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    Joe wasn’t sure. Maybe if he hadn’t been keeping Ricky on the straight and fucking narrow, he’d have seen the man arrive, got a better look. But whether it was the Doctor or not, if he was approaching the main entrance of the compound with the aim of reinforcing its occupants or helping them in any way, he had to be stopped.
    They were at the top of the rickety set of wooden stairs, the stench of the ground-floor toilet wafting up towards them and no trace of their previous argument in their voices. They needed to get to ground level, because to fire from their OP would immediately give away its location. Seconds later they were hurtling towards the front door. Opening it, Joe stepped out into the darkness beyond, his M4 fully engaged. Ricky was with him.
    Joe took in the situation at a glance. The Doctor – if it was the Doctor – was fifteen metres away, at Joe’s two o’clock. The courting couple had separated. The boy was edging away eastwards along the perimeter wall. Distance, twenty metres, eleven o’clock. He’d left the girl crouching on the ground, yelling her head off at the sight of two men with weapons. They were both in the wrong place at the wrong time: Joe and Ricky couldn’t let Romeo go off and alert anyone to their presence. Same went for Juliet.
    ‘Take them out,’ he instructed Ricky, and turned his attention back to the new arrival.
    The guy was seventeen metres away now. Eighteen.
    A single head shot would put him down, but Joe made the split-second decision to aim for the body. If this was the Doctor, they needed to identify him, and it was hard to identify a body with only half a head.
    He fired. The suppressed M4 made a dull knocking noise and the man went down.
    To his left he heard the discharge of Ricky’s weapon as he fired on Romeo.
    Joe kept his own target in his sight, checking for movement. After five seconds, though, the girl was still screaming. He looked to the left. Ricky had his weapon pointed at Juliet, who was still crouched on the ground ten metres away, to their twelve o’clock. The red dot of his laser marker danced on her throat.
    But Ricky didn’t fire. His hand was shaking again.
    ‘Fuck’s sake!’ Joe hissed. He turned his own weapon in the girl’s direction. The red dot from his gun joined Ricky’s.
    One round. A flash of blood and the girl fell backwards.
    There was no time for Joe to lay into Ricky for his moment of indecision. An explosion from inside the compound ripped through the air. Both men pressed themselves against the exterior wall of the house. Joe engaged his comms. ‘Zero,’ he shouted, ‘this is Sierra Foxtrot Five. What the hell’s going on in there?’
    A crackle of interference, then a voice. ‘Entry team breaching the internal walls to reach target Geronimo. Hold the cordon. Repeat, hold the cordon.’
    ‘Roger that.’
    Joe immediately consulted his mental map of the compound. It was triangular in shape. The main building, situated opposite the triangle’s apex, was connected to the main entrance gates by a pair of high interior walls that formed a thirty-metre-long, open-topped passageway. The Black Hawk had crashed in the western segment of the compound, where, intelligence reports suggested, the occupants burned their rubbish. The explosion must have been the SEALs breaking their way through the walls of the roofless corridor that led from the entrance gates – the same gates Joe’s target had been trying to reach. The man had fallen into a ditch along the bottom of the compound wall eighteen metres from Joe’s position and to his two o’clock. Joe needed to get over there, identify him and finish him off if necessary.
    ‘Cover me,’ he said.
    Ricky nodded, dropped to one knee and pressed the butt of his M4 into his shoulder, ready to provide covering fire should Joe need it.
    Joe ran. The distance between the house and the enemy wall was ten metres, but he had to run double that on the diagonal in a