‘Trousers too,’ Tony said.

  Al-Zafawi translated. The young man looked coy. Tony pulled off his own camo trousers and handed them over. He had to wait for the young man to move behind one of the vehicles and make the swap in privacy, before returning fully clad and handing Tony his trousers.

  ‘Tell him he must wear a shemagh.’

  ‘He would wear it anyway, in the storm.’

  ‘Just tell him. He needs to keep it on, even when he gets above the storm line. Explain that we don’t want the SAS team photographing him. Tell him he’ll become a high-value target if things go wrong.’

  Al-Zafawi explained this. The young man went to his vehicle and returned with his head wrapped in a shemagh. Tony looked him up and down. They were almost exactly the same height. The Taliban fighter was wearing Tony’s clothes. Holding his weapon. If Danny Black was lying in wait, he would certainly mistake this patsy for Tony.

  ‘You need to head north from Gareshk,’ Tony said, Al-Zafawi translating as he spoke. ‘When the road stops, leave your vehicle and keep heading directly north towards the mountains. It will take you half an hour to climb the foothills, then you’ll see a gulley heading up the mountain. You’ve got your phone?’

  The young man shook his head and pointed at Tony’s jacket. Tony felt in the pocket and took out an old mobile with a stubby aerial. He turned to Al-Zafawi. ‘This thing works up there?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When you see the gulley, stay hidden and wait for the word from us that we’re in position. It’s 03.00 hours now – I’m guessing you won’t hear from us until after sunrise. When you do, follow that gulley uphill. You’ll be safe while you’re doing that. But when the gulley enters the treeline again, that’s when you need to be careful. Scout the area carefully. Use all your skills. If you see any movement of personnel, alert us by phone. You understand?’

  The young man nodded as Al-Zafawi translated for Tony.

  ‘Then go.’ Tony put one arm on his shoulder. ‘You’re a brave guy. You’re looking out for your brothers. When we’ve finished this, we’ll all owe you.’

  The young man looked round at the others. For a moment, Tony thought he was having second thoughts. But then he bowed his head and moved towards his vehicle, still clutching Tony’s M4. Half a minute later, his red tail lights were disappearing out of the barn and into the storm.

  The remaining Taliban were muttering to each other, some of them casting glances at Tony. It was clear that they were suspicious of him. Tony didn’t care. They’d find out what he was doing sooner or later. Just so long as Al-Zafawi had enough authority to keep them moving.

  Which he did. The Taliban leader issued a single command and his team moved back into their vehicles. Tony folded up the map that was still spread out over the bonnet.

  ‘It’s over to you now, buster,’ he said. ‘Get us to the high ground. Let’s hunt some SAS.’

  The convoy didn’t return to the road. Instead, they headed north across bumpy open terrain, battered by the sandstorm, but with the ridge line of the mountain ahead occasionally appearing, illuminated by the bright Afghan moon.

  CHAPTER 24

  There were shapes.

  Caitlin didn’t know what they were. They hovered above her like ghosts. All she knew was the pain in her head, face and torso. Her lips and nose felt twice their usual size, and throbbed agonisingly. Her head was split. It hurt to breathe.

  She certainly didn’t know where she was.

  At first, she wondered if she was back in Australia. Maybe the shapes hovering over her were her mum and dad.

  But her mum and dad were long dead. She had nothing to be back in Australia for.

  One of the shapes spoke. It sounded distant, as if the voice was in another room. The language sounded guttural.

  Pashto.

  Caitlin inhaled noisily as awareness flooded back. Danny Black. Tommy and Gabina.

  Tony.

  She saw him in her mind. His crazed, deadly expression.

  She felt his fist in her face.

  Water. Someone was putting a cup to her lips. It was only as the fresh liquid flooded her mouth that she realised she could taste blood.

  She tried to sit up. Water spilled down her chin. Her torso shrieked with pain. Two voices started jabbering and a hand forced her back into a lying position.

  ‘No,’ she tried to say. ‘I have to go . . .’

  The shapes above her became more distinct. Women’s faces. One young, one old.

