide the camo trousers and the gloves. We’ll get rid of them when we can.’

  Dexter gave him a ‘don’t tell me what to do’ look, then marched out of the room. As he left, he gave Baron a single instruction: ‘Noise.’ The dog responded immediately with several sharp barks.

  Tony checked his clothes. Having moved across the room before Dexter entered, he was entirely free of blood spatter. But his work was only just beginning. He needed to get out of here. The unit was accommodated about thirty metres from the nearest ANA accommodation block. They’d have heard the gunshot in there, and would be able to hear the Malinois barking right now. But Tony estimated it would be approximately ninety seconds before anybody got to the scene. That gave him another forty-five seconds or so.

  He ran ten metres down the corridor. The toilets were on the right, the showers on the left. He turned into the toilets. Entered. Unbuckled his belt. Undid the button on his camo trousers. Paused, listening at the door. The dog was still barking.

  He only had to wait about twenty seconds before he heard footsteps and shouting. He stepped into one of the line of three cubicles and flushed the chain. Then stepped out into the corridor, doing up his button, the noise of the flush ongoing as the door shut behind him. There were four ANA soldiers approaching the bunk room. Two of them were carrying pistols. To Tony’s trained eye, they looked like a bunch of amateurs. But they were here, and that was what mattered. They were evidently apprehensive about approaching the barking Malinois, but one of them was braver than the others and got close enough to the open door to look in. He started shouting dramatically in Pashto. The others crowded round him.

  ‘Hey!’ Tony shouted above the chaotic noise of the dog barking and the soldiers talking anxiously to each other. He did up his belt as he strode towards them. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ As he reached the congregation around the door, he pushed through them to look into the bunk room.

  He stared, as if in shock. The ANA guys fell silent, although the dog was still barking. The animal was clearly on edge. Its teeth were bared, and it was looking around for its handler.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ Tony stepped back, shaking his head. ‘Dexter,’ he breathed. Then he shouted: ‘Dexter, get here, now!’

  Dexter was already emerging into the corridor from the shower rooms opposite the toilets. His hair and beard were wet. He was wearing the new camo trousers. Beads of water dripped down his torso. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he said.

  ‘Get Holroyd.’

  ‘Why? What the fuck—’

  ‘Cole’s done himself in. Get him now!’

  But there was no need. Holroyd was running down the corridor, red-faced. He pushed through the ANA soldiers. They complained loudly in Pashto and the area around the door was chaos again. ‘Can’t you stop this dog barking?’ Holroyd shouted.

  Something seemed to flip in the dog’s behaviour. It lurched forward, clearly disturbed, and bit one of the ANA soldiers around the ankle, an aggressive growl emanating from its throat. The ANA soldier screamed in pain and the crowd around the door was suddenly twice as noisy. Dexter shouted a command at the Malinois and the dog released its bite. The soldier staggered back, then crouched down to grab his bleeding ankle while the other soldiers fell silent again. He gave Dexter a poisonous look as the SAS man bent down to calm the dog, who was still snarling and baring his teeth.

  As he did this, Holroyd was standing in the doorway, staring silently into the room. He swore under his breath.

  Tony turned his back on the room. Pinched his forehead. He felt Holroyd’s hand on his shoulder. ‘You okay?’ the RMP man said.

  ‘I was just having a shit,’ Tony said. ‘Dexter was in the shower.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘I shouldn’t have fucking left him on his own. I knew he wasn’t right. He’d been up all night, talking. Couldn’t shut him up. I didn’t think he’d . . .’ He left it hanging as he looked over his shoulder into the room again. ‘Jesus, he used my fucking gun . . .’

  Holroyd grabbed him by both shoulders. ‘Listen to me. It’s not your fault, okay? If somebody wants to top themselves on an army base, there’s a million opportunities. This isn’t on you.’

  ‘We should have kept an eye on him.’

  ‘Will you stay out of there!’ Holroyd barked at one of the ANA guys who had just set foot inside the room. Dexter was looking, ashen-faced, into the room, shaking his head. ‘Listen,’ Holroyd said. ‘You’re my guys, okay? You understand that? Stuff like this . . .’ He pointed into the room. ‘This is why we need to lift the lid on what’s going on.’

