Firefight

FIVE

Pankhurst pressed his fingertips together. 'It's complicated, Will,' he said. 'Why don't you sit down, let me order you some coffee.'

Reluctantly, Will took a seat. 'Forget about the coffee,' he said. 'Just talk.'

Pankhurst nodded his head. 'We need to find Ahmed, and we need to find him quickly. But we're stabbing in the dark. Truth is, we haven't got a clue where he is. Don Priestley's a yank through and through, always exaggerating the Americans' capacity to do things; but he wasn't exaggerating about Ahmed. They did a very good job with him. If he doesn't want to be found…'

'You must have people looking.'

'Of course we have, Will. We've got a lot of people looking. But it won't do any good. We don't even know if he's in the country.'

'Then how the hell — ?'

Pankhurst raised his hand in the air to silence Will's outburst. The director stood up, moved round to the other side of the desk and perched on the edge, just in front of Will. 'You don't like me, Will,' he said suddenly. 'That's OK, you're in the majority. My job means that I have to do some pretty unlikeable things. But we have to work together on this and that means you need to start putting some trust in the fact that I know what I'm talking about. Are we agreed?'

Will held his gaze and for a moment the two men simply stared at each other.

'We're agreed,' he conceded finally.

'Good.' Pankhurst returned to his seat and continued as if that little confrontation had never happened. 'As I say, we have a lot of people looking for him, but I don't hold out much hope that he'll be found. But we have another lead and that's what I want you to follow up.'

'What's the lead?'

'His sister. Latifa Ahmed.'

Will blinked. 'You think she'll know where he is?'

'It's possible,' Pankhurst replied. 'At least, she's our best shot. It seems that Ahmed was always very close to her. Don Priestley told you yesterday that she was the only person in Afghanistan who knew the truth when Ahmed staged his own death. What he didn't tell you was that they kept in occasional but regular contact while he was in the US.'

'How?'

'Letters, mostly,' Pankhurst said. 'Ahmed would pretend to be a distant cousin living in Kabul. The letter would be sent to a US contact in the capital, then passed via a long sequence of agents — long enough that it would be nighon impossible to trace the source of the letter — before being delivered to her. It would never be more than a few lines and it could take months to arrive. Even so, from what I could glean from Priestley, the CIA were less than wild about letting him do even that.'

'Why did they?'

'Because it was his condition. He refused to help them at all unless he could have some way of letting Latifa know that he was OK. The CIA had to give in. Then, when he was reinserted into Afghanistan in 1990, he found his own ways to keep in touch with her.'

Pankhurst paused for a moment. 'Tell me, Will,' he continued, 'how much do you know about the Taliban and the way they treated the women of Afghanistan?'

Will shrugged. 'Bits and pieces,' he said.

'Right. Well let me give you some idea of the conditions under which Latifa Ahmed was forced to live when the Taliban came to power in 1996. She was forced to wear the burka, of course; she was banned from proper medical care if she was ill; she was looked upon as a third-class citizen. But in actual fact, Latifa had it a lot better than most women in Afghanistan at the time. Ahmed saw to that. He had infiltrated the highest echelons of al-Qaeda by then and had influence among the Taliban authorities. Of course, no one knew she was his sister, but he let it be known around the neighbourhood where Latifa lived that if she was interfered with in any way, it would not be tolerated.'

'Sounds dangerous,' Will commented. 'Surely he was worried people would ask questions.'

'It was a risk he ran,' Pankhurst agreed. 'But he meant what he said. In 1998 a member of the Taliban police stopped Latifa in the street. It's unclear what he thought her misdemeanour was, but the punishment he gave her was brutal. Nothing out of the ordinary, you understand, but still brutal. In a busy street she was beaten with a metal stick; her arm was broken and she was left weeping in the gutter. Nobody offered to help, of course, because to do that would have been to risk imprisonment or worse.

'The following day, the policeman was found. His throat had been sliced when he was sitting at his table eating a solitary dinner. Nobody saw the killer go in or out of the house, but rumours travelled fast. Nobody lay a finger on Latifa until Ahmed was outed in Afghanistan in the year 2000.

'When word of his true identity reached al-Qaeda's ears, the rumours that he had been protecting Latifa Ahmed simply confirmed their intelligence. Latifa's luck changed then. She was imprisoned by the Taliban, where we can only assume she experienced the brutality for which that regime is so notorious.'