  ‘Mina,’ she whispered.

  Mina started to talk. She sounded half anxious, half relieved. Caitlin had another go at sitting up. It hurt, badly, but she managed it this time. She became aware of another sound: a howling, outdoors. Her vision was clearing. She was in a dark room, lit only by candles. Mina was standing above her, staring in wide-eyed concern. There were bowls of water on the floor. Bloodied cloths. They had clearly been tending her.

  Wincing, Caitlin got to her feet. She had to grab hold of Mina’s shoulder to steady herself. The grandmother looked on from the corner of the room in stony-faced disapproval. Mina started to speak again. Caitlin understood the gist of what she was saying: lie down, don’t move, stay here.

  But that was impossible. It wasn’t just that her presence here compromised the women. Danny and the others were in danger. She had to move.

  She took Mina’s hands in hers. Looked her in the eye. ‘Thank you, Mina,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Silenced, Mina gave a helpless smile as Caitlin released her and nodded at the grandmother, who would plainly not be sorry to see her go. She headed towards the exit of their poor house.

  ‘Hello!’ Mina spoke the single word of English, perhaps the only word she knew. Caitlin turned. Mina was holding up a fresh set of blue robes. Caitlin looked down at herself. Camo trousers, bloodied T-shirt. She accepted the robes gratefully, put them on and covered her head. Then Mina handed over a handgun. Caitlin recognised it as Tommy’s – the young girl must have taken it from her compound. She was a brave kid. With a final thank you, she stepped outside.

  She realised now what the howling was. A sandstorm raged around Panjika. At least that meant nobody else would be outside. She checked her watch. 03.15 hours. A couple of hours till dawn. She wrapped her headdress more tightly. It was a struggle just to move. Her whole body ached. But she forced herself forward. She was on the opposite side of the village to her own compound. She hurried through the storm to the little wooden bridge that forded the riverbed, keeping to the shadows, her head down. As she crossed it, she could see her compound fifty metres away, the door flapping open in the wind. It was the last thing she wanted to do: to revisit the corpses of Tommy and Gabina. But she had no option. By morning, the compound would be overrun. ANP, ANA, Taliban, all wanting to know what had happened in there. By then, she had to be gone.

  But first, she needed something.

  The door to the compound creaked open.

  The courtyard was empty, apart from the grotesque form of Gabina’s body dead on the ground. The walls offered some protection from the storm, but there was still a little sand drifting against the corpse. Caitlin averted her eyes as she passed the young woman – though she couldn’t help noticing that the body was already starting to smell in the warm night air. She approached Tommy’s room. The smell was worse in here. Tommy’s bloodied eyes had clotted over, giving him the full horror show look. Caitlin forced herself to look elsewhere. Tommy’s comms equipment was in the far corner of the room. Danny had taken Caitlin’s sat phone, but she knew Tommy had a spare here somewhere. She needed it, because she had to get in touch with Spearpoint. As she rummaged through Tommy’s stuff in the dark, Tony’s words echoed in her head. When I catch up with Danny Black – and I will do that, with a little help from my friends – I’ll tell him exactly what happened here.

  What friends did he mean? Dexter and Cole? They were dead. Tony had admitted that. There was nobody else.

  The next words you’re going to say, Caitlin, will be Al-Zafawi’s exact location.

  Why would Tony need to know that?

  There was only one reason, so far as Caitlin could tell.

  Spearpoint would surely know by now that Tony was AWOL. Danny and the team would have been tasked to hunt him down. But they would be expecting Tony to be alone. Whereas Tony, she knew, had other plans. Spearpoint needed to know about them.

  She found Tommy’s spare sat phone. Took it out into the storm and powered it up. Dialled the access number.

  Nothing. The link was down.

  She cursed. Perhaps it was something to do with the storm. She tried again.

  No signal.

  She felt dizzy. Like she was going to pass out again. She steadied herself with one hand against the wall.

  Tried to think.

