‘Movement to the north.’ Brooker’s voice, low and urgent.

  Danny twisted his head to look up the gulley. A figure had emerged from the treeline. Male. Afghan. Distance: eighty to eighty-five metres. Danny squinted. He recognised the bruised, black-bearded face.

  Al-Zafawi.

  The figure in the gulley shouted something in Pashto: final proof that it wasn’t Tony. Al-Zafawi didn’t reply. He was sliding clumsily down the slope, his arms sticking out to keep his balance.

  ‘Hold your fire,’ Danny warned as the Taliban leader approached. ‘Don’t give away your positions. Tony’s up there somewhere.’ He tried to identify the point up above where Al-Zafawi had emerged from the treeline.

  ‘Can you see anyone?’ Riley asked.

  ‘Negative,’ said Danny.

  Instinctively, he wanted to change the trajectory of his weapon so that it was pointing uphill. But that would involve too much movement. He would risk being seen. For now, he had to bide his time.

  And watch.

  Al-Zafawi was halfway to the cache. He had a fierce, greedy look on his face. The Tony substitute shouted to him again, but received no reply. Now Danny could see that all his attention was on the strangely shaped boulder that marked the cache. Danny moved his gaze from Al-Zafawi to the treeline and back again.

  Any moment now, he knew, it was going to go noisy.

  Al-Zafawi was ten metres from the boulder.

  Five.

  He shouted something aggressive at the Tony substitute, who backed off a little so that he was maybe six or seven metres from the cache. Al-Zafawi reached the boulder. He held on to one of the protruding spikes to steady himself. Then he started scanning the ground, his eyes keen and wide.

  Danny watched. The comms was silent. He was holding his breath. Jesus, the pain in his arm.

  ‘Fucker’s going to set it off,’ Kit breathed.

  Danny remembered Hammond’s urgent question when they’d spoken outside the cave. Tell me Al-Zafawi’s alive . . .

  Not for long. This was out of Danny’s hands now. The Yanks could scream about it all they liked.

  Al-Zafawi stepped round the boulder. Danny could see his face directly. He was clearly looking for disturbed earth.

  He found it. A slow smile spread across his face. He took a step towards it.

  The final step of his life.

  The volume of the explosion told Danny that Kit had been heavy on the C-4. Its crack and boom echoed across the mountainside. The explosion itself immediately rendered Al-Zafawi and the Tony substitute invisible, hidden by a huge cloud of dust and earth blown skywards. Danny caught a flash of red in the cloud, and he knew that both men would have been instantly killed. Dust and tiny pebbles rained down on the bush where he was hiding. He tried to look through the cloud, up the hill towards the treeline. He was searching for movement.

  He saw it.

  Tony saw the explosion a fraction of a second before he heard it. He saw earth and rock and dust spit into the air. He saw body parts flung up the ravine.

  But most of all, he saw his bullion cache, destroyed by a device that was evidently meant to take him with it. A fierce burning sensation pulsed through him. He had to suppress the desire to scream a curse at the top of his voice. His money. His fucking money. After everything he’d done to win it. After all the graft . . .

  He saw Danny Black’s face in his mind’s eye and his own face contorted. He would do anything to nail that cunt right now. If Black was in front of him, he’d do it without hesitation.

  But Black wasn’t in front of him, and Tony had his own skin to save.

  The three gunmen, shocked by the sudden explosion, moved to the treeline and stared down the gulley. No longer at gunpoint, Tony grabbed his weapon from the ground. He was on the point of raising it to take out the three Taliban when they moved beyond the treeline and he stayed his hand. There was an SAS team down there. Their attention now would be fully on the Taliban – not just these three muppets, but the other four too. Looking through the trees, Tony could see them emerging from their positions. He guessed their anger at seeing Al-Zafawi blown sky high was trumping whatever tactical ability they had. Well, that was fine with Tony. The Regiment could slog it out with the Red Unit. It would give Tony the opportunity to make his escape.