There was a silence as the two of them considered the kind of horror Latifa would have gone through.

'How do you know all of this?' Will asked after a while.

'When Ahmed arrived in England, we debriefed him thoroughly. At first, all he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to rescue his sister, but we nipped that in the bud.'

'How?'

Pankhurst's face twitched. 'We told him she was dead.'

'Nice.'

'We do what's necessary, Will. Faisal Ahmed was no good to us dead in a ditch in Afghanistan. We calculated that learning of his sister's death would harden his resolve against the Taliban, make him more likely to help us. The British and American governments had always advocated regime change in the region; if he worked with us, he could be doing his bit to avenge his sister.

'He didn't have to grieve long. British and American troops marched into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. Latifa Ahmed was discovered in a prison on the outskirts of Kabul and we were able to break the news to a grateful Ahmed that his sister was not dead after all. She wasn't in a good way, though. She weighed a little under six stone and her body was covered in sores. She hadn't eaten for weeks, nor had she been allowed out of the tiny cell in which she had been imprisoned, even to use the lavatory. She was practically swimming in her own excrement.

'From that point on, our intelligence on Latifa gets a bit thin. Faisal Ahmed was already proving his worth to us, so to keep him sweet, we offered to look after Latifa. She was cared for by the security forces out there for a short while — a couple of weeks at the best, until she regained some of her strength — then she disappeared. Our best guess is that after the traumas she underwent at the hand of the Taliban, she hid herself away in a quiet village somewhere — although, as you know, quiet villages are few and far between in Afghanistan. We're fairly sure, from all we know about their relationship, that Ahmed will have kept in touch with his sister somehow. We're equally convinced — and a number of psychiatric reports back this up — that he will have continued to remain in contact with her even after he went dark in 2003.

'As I've said, we rather lost track of Latifa once the Taliban fell. A few days ago, however, word reached us of her whereabouts. When the Taliban were thrown from power, their supporters were scattered around the country. Since then, certain factions have regrouped and gained in strength. It seems that Latifa has been abducted by one of these resurgent factions.

'Why?' Will asked, suspiciously. 'Surely the Taliban have bigger fish to fry at the moment.'

'I don't know,' Pankhurst admitted. 'I don't know why the Taliban do anything. What you've got to remember is that they're a law unto themselves and they have all sorts of warring factions that we don't even know about. I'm sure that most Taliban members couldn't give a fig about Latifa Ahmed. But clearly there's one group that does. If you want to know why, perhaps you can ask her when you see her.'

Will's eyes widened.

'We have an informer in the area who claims he can lead us to her. And that, Will, is where you come in.'

'You want me to go back to Afghanistan?'

'Precisely. You'll meet our contact and your objective will be to extract Latifa Ahmed from wherever she's being held and to bring her back safely to this country for questioning. If she can shed any light on Faisal Ahmed's whereabouts, we have to know. He could strike any minute and, frankly, this is our only lead.'

Will chewed on a fingernail for a moment. 'How reliable is your source?'

Pankhurst shrugged. 'We think he's sound. But we're not following this up because our source is reliable; we're following it up because we don't have any other options. And we don't have the luxury of time: at the moment we've no reason to believe that Faisal Ahmed knows Latifa's location. But he'll find out and we're pretty sure he'll try to free her. We have to get our hands on the woman before that happens.'

Will stood up and walked to the window. He looked out over the Thames to see that a flurry of snow was falling. It would be snowing in Afghanistan, too, not like the last time he was there. It had been high summer then, 35 degrees at the height of the sun, dry and acrid. But the Afghan winters were harsh. There would be deep snow — difficult to move through, easy to be seen in. And Afghanistan — the 'Stan' as the Regiment guys called it — was just as bad now as it was then. Worse, even. All this for a lead that could very well come to nothing.

He turned back to look at Pankhurst. 'How sure are you that Ahmed's planning something?' he asked.

'How sure do I need to be before I act?' the Director General replied, quietly. 'Our intelligence is pretty concrete. The student we apprehended in Rome gave us the basics.'

'Can I talk to him?'

'No,' Pankhurst said quickly. 'No. You can't do that.'

Will nodded, tactfully. He knew what that meant. If the student had been taken to a black camp, chances were he hadn't survived the questioning. Unfortunate for him, convenient for the authorities — they didn't want anyone running around spilling the beans about what they had been through.

