Tajican honked the coach’s horn, and slowly the vehicle edged its way through the thickening river of people towards a hastily erected spool-wire perimeter lit every few hundred yards by powerful floodlights. Behind the curls of razor wire, US marines stood, evenly spaced, guns ready and coolly regarding the growing mass of people only a few yards away from them.

The American soldier sitting beside Private Tajican urged the Fijian to keep the vehicle moving and not let it come to a complete standstill.

‘They’ll overrun us in seconds,’ he muttered warily eyeing the surging crowd ahead and either side of them.

Andy was impressed at how Tajican calmly kept a steady forward momentum, his face locked with concentration, whilst all around him palms and fists thumped noisily against the side and front of the coach.

Something suddenly flew into the coach through the open, glassless front; a stone, a rock . . . whatever it was, it glanced off Tajican’s head, and he clasped a hand to the gash it had caused. Blood rolled down the back of his hand, his arm and soaked into his sleeve.

But he continued calmly driving forward.

When another projectile arced through from the front into the coach, the American soldier sitting at Tajican’s side decided he’d had enough. He swung his assault rifle down and fired a long burst over the heads of the people outside.

The effect was instant. The road ahead cleared.

‘Hit the fuckin’ gas!’ the American shouted. Tajican did just that, and the coach sped up towards the perimeter fence ahead and the entrance gate - a Humvee, parked lengthways across a twelve-foot wide gap in the razor wire. The Humvee rolled out of the way at the very last moment, allowing the coach through, and then immediately rolled back to prevent the thick gathering of people surging through in its wake.

Andy was unprepared for the level of chaos he could see around him. He had seen the inside of several US and UK army bases since he’d started doing field-work in Iraq; always a hive of activity - chaos to the untrained eye. But the disarray he witnessed before him bore no resemblance to any military camp he had seen.

The sky was still dark, but showing the first pale stain of the coming dawn. The airfield was lit by dozens of floodlights erected on tripods and deployed along the main strip. From what he could see, it was an airfield that had been mothballed in recent years, but, in the space of the last forty-eight hours, had been hurriedly revived and adapted to meet immediate needs. There was a control tower to one side of the strip. Clearly the building had, at some point in the past, been gutted of all its electronic equipment, but was now being used in an ad hoc way. At its base a communications truck was parked, whilst several men stood up in the observation tower monitoring the steady stream of transport planes coming in and taking off; they were using laptops that trailed thick cables out through the tower’s rusty old window-frames down to the truck below.

Along the airstrip Andy could see hundreds of men, clustered in groups, most of them lying down; a patchwork quilt of exhausted soldiers, each group awaiting its turn to board a plane.

On the strip, Andy watched a Hercules C130 coming in to land at one end, whilst at the other, another plane was awaiting its chance to take off. Halfway along the strip, on a tarmac turn-off, a plane was being hurriedly loaded up with a group of men who had been roused from their slumber and herded at the double towards the boarding ramp.

The American soldier who had guided their coach in led Andy, Mike, Erich, Westley and his men towards a tent in the middle of the airfield. A flap was pulled to one side. The clinical blue glow of half-a-dozen halogen strip lights swinging from the tent support frame amidst drooping coils of electrical flex, spilled out through the opening into the pre-dawn gloom.

They entered the tent. Standing inside, looking harried, tired, and more than ready to grab some bunk time, was a Marine colonel; a short squat man with greying crew-cut hair and leathery skin pulled tight around a pair of narrowed eyes.

‘Colonel Ellory, sir. We picked these guys up on the border road. They’re Brits, sir.’

Ellory turned to look at them. His eyes ran quickly across Andy and the other two civilians, and then towards Westley, looking for rank insignia. ‘Okay son, where’s your CO?’

Westley saluted awkwardly. ‘We lost him, also our senior platoon NCO. I’m highest rank here, sir. Lance Corporal Westley.’

Colonel Ellory frowned as he worked to make sense of Westley’s Geordie accent. ‘You’re in charge, son?’

‘Yessir.’

