Steeplechase, Log Race, Endurance March over twenty-eight kilometres of rough country, bergen rucksack loaded with 22kg of bricks and gravel, Speed March, Assault Course, including the dreaded Shuffle Bars – scaffolding poles fifty feet off the ground and no hand-holds -Stretcher Race with a twelve-man team hauling 75kg of steel bars and sandbags over twelve kilometres of Welsh peaks and gullies.

The ones that came through it would know – with the bright shining certainty of hardened survivors – that they'd earned the right to proudly wear the Red Beret with its winged badge of lion and crown above a floating parachute.

Their first day in, Dillon thought, watching the Joe Crows disembark, with it all before them. After eighteen years, four months and sixteen days, he was going out. Back to Civvies. Back to a world he hardly remembered. Another lifetime, a different Frank Dillon altogether, so it seemed to him, all those years ago – a gangling lad with a shock of floppy black hair, an attitude problem, and a sheaf of pathetic school reports, plus two scrapes with the law that had nearly landed him in Borstal. The Paras had sorted that out, hair, attitude, even the required discipline of book-study, the lot. They had shaped and trained and hammered him into the mould of a professional fighting man, a member of one the finest and fittest elite corps in the world, Commandos and SAS included. At thirty-six he was still remarkably fit. Still possessed the skills necessary to strip down and assemble blindfold the SA80 family of weapons, stalk an enemy through brush and bog, hurl himself into space through the door of a Hercules C-130 at eight hundred feet. That was Frank Dillon's story in a nutshell, serving Queen and Country. Question was, what the fuck was he going to do now?

Dillon pushed his cup away and checked his watch against the wall clock. 7.20 a.m. Better snap to it if he was going to catch the London train.