On the surface, Mullins came across as a laid-back whisky-guzzling country boy. But in truth he was a brilliant warfighter and a deep thinker, with a postgraduate degree in war studies. One of the best soldiers Carter had ever worked with.

  ‘Long time,’ Mullins was saying. ‘What has it been, chief? Three years?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Carter said.

  Mullins waved a hand at the guy beside him. ‘You remember Bryan, right? From Afghan?’

  ‘Hey, bud,’ Ortega said.

  Carter nodded a greeting at the second guy. Bryan Ortega was ex-Delta Force, he recalled. Otherwise known as CAG, for Combat Applications Group, or ‘The Unit’, or Task Force Green. Clearly there was some serious competition to be the most titled team in the US Special Forces community. Maybe there was a prize.

  A hard-as-nails bloke from Phoenix, Arizona, Ortega was in his late thirties. He looked like the typical Delta operator, barrel-chested and muscular. The veins on his forearms were as thick as gas pipes. He was decked out in an olive-green shirt that barely stretched around his immense biceps, a pair of creased khaki trousers. His forearms were sleeved with gang tattoos. A large silver crucifix hung around his neck.

  Carter didn’t know him very well, but he’d heard second-hand rumours about Ortega from Mullins and a few of the other American operators. His parents, it was said, had fled Colombia during the years of the narco wars. There had been stories that Bryan had been involved with a local gang in his youth. People with connections to the Mexican cartels. Ortega had narrowly escaped the life, but some of his relatives hadn’t been so fortunate. He was a serious, brooding guy, deeply religious. He never swore, said little, and mostly kept to himself on ops.

  ‘Look like you messed up your hand, bud,’ Ortega said. He grinned. ‘What, you think you’re Floyd Mayweather now?’

  Carter looked down at his bruised right hand. The skin on his knuckles was torn and bloody. Collateral damage, from banging the general’s son in the face. He hadn’t even noticed at the time.

  Treadwell stepped forward, indicating the balding guy in the sharp suit.

  ‘This is Tobias Proudlock,’ he said. ‘He’s from Vauxhall. Six’s man in DC these days. Quite new to the role, so you won’t have crossed paths before.’

  Carter blinked and snapped out of his stupor. ‘What the fuck is this about?’

  Treadwell said, ‘These three gentlemen would like a word with you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That is something we would very much prefer to discuss in private,’ Proudlock, the balding guy in the suit, said in a cut-glass accent. ‘You know how it is.’

  He smiled politely and turned towards Langton.

  ‘We’ll take it from here, Simon. Thanks.’

  Langton took the hint, levered himself out of his chair with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘Yes. Well. I’ll leave you to it, then. Anything you need, let me know.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Proudlock said.

  Langton turned to Treadwell and nodded. The latter started for the door. Langton followed, then stopped in front of Carter and gave him the stink-eye. Carter could smell the wine on his breath.

  ‘Just so you know,’ he slurred, ‘I had already made the decision to get rid of you. On account of your outrageous conduct this evening. Whatever business you have here with these fellows, don’t think you’re off the hook. I’ll be filing a complaint with your superiors as soon as possible. I shall make my displeasure clear in the strongest possible terms.’

  Carter shrugged. ‘Fill out your forms if it makes you happy.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to say for yourself?’ Langton snapped. ‘Not even an apology, for Chrissakes?’

  ‘No,’ Carter replied. ‘Because I’m not bloody sorry. I’ll be glad to be gone.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  Langton snorted contemptuously before he marched out of the room. Treadwell followed them out and pulled the door discreetly shut behind him. Then Mullins smiled and said, ‘You seem to have pissed him off pretty good, chief.’

  Carter said, ‘That’s nothing. You should see him when the embassy canteen runs out of foie gras.’

  Mullins’s massive shoulders pumped like pistons as he started to laugh. Ortega soon joined in. Proudlock gave Carter a disapproving look and waved a hand at the chair Langton had just vacated.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘Get you something? Coffee? Water?’

