'Hit the ground!'Will yelled and the five of them dived into the thick, powdery snow.
'Where is he?' he heard Anderson yell and Will scoured the hillside to see where this surprise enemy fire was coming from.
Suddenly, from his right, there came a barrage of muffled fire. It was Kennedy. He let off five silent shots from his suppressed Diemaco and somewhere up the hill there was a yell of pain. A figure tumbled forwards from behind a mound of snow.
One final shot from Kennedy was all it took to dispatch him.
Silence again.
Will was breathing heavily, hardly noticing the chill of the snow. They lay there for a good minute, carefully scanning the hillside as they searched for any more hidden ambushes.
Nothing.
'Get back to the truck!' Will called. They pushed themselves up and stepped backwards to the vehicle, firing the occasional shot to give them cover. From the corner of his eye, Will was aware of the corpse collapsed by the passenger door. His head had been completely shot open, the warm blood still oozing from his shattered skull melting the snow around him. Good, Will thought to himself. That was one ambusher they didn't have to worry about. They'd have to leave the guys that Will and Anderson had nailed. There could be other ambushers up there and they couldn't risk examining the bodies. They just had to get out of there as quickly as possible.
He was just by the truck, a couple of metres from Drew, when he heard a voice. From behind the ambushers' vehicle another Afghan had appeared. His hands were stretched in the air in a gesture of surrender and he walked nervously towards them.
Instinctively, Drew had raised his firearm and had it aimed firmly at the surrendering enemy. The Afghan stopped and a tense silence descended. Drew looked over at Will, his eyes questioning.
He was waiting for an order and Will only had a split second in which to give it.
He looked at the Afghan. Then he looked back at Drew and nodded.
Instantly, Drew pulled the trigger. The Afghan crumpled to the ground. 'Get in the truck, everyone,' Will instructed.
They all took their places — all except Ismail, who insisted on sitting on the floor of the vehicle. 'Are they gone?' he whimpered.
'Stay down!' Will told him in a tone of voice that he knew would do nothing for Ismail's state of mind — but he didn't have time to mollycoddle anyone now. The door on his side of the truck had been all but destroyed. He pulled the other one shut as Drew moved the vehicle away. They would just have to drive with the back blown open.
As the truck speeded up, he pointed his rifle out the back; passing the ambushers' vehicle, he aimed precisely and then shot into two of the tyres. They blasted into a mass of shredded rubber. Will felt a surge of grim satisfaction — if any of those bastards were nearby, they wouldn't be following very easily, if at all.
Ismail was hyperventilating now, looking up at Will and Anderson with a strange mixture of awe and fear. Will felt a surge of momentary sympathy — they might be used to situations like this, but Ismail sure as hell wasn't.
'You can get up now,' he told the shivering Afghan.
Ismail pushed himself up almost reluctantly and took a seat on one of the benches along the side of the truck. His eyes darted around from man to man, then widened when Kennedy looked at them over his shoulder: his face was spattered with the blood of the man he had shot at close range.
'You all right?' Kennedy grunted.
Ismail nodded.
'You did well,' Will told him.
'I did nothing,' Ismail replied. 'I am not—' he struggled to find the right word, '- I am not suitable for this kind of situation.'
'Well you'd better get used to it,' Will told him, bluntly, 'because chances are it's going to get harder than that.'
He stared at Ismail, who did his best to stare back. But after a while the Afghan lowered his gaze back down to the floor.
No one said anything and the truck trundled on down the icy road.
A dusty red light from a small fire illuminated the hut, but only just. Seated in a wooden chair by the fire was a tall, bearded man. His face was scarred, from the lower lip up to his cheek, and no hair grew where the ancient wound had marked his face.
Two other bearded men stood a little distance away from him. One of them spoke. 'We should just kill her now, Jamal,' he said. 'It is clear that the woman will not tell us what we want to know.'
Jamal stroked his scarred lip with a long, slender finger. He remembered the day the wound had been inflicted. His slight sneer flickered across his damaged lips as he recalled the face of the man who did it. 'I do not agree,' he said, quietly.
'What more can we do?'
Jamal's eyes narrowed. 'Many things,'he whispered. He gazed silently into the fire, as though contemplating the embers.
'Is it so important, Jamal?' the other man asked. 'Is it so important that we find this brother of hers? It is becoming a struggle to keep her alive. It would be much easier if we killed her now.'
'Important?' Jamal asked. 'Yes, it is important.' He looked at each of the men in turn. 'The Taliban are the true students of the Koran. We will be returned to power in Afghanistan. God will see to it. But what will people think when they discover that this man who betrayed us at the highest level has been allowed to go free? What will that do to our authority?'
'But he may not even be in this country.'
At this, Jamal looked angry. 'Do you not think that we have influence that extends further than Afghanistan? Do you not think that we have people willing to do God's work in America, the Great Satan? Do you not think that we have brothers in Washington and London and all over the West? Believe me, if that woman knows where he is, she will tell me, and in the name of Allah I will have him hunted down and killed.' He looked meaningfully at the two of them. 'Or perhaps the name of Allah is not as important to you as it is to me.'
The two men shifted uneasily. 'Of course it is, Jamal,' one of them replied. 'But is it necessary for so many of us to guard her day and night? She is too weak even to stand up, let alone try to escape.'
Jamal continued to stroke his scar. 'It is very necessary,' he stated. 'We are not the only people who wish to learn the whereabouts of Faisal Ahmed, of that you may be sure. It is not a matter of if they try and rescue her; it is a matter of when.'
'But who would be so foolish? We are heavily armed, and with all this snow — '
'It is not our weapons or the snow that will bring us victory,' Jamal insisted. 'We fight in the name of Allah. To die in his name will be glorious. Who in this room does not crave shihada, martyrdom?'
Jamal's face shone as a silence fell on the room and the irrefutable truth of his statement sunk in.
'I suggest you go back to your positions,' he said, after a while. 'Allahu Akbar.'
The two men bowed slightly. 'Allahu Akbar,' they said, before turning to leave.
'We need to stop here.'
Will checked his watch: 18.30 hours. Ismail had not spoken in the two hours since the ambush and even the SAS men had been quiet. They all sensed, Will knew, that they had been lucky. The people in this part of the world were well armed and life was cheap. If the hidden ambusher had been a bit more precise with his shooting, there would have been some British corpses lying back there in the snow with their Afghan attackers.
Will stared out of the window. It was twilight and the landscape looked no different to him than any they had passed for ages. 'You sure?' he asked Ismail.
'Positive,' their informant nodded. 'The village is about two kilometres east of here.'