'Shut the fuck up, you wanker!' Mal shouted at the screaming victim, who happened to be one of his best mates. He had opened Steve's thigh pocket now and Dave could see him pulling the big morphine syringe from it. Angus was holding Steve down.

'I said fucking shut up!' Mal roared over the clamour of the fire fight. He was shoving the autojet into Steve's remaining leg. Almost instantly, Steve fell silent.

Steve's body armour was covered with blood and shrapnel. His clothes were torn, his face lacerated and his helmet pushed back off his head. With the morphine in, Angus and Mal went to work. Mal's hand found the artery inside the hideous bloody gap at the top of Steve's left leg, scissor clamp at the ready, while Angus tightened the tourniquet.

A medic had reached Jordan Nelson. The rifleman lay still in the dusty street. He looked as though he'd fallen asleep on duty, except that most of his clothes were missing and his lower body was charred almost beyond recognition. A couple of lads from 3 Section and the medic were leaning over him and they were strangely still too. Dave wondered if it was possible to survive burns so severe.

The zap numbers of the casualties had been relayed to the Medical Emergency Response Team at Camp Bastion where the doctor would already be in a Land Rover heading for the helicopter, maybe already receiving details of the casualties' blood groups and allergies on his hand-held. But for the Chinook to get here, the contact had to be over. And it showed no sign of ending. If anything, now that the convoy had been halted, the ambush was more intense.

Dave had found a good firing position inside the ruined hulk of the Vector. He had also found Jordan Nelson's machine gun wedged between a slab of armour plating and a brown mud wall. He grabbed it without hope and was amazed when it worked. Far away, in a second-storey window, across two walls and the yard which they protected, he caught a glimpse of movement. Feeling a surge of satisfaction, he fired. A body slumped from the window.