An iconic picture. Countless hundreds like it no doubt flying round the world news, the World Wide Web. It was one of those moments in time, I thought, when everything changes. The Berlin Wall coming down. Armstrong walking on the moon. Kennedy being shot.

The fact that it had happened right across from the Palestine Hotel where the world’s reporters had been stationed didn’t even occur to us at the time, or the fact that there didn’t seem to be huge numbers there celebrating the fact.

US tanks circled the area, and rightly so: sniper fire had already stopped Marine Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin from raising an American flag the first time he had tried to do it. The war might have been over but not all the combatants knew that yet. Corporal Jones closed the camera and smiled again, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the sun.

9 April 2003, the day everything changed.

‘It’s going to be another scorcher,’ Anne said, surprising no one, as the jeep bounced in the road and the landmine buried beneath it detonated and exploded in a white-hot burst of pain and light and death.

Chapter 8

I felt as if I had been put in a sack and kicked around the locker room by the full linebacker defensive of the Miami Rangers.

I could feel the harsh sand clogging my nostrils, the flayed skin of my cheeks hot. My head throbbed like the worst hangover imaginable.

My eyes were screwed shut and I couldn’t bring myself to open them. I didn’t dare. I was terrified of what I might see. I could hear a low moaning sound like that of a whimpering animal and it took me a moment or two to realise that it was me who was making the noise.

I blew out a deep, ragged breath and finally opened my eyes.

The sunlight skewered them. Searing needles of pain stabbing into them. I closed them again till the pain receded.