  With great difficulty, she pictured the map that Brooker had shown them outside the deserted village. He had pinpointed the cache location. That was where Tony would be, eventually. And if Tony was there, Danny surely wouldn’t be far behind.

  Clutching the sat phone, blasted by the swirling sand, she stumbled as fast as her agonised body would allow, out of the compound and towards the copse where Tony had laid into her and where she had left her Hilux. Minutes later, she was burning out of Panjika, visibility massively compromised by the sandstorm and her blurred sight, her body aching, the anxiety in her mind as sharp as the pain in her broken ribs.

  03.30 hours.

  The Taliban convoy came to a halt.

  They were still in the foothills. Tony estimated that, as the crow flew, they were a klick from the cache. That klick would lead them through densely forested, steeply undulating terrain. But they were taking the long way round. At the base of a scree slope they parked their vehicles in a dried-out wadi where sand was drifting up against the western side. The Taliban team started tooling up. Al-Zafawi threw Tony a shemagh to protect himself from the sand. He pointed up the slope.

  ‘That way,’ he shouted. ‘The ground is difficult at first, but then there is a path that heads west.’

  ‘How long till we get to the top of the ravine?’ Tony bellowed back as he wrapped the shemagh round his head.

  Al-Zafawi thought for a moment as he too wrapped his head. ‘Two hours.’ He looked Tony up and down. ‘My men are used to this terrain,’ he said, ‘and to these conditions. Maybe you will find it too difficult.’

  Tony sneered. ‘One of these days, you and me can do the fan dance.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Tell your men to get ready. We head up there right now.’

  Al-Zafawi inclined his head in acknowledgement. But before he turned to give the order, Tony grabbed him by the arm. The Taliban leader clearly didn’t like being touched. His hissed something in Pashto, and struggled. That was fine by Tony.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, buster,’ he shouted over the storm. ‘That once we get on target, you can do away with me. You can’t. You’ll never find that bullion if I don’t show you where it is. You got that?’

  They locked gazes for a full ten seconds through the gaps in their shemaghs. Al-Zafawi shook Tony off and shouted the move order to his men.

  Caitlin had to stop more than once.

  It wasn’t the pain in her body that was the problem. It wasn’t the storm. It was her head. She guessed she was concussed. Every twenty minutes or so the world would spin, her eyes would roll and nausea would flood over her. The swirling sand outside seemed to be in her head at the same time. She had to pull over on the side of the road. Take deep breaths. Hold her head in her hands until the nausea passed and she could operate the vehicle without taking it off-road in a moment of dizziness. Whenever she stopped, she tried to make sat phone contact with Spearpoint. Occasionally there was a distorted sound of electrical interference. Mostly, there was nothing. So she would drive again, until the next time her faculties let her down. The going was very slow. The panic in her gut was rising.

  Tony and the Taliban team trudged in single file through the storm. There were four guys ahead of Tony. Looking up at them, he was reminded of old pictures of Antarctic explorers forcing their way through life-sapping blizzards. Here, the blizzard was the sandstorm blasting them from all sides. The scree, though, was just as slippery underfoot as snow. Even though he was fully clad and wrapped in his shemagh, Tony felt as though sand had contaminated every part of his body. His tongue was leathery, his eyes watered. The wind howled deafeningly around him.

  He kept going. He could almost taste the prize. Sure, once Danny Black was out of the way he would have to deal with Al-Zafawi and his men. There was no way they intended to let him disappear with half the bullion. But if Tony had learned anything over the past few days it was this: he had a gift for getting people out of the way. This bunch of Taliban SF wannabes would hardly present a problem.

  And then what? Once he had his bullion, where would he go? The UK was out of the question of course. Maybe central Africa. There were a thousand places where a former SAS guy could live comfortably and go the full Lord Lucan while everyone forgot all about him.

  He snapped his attention back to the job in hand. There was work to do before he could consider his next move. Namely: Danny Black. Tony felt a keen tang of anticipation at the idea of putting that cunt out of action permanently. It was just a shame he’d been disturbed before he could do the same to Caitlin.

  Talk about a missed opportunity.