He turned to the others, ‘And you are?’

‘I’m a civilian contractor, Andy Sutherland.’

‘Mike Kenrick, I’m a contractor too.’

‘Erich Feillebois, engineer with Ceneco Oil.’

Ellory nodded. ‘Okay guys. This is how it is. We’re trying to get as many of our boys home as quickly as possible. There’s a limited number of planes, a limited amount of fuel. Not everyone’s getting home. Priority goes to military personnel, and amongst them, priority goes to our boys. That’s the deal, I’m afraid. I know it sounds shitty, but . . . well, that’s how we’re doing it.’

‘Have you got any other British troops?’ asked Andy.

‘Yeah, there’s a few around. We’ve had some stragglers rolling in over the border road. A bunch of army vehicle retrieval engineers, quite a few independent security contractors, all goddamn nationalities. A mixed bunch out there. You’ll just have to take your chances with them. The Brits and the other internationals are in two separate groups down the other end of the strip.’

Colonel Ellory looked like he was pretty much done with the conversation and ready to turn his attention elsewhere.

Andy stepped in quickly. ‘How long are you planning on keeping this strip open?’

Ellory sighed. ‘I’d like to say, as long as it takes. But we’ll keep it going until I get orders to pull the plug and get out.’

‘How bad is it out there?’ asked Mike.

‘Out where? You mean the Middle East? Or home?’

Mike shrugged. ‘We’ve been out of the loop.’

Ellory ran a hand through his coarse grey crew-cut. ‘The Middle East is a goddamn write-off. We sent our boys into Saudi to try and save what they could. The crazy Muslim sons of bitches made for the refineries first. Pretty much destroyed most of them before we could get in there.’ Ellory looked at them. ‘And that’s pretty fucking smart if you ask me. There’s multiple redundancy in those pipelines and the wells. Not the case with their refineries. Those sons of bitches targeted exactly the right things. And it’s the same deal in Kuwait and the Emirates. You ask me, this wasn’t a fucking spontaneous outbreak of religious civil war. It was a goddamned organised operation. Some serious military-level planning went into this shit. They hit Venezuela, they hit the refineries in Baku. These motherfuckers knew exactly what they were doing.’

‘Who? Which motherfuckers?’ asked Mike.

‘Shit. You kidding me?’

‘Don’t tell me you think it was Al-Qaeda,’ Mike laughed, ‘because if you—’

‘Do I look like a dumbass?’ Ellory shook his head. ‘Of course I don’t think it’s Al-Qaeda. They couldn’t organise a piss in a bucket. Fuck . . . they’re just a bunch of phantoms anyway. No. I can make an educated guess as to who’s behind this shit though,’ said Ellory, placing his hands on the desk in front of him and arching a stiff and tired back. ‘Those sons of bitches in Iran.’

Andy nodded. It was a possibility. Perhaps they were the ones behind all of this. They had the wherewithal to pull off something on this kind of scale. And motive too.

‘Yeah, I could believe they’re behind this,’ said Mike. ‘I mean, we stalled their nuclear programme. But this . . . this has worked better than God knows how many nukes would have done.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ellory. ‘They know goddamn well they can hurt the world far more this way, by hitting the most vulnerable oil chokepoints. And shit, they got us all. But I’ll say this. When we get this crap fixed-up again, and mark my words, we will, they’d better run for shelter in Tehran, because we are going to bomb those fuckers back to the Jurassic.’

Andy wondered whether plans were already being drawn up to deliver some payback, or whether the US government, like every other government, was focusing on damage limitation right now. If Iran really had been behind this, Andy reflected, they’d better bloody well hope the world wasn’t going to recover enough to focus its attention on them and bring some retribution to bear. Proof of their involvement, or no proof.

‘Shit, we should’ve seen this coming.’ Ellory shook his head. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got time to talk this crap through with you guys.’ He pointed towards Andy, Westley and his men standing just outside the tent. ‘You guys’ll have to take your chances with the other Brits assembled at the end of the strip.’ He pointed to Erich, ‘And you need to get yourself down and join the international group.’

