Afghanistan was the only home he knew and the 055 Brigade was the only family he acknowledged. Everything about a life before the training camps was expelled from his mind; it did not exist. For twenty months he had been taken out for two sessions a week of fifteen minutes' exercise. His legs had been shackled, his steps stumbling and short within the constraints of the chain's length. A guard had held each arm, and his sandals had scuffed the flattened worn dirt of the circuit in the yard. In those twenty months, he had been walked the hundred yards to the interrogation block nine times. His leg muscles had atrophied, but still he ran.

He sobbed from pain. In front of another man – an instructor at the training camp, an Arab in the 055 Brigade, a guard or interrogator at Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta – he would never have shown how pain hurt him. He was alone. The pain was in his legs, in the muscles of his calves and thighs. The unworked muscles seemed to scream as he pounded forward. When he fell, many times, he scraped the skin off his knees and elbows, and blood stained the cotton of his overalls.

There was no water and his throat rasped with dryness. His lungs sucked in the growing warmth of the air. The only time he stopped was when he came to a rutted track and lay in scrub near to it, with the scent of wild flowers in his nose. He waited till his heartbeat had subsided to listen for a vehicle or a man or a goat's bell. When he heard nothing, only the wind, he crossed the track and went on.

Somewhere in front of him, by the base of the line of the mountains, was the family he yearned for.

Across Afghan mountains, the Iranian land mass and the chasm of the Gulf of Oman, the same dawn rose over a limitless desert of salt flats and razor-spined dunes of ochre sand.