  The Taliban seemed to have forgotten about him. They had their weapons raised. It was going to be a rout. Tony knew he should turn and run. But something stopped him. He moved slightly closer to the treeline, watching as the Taliban fighters advanced. And further down the hill, finally, he saw movement. The explosion had subsided and his eye was suddenly drawn to a thicket, about thirty metres west of the cache boulder. The thorny foliage shuddered just a little. Tony stared at it. The movement subsided, but he knew someone was hiding there. Was it Danny Black? Instinctively, he raised his rifle, ready to fire a burst directly into the bush.

  But then he lowered it again. He wasn’t going to give away his position as easily as that.

  He stepped backwards. Then he turned. By the time he started running back into the forest, the first gunshot had been fired.

  Movement of enemy personnel.

  Danny saw three guys emerge from the treeline. Distance eighty metres. He adjusted his rifle. He knew that the movement might give away his position, but that was too bad. He needed to prepare to fire towards the oncoming threat. He viewed the three militants through his sight, but something else caught his attention. Movement, just beyond them, behind the treeline. The powerful sight picked out a fourth figure. It was raising its rifle, pointing directly towards Danny’s firing point. But then the figure lowered its rifle and Danny saw his face.

  Tony.

  For a moment, it was as though Tony was staring directly at him. Danny prepared to take the shot.

  Too late. Tony had melted back into the forest.

  But Danny knew his position.

  ‘Okay, fellas.’ Brooker’s voice over comms was calmer than it had been all morning. ‘We’ve got seven targets advancing in line down the hill. Distance between each target, approximately ten metres. I’m assigning numbers one to seven from left to right. Tell me who’ve you’ve got in your sights.’

  Danny aimed directly at the figure at the right-hand side of the line. ‘Seven,’ he said clearly.

  Murray, Kit and Riley spoke in turn.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘I have three. On my word, take the shot.’ There was a two-second pause. Danny kept his cross hairs squarely on the chest of his guy. Held his breath to ensure accuracy. Brooker gave the word. ‘Go.’

  Danny fired. Even though his weapon wasn’t zeroed, the aim was good. The round hit his target in the chest and the man went down with a heavy, leaden finality. Four more rounds split the air in unison. Danny knew he didn’t even need to check that his unit mates had made their targets. There would only be two Taliban fighters left.

  He turned to get the others in his sights just as a burst of automatic fire rent the air. Rounds fell metres from his position. He caught sight of one of the fighters down on his knee in the firing position, aiming directly towards him. Instinctively, he pressed himself into the earth, covering his head with his hands.

  Voices came over his comms. Completely calm.

  ‘One.’

  ‘Three.’

  Another burst of automatic fire. The rounds fell closer this time. Just a metre or two from Danny’s position.

  ‘Take the shot.’

  Danny heard the retort of two single rounds. Then silence.

  ‘Targets down,’ Brooker said.

  Danny looked up again. He panned around the area. All seven Taliban were immobile corpses on the slope.

  ‘Not a bad day at the office,’ Riley’s laconic drawl came over the comms.

  ‘Not over yet,’ Danny said. ‘There might be others, and we haven’t taken Tony.’

  ‘May not be there, mucker,’ Brooker said.

  ‘He’s there. I saw him.’ A pause. ‘I’m going after him. I need covering fire while I get up to the treeline.’

  ‘Roger that,’ said Brooker. ‘Lads, you know what to do.’

  From his firing position, Danny plotted his route up to the treeline where he had seen Tony. He would make use of the gulley, he decided. It would give him extra cover. He spoke over comms. ‘Moving in three, two, one, go.’

  The covering fire from his unit mates started the moment he emerged, scratched and sore, from the thicket. Single shots, from the various directions of their positions, one every four or five seconds. Danny sprinted, head bowed and wincing from the pain in his shoulder, towards the gulley. He passed the marker boulder. A crater the depth of a man had been blown out of the ground by Kit’s booby trap. There were gobbets of molten gold scattered around.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to blow the bloody gold,’ Danny muttered over the comms.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kit said. ‘Sorry about that.’