  Carter shook his head. His head was still spinning.

  Mullins, the thickset Kentuckian, grinned and said, ‘Chief, I’ll tell you something. You have an impeccable sense of timing. You’re one lucky motherfucker.’

  ‘That’s not how it looks from here, mate.’

  Mullins laughed, took off his cap and scraped a hand through his mussed hair. Carter dropped into the empty chair opposite the Americans, his guts twisting into a knot.

  ‘You figured this was something to do with that jerk you beat up earlier. Right?’ Mullins asked, replacing his cap.

  Carter shrugged. ‘It crossed my mind.’

  Mullins laughed again. ‘Can’t say I blame you. Would have done the same thing myself. Honestly, it sounds like the dipshit deserved it. Beating the shit out of the kid in the general’s office, though. That takes some serious cojones.’ He shook his head and smiled. ‘I’ll say this. You Brits certainly do it in style.’

  Carter said, ‘What are you lads doing here?’

  Mullins uncrossed his legs and said, ‘Full disclosure. Since we’re all friends here. Bryan and I work for the Company these days. But then I guess you figured that out already.’

  Carter stiffened.

  The Company.

  The CIA.

  Which meant that Mullins and Ortega were ops officers with the Special Operations Group, the CIA’s elite paramilitary unit. SOG was a close-knit team of veteran ex-SEAL Team Six and Delta guys tasked with carrying out black ops on foreign soil. Doing the Company’s dirty work. The agency had hired a bunch of lads from the US SF community in recent years, either directly or as third-party contractors to create an extra layer of deniability.

  Which prompted another question.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, searching the faces of the two Americans facing him. ‘Why the fuck am I here?’

  Mullins tipped his head at Proudlock. Giving the floor to the MI6 officer. Proudlock leaned forward and laced his hands in front of him. His silver cufflinks glinted sharply in the glow of the wall lights.

  ‘We’ve been sent down from Washington to brief you,’ he said. He shifted his weight and grimaced, like he had a serious case of piles. ‘Luckily for you, I might add. If we had got here a few hours later, you would have been on a flight back to London by now.’

  ‘That, ah, situation with the kid has been taken care of, by the way,’ Mullins said. The Kentucky native poured himself a cup of black coffee and proceeded to tip the contents of four sugar sachets into it. ‘The general won’t be pressing any charges. You’re in the clear, regardless of what your ambassador may think.’

  Carter nodded slowly. He should have been elated. Two minutes ago, he had been facing the sack. The end of his life as a Blade. Now he was in the clear. But any sense of relief he felt was immediately tempered by the knowledge that the Company wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help him without wanting something in return.

  Whatever they wanted, Carter figured it had to be better than the alternative.

  Better than running a crap training package and taking shit from the Vargas family.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘What’s the craic?’

  There was a pause of silence while Proudlock produced a manila folder from a leather satchel beside his chair. Ortega sat with his thick arms folded across his chest, stared at a point on the table like he had a problem with it. Mullins tore open a fifth sachet of sugar and tipped it into his mug. Carter was beginning to think the guy had a problem.

  Proudlock placed the folder down in front of him, flipped it open and looked up. Then he said, ‘What can you tell me about a chap called David Vann?’

  ‘Dave?’ Carter sat upright. ‘He’s ex-Regiment.’

  ‘You knew him personally, I understand. Chum of yours.’

  ‘Yes.’ Carter sighed between gritted teeth. ‘I knew Dave all right. He was one of the legends of the Regiment when I joined. He was my instructor on Selection.’

  ‘You served under him directly, correct?’

  Carter nodded. ‘That’s right. When he came off Training Wing, he took over as my troop sergeant.’

  ‘Would you say you were close?’

  Carter shrugged and said, ‘We were both Para Reg.’ He saw the blank look on Proudlock’s smooth face and added, ‘We both came from the Parachute Regiment before joining the SAS. We were both ex-Pathfinders.’

