Sweat trickled down the side of Sam’s face next to the unfurled bit of carpet he had used to conceal his weapon. The midday sun scorched the back of his neck as he lay flat on the roof facing the back of their target’s house. Mac lay five metres away, his Diemaco C8 loaded and at the ready. Through the brickwork lattice they could see the guards on the opposite roof – a distance, Sam estimated, of thirty metres. One of them was smoking a cigarette; the other was fiddling with his weapon.

Sam checked his watch.

‘Contact in sixty seconds,’ Jacob’s voice came over their comms earpiece.

‘Roger that.’

They waited.

The hard, angular contents of his ops waistcoat dug into his ribcage.

Thirty seconds.

Fifteen.

The distinctive crack of rounds being fired. The smoker dropped his cigarette and sprang to his feet, immediately rushing to the front and out of sight. Sam and Mac waited for the second man to disappear. Moments later he did.

Sam steeled himself for the noise of the explosion.

When it came, it sent a brief shock through his body. Sam’s experience had taught him to judge the size of any explosion he heard, and it sounded big. It didn’t stop him from moving, though. He got to his feet while Mac stayed in the firing position, ready to cover him. Instantly, however, there was a shout. ‘Sam! Get down!’

He immediately fell back to the ground. The second sniper had reappeared, ten metres to the right of the first. His AK-47 was ready to fire and he had noticed Sam. Two rounds hit the top of the roof in quick succession.

They were the last two rounds the Iraqi guard would ever fire.

Mac’s aim was unerring. As he pressed down on the trigger, Sam could tell that his friend was totally in the zone. He could almost visualise the cartridge stirring to life in the chamber, the propellant gases expanding and exerting pressure on the bolt, creating a calculated delay that permits the projectile to exit the barrel, the gas pressure dropping again once the projectile has been released.

The MP5 round hit the guard straight in the face. There was a flash of red before the sniper fell to the ground and out of sight.

‘Go!’ Mac urged.

Sam sprinted, knowing he was covered. It took him no more than fifteen seconds to hurtle down the stairs and across the ten-metre-wide street before firing several rounds at the handle of the door. The wood splintered and broke – one good kick and it was open. He scanned the back garden for hostiles, his eye zeroed in on the sights and his finger resting lightly on the trigger. Convinced that it was clear, he looked up at the roof where Mac was covering him. ‘I’m in,’ he stated over the comms, giving his friend the thumbs-up sign, then directing his gun once more into the back garden of the house.

Mac was there within seconds. They nodded at each other as Mac covered the entrance, allowing Sam to push on inside. There was no one here – it looked like Jacob’s strategy was working.

It was less than a minute after the initial explosion that the two of them gained entry into the house. Out front they could hear the sound of shots, a distinctive loud, sharp crack, then the rounds nicking against the walls and ricocheting into the ground. Sam steeled himself against the image of his brother being fired at. His instinct wanted him to join in the firefight, but Jacob was a big boy. Older than Sam and more experienced. He could take care of himself. But just to reassure himself he asked the question. ‘You okay, J.?’

‘Walk in the park,’ came the reply, followed by another round of fire.

Sam and Mac swept the ground floor in under a minute. Empty. Mac took the lead up the stairs. These were pressed up against one wall with a solid banister on the other side. They led up to a balcony-style landing with a metre-high wall looking over the ground floor. Sam covered Mac from below. His friend disappeared from sight. There was the sudden, brutal sound of two rounds in quick succession: Mac had double-tapped someone. Sam sprinted up the stairs in time to see an Iraqi with half his head missing slide down the whitewashed wall, leaving a brushstroke of red where the fatal wound scraped against it.

They were in a corridor-cum-landing. To Sam’s right the low wall overlooking the ground floor. There was a door at either end and one in the middle. It was this door that the Iraqi had been guarding, so they immediately took their positions on either side of it. Sam plunged one hand down the top of his dishdash and pulled a flashbang from his ops waistcoat, then nodded at Mac who held up three fingers, then two, then one. Mac kicked the door in, before aiming his weapon into the room and allowing Sam to rip the pin from the tennis-ball sized grenade and hurl it inside. As soon as it was in, Sam braced himself, clenching his eyes slightly and waiting for the explosion.

One second.

Two seconds.

Impact.

The moment the sonic boom arrived, Sam and Mac appeared in the doorway to take stock of the situation.

It was smoky and dusty, but not so much that they couldn’t see to work. There were four men inside. They were all suffering temporary blindness from the grenade; one of them had a thin streak of blood seeping from his ear. Three men were clutching their AK-47s, waving them dangerously around the room despite the fact that they were totally disorientated. The fourth, an older man with a face Sam thought he recognised, cowered in the corner. That was him, he thought to himself. The target. It had to be. And even if it wasn’t, their next move was clear. The Iraqis carrying the weapons needed to be plugged before they blindly opened fire and got lucky.

Three shots. Three direct hits. Each round produced a satisfying whump as it crashed into human flesh, hot lead burning a neat, perfectly round hole into the body, the round then ricocheting off bone and muscle, ripping through organs and severely fucking up the target. The men fell dead to the floor, with bits of bone and thick clumps of brain around them.

Sam entered the room. The fourth man – massively fat and with a scraggly beard – was groping blindly. As Sam grabbed him he started shouting, his voice harsh and full of authority. What he was saying, Sam had no idea. He just used one hand to pull his Iraqi hostage out of the room, his other hand outstretched and pointing the Diemaco in front of him. The man stumbled as Sam dragged him into the corridor. He continued to bark harshly in Arabic.

‘Target attained,’ he said curtly into the comms. No reply. ‘Repeat, target attained. I’ve got him. Over.’ Still nothing. He cursed. The fucking comms were down. Sam looked up at Mac whose nod told him he was experiencing the same problem.

They needed to get this guy out of the house as quickly as possible. A quick look at the stairs, however, told him that getting out was going to be a problem.

There were four of them, positioned at intervals along the staircase. Their AK-47s were raised and although Sam could tell at a glance from the way they held their weapons that they were not well trained, he also knew that he and Mac were in a world of trouble. In an instant he grabbed his hostage and used his body as a shield before aiming the Diemaco directly at his head. From the corner of his eye he saw Mac hit the floor. His friend was shielded now by the low internal wall that looked over the ground floor. Sam followed suit, pulling his hostage with him.

The two SAS men were breathing heavily. Mac took up position, crouched down on one knee, the butt of his gun pressed hard into his shoulder as he aimed towards the top of the stairs.

Stalemate. The Iraqis knew they couldn’t advance; neither could Sam and Mac leave the protection of the wall while the enemy were on the stairs. The first person to put their head above the parapet would get it. There was a tense silence.