  There was a shout from one of the guys above him. Tony peered up. The lead Taliban appeared to have cleared the storm line. Tony quickened his pace and soon he, too, was clear of it. He removed his shemagh and breathed a lungful of sand-free air. It was cooler here than down on the desert floor. As the remaining Taliban congregated, he saw that they were on the edge of the treeline. A path led into it, heading west just as Al-Zafawi had said.

  As Tony was looking towards the trees, he was aware of the Taliban surrounding him. He turned to face them. They had murder on their minds, no doubt about it. But not yet. Tony was still useful to them, and so they were holding back. More fool them.

  ‘Move,’ Tony said. ‘The sun will be up in forty-five minutes. We need to get into position.’

  Al-Zafawi clearly didn’t like being ordered around, but gave the instruction. The Taliban patrol moved west. Tony trod carefully in more ways than one.

  05.00 hours.

  Dawn arrived slowly. Danny and his team were protected from the rising sun by the peaks and forests on all sides of their position, so the transition from darkness to steely grey was almost imperceptible. Danny wondered if the storm was still blowing beneath them. Up here, in the hills, he had no way of knowing.

  Since installing himself in the harsh thicket of his OP, Danny hadn’t moved. Nor had there been any sign of the others. The four armed men, their weapons trained on the booby-trapped cache, were completely invisible even when you knew they were there. For Danny, the only evidence of their existence was the occasional whispered acknowledgement over comms. After fifteen minutes, Murray had confirmed that he’d successfully made contact with Spearpoint, who were aware of their situation. Apart from that, a half-hourly check-in to confirm all was well.

  But there had been too many of those half-hourly check-ins for Danny’s liking. Doubts had started to creep into his thinking. Where was their target? Danny had been so sure that Tony’s priority would be to get to the cache and, like any self-respecting Regiment man, he would want to take advantage of the SAS’s best friend: the cover of darkness. But darkness had left them. Did that mean Tony had something else in mind? Had Danny got it wrong?

  The pain in his left shoulder was worse than ever. The whole of one side of his torso had gone numb. He had a bad feeling it was infected. In this heat, without proper medical care, that could be dangerous. But he couldn’t tend to it now. All he could do was lie and wait until the man who’d given him the wound in the first place arrived.

  Suck it up, Danny, he told himself. Suck it up.

  Brooker’s voice came over the comms. ‘How long do we give it?’

  Danny panned up and down the ravine with his weapon’s sights. Nothing but grey rock, slate-coloured scree and deep green conifers. ‘As long as it takes,’ he said, with more confidence than he felt.

  Spearpoint.

  The ops room was silent. The unit had made contact two hours previously, but since then: nothing. Cadogan sat in a chair, staring up at the screen on the wall, which gave him none of the information he wanted to know: what was happening on the ground, and was Tony Wiseman still alive? The rest of the Spearpoint personnel did the same. Nobody spoke or even moved. Twelve men, anxiously waiting for intel.

  Cadogan’s phone rang. Almost everyone in the room started. He answered it quickly.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Ray Hammond. ‘What news?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have you been able to raise the Panjika team?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Caitlin hasn’t phoned in?’

  ‘What do you want from me, my dear chap? I said I haven’t heard from them.’

  A pause.

  ‘Black and his men will pull this off,’ Hammond said. ‘They’re the best we have.’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ Cadogan said. ‘For all our sakes.’

  He killed the line and went back to waiting.

  The rocky path through the conifers was treacherous. There were fissures in the ground, often camouflaged by dead wood. Two of the Taliban team had twisted their ankles and were limping their way through the mountainside forest. They were quiet enough, and moved more deftly than Tony had expected, but it helped when dawn crept through the trees, lighting their way a little. But dawn was also a warning. They needed to get into position.

  05.35 hours. The lead Taliban guy held up one hand. Tony and Al-Zafawi approached him. He was standing by a fallen tree trunk. As they approached, he pointed south, down the hill. Tony saw that they were on the edge of the treeline. And peering down, he saw scenery he recognised.