'He must have got his intel from somewhere, though,' Will insisted.

Pankhurst nodded. 'He was a regular at the Rome mosque. We've interrogated the people he was friendly with, but they've given us nothing else. Trust me, Will, you won't get anything out of them. Our people are extremely persuasive.'

Will fell silent again. The prospect of a return to Afghanistan made him feel sick. But what was the alternative? To go back to the flat in Hereford and pick up his life where he had left off, dividing his time between the graveyard and the pub? How could he, now that he knew the truth about his family's death? How could he, now that he knew their killer was out there somewhere? He stared out of the window over the London skyline. Maybe Ahmed was there, hiding somewhere, waiting to strike. Waiting to kill more innocent people. Waiting to make widows and orphans. Waiting to destroy more lives, just like he had destroyed Will's. How bizarre that Will should have to go all the way back to Afghanistan to find out this man's location. Still, if that was what he had to do…

He turned back to Pankhurst. 'I'm not going in alone,' he said firmly. 'I'll need a unit. SAS.'

Pankhurst's nose twitched. 'Out of the question. If I could simply deploy the SAS, I would. You're being brought in precisely because you've been out of play for two years.'

'Cut the bullshit, Pankhurst,' Will snapped. The Director General's face flickered with annoyance. 'You and I both know I'm being brought in because you've gambled that I want Faisal Ahmed dead more than anything in the world.' Will looked around him. 'It's a comfortable office, this,' he said a bit more calmly. 'I'm not used to this sort of luxury. You obviously are. And you've obviously never been on covert ops in the Stan. If you had, you'd know that only an idiot would lay siege to the Taliban in mid-winter. If this were a more straightforward op, you'd be deploying a squadron. I'm asking for three men and if I don't get them, I'm not going.'

Pankhurst fell silent for a moment. When he spoke, it was with the reasonable voice of a skilled negotiator. 'I'm sure we could arrange some NATO troops in Kandahar.'

'I don't want NATO troops,' Will insisted. 'And I don't want fucking Green Berets. I want SAS. I know how they work and I know they're the best. Christ, sir, these guys devote their lives to this kind of work. There's no more chance of there being a mole in Hereford than there is of there being a mole in this room as we speak.'

The Director General took a deep breath. 'All right,' he said, quietly. 'I've asked you to trust me, so I'm going to return the compliment.'

Pankhurst managed to sound almost gracious, but Will knew it was simply that he had the DG over a barrel, so he stopped short of thanking him. 'Don't you have any more precise information about where this woman's being held?' he asked.

'Nothing. Our source is very jumpy — when you meet him, you'll need to win his trust. But we can hazard a guess that you'll be heading south from Kandahar — that's the area where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.'

Will nodded, curtly. He knew how dangerous that part of the world was.

'Listen to me carefully, Will,' Pankhurst continued. 'Your unit are the only ones you reveal your objective to and even they cannot know why you are extracting Latifa Ahmed. Someone's been tipping this guy off and we don't know how deep their influence goes. I know you've been trained to trust everyone at Hereford, Will, but that's one part of your training that you need to forget. We can't afford to trust anyone. Do you understand?'

'Yeah,' he replied. 'I understand.'

'And you're willing to do what it takes to get Latifa Ahmed out of Afghanistan?'

He nodded his head.

'Good,' Pankhurst said. If he felt any sense of satisfaction in Will's acceptance, he didn't show it. 'We can't hang around. We're assuming Ahmed doesn't know Latifa is being tortured, but as soon as he finds out he'll be straight there to extract her. And that woman has a lot of nasty things to look forward to — I don't want the Taliban torturing her to death before we've had the chance to ask her a few questions.'

'Yeah, well my diary's pretty free.'

'I'm sure it is,' Pankhurst replied. 'I'll get in touch with Credenhill now, tell them you'll be there in a couple of hours. In the meantime, I need to give you further instructions…'

Three and a half thousand miles away, a woman lay on the floor. She did not want to shiver. She did not want to show any sign of weakness, but she could not help it. The snow was thick outside — it had been falling for days now, the flakes piling softly on top of each other, covering the warscarred ground of her country in a false blanket of purity. As a child, she had loved the coming of the snows. She and her brother would rush out of their small house to play in it the moment they were allowed, their parents watching them fondly from the doorway as they made snowballs and threw showers of powder at each other.

