‘Yeah?’

Jamie recognised the voice, of course. The slurring, shouting, barely articulate female voice at the other end, a sound he remembered from his earliest childhood. He sighed and looked up at the neon light in front of him, all enthusiasm for his next adventure instantly dissolving into nothing.

When he spoke, it was with the stuttering hesitation of someone trying to get a word in edgeways.

‘Jesus, Mum,’ he said. ‘What do you want? I told you not to call me. What do you want…?’

Sam spent a restless night, knowing he had to wake early. He was up with the sun and, his fridge being bare, ate breakfast at a café before heading back to base. He arrived there fifteen minutes before the agreed RV, in time to see the rest of the squadron arriving. To a man, they looked unshaven, hungover and above all thoroughly pissed off to be called in so early.

He found Mac outside the squadron office. ‘They told you what all this is about?’ Sam demanded. As a troop sergeant, Mac would normally have been pulled in early, had the mission explained to him and the plans presented. But he looked more like he’d spent the evening with a bottle of JD than the ops sergeant and he shook his head.

‘Got the call when I was in the boozer.’

‘Yeah,’ Sam observed. ‘You look like shit.’

‘The good ladies of Hereford didn’t agree with you,’ Mac replied with a wink.

Sam shook his head. ‘It’s no wonder your missus won’t let you back in the house,’ he said. ‘Other women would’ve stuck a knife in your back by now. We’d be reading about it in the News of the World.’

‘Who dares wins, mate,’ Mac said.

Sam couldn’t help smiling. ‘You know where the briefing is?’

‘Kremlin.’

He nodded and together they started walking towards the briefing room. As they walked they chatted. ‘Been to see the old man?’ Mac asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘How is he?’

‘Fine,’ Sam lied. ‘Terror of the fucking nurses.’ He said it with a note of finality. Mac took the hint and didn’t say any more.

The Kremlin was located deep inside the main HQ building, near the records room and the CO’s office. The two men walked in silence. When they entered the briefing room itself, they saw about twenty of the guys already there. Major Jack Whitely was up front: a short, squat man in camouflage gear, with a shock of ginger hair and sharp green eyes. He stood at a lectern, rifling through some notes. As Sam and Mac took a seat at the front row he nodded a greeting to them and then went back to what he was doing.

Over the next couple of minutes a further ten men arrived and at 07.00 hrs precisely Jack Whitely cleared his throat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get started.’ He flicked a switch on his lectern and the lights dimmed. An overhead projector at the back of the room beamed light onto a white screen behind him. Jack picked up a small remote and pressed a button. A map of Central Asia appeared behind him.

‘At 12.00 hrs on Thursday you’ll be bussed to Brize Norton,’ Whitely announced. Today was Tuesday. They had about forty-eight hours. ‘From there you’ll be taking an all-expenses-paid flight to Bagram Airbase, northern Afghanistan.’

Several of the men in the room groaned noisily. Sam felt like joining them and so, from the look his friend gave him, did Mac. ‘What was the fucking point in coming back?’ Sam whispered.

‘All right, guys,’ Whitely said firmly. ‘Listen up.’ He flicked the button on his remote again. A new map appeared on the screen.

‘We have a training camp in southern Kazakhstan,’ Whitely continued. ‘An area called the Chu Valley. We ’re expecting there to be about twenty individuals there. Our orders are to make sure they don’t wake up in the morning.’

The men were silent now. Listening hard.

‘Mode of insertion,’ Whitely announced, ‘HALO. Air troop, this is your gig. Rest of the squadron to remain on alert at Bagram in case of problems.’

All of sudden, Sam was in the groove. He’d been in hundreds of briefings like this before and any tiredness or annoyance he had felt when he first arrived had been shed. He listened keenly, his senses alert, knowing that he had to be on the ball. Air troop was his. He needed to be on top of things.

‘There’ll be a further briefing at Bagram,’ continued Whitely. ‘We have spooks on the ground who’ll give you more detail on the geography. But first off, you need to be made aware of something.’

Whitely looked out over the briefing room. In the dim light Sam could see that the Major’s face had suddenly gone serious, as though he were judging the mood of the men.

‘MI6 have supplied us with pictures of the targets we expect to find there.’ He pressed the button on the remote for the third time.

It was not in the nature of Regiment men to express surprise. They’d been asked to do enough morally ambiguous things in their time to be largely shock-proof. But Sam knew, as the image beamed out by the overhead projector changed, they would be taken aback by what had just appeared. On the screen in front of them were twenty grainy photographs. They varied in their quality. Some looked like passport photos, taken in cheap booths; others looked like they had been cut and pasted from bigger pictures. But they all had one thing in common. White skin. Caucasian features. The squadron wasn’t being presented with the usual brown skin, beards or turbans.

‘Your targets,’ Whitely announced firmly, ‘are British citizens. They’ll be speaking English. That shouldn’t distract you from the job in hand.’

There was a brief silence before a voice called from the back of the room. ‘What’s the story, Boss? Who are they?’

‘That, I’m afraid,’ Whitely replied, ‘is for our masters in the Firm to know, and for us not to find out. It’s an in-an-out job and is strictly under the radar. The UK ’s relationship with Kazakhstan is good, but fragile. Any whiff that this is our doing and we’ll be giving the suits in Whitehall a right headache, and I know how upset you’d all be if that happened.’

There was a smattering of cynical laughter.

Sam didn’t join in.

He had barely heard what Whitely was saying, and laughter was the last thing on his mind.

His attention had been grabbed by something else.

Something on the screen.

Sam Redman had a good eye. A mind for detail. As soon as the photographs had appeared on the screen he had methodically and meticulously studied each one for a few seconds. His gaze fell on one picture. It was halfway down the group of images, no bigger than the others, no less indistinct. And yet when he saw that photograph, his blood turned to ice in his veins. The man had dark hair and a beard, flecked with grey, that covered most of his face. There was a bruise to one side of his forehead. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. Dark eyes, with shadowy rings dug underneath them and thick-set eyebrows.

Sam would know those eyes anywhere, because they belonged to his brother.

It was like a dream – a dream in which he urgently had to do something, but couldn’t force his body into action. This was a mistake. It had to be. Sam looked over his shoulder at the guys congregated in the room around him. Their faces glowed in the dim light of the OHP, but their expressions registered no surprise as they gazed at the screen. Sam’s eyes darted from one face to another. None of them, he realised, would recognise Jacob even if they saw him. They were either too young or never knew him.

All of them, he realised, except one person.

Sam faced forward again and glanced to his right where Mac was sitting. His friend looked up at the screen. There was no twinge of recognition in his face.

And then the room was plunged into darkness as the OHP was switched off. ‘All right, guys,’ Whitely announced brightly as he turned the main lights on again. ‘RV back here 09.00 on Thursday. Rest up before then. Tell your missus to keep her hands off you – everything goes right you’ll be back for tea and blow jobs Sunday lunchtime.’ He straightened his papers on the lectern and headed for the door.