  They stared at him, dumbly.

  ‘From now on, you’re with the good guys, okay? The Regiment needs its wings clipping, and the three of us, we’re going to do that. Okay?’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Okay?’

  Tony and Dexter nodded. Dexter clicked his fingers and Baron was immediately by his side. He knelt down to stroke the dog while Holroyd stepped up to the room and firmly closed the door. ‘Nobody enters,’ he told the ANA guys. They seemed to understand the gist of his instructions because they stepped back from the door.

  ‘I’ll get the medical boys here immediately,’ Holroyd told Tony and Dexter. ‘I’ll inform Hereford and we’ll get him repatriated as soon as possible. You don’t talk. Anybody tries to tap you up about what happened, you let me know. Understood?’

  Tony and Dexter nodded.

  Holroyd pointed at the dog. ‘That animal needs to be isolated.’ When Dexter looked like he was going to complain, Holroyd interrupted him. ‘Don’t tell me he doesn’t like kennels. I don’t want to hear it. The Afghans won’t tolerate it attacking their men. It’s for the animal’s own safety.’

  ‘Safety my arse,’ Dexter said. ‘He’s more vulnerable where they can—’

  ‘He’s right,’ Tony interrupted, and when Dexter looked like arguing, he repeated himself. ‘He’s right.’ Dexter didn’t look happy, but he backed down.

  ‘Come on,’ Holroyd said. ‘Let’s get you two out of here.’

  He turned on his heel and marched down the corridor. Tony and Dexter followed, the Malinois trotting obediently behind. It showed no sign of its former aggression. At one point, the two SAS men glanced at each other. But they didn’t hold their gaze for long. They had an appearance of shock and mourning to keep up, after all.

  There were times when the four walls of Caitlin Wallace’s tiny room inside her compound started to close in on her. Times when she needed to get outside, without being shadowed by Tommy or by her interpreter. This was one of them.

  The night had been long, and she’d slept poorly. There were too many questions going round in her head. Why had Spearpoint blocked her from questioning the local Imam about Al-Zafawi, the Taliban leader? Surely that was exactly the kind of intel she was on the ground to gather. She could have seen to it that the Imam wasn’t in a state to tip Al-Zafawi off, and if she wasn’t allowed to follow up her leads, what was the point of being here in the first place? These were the questions that circled in her brain, and which continued to circle as, in the quiet darkness of the half hour before dawn, she strapped on her handgun, covered her camo gear, boots and T-shirt with blue robes, wrapped a headdress around her head so only her eyes were showing, and stepped out into the street.

  It was deserted. The call to prayer had not yet been sounded, nor had the inhabitants of the small town of Panjika emerged from their houses. Caitlin had only walked a few paces before admitting to herself that this was not a random pre-dawn walk. She had a destination this morning. She kept to the shadows as she hurried past compounds and individual dwellings, along the ramshackle main street of the village and past the pitiful shops that were all shuttered up. She arrived at the mosque in about five minutes and stood, for a moment, in the shadow of a single tree about thirty metres from the building, watching its entrance.

  It was not an impressive-looking place, although the cover of darkness made it look less like a building site, despite the silhouettes of steel reinforcing rods from the reconstructed corner sprouting up into the sky. Caitlin stared at the entrance for a couple of minutes, before swearing under her breath. She didn’t even know why she was here. What the hell did she think was going to happen? That Al-Zafawi would stroll up to the mosque while she was watching and waiting? In any case, the implication from her source had been that Al-Zafawi visited the Imam at the family compound on the other side of the dried-up riverbed behind the mosque. And even if she saw him, what would Caitlin do? Her instructions from Spearpoint were clear: don’t follow that line of inquiry.

  But why? Five minutes passed and the questions started circling her head again.

  So much so that she almost missed it.

  The movement had come from the eastern corner of the mosque, to Caitlin’s two o’clock. For a moment she thought she’d imagined it. But then a bird, clearly disturbed by something, flew up from the same position. There had definitely been somebody there.