But it had been snowing, too, when the soldiers came; and now, she could not think of the whiteness of the snow without picturing the crimson of their parents' blood as it seeped from their bodies, melting the white powder with its warmth, before mingling into mush. Her childhood delight in the coming of the first snows had ended that day.

The hut in which she was being kept had no floor — just the earth, hardened with the cold, which seemed to leech any of the remaining warmth out of her body as she sat there. She pulled the thin cloth they had given her to wear tightly around her, but it had been chosen more to cover her body than to keep her warm and it did little good. She even found that she was glad of the burka headdress they had insisted she wear — in that enclosed environment around her head, the heat of her breath at least staved off some of the chill.

She had not eaten for three days; even then the food had been filthy, but she had devoured it simply because she was famished. Every few hours of the day and night, one or two of them would come in. She had learned long ago with these people that it was better to let them do what they had come to do, rather than try to resist. They used thick wooden sticks, mostly, and beat her around the stomach and the back of her legs; she did not dare look at her skin for fear that it would revolt even her, and she had become used to the constant pain and the bruises that grew worse day by day.

One day, a particular man would come in. He was taller than the others and more quietly spoken. His face was scarred — a long scar, starting on his lower lip and finishing somewhere on his left cheek. No hair grew over the scar, which was red and angry, and it gave his face an ugly, gnarled look.

When she had seen that scar, she had known that her life was about to turn unpleasant, because she had been there when it was first inflicted. It had been a while before the Taliban had been overthrown and shortly after they had discovered that her brother — her foolish, reckless, beloved brother — was a double agent. He had come to warn her, to tell her to flee, but the Taliban were close behind. They had burst into her tiny house, knocking down the door — six of them, armed and with wicked, almost hungry gleams in their eyes.

The men were barking harshly in Pashto, shouting at each other to grab Latifa; but they soon fell silent when they saw Faisal Ahmed waiting for them. Her brother had pulled his gun on them. He fired it twice, with a deadly pinpoint accuracy: two Taliban members fell to the ground instantly, their foreheads exploding in a grisly shower of blood and brain; but the others, silent now though still with a terrifying fervour in their eyes, had continued to close in on him.

That was when he drew his knife.

It was a wicked-looking thing, its blade smooth and sharp on one side, hooked and jagged on the other. When he stabbed it into the belly of one of their attackers, the man's entrails came out with it. Latifa had watched as Faisal swung the knife, which still had human gore hanging from it, and slashed another of them across the face. The blade instantly ripped a gash across the man's lower lip and up into his cheek; he had roared in pain and raised his hands to his bloodsoaked face.

Faisal had almost overcome them, but not quite. No doubt if he hadn't come to warn her, he would have been long gone. But he had come to warn her and now he would pay the price. They would both pay the price for the path he had chosen to take.

That had been nine years ago. The man who held her in captivity now had never made any reference to the day her brother had scarred him so horribly. But they both knew what this was all about. And while he did not hit her or raise his voice to her, she was more scared of him than anyone. He asked her questions. He told her she would die if she did not comply. Despite her state, she had been fully aware of the madness and the thuggery that lay beneath those questions. To stand up to him was perhaps the most difficult thing she had ever done in her difficult life.

There were no windows in the hut, so she had to judge what time it was by the amount of light that peeped through a crack in the wooden walls. It was mid-morning, she guessed. About the time that he usually came. She huddled into one corner, waiting for the sound she so dreaded: her door being unlocked.

It came soon enough and when it did she started shaking through fear as well as cold. She heard the harsh voices first, then the scratchy sound of a key in the lock. Her eyes winced as the door opened, letting in the light, which was blindingly bright from being reflected off the snow. Two men appeared in the doorway, both of them wearing robes, turbans and long beards. One of them carried an AK-47 strapped around his neck — he stood guard outside the door. The second man carried no weapon. He closed the door behind him, then walked towards her. She remained cowering in the corner.

'Get to your feet, woman,' he said softly in Pashto.

She pushed herself up from the ground. Her legs were weak, and it was a strain to remain upright. She found she was glad of the burka — it hid the fear on her face as he looked at her.

'You shall tell us where your brother is,' the man insisted quietly. 'Sooner or later, you shall tell us. It is the will of Allah.'