  Proudlock furrowed his brow. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘A lot of the guys who pass Selection come from Para Reg. They tend to form their own cliques at Hereford. Look at everyone else as a crap hat or a wanker.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘At first. There’s a mindset when you’re in the Paras.’ Carter tried to find the words to explain it to a civilian. ‘You can be a bit of an arsehole, but if you’re ex-Para, you’ll get away with it. The other Para lads will give you a break. Because of the loyalty to their old unit.’

  ‘So Vann looked out for you? He was a mentor, you might say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But there was more to it than that, Carter knew.

  Vann had already been in the Regiment for several years when Carter had first joined D Squadron. Every lad at Hereford knew about Vann. He’d fought in Bosnia in the 1990s, Sierra Leone. Then Iraq, taking the fight to al-Qaeda and the insurgents lopping off the heads of Western hostages.

  Vann had a reputation as a brilliant, occasionally reckless, soldier. One of the true hardcore operators. He was feared and respected by the other lads in equal measure.

  Carter had looked up to Vann. Admired him.

  And he’d saved Carter’s career.

  Some of the guys in the SAS were guilty of slacking off once they made it through the rigours of Selection. Once you got that beige beret on your head, it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking you had reached the pinnacle of your army career. For a while, Carter had made the same mistake. Instead of knuckling down and learning how to fight, he had started to act as if he was the greatest fucking soldier in the history of the world.

  For the first year he’d regularly gone out on the piss with the other lads who came from Para Reg, getting into scraps with the locals. He was on a path to destruction.

  Then Vann had pulled him to one side after training one day. ‘Calm down, son,’ he’d told Carter in his Belfast brogue. ‘You’re in the SAS now. Know what that means?’

  Carter had just looked at him.

  ‘You think you’ve hit the big time, right? But that’s a load of bollocks,’ Vann had continued. ‘All you’ve done is join another unit with better kit. That’s it. Now you’re gonna have to prove yourself every day, all over again. If you don’t, you’ll get fucking RTU’d.’

  If anyone else had spoken to Carter that way, he wouldn’t have listened. But he respected Vann enough to realise that he was telling the truth. If Carter wanted a long-term career in the Regiment, he had to start looking after himself.

  Learn how to live like a professional, Vann had said.

  Take yourself seriously.

  From that moment on, Carter had dedicated himself fully to life as an elite operator. But he never forgot Vann’s advice. Without his intervention, Carter would never have survived in the Regiment. He’d be back in Para Reg now, wondering what might have been.

  He said, ‘What’s your interest in Dave?’

  Mullins and Ortega looked knowingly at one another. Proudlock sat back and glanced at the Company men, waiting for them to take over. Mullins frowned at his palms for a long beat, as if he was trying to read his own fortune.

  He lifted his gaze to Carter. ‘What we’re about to tell you goes no further than these four walls. It’s important you understand that. Soldier to soldier. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Carter said warily.

  Mullins sipped his sugar-plus-coffee and said, ‘For the past five months, Vann has been running an operation for us. Strictly off the books.’

  ‘What kind of operation?’

  ‘A training job,’ Ortega said. ‘In Afghanistan.’

  ‘Vann has been working with what’s left of the anti-Taliban forces,’ Proudlock explained. ‘The resistance movement.’

  ‘I’m surprised there’s anyone left. I thought the Taliban crushed most of them lot during the takeover.’

  ‘There’s a small group of holdouts,’ Mullins said. ‘Veteran mujahideen fighters, soldiers, plus a few disillusioned Taliban. They’re currently operating in the north-eastern pocket of the country, between the Panjshir Valley and the border with Tajikistan.’

  ‘Your old stomping ground, I believe,’ Proudlock interjected.

  Carter gave a slight nod. ‘I was an embed in them parts for a while.’

  ‘This was . . .’ Proudlock consulted the file. ‘Between 2018 and 2019, I understand.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Afghanistan.

  Carter had been embedded for eighteen long months with a Special Forces unit in the north of the country. The Regiment ‘embeds’ had been tasked with leading groups of elite Afghan soldiers on missions to gather intel and carry out attacks on Taliban positions. Acting independently of the coalition, they had sabotaged static targets, ambushed insurgent forces and neutralised heroin dealers. Taking out those enemies beyond the reach of conventional forces.

