He’d said, out in the rain and scrub beside the shooting ranges, that the basics should always be observed, and he’d used the buzz words that anyone attempting rural surveillance, in Iraq, Afghanistan or Northern Ireland, should have at the forefront of their mind. The outline of the human body was so distinctive that its shape must always be broken. Shadows were an aid, and should be hugged. The biggest giveaway, unprofessional and unforgivable, was the silhouette . Any kit surface, the bulk of binoculars or the length of a spotter ’scope, must be broken up. When a team moved, spacing was critical. The last of his six bullet points was smell: he’d talked of how long it lingered on open ground if there was no wind, and not just fags, toothpaste and weapons oil but the insect repellent you needed to keep man-eating Iraqi mosquitoes at bay. They were terrific, those young fellows, and they gave him respect.

He’d ended the outside session with a popular theme: how useless the Americans were – and the story of the FBI agent in the hunt for a red-neck abortion-clinic bomber in the mountains of North Carolina. The agent was supposed to be on a covert lie-up and had freaked out because he couldn’t take the darkness or the silence. Another, from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had started to shriek because he wasn’t permitted, in his hide, to smoke his daily ration of Marlboro Lite.. . And a sheriff’s deputy, gone for a week’s duty in a forest, had broken his spectacles on the first day out: he hadn’t brought a spare pair and could barely see his hand in front of him for the rest of the stag. If Foulkes had been talking to an American audience, then FBI, ATF and the deputy would have become British, and if it had been Germans, the miscreants would have been Poles. It had been a good dinner and he had felt valued. At the table, they called him by the name he’d been given a couple of decades earlier: he was ‘Foxy’ Foulkes.