Badger had made his own, and when Ged was assigned to him he’d told the man, four years older than himself, that what he’d concocted was crap and had made him a new one. The others on the team were astonished that the ‘arrogant bastard’ had done something for someone else, and the new camouflage headgear was best grade. Their faces, beneath the scrim netting that hung over their eyes, mouths and noses, were smeared with cream in green and black slashes, and the ’scope’s lens had more scrim over it… The bloody rain dripped on them.

It had been a good stag – good enough to justify the damp and the hunger: they’d eaten only a muesli bar each over a fifteen-hour period and drunk minimum water. Badger had identified the natural leader among the Muslim kids – bad not having the audio working, but the ’scope lens was enough to sort out the men from the boys. There was one to whom the others seemed to respond: he gave the instructions, didn’t do the runs up the hill with a weighted rucksack. He was a tall man, wore hiking boots, jeans and a heavy anorak; he didn’t have the trademark beard of a jihadist or the close-cropped skull. He wore thick rimless spectacles and might have been a library supervisor or a junior accountant – could have been anything – which meant he had worked on his anonymity with the help of a razor.

Badger wasn’t armed and Ged had a disabling spray canister on his belt under the gillie suit; the power of the ’scope’s Leica lens, and the 500-ml one on the camera, meant they didn’t have to be closer. There was support at the pick-up point, with Glocks and H amp;Ks, but that was down on the road and in a lay-by closer to Beulah than Abergwesyn. The kids from Luton would have been fired up with holy-war stuff, and the discovery of a covert team watching them would have bred – no argument – angst, and from angst came violence, and from violence came a knife and a bared throat when a victim’s head was yanked back. The lenses they had been issued with meant they could stay a decent distance back, up the hillside, and do their business and… It was useful intelligence they had gained, and they had high-quality pictures and the number-plates of a Transit van that would be picked up when it was back on the road.