She took a deep breath. How close she had been to crumbling on more than one occasion. How close she had come to persuading herself that her brother had brought all this on himself. She did not approve of how he was spending his life. She did not approve at all. But he was her brother. He had looked after her. She loved him. And whenever she found her resolve crumbling, she thought of him as a little boy. So earnest. How could she condemn him to the fate these Taliban monsters no doubt had in store for him?

'I do not know where he is,' she whispered.

The man remained expressionless. 'You are lying, of course,' he said. 'He has been in contact with you. This is not something we suspect; it is something we know. Your pain will not cease until you tell us where he is.'

She stared defiantly at him, though he could not see her expression. They stood there for a moment, face to face in that freezing hut, before he turned and walked out of the room. 'Beat her,' he said to the guard as he left.

She felt her knees buckle at those words, but she did her best to remain standing as the guard entered the hut. He was a huge man — burly and big boned — with a thick-set face and broad, heavy shoulders. He had a look of wild fervour in his eyes as he removed the strap of his gun from round his neck. A look that suggested he would take great pleasure in what he was about to do. Pleasure in carrying out Allah's will.

'Please,' she whispered, but her plea went unheard or at least unnoticed.

The guard made sure that the safety catch of his weapon was switched on. Then he put one hand on the barrel and the other on the handle. He approached her, waving the butt of the gun in her direction.

'Please,' she whispered again. 'Please, don't — '

The butt cracked down hard on the side of her head. She gasped with pain and started to fall; but before she could hit the ground she felt a heavy blow in her stomach as the guard whacked the blunt metal against her skin. It winded her so badly that she could not even make a noise; she just staggered slightly, trying, through her pain, to catch her breath.

And then it began in earnest.

Mostly the guard used the butt of the gun to beat her, though occasionally he used his feet, booted heavily under his dirty white robes. She huddled up into a little ball, like a hedgehog protecting itself, although she had no spikes to shield her from danger — only her damaged and brutalised skin, pulled tight over the bones of her thin body.

'You must tell him what he wants to know,' he would say occasionally. 'It is the only way to make this stop.'

But she said nothing. She even found herself wishing he would use the other end of his gun, to put an end to this. But she knew they would not allow her to die. Not yet. Not while they still had a use for her.

The beating seemed to last for an age — at one point she coughed up what she could only assume was blood into the veil of her burka — and it only finished when the guard himself seemed exhausted. He spat on her prostrate body, then left the hut without a word, locking the door behind him.

The woman did not move. She could not move. Freezing though she was, her body was too sore for her even to contemplate huddling up to try and keep warm, so she just lay there, her head spinning, her body pressed against the frozen earth.

She wondered which direction she was facing. Towards Mecca perhaps? Most likely not. She prayed nevertheless. With what strength she had, she whispered the takbir: 'Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.'

Surely God would not be angry with her for facing in the wrong direction.

Surely He did not condone the actions of these men, even if they did it in His name.

Surely He would not condemn her for refusing to say what she knew about her brother, her own flesh and blood, no matter what wicked things he may have done.

Surely He would not leave her to die in this place.

He would send someone to help her. Surely He would.

But who in the world would ever find her here?

Will Jackson felt as if he were living in a dream, but he couldn't tell if it was a good dream or a nightmare. Everything just seemed so unreal — Five's sudden appearance in his life; the night he had spent with Kate; Faisal Ahmed. As he gazed out of the window of the chauffeur-driven car Pankhurst had arranged to take him back out of London, he decided that he wouldn't be at all surprised to wake up and find that he had imagined it all.

He didn't want to wake up, though. He didn't want it to be a dream. For the first time in ages, he felt as if he had a purpose. It was nerve-racking, certainly. Gut-wrenching, even. But somehow it felt right.

Will felt weird as he saw RAF Credenhill, 22 SAS Regiment's Hereford headquarters, approach. He hadn't seen the high fences with huge rolls of wicked-looking barbed wire perched on top of them for two years; he hadn't walked into one of the cavernous hangars that housed each of the Regiment's squadrons; but before that this unfriendlyseeming place had been a home from home. Will had felt comfortable among its training grounds and mess rooms, just like other people feel comfortable in their own gardens. He liked it. Now, though, he didn't relish the idea of walking down its corridors again; he didn't relish the idea of the looks the boys would give him. No doubt rumours had circulated about him since he left the Regiment and tongues would wag even more enthusiastically about his return.