  Al-Zafawi’s torso smouldered at the edge of the gulley. Danny couldn’t see the Tony substitute, but there were body parts and gristle littered over the area. He scrambled up the gulley, keeping his head and body low. The unit’s rounds crossed just a couple of metres above him as he powered over rock and scree and foliage. He felt none of his previous exhaustion and he even managed to compartmentalise the shoulder pain. His mind and body were finely tuned to his objective: catching Tony, and putting him down.

  Fifty metres up the gulley he spoke into comms. ‘I’m moving out on a north-easterly trajectory towards the treeline.’

  ‘Roger that,’ came the four-way reply.

  Danny pushed himself out of the gulley. Distance to the treeline: twenty metres. He engaged his weapon and advanced towards it, releasing single shots into the trees as he advanced at a jog. The unit’s covering fire continued behind him, but it stopped as soon as he hit the treeline.

  Silence.

  Danny panned his weapon left and right, hyper alert for any sign of movement. He saw none. He was certain this was where Tony had been. But where had he run? His best move would be to head further into the forested area. There he could find cover, maybe a concealed firing point. Danny looked at the ground. It was too dry for footprints, but he immediately noticed a stone, about the size of his fist, that had been turned over to reveal a less dusty underside. It was about three metres from his position in a north-east-east direction. There was a faint imprint in the ground next to it, on Danny’s side. It had clearly been kicked as somebody retreated in that direction. Danny had his trajectory.

  Finger on trigger, weapon raised, he advanced. He made no noise. In an instant he was on exercises back in the jungles of Belize. He could almost hear his training officer whispering in his ear: ‘Don’t look at the trees. Look through them.’ Danny did just that, piercing the forest with his gaze so that he was aware of what was twenty metres ahead, despite the obstructions.

  He was aware of other things too. A cracked twig on the ground ahead. The thin, sun-starved, shoulder-height limb of a tree bent in the direction that someone had recently passed. He knew he was on track. He knew that any moment –

  There was a sound to his right. A sudden, massive crash as a figure hurtled himself towards Danny. Danny twisted his body to try to make the shot, but he wasn’t fast enough. He saw the briefest glimpse of Tony’s face – the anger on his lips and the madness in his eyes – before he was thrown to the ground, his opponent’s heavy body crushing him.

  Danny’s immediate thought was to make a distress signal over comms. But that was clearly Tony’s first thought too. He ripped away Danny’s boom mike and yanked the comms earpiece from his head. Then, with one hand on Danny’s throat and the weight of his body against his weapon, he started to punch. He knew where Danny’s wound was, of course, because he had inflicted it. He pounded his fist against Danny’s shoulder several times, putting all of his bodyweight behind the blow. The pain was indescribable. With each strike, Danny felt his eyes roll and an electric flash clouded his sight. He sensed a thin line of dribble drip from the right of his mouth. He didn’t know if it was blood or spit. Retaliation was impossible. He could do nothing but endure the pain. Above it all, he could hear Tony’s hate-filled, whispered hiss.

  ‘I’m sick of you fucking things up for me, Black. It ends now.’

  Tony’s anger was clearly such that he wanted Danny to suffer some more before putting a bullet in his skull. He yanked Danny’s left arm up and pinned it down with one knee. Danny caught a glimpse of his mad eyes as he held his rifle upside down in two hands, almost gently touched the butt to the wound area, then lifted it high and brought it smashing down with all his force.

  Danny tried to scream, but his throat wouldn’t work. He couldn’t feel his arm. A sodden patch of blood oozed through his camo jacket. His limb felt alien, like it belonged to someone else. When Tony raised his weapon for a second time, Danny closed his eyes before he smashed it down again. Held his breath and endured the excruciating agony of the impact when it came.

  When he opened his eyes again, Tony was standing up. He pressed his right foot on top of Danny’s weapon, which was still slung across his chest, to stop him using it. Tony’s own weapon was the right way round now. Its barrel was pointing directly at Danny’s face, and Tony’s finger was on the trigger.

  ‘Nailed by a Taliban AK-47,’ Tony said. ‘Of all the ways to go. Those twats at Hereford will probably chalk you up as a hero. Shame it’s only me who knows you’re a cunt.’

  Everything was spinning. Danny tried to roll away, but he had no energy. He couldn’t move. He closed his eyes and waited for it to happen.

