Her feet and hands were still bound, but if she could lock her arms around his head, she might still have a chance, with one wrenching pull, of separating his head from his spinal column…

‘I can trust you, Caitlin, because I know you,’ Baumer continued. ‘Just like you know me. I know you must be calculating the odds of lashing out at me now. You must be measuring your strength against the damage and pain you have endured in here for the last three weeks, perhaps weighing up what residual skills you retain from all your years of training, what strength of will you possess, even after Reynard has tried to break that will.’

He grinned and flicked one eyebrow up in a gesture of camaraderie.

Then his hand shot out in a blur and he gripped one of hers, turning it back on her cuffed, bleeding wrists so quickly that a spike of pure white fire ran up her arms. She almost screamed, biting deeply into the inside of her cheek in a desperate attempt to draw her mind off the agony of the wrist lock.

The holy warrior known as al Banna let her go. ‘So, shall we stop fucking around?’

He drove a fist squarely into her face, a blow that detonated inside her head like shellfire. As the back of her skull hit the hard concrete slab, she felt his iron grip on her arms again, wrenching her bodily over onto her stomach.

‘Or shall we begin?’ he snarled.

She tried to lash out with a feeble kick but only scraped more skin off her legs. Another punch on the back of her neck stunned her and she came to understand just how weakened she was by weeks of torture and illness. His hands clawed at her hips, dragging her towards him, confirming the worst.

When Caitlin was a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, her family had travelled to California for a holiday, driving all the way from Charleston AFB in South Carolina, where her daddy had been stationed with an airlift squadron. They did all of the family things you do in California – visiting Disneyland, Hollywood, the beaches. But for her the standout memory had been climbing the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, just before the clock struck ten in the morning. The pealing of the bells was frighteningly loud, much louder than she had imagined it would be. She not only heard the thunderous clanging, she felt it, inside her chest and stomach, reverberating right down through her feet. The sensation, which was entirely unpleasant, remained with her ever after.

The rape lasted only a few minutes, but she was still shaking hours later.

Lying on her slab, under a harsh, flat white light in her cell at Noisy-le-Sec, she felt a powerful psychic echo of that same deep body shock.

Her limbs quivered and shook, sometimes so violently that she resembled a victim of late-stage Parkinson’s disease, but it was inside that she felt herself being torn apart by a quaking, shuddering violence that was entirely psychological.

Nobody had entered the room since her violation. In her rational, calculating mind, the cold, mechanical killer’s mind that had been honed to such a dangerous edge, she knew that was just part of ‘the tactical questioning phase’. But she could not rid herself of the burning shame and humiliation she felt. As hard as she tried to control herself, the awful, nauseating tremors reminded her of that day in the bell tower, which naturally led to thoughts of her family, especially her father, and with them came more unutterable shame.

She tried to focus on something simple, some goal she might start working towards – like driving a stiffened sword hand-strike into Baumer’s throat at the first opportunity. But that only reminded her of how weak and unable to resist him she had been in the first place.

She was curled into a tight, shivering foetal ball when the lights went out.

It was so unexpected that Caitlin suffered a moment of total disorientation. She had been kept for so long in this cell flooded with bright, artificial light that the sudden fall of darkness was terrifying, as though her eyes had been put out. She squirmed far back into the corner of her cell, without being consciously aware she had done so. And then she heard something so familiar, but, like the sudden inky darkness, so unexpected it made her mind seize up for an instant.

Gunfire.

It was muted at first, far off in the distance somewhere in the underground maze of Noisy-le-Sec’s interrogation cells. But it soon grew louder, and with it came other sounds. Boots running. Men cursing. More gunfire, the ripping snarl of automatic weapons and the crash of large-bore, single-shot rifles and pistols. A grenade exploded with a deafening roar in one of the enclosed tunnels outside her cell. She could see the flashes in the dark now and pick out individual voices; none of them familiar, all of them French.

Men ran past the heavy iron cage door that locked her in. One stopped, briefly, and fired in through the bars. A short wild burst that largely missed her, although a ricochet did rake a painful burning graze along one hip. She groaned and rolled off the slab, letting herself fall as a deadweight to the floor. In the pitch-blackness of the cell, nobody could see her, and whoever had stopped to finish her off rushed on. Muzzle flashes soon accompanied the crash and zip of bullets, which reached a crescendo as more men rushed past her cell, carrying their fight deeper into the prison complex.

In the darkness, Caitlin crawled into a blind corner, where she just might avoid getting shot, if she was lucky. She huddled there, naked, bleeding, and all alone, for what felt like a long time.

36

PACOM HQ, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

‘My God, it looks like the seventh level of hell down there.’

‘Down there’ meant the Valley of the Nile, for thousands of years a seat of human civilisation, and now an eerie wasteland of oozing, radioactive mud dotted with the stubs of a few scattered ruins, both modern and ancient. To Jim Ritchie, it looked like nothing more than an endless sea of black garden mulch littered with tens of millions of corpses being picked over by every vulture in north-east Africa. The few American recon teams that had ventured in there described the buzzing of flies as being unbearably loud, something akin to a bandsaw. There were a handful of crazed survivors, one-in-ten-million lottery winners, of a sort. They were all, without exception, insane. The population of Egypt had been reduced to a few oasis dwellers deep in the Western Desert, and some wandering Bedouin, all moving south.

Ritchie stood grim-faced in front of the multi-panel displays, many of them recently arrived from Qatar, from the former headquarters of the Coalition. The Pacific Command’s war room was fully engaged monitoring the dozen or more chaotic conflicts now scattered across Ritchie’s theatre. This temporary facility had been constructed to maintain an overwatch of the former CENTCOM area, the nuclear wastelands of the Middle East. And as bad as the apocalyptic desolation of Egypt may have looked through the cameras of the two Global Hawks slowly circling above the Nile Valley and Delta, it was by no means the most horrifying vista arrayed in front of him.