The car pulled up at the main gates. Four soldiers stood guard, each carrying a machine gun and an unsmiling expression. The driver, who had not spoken a word to Will all the way from London, wound down his window. 'Will Jackson for Lieutenant Colonel Elliott,' he told the MOD policeman who came to the car to enquire their business.

The MOD policeman looked to the back of the car and his eyes widened slightly when he saw Will. Will recognised him vaguely — a face from the past that he couldn't put a name to. 'Do you have some identification?' the MOD policeman asked.

Will handed over the MOD pass that Pankhurst had supplied him with. The MOD policeman took it, stepped back from the car, spoke into a radio handset and within seconds the gates were open and the car was driving through.

Will had been relieved to hear that Half Colonel Steve Elliott was still CO at Credenhill. They went back a long time — indeed it was Elliott who had first selected Will for the ranks of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment when he was a bright-eyed young squaddie. Back then, Will had thought Elliott was little more than a psychopath; but then that was what most potential recruits thought of their commanding officers when they were undergoing SAS training. When Will had been the first to complete the endurance stage of the final phase of his training — a forty-mile hike across the Brecon Beacons with full pack and rifle — he had expected a few words of congratulation. But that wasn't Elliott's style. 'Don't make the mistake of assuming the worst is over, Jackson,' he had informed the exhausted recruit in front of his new colleagues. 'A gentle walk in the hills isn't what you can expect on covert ops.'

'No, sir,' Will had replied immediately.

As time went on, though, Jackson had proved himself to Elliott. More than proved himself, in fact. He had risen through the ranks, and had come to respect and appreciate Elliott's blunt, no-nonsense style of talking. There was no room for bullshit when people's lives depended on you. And after Will's family died, Steve Elliott had been the man who stood by him. 'Don't leave the Regiment, Will,' he had said. 'You'll regret it. Take time out — as much as you like. But don't leave. Don't let the fight go out of you.'

Will had ignored his advice. Now and then in the few months that had followed, Elliott's words had come back to haunt him. But as time passed and a return to the military became less and less feasible, so Will had stopped worrying that his respected commander had been right. About a year ago, Elliott had dropped him a line, inviting him to get in touch. The invitation had gone unanswered.

The car trundled to a halt in a small car park just in front of the main HQ building.

'Thanks for the lift.'

'Yes, sir,' the chauffeur replied. He stepped out of the car, opened Will's door and stood politely by as he climbed out. Will took a deep breath, nodded to the driver, then strode towards the main building.

A uniformed officer whom Will didn't recognise was at the desk.

'I'm here to see Lieutenant Colonel Elliott,' he said. 'My name's Will Jackson.'

That look again. The soldier clearly recognised his name. Will knew what Regiment gossip was like — he'd lay money on every soldier in the base knowing within the hour that he had arrived.

'I'll tell him you're here,' the soldier replied.

Steve Elliott was a big man — big even compared to the well-built SAS soldiers who surrounded him every day. He wore camouflage trousers and shirt, and Will had to think hard to remember if he had ever seen the man wear anything else. Elliott's nose had been broken in a couple of places and there was an ugly red scar peeping above the top of his shirt and up his neck. No one knew where he had received it, but it was fairly widely known that Elliott had been taken captive and tortured in western Iraq in 1991.Will had never heard him speak of his experience, but then few men ever did talk about things like that. His hair was a steely grey now and his forehead showed the creases of a lifetime's frowning. But Elliott's eyes were smiling as he approached Will and shook his hand.

'How are you, Will?' he asked, warmly.

Will shrugged, his eyes flickering over to the soldier at the desk, who was watching them with obvious curiosity. 'Is there somewhere we can talk, boss?'

'Of course,' Elliott nodded. 'My office. Come on.'

They walked along the corridor in silence until they came to a door with Elliott's name on it. He held it open. 'Come on in, Will.'

Steve Elliott's office was very familiar to Will. He'd lost count of the number of unofficial debriefs that had taken place here. It was a typical military office — sparse, cold even. On the wall was an old picture of Elliott in the days when he was a squadron leader: his nose wasn't broken then and he looked somehow more innocent, less ravaged by the stress of the job and the passing years. But it was clearly the same man, the same steely resolve in his eyes.

Elliott took a seat behind his desk — a plain table with a telephone and a few papers scattered over it — while Will sat in the seat opposite.

