to get inside the Black Hawk’s industrial clamour. Then the pilot’s voice boomed again: ‘One minute!’ Chase glanced out of the window. His eyes had now fully adjusted to the darkness, revealing that the landscape was climbing towards ragged mountains to the north. There were still expanses of desert plain, but they were broken up by steep, knotted hills. Tough terrain.
And they had six miles of it to cross.
The Black Hawk’s engine note changed, the aircraft tilting back sharply to slow itself before landing. Chase tensed. Any moment—
A harsh thump. Green slid open the cabin door on one side, Bluey the other, and the team scrambled out. Chase already had a weapon ready – a Diemaco C8SFW carbine, a Canadian-built variant of the American M4 assault rifle – as he ran clear of the swirling dust and dived flat to the ground, the others doing the same around him.
The Black Hawk heaved itself upwards, hitting Chase with a gritty downblast as it wheeled back the way it had come. The Little Bird followed. With surprising speed, the chop of the two helicopters’ rotors faded.
The dust settled. Chase stayed down, scanning the landscape for any hint that they were not alone.
Nothing. They were in the clear.
A quiet whistle. He looked round, and saw Mac’s shadowy figure standing up. The other men rose in response. Still wary, they assembled before the bearded Scot as he switched on a red-lensed torch to check first a map, then his compass. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing towards the mountains.
Chase regarded the black mass rising against the starscape with a grumbling sigh. ‘Buggeration and fuckery. Might have bloody known we’d be going the steepest possible route.’
‘Enough complaining,’ snapped Stikes. ‘Chase, you and Green take the lead. All right, let’s move!’
For most people, traversing six miles of hilly, rock-strewn terrain – in the dark – would be a slow, arduous and even painful task. For the multinational special forces team, however, it was little more than an inconvenient slog. They had night vision goggles, but nobody used them – the stars and the sliver of crescent moon, shining brilliantly in a pollution-free sky, gave the eight men more than enough light. After covering five miles in just over an hour and forty minutes, the only ill effect felt by Chase was a sore toe, and even Mac, oldest of the group by over fifteen years, was still in strong enough shape to be suffering only a slight shortness of breath.
Not that Chase was going to cut him any slack, dropping back from Green to speak to him as they ascended a dusty hillside. ‘You okay, Mac?’ he asked jovially. ‘Sounds like you’re wheezing a bit. Need some oxygen?’
‘Cheeky sod,’ Mac replied. ‘You know, when I joined the Regiment the entrance exercises were much harder than they are now. A smoker like you would have dropped dead before finishing the first one.’
‘I only smoke off duty. And I didn’t know the SAS even existed in the nineteenth century!’
‘Keep your mouth shut, Chase,’ growled Stikes from behind them. ‘They’ll be able to hear you half a mile away, bellowing like that.’
Chase’s voice had been barely above a conversational level, but he lowered it still further to mutter, ‘See if you can hear this, you fucking bell-end.’
‘What was that, sergeant?’
‘Nothing, Alexander,’ Mac called back to Stikes, suppressing a laugh. ‘That’s enough of that, Eddie. Catch up with Will before he reaches the top of the hill. We’re getting close.’
‘On it, sir,’ said Chase, giving Mac a grin before increasing his pace up the slope. By the time he drew level with Green, his levity had been replaced by caution, senses now on full alert. Both men dropped and crawled the last few feet to peer over the summit.
Ahead was a rough plain about half a mile across, a great humped sandstone ridge rising steeply at the far side. A narrow pass split the ridge from the mountains, a large rock near its entrance poking from the ground like a spearhead. The obvious route to the isolated farm was by travelling up the pass.
So obvious that it had to be a trap.
Unless the Taliban were complete idiots, which whatever his other opinions about them Chase thought was unlikely, there would almost certainly be guards watching the ravine’s far end. It was a natural choke point, easy for a few men to cover, and almost impossible to pass through undetected. And if the team were detected, that would be the end for