Andy McNab - Crossfire

It ended: I love you darling, but they need to know how long.

One thing we knew for sure, then: up to the point he wrote those words, he was alive. They could only have come from Dom.

Proof-of-life statements are an important part of any hostage deal. A trained negotiator would also be looking for clues that Dom was either bullshitting or under duress. Prone-to-capture troops and business people working in hostile zones have a ready-prepared under-duress sign, and maybe even a coded means of identifying locations. All Dom's had been sent at around eighty thirty, local. That was why she had been up, online and waiting.

We'd reached a bank of pay stations for the short-stay. I handed him back the sheet. 'Any idea yet who's lifted him?'

Criminals would demand a ransom and hold out for it. Only if it didn't eventually materialize would they offload him in a fire sale to another gang – or, in Afghanistan, the Taliban. That was when things usually turned nasty. Each gang would sell him on to the next like a girl passed between sex-traffickers; he'd spiral down a chain of extremist groups with life getting worse and worse until he ended up with one who didn't want anything except to hack off his head in front of a camera.

The Yes Man shook his head. 'It could be freelancers, it could be another drug cartel. I don't know and don't care.' He put the sheet into his pocket and paid for his ticket. 'I just want him back and in a fit state to talk.'

We stalled as four guys walked past with suit-carriers over their arms and overnight bags trundling on wheels behind them.

'Is he emailing anybody else?'

'No.'

The Yes Man had phenomenal electronic firepower at his beck and call. Using the Echelon system, GCHQ could capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, emails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world.

'This could all be bullshit to get the cash from the house and fuck his wife off.' He gave me a strange look and I wondered if he thought I'd lost my marbles. 'Why not?' I raised my palms. 'We don't know what the fuck is happening.'

He did it again. I suddenly realized it was the profanity and not the idea he didn't like.

'There's no other traffic from that or any other email address while the user is logged on. But his emails have all been sent from the same location.'

He'd stopped by the boot of a navy Audi A4 and produced a key fob from his trouser pocket. He pressed it and the boot unlocked. A laptop bag was sitting on top of picnic blankets and wellington boots.

'Everything you need is loaded in here. New ACA, the lot. The Read Me file will start you off. If you have information, you send it directly to me the moment it happens.'

He handed me the case. 'The password is your old army number. You know how to work Schubert?'

I nodded. GCHQ had developed the secure hard drive and email system so not even the Americans could suck it up. There wasn't anything to know about it. It just, like, worked.

'Good. The mobile will still be secure there.'

He unzipped the front pocket of the bag to show me the airline tickets.

He took a step closer, as if airport car parks had ears. I could see inside his collar. He'd been squeezing that boil.

'I want to keep foremost in your mind the sensitivity of this operation. There are people in the FCO in Kabul, embassy officials, who may well be part of the problem. We need him back without anyone knowing.'

He held out a hand, but shaking wasn't what he had in mind. 'Why don't you let me have your own documents, for security? I'll hold them until you get back.'

I zipped up the laptop and put it over my shoulder. I smiled, shook my head and walked away.

Thursday, 8 March 1305 hrs Well over an hour behind schedule, and six security checks and X-rays later – including one right at the door of the aircraft – the Indian Airlines Airbus 320 took off into the hot blue sky over Delhi and pointed north-west for the two-hour flight to Kabul.

Departures had been a nightmare. We'd even been segregated in our own little holding area. It reminded me of the Belfast to London flights during that war, except that here the whole terminal, including our Kabul leper colony, was plastered with flat screens showing non-stop Bollywood. No matter which film it was, they all seemed to star the same tall guy with a grey beard; he even popped up in the commercial breaks, advertising mobile phones and aftershave. Then one of the channels ran a documentary about his waxwork in Madame Tussaud's.

The aircraft could have carried 150 passengers but was only half full. Kabul was hardly competing with Amsterdam or Prague for the city-break crowd. The Gurkhas and Filipinos in economy, paid to guard compounds, were proud big-time of what they did, and didn't care who knew it. They toted US Army camouflage print or Brit DMP day sacks, and their T-shirts were emblazoned with eagles wrapped in the Stars and Stripes and messages about Operation Enduring Freedom.

Up in business class, Indian men in pressed, short-sleeved shirts scribbled furiously on notepads, arranging the shipment of another twenty tonnes of Fairy Liquid and marmalade into the war zone.

Some of the Westerners looked like seasoned contractors, the sort who supplied the armies with everyone from cooks to radar operators. They were the ones in black polo shirts with embroidered company logos. There were also a few of the bigger-buck contractors. They wore Gucci safari vests, and their hair was longer to show they weren't military. One had a Mohican. They didn't want a sergeant major shouting at them by mistake. Me, I was in my normal shit state, but at least I had brand-new boxers and socks on. When I pulled off my boots the stink wasn't half as bad as usual.

The seat-belt light pinged off and the attendants started serving our pre-ordered drinks. I'd gone for Pepsi to wash down the antibiotics. I gazed out of the window. I'd thought I'd never get shot again, and I had been. Afghanistan was one place I'd thought I'd never come back to, and here I was. Whatever happened, I didn't want to be running up and down those fucking hills again.

When the Russians invaded in 1979, it had been for much the same reasons as we did in 2001. They were 'liberating' the country. The West didn't see it that way. Soviet troops weren't welcome so close to the Gulf oilfields.

As a young Green Jacket squaddy running round Tidworth garrison in Wiltshire, the invasion had about as much impact on my life as coastal erosion in Northumberland. It didn't directly hit my pay packet or interrupt the supply of curry sauce to the local chippie, so why should I give a shit? In any case, I didn't even know where Afghanistan was.

To start with, the invasion was a breeze. The Russians thought they'd cracked it. Their problem was, none of them had a clue about mountain warfare or counter-insurgency, and their weaponry and military equipment – particularly their armoured vehicles and tanks – were crap. Their other problem was the mujahideen.

The Dad's Army in cowpat hats finally started to get their act together and kick ass – until the Russians brought in the Hind gunships. Basically an airborne artillery park, the Hind was the most formidable helicopter in existence. It turned the tide. By the mid-eighties, the Americans were flapping big-time. It was still the Cold War. The Kremlin needed to be taught a lesson.

Ronald Reagan was suddenly hailing the muj as freedom-fighters. A wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden, called on Muslim fighters round the world to come and do their bit. Weapons poured in from all over, and they didn't have a clue how to use them. Dickheads like me, by then a lance corporal in the SAS, were told to get cracking and give them a hand.