  The gunshot was loud. It made his whole body start. He gasped for breath.

  Why hadn’t he felt anything. Had Tony shot him in his numb arm?

  He opened his eyes.

  Tony was looking down at himself in horror. He had dropped his weapon and there was a patch of blood oozing through his clothes, at exactly the same point on his left shoulder where Danny was wounded. Tony looked up, staring beyond Danny into the trees. There was no doubting it. He was scared.

  Tony staggered back, one hand over the shoulder wound. It was pissing blood.

  Ignoring the screaming pain in his own wound, Danny found the strength to grab his weapon with his good hand and swing it up to point towards Tony. But he didn’t fire. A figure moved past him to the left, bearing down on Tony, brandishing a pistol with two hands.

  It was Caitlin, and she was moving with purpose.

  Tony continued to stagger backwards, but Caitlin was almost on top of him. She didn’t fire. She kicked out with her right foot and struck him squarely in the right knee.

  Tony collapsed. Caitlin stood over him, her weapon aimed precisely at his skull. Blood poured through the fingers of his hand as it pressed against his shoulder wound.

  Danny forced himself to his feet. His bad arm hung limply by his side, but he brandished his weapon with his good arm, pointing it at Tony. In his peripheral vision he was aware of movement to his right. More Taliban? No. He glimpsed Brooker through the trees, about fifteen metres away, well camouflaged and weapon engaged. He looked to his left. Riley, ready to attack.

  But they were hesitating. Danny could sense it. None of them really wanted to be the one to nail another Regiment guy.

  Danny looked at Caitlin. She was a mess. Her face was bruised, swollen and scabbed. Her nose broken and bloodied. She looked as though she was having trouble standing. But she was managing it, and she had her right arm stretched out, a handgun pointing at the back of Tony’s head.

  Tony looked at Danny. ‘Just fucking do it,’ he said.

  Danny didn’t reply. He just kept staring, first at Tony, then at Caitlin. Her gun arm was trembling, but she still had the handgun pointed at Tony’s head.

  Thoughts jostled in Danny’s mind. Flashes of bad memory. So many of them involved Tony. ‘He did this to you?’ he asked Caitlin.

  Caitlin nodded.

  ‘He was going to kill you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Caitlin’s voice was hoarse. It hardly sounded like her.

  ‘He was going to kill me too.’

  ‘Just do it!’ Tony hissed. There was a frightened waver in his voice. Danny was pleased to hear it.

  He looked around at the others. Their reluctance to fire hung among the trees like a mist. Maybe, he thought, they could bind Tony. Take him back to Camp Shorabak. Bundle him on to a C-130 and let the RMPs have their fun with him.

  But Danny knew that wasn’t an option. Tony was a liability to the Regiment. His crimes had to be covered up. Hereford and Spearpoint had made their decision and passed their sentence. All that remained was to carry it out.

  ‘They won’t put you down as a hero,’ he told Tony. ‘They’ll write you out of the history books. Good thing too.’

  Tony spat at his feet.

  Silence.

  Danny looked at Caitlin. ‘He’s all yours,’ he said. ‘Do it quickly.’

  He turned his back on them.

  As he walked away, he heard the retort of Caitlin’s handgun. Then the unmistakable sound of a body slumping to the ground.

  Three more shots. Danny didn’t stop and he didn’t look round.

  ‘Burn him,’ he called to the others in a blunt voice. ‘No identifying features. Tony was never here.’

  The rest of the unit moved into the clearing. They had lowered their weapons now. There was no need for them.

  Danny stopped by the nearest tree. He collapsed to his knees and slumped against the trunk. He sensed Caitlin looking down on him but no longer had the energy to speak. The job was done. The Regiment would live to fight another day.

  The question was: would he?

  EPILOGUE

  Hereford, one week later

  Jacko McGuigan, newly promoted since the unexplained disappearance of his former boss Mike Holroyd, gave the MOD police officer at the entrance to RAF Credenhill a superior look. He was proud of his recent promotion, and didn’t mind showing it. The officer checked his accreditation, nodded as he handed it back and waved Jacko through.