  Caitlin pressed herself up against the tree trunk. Her pulse had suddenly accelerated. She had the unnerving feeling that somebody had been watching her.

  Get back to the compound, she told herself. You don’t need a confrontation now . . .

  She glanced back the way she came. And the voice in her head that had just advised caution instantly acknowledged that she was going to do nothing of the sort.

  Caitlin slipped her right hand into a slit in her robes and loosened her pistol in its holster. She kept it hidden, but held it firmly as she stepped out from beneath the tree and crossed the open ground towards the mosque, scanning left and right. She moved silently and reached the front of the mosque in under thirty seconds. There she stopped and listened. It was almost unnaturally silent. She crept towards the corner of the mosque. She removed her handgun. Held it head height, barrel up. She quickly turned the corner and scanned the ground in front of her.

  Nothing.

  Only then did she feel the unmistakable pressure of a gun barrel against the back of her head.

  She froze.

  Very slowly, she lowered her weapon. Made it safe, then dropped it on the ground.

  A male voice spoke. ‘Desert boots under your robes. A Sig nine millimetre. Call me cynical, but I’m thinking you’re not quite who you seem.’

  Caitlin blinked heavily. That voice seemed out of place, here in the humid darkness of a Helmand dawn. But there was no doubt that she recognised it.

  Slowly, she removed her headdress. Turned round to face the gunman.

  He didn’t look good. He had scruffy black hair. Several days’ stubble. His face was pale and although his pistol was still raised in his right hand, he held his left as if it was broken.

  ‘Call me cynical,’ Caitlin said, ‘but I’m thinking that you, arriving here, right now – that’s probably not good news. Am I right, Danny Black, or am I right?’

  CHAPTER 15

  Danny lowered his weapon. Looked around the deserted area. ‘You should put your headdress back on,’ he said. ‘Women don’t walk the streets of—’

  ‘You’re really going to mansplain to me what the women of this village do and don’t do?’ Caitlin bit back in her spiky Australian accent. But she did put the headdress back on.

  Danny allowed himself a smile. He liked Caitlin. Maybe a little too much. She’d made it pretty clear on a previous op that she was interested in him. He’d turned her down and she’d embarked on a short-lived fling with Tony, of all people. But there was always that frisson between them whenever they saw each other.

  ‘Jesus, Danny,’ she said, ‘you scared the living crap out of me there. What the fuck are you doing here? Last I heard you were on Tony’s team.’

  ‘Didn’t work out,’ Danny said.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Stole a vehicle. It’s in a ditch on the north side of the village.’ He looked around. ‘Where can we talk?’

  ‘Back at my compound.’

  ‘Who else is there?’

  ‘My interpreter. And Tommy – you know, D squadron.’

  Danny shook his head. He had his doubts about making contact even with Caitlin. If he was to stay dark, he needed to keep his location a secret from anyone else with the ability to report it back to Hereford. ‘Anywhere else? We need to get off the street. It’s going to get light any minute.’

  Caitlin thought for a moment. ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  She led Danny further up the main street, turning left by a line of old motorbikes, up to a two-storey building with heavy shutters on the ground floor. ‘I know the woman who lives here,’ Caitlin said. ‘Her old man and daughter are in hospital. Little boy died in a road bomb a couple of nights back. I’ve been helping her out. She doesn’t speak any English.’

  Caitlin led them up a rough external staircase to the first floor. She knocked lightly, then let herself in through the unlocked door and removed her headdress. Danny found himself in a poor living space. The only light came from a flickering gas lamp whose yellow flame illuminated mattresses in two corners, a rickety table with four chairs and an ancient gas stove. A woman lay on one of the mattresses. Her ankle was bandaged and her face covered with steristrips. She was muttering deliriously to herself and didn’t seem to register Danny and Caitlin’s arrival.

  ‘She was hurt by the IED,’ Caitlin murmured. ‘I think she’ll pull through, but for now . . .’ She waved one arm around the room as if to indicate that this was now their domain. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Danny? What’s happening?’