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Wilkes shifted his weight against his pack — something was digging into his ribs and his butt was already sore. The insertion flight was always the worst aspect of any op, the helo flight out the best. His stomach rumbled. There’d been no time to grab something from the mess. He wondered what had been stuffed into the ‘ratpacks’, their primary food source for the duration. Ratpacks — ration packs — had been developed by nutritionists to provide all the calories and essential vitamins required to keep a soldier out in the field killing for twenty-four hours. They weren’t exactly gourmet, but they weren’t bad either, containing precooked meals, chilli powder, salt, pepper, Vegemite, peanut butter, cheese, crackers, coffee, tea, condensed milk, sweet biscuits, sugar and chocolate. They had each taken enough ratpacks for a two-day insertion. Wilkes added a satchel of coriander powder to his kit to enliven the flavour of the precooked meals.

Like all SAS soldiers, Wilkes and his men were more than capable of living off the land, especially the jungle, which Wilkes thought of as part kitchen, part garden shed. There was food literally growing on trees, as well as underground in the form of roots and tubers. There were also plenty of animals that could be eaten — mammals and reptiles. That was the kitchen part. A veritable smorgasbord of berries and fruits that looked edible but were, in fact, lethal was the garden shed part. But while Wilkes and his men could all live indefinitely on the food nature provided around them, it was a hell of a lot easier to just rip into a ratpack. Foraging for food could take hours and significantly reduce their effectiveness as a fighting force.

Each man also carried a light sleeping bag, mosquito netting, groundsheet and silk hammock, which could be strung between trees to provide a comfortable resting place no matter what the angle of the ground, as well as keeping the trooper out of range of the ants, scorpions and other biting nasties. The groundsheet was thrown over the top to keep the rain off. And the mossie net’s use was obvious. In the morning, the whole lot could be packed away leaving no trace of their presence.

Finally, the soldiers each had a survival kit that included a map of the area printed on fine silk fabric that could also be used as a water filter, a needle and thread, water purification tablets, a flint and steel with which to start a fire, a length of fishing line and a hook that could be used both to catch fish and as a snare for capturing small animals, a basic first aid kit complete with bandages, disinfectant powder, antibiotics, liquid sutures, a scalpel, gauze, codeine tablets, lock-ties and three one-shot ampoules of morphine with hypodermic syringe built in.

Floppy hat, Kevlar helmet, camouflage face paint, trenching tool, a dagger, and a machete to hack away the dense foliage once their cover was blown, when stealth and secrecy were no longer on their side, completed the approximately eighty-five kilogram pack each man was lugging into the jungle. It was like hauling a full-grown man on your back. It could have been worse, thought Wilkes, if they’d expected the operation to last a week rather than a couple of days. Once they arrived and had scouted the surrounding terrain, they would cache most of this gear, returning as needed for ammunition, spare comms, batteries and rations, carrying only what was needed to keep them as light and as mobile as possible.

Wilkes looked at the nine men jammed in around him: Ellis, Coombs, Littlemore, Beck, Curry, Robson, Gibbo, Morgan and Ferris. They seemed okay — almost comfortable — but the risks they were about to face were enormous. Wilkes reflected on his own mortality. If death came to him, well, no fucking worries, mate. He was by no means a fatalist, nor did he have a death wish, but you could hardly be a member of the SAS and not be at least a little ambivalent about your own life and death. If you bought it, tough shit. Sure, there were people who would miss him and cry at his passing and he felt a pang of sorrow for them but, for himself, this was the only way to live.

He’d done a lot of very dangerous shit over the years: served in Bougainville advising the Papua New Guinea regulars fighting the guerrillas; he’d been inserted into the Congo with US Marine Recon to eradicate the organised gangs of gorilla poachers; he’d helped rescue a couple of CIA men who’d been captured and held to ransom in Bosnia; he’d been dropped into Kosovo scouting for targets for the UN pilots. And, of course, East Timor. He’d missed Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran — he was a jungle expert.