He pointed to Mike. ‘You, on the other hand, you’ll need to make your way over to where we’ve put all our civilian contractors, US nationals, defence contractors.’

Mike looked across at Andy. ‘These guys have been through a lot Colonel, they—’

‘I do not have the fucking time to argue the point! If we have the time and the planes, we’ll get them out, but American nationals and personnel are to go first. Now if you wouldn’t mind getting your ass out of my tent, I’ve got a million and one things to attend to,’ Colonel Ellory said, offering a formal nod and then turning towards a sergeant who had entered brandishing a clipboard.

Andy turned to Westley, ‘Okay then, I guess we do as the man says, and go find the other Brits.’

They walked out of the tent into the half-light, towards Wesley’s platoon gathered in a loose and weary-looking huddle beneath the glow of a floodlight several dozen yards away. Erich shook hands with Andy and Mike.

‘I go now,’ he said quietly. ‘See if I find any other French here. You stay safe, eh?’

Andy nodded, ‘Safe journey, mate.’

They watched him walk away along the edge of the airstrip, past silent islands of soldiers, sitting, resting, some smoking, some sleeping.

Lance Corporal Westley walked over towards his men and got them on their feet. He left Mike and Andy standing watching the planes come and go, listening to the roar of propeller engines turning, and the distant cries and chants of the civilians massing outside the perimeter of razor wire.

‘Well I guess this is where we part company, Dr Sutherland,’ said Mike.

‘Yeah, we’ll have to get together and do this again next year.’

Mike laughed.

Andy stuck out a hand. ‘I’d give you my email address, but I’m not sure there’ll be an Internet when we get back home.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ said Mike, grabbing the offered hand and shaking it.

‘But look, if it turns out this isn’t actually the end of the world,’ Andy continued, ‘you can always get me through my website - PeakOilWatch.co.uk.’

Mike nodded. ‘I’ll make a point of looking you up.’ He watched Westley’s men preparing to move off. ‘You know, for a guy that’s never handled a gun before,’ he said pointing towards the remnants of the platoon, ‘you did a good job leading those boys out of trouble.’

Andy shook his head. ‘Not good enough. Telling Peters to turn off our lights—’

‘Shit like that happens, Andy. But you got the rest of these boys through, that’s what counts,’ said Mike, a grin flashing from his dark beard. ‘You did good.’

They shared an awkward silence, not really sure what came next, but knowing there was more to be said.

‘We went through a lot of stuff, these last few days, didn’t we?’ said Mike.

‘Yes. I’m sure we should be talking it out or something, Dr Phil style.’

‘There never seems to be time enough to talk. It seems like all we’ve done in the last three days is fight, run and drive.’

‘Yeah. Anyway,’ said Andy, ‘I’m not sure I want to revisit any of it right now. I’ve got a wife and two kids to get home to.’

Mike nodded. ‘If they’re half as resourceful as you, they’ll be just fine, Andy. Trust me.’

He shrugged. ‘What about you, Mike? You must have family you’re worried about.’

‘Nope,’ said Mike shaking his head, ‘it’s just me. The job always seemed to come first.’

‘I guess that makes things easier.’

‘A lot.’

Andy caught sight of a smear of dry blood on the American’s forearm. ‘I’m sorry about Farid. I’d have liked him to have made it.’

‘Yeah. He made some sense, didn’t he?’

‘I think he did.’

‘And we lost some good men back there. Lieutenant Carter, Sergeant Bolton . . .’

Andy nodded.

‘Good soldiers,’ said Mike casting a glance at Westley and his men who were beginning to head wearily down towards the end of the strip, ‘all of them, good men. You Brits can put up a good fight.’

Andy smiled, ‘Ahh, except I’m not a Brit.’

‘You Kiwis too,’ Mike replied, slapping him on the shoulder.

‘Take care Mike. I hope things aren’t as fucked up for you back home as I suspect they are for us.’

‘This mess will right itself eventually.’

‘I’m not so confident.’