The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan Page A

there were still another four or five hours until sundown. If he escaped now, that was four or five hours when he would be running in daylight . . .
    He held on to the last glimmers of hope. Maybe a backup squadron was out trying to find him. Even that thought had its worries: if the Taliban heard the noise of vehicles approaching, chances were they’d come in and execute him immediately, just to be rid of him. And he’d seen enough video clips on the Internet of Taliban executions to know how brutal that would be.
    Fear again. He did what he could to control it. He didn’t know how long it would be before they got to work on him. Maybe their strategy was to make him sweat it out. Once they started, it would only be a matter of time before he cracked. He knew any information he had now would be useless. The guys back at base would have recovered the bodies from the wreckage of the bird. They would know Jack was missing. They’d have changed any operational details he was privy to.
    During training they always told you that if you were captured, you had to last twenty-four hours. Easy for some instructor in the safety of Hereford to say but once your balls were in that vice all fucking bets were off. Might take an hour, might take a day, might take a week. But sooner or later he’d be singing like a canary on speed.
    That meant Jack’s only loyalty was to himself. His only focus: to get out of there. If that meant pretending to be compliant, if it meant making them think he was a soft touch, so be it. Jack would tell these bastards whatever they wanted to hear. Humanise himself. Appease them. If it bought him a little time to cook something up, anything was acceptable.
    And then, when he got the chance – if he got the chance – he’d kill as many of them as he could.
    Time passed. Two hours, he estimated. The sun was lower now and shooting a beam through the tiny opening.
    Jack sat in the corner of the room, sweating in the afternoon heat, having untied the ropes round his ankles. He was sitting still, conserving his energy. At one point he pulled down his trousers, crouched on the bucket and took a shit. The smell that leached into the air of his prison was foul, but he knew from experience that during a ‘tactical questioning’, the bowels were often the first to go. Better to evacuate himself at a moment of his own choosing.
    He made a mental list of everything he had at his disposal, and it wasn’t a long one. They’d confiscated all his weapons, of course, along with the spare ammo and fragmentation grenades that he’d stashed in his ops waistcoat with his now missing escape and evasion kit. The shoelaces had been removed from his boots to make walking more difficult. In fact, the only thing they’d left him with was his Silva compass, because that was no good to anyone. The body of the compass had cracked and the needle had detached itself from its spindle. His compass wouldn’t get him out of this room, let alone back to base. And apart from that, they’d left him with nothing other than the clothes on his back. Even his belt had gone . . . But his captors had missed the pliable saw blade that all the guys wore sewn into the elasticated cord round the top of their trousers. He loosened the blade, ready to pull it out when he needed it.
    The door opened. Jack looked up slowly from his sitting position. Four men walked in. They all had assault rifles, but only two of them had their weapons pointing at Jack. A third clutched a small video camera, and the fourth had the swagger of a leader. He was the only one that still wore combat camo. Bin Laden chic. Jack thought he recognised his face, and his eyes flickered towards the man’s left hand.
    Four fingers. It was the same guy he’d seen out on the ground earlier.
    The armed men stood by the door while their leader approached Jack, who remained still in the corner. He was tall – almost as tall as Jack – and he towered above him, looking down