Crunching over the cinders and broken glass, Harry on one side, Steve Harris on the other, Dillon caught sight of Malone talking to another guy just outside the entrance. Tony Malone, plainclothes military police, six-foot-four, built like a brick shithouse with a personality to match. Dillon wasn't given to hating people, he didn't care to waste the emotional investment, but Malone made a career of being stagnant pond life and proud of it.

'Oi! Malone,' Dillon called out as they approached. 'This place given the all-clear, has it?'

Malone turned, eyes narrowing under the black bar of his eyebrows, Brylcreemed hair gleaming slickly in the fairy lights. He didn't like being addressed as if he were a common craphat, even by a staff sergeant in the Paras. He spat the words out, hardly moving his lips.

'You and your mob drinking, Dillon, no place is -'

No love lost between them, Dillon went straight to him, staring up past Malone's hairy nostrils, though he kept his voice low and neutral. 'I asked you a question, mate.'

Malone stared back, eyes like slits, as if seriously considering whether to have a go, right there and then. He'd taken on bigger guys and beaten them to a pulp, but there was something about Dillon, a kind of chilling stillness and brooding intensity about the man, that warned him off. And Dillon's face bore the marks of someone who'd been through the wars and lived to tell the tale. The NAAFI brawl in Belize that had slit his cheek wide open and left him with a thin cruel scar. Nearly losing an eye 'down south' on Mount Longdon, the sniper's bullet grazing his right eyebrow and leaving a pale puckered abrasion. The kind of face that could take punishment and come back for second helpings.