'Can I get you something?' Elliott asked. 'A coffee — '

'Nothing. Thanks,' Will replied. 'Look, boss, I know you tried to get in contact with me a while ago. I'm sorry I — '.

Elliott held up his hand. 'Nothing to apologise for, Will,' he said briskly, and Will nodded in gratitude. 'Christ only knows what you must have been going through,' the commander continued. 'Everyone here was more shocked than I can tell you. You expect to lose people when you're out on ops, but — ' His voice trailed off. Will had the impression that Elliott knew he was saying nothing that hadn't gone through Will's own mind a million times.

'Thank you, sir,' he said quietly.

They sat in silence for a moment.

'I'm surprised to see you here,' Elliott said finally.

'Not as surprised as I am to be here.'

'Pankhurst told me I'm to give you anything you need and that transport was being arranged to the NATO base in Kandahar. But he didn't tell me much else. Care to elaborate on your away break to the Stan?'

Will looked at his old friend. Elliott was smiling at him, leaning back comfortably in his chair. He looked relaxed, but Will could sense his intrigue, sense that he was desperate to find out what was going on. But as he sat there, Lowther Pankhurst's words rang in his head: We can't afford to trust anyone. He might not like the guy, but when the Director General of MI5 tells you to be suspicious, you'd better be suspicious.

'Sorry, boss,' he said calmly. 'I'm afraid I can't tell you that.'

Elliott's eyes narrowed slightly. 'We go back a long way, Will. I'd like to think we're friends. But I have to tell you this: it's a brave soldier who keeps his CO in the dark.'

The veiled threat hung there between them. Elliott clearly did not like the fact that Pankhurst had not told him nearly as much as he would have expected.

'I'm sorry, boss,' Will replied. 'I'm not a soldier. Not any more.'

'But you still think of yourself as one, Will. Why else would you still be calling me "boss"?'

'Old habits die hard, I guess.'

Elliott shrugged. 'Rumours that you're back at Credenhill will be buzzing around already, Will,' he pressed on. 'You're quite a celebrity around here, you know. Even now. If word gets out that you're just a puppet for Five, things could get nasty for you.'

Will couldn't tell from Elliott's demeanour if that was a threat or a warning. Either way, he knew his response had to be the same. 'I won't be around long enough for that to make any difference to me,' he said firmly. 'I'm sorry, boss, but I'm past caring about Credenhill gossip. I'm here to put together a team. I can't tell you what we're doing, not until the operation is over. Probably not even then.'

'All right, Will,' Elliott conceded. 'I have my orders from Five. They tell me you need three men.'

Will nodded. 'We'll be going cross-country into southern Afghanistan. It's going to be snowing and if things go as they should we'll have one hostage who won't be in very good shape, so I need at least one person well trained in cold-weather survival. If any of them have had active service in Afghanistan, so much the better. Sharpshooters, well versed in escape and evasion. I need the best, boss.'

Elliott pressed his fingers together and looked at his former employee as though sizing him up.

'All right, Will,' he said finally. 'The lads we've selected will fit the bill. But maybe one day you'll let me know what this is all about.' He picked up the phone on his desk and dialled a short number. 'Let Major Adams know we're ready for him,' he told whoever was at the other end. 'We'll be there in a few minutes.' He replaced the phone on to its cradle.

'Thank you,' Will said, quietly.

Elliott shrugged and an awkward silence fell on the room. Eventually the Half Colonel spoke. 'Listen, Will,' he said. 'I'm not trying to get you to tell me what you're doing, but if you're planning on heading south from Kandahar, you need to be careful. I know you've had experience in Afghanistan; I know you understand how fucked up that place is. But things are different there now. More dangerous, especially in the south. I'm sure you're aware that there are Taliban factions regrouping down there. They're well armed and, frankly, they're desperate. I've lost more men on covert ops in Afghanistan in the last eighteen months than I'd care to count.'

Will listened carefully — he knew Elliott didn't give warnings lightly.

'I've attended enough Regiment funerals this year, Will. Let's not have any more just before Christmas, eh?'

'I don't want funerals any more than you do, boss.'

'No,' Elliott said. 'I know. They said the operation was urgent and that you'd want to get to Afghanistan as soon as possible. When are you planning on leaving?'

Will looked momentarily down to the floor, then fixed Elliott with a determined stare.

'Transport's arranged for tonight,' he said. 'We don't have any time to lose.'