  For a while, the operations had been devastatingly successful. But the stress of living in total isolation from his colleagues, dealing with the blood feuds and tribal rivalries, while waging a dirty war against the enemy, had eventually exacted a heavy toll on Carter.

  He had returned from his rotation a changed man. As if he’d undergone a personality transplant. Something had broken during that long period of disconnect from the Regiment and the rigid structure of army life. He suddenly found he had no tolerance for the political bullshit at Hereford. For a man with no filter, that was a serious problem.

  Eventually, the head shed had grown tired of Carter’s outspoken attitude. His CO had accused him of not being a team player and packed him off to Mali on a training posting.

  Then he’d intervened in the terrorist attack in Bamako. Made himself an enemy for life with the British ambassador.

  He snapped back to the present as Mullins continued the briefing. ‘The rebel fighters call themselves the National Alliance. They claim to be the legitimate government of Afghanistan and have vowed to fight the Taliban to the death. They’re led by a guy called Jabar Hakimi.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. He’s from the younger generation of Afghans. His older brother, Rashid, fought against the Taliban for several years before he was killed in a gun battle last year near Aybak. The Alliance elders promptly declared Jabar as the new leader. Before that he had served as one of the junior field commanders.’

  Proudlock said, ‘Hakimi is something of an unknown quantity. But his brother was a brilliant leader, which buys him a certain amount of support. Rashid was politically astute, charismatic, moderate. A humble ascetic who inspired fervent devotion among his followers. Did his thesis at Durham. Wrote about the tactics of the Viet Cong. A rather interesting read, actually.’

  ‘You think his younger brother is up to the job?’ asked Carter.

  ‘He has the credentials,’ Proudlock replied confidently. ‘His brother’s name carries a lot of weight among the tribes. Jabar has some military experience, and he knows his men. He’s the horse we’re backing in this race. We’ve invested considerable resources in him.’

  Something clicked inside Carter’s head. He suddenly understood why Six had agreed to run a deniable operation inside Afghanistan with the Company. Because Whitehall had staked its chips on Hakimi one day becoming an influential power broker in Afghanistan’s political landscape. A risky strategy, with no certainty of a favourable outcome. But worth a shot, given the potential upside.

  Ortega said, ‘The rest of the rebel leadership fled the country after the latest Taliban offensive. They’re out of the picture. Which means Hakimi is basically the last man standing.’

  Mullins swigged his coffee and said, ‘Shortly after the evacuations, we began supplying arms and equipment to the National Alliance. Small arms, mostly. A long-term project. As part of the arrangement, we agreed to send in a guy to teach the rebels how to use them. An outsider. Six recommended your buddy.’

  Carter canted his head to one side. ‘Why send in Dave? Why not one of your own lads?’

  ‘We wanted a buffer. Orders from the very top, you understand. We were given the authorisation to equip the National Alliance, but on condition that nothing could be traced back to us. The commander-in-chief wanted clean hands on this one, in case of a clusterfuck. Which is why we brought you guys onto the team,’ he added, gesturing towards Proudlock.

  ‘I should point out that our involvement in this operation is strictly in an advisory capacity,’ the latter said. ‘We’ve facilitated the arrangement with Vann, but the financial muscle and logistics come from our cousins across the pond.’

  Carter frowned and rubbed his stubbled jaw. ‘I don’t understand. What has any of this got to do with me?’

  Mullins said, ‘Vann was in regular contact with us, using an encrypted satphone linked to a secure line at Langley. Bryan has been acting as his handler,’ he added, nodding at Ortega. ‘The deal was, Vann would file a sitrep once a week, or whenever he needed supplies. Or to report an engagement with the enemy.’

  ‘I know the drill,’ Carter replied irritably. ‘What’s the problem?’

  Ortega said, ‘Six weeks ago, Vann went silent.’