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looked back to see what the plywood sheet had hidden.
    There was another set of doors. These were also padlocked but painted bright red, and bore a sign and crest saying ‘United States Air Force Medical Service’.
    Again, I cut the padlock. I swung the doors open. We shone our flashlights in. Transparent plastic sheets hung from the ceiling. We pushed through them.
    Before us was a disused mortuary. Sinks, drains, and…four tables and four dark green bodybags on the tables. They looked like they had bodies in them. Oh fuck. I turned to Farzana.
    ‘Fuzz. I can’t do this.’
    She nodded and went forward. I faced away.
    I waited.
    After a while came a laugh.
    ‘Riz bhai, dekho na!’
    All the bodybags contained mannequins. I sagged in relief and waved at Fuzz to keep looking. I searched at the opposite end. Here was another room, no door. There were transparent strips in place on the doorway, the kind you found in warehouses. I pushed through and placed one of the RAC striplights on the floor and turned it on. No dust here. The room contained a hospital gurney and mattress and the floor was strewn with medical kit wrappings and detritus. There was a mobile drip stand and a folding chair, but not much else. Fuzz came in through the strips and looked at the floor, then began inspecting the gurney. I lifted the mattress. Nothing underneath. Under the gurney was a used disposable blood type testing kit.
    ‘Remember what clothes she was wearing on the day, Fuzz?’
    ‘Of course. That manky Phoenix Program t-shirt and pedal pusher jeans.’
    ‘Yeah. And those horrible old deck shoes that I was always trying to dump.’
    I noticed there was a small shelf-type bed in the corner. We went to have a look at that. Fuzz carried on looking up and down. She started inspecting the bed frame. I went to look at the plug points next to it. They were badly scratched.
    Two minutes later Fuzz whistled a bird-trill and pointed at a bloodstain on the wood of the bed frame. I went back to have a look.
    Scratched into the bottom of the frame below the bloodstain were some words in Urdu. They were upside down. We both craned our heads ridiculously to read the scrawl. My eyes watered. Fuzz was ahead of me. ‘Mangetar, mein marri hui nahi hoon.’
    And then Fuzz whooped and hugged me. We fell to the floor in a heap and started laughing. I knew Bang-Bang would do it. So long as she was alive, she’d have scratched that in any place available. It meant ‘fiancé, I’m not dead.’
    I got on the phone to the Colonel. Behind me Fuzz was dancing round and singing an obscure Bollywood song.
    Two rings. ‘Riz. What do you have?’
    ‘We’re at RAF Barford St John and she’s left a message. She’s left a message!’
    ‘Son, we’re go. I’ll call Swallow and the lads now.’
    ‘Yeah but we don’t know if she’s definitely in Kabul ye-’
    He’d hung up.
    Fuzz had walked outside to the airstrip. I walked to her side. She was looking at tyre marks on the concrete in the light of her flashlight, and seemed lost in thought.
    Presently I asked her. ‘Thoughts, Fuzz?’
    She looked at me. ‘Probably a propeller-driven plane landing. Difficult to get a jet in here. And they look relatively recent. Say within the last week.’
    She took a photo on her phone with the flash on. She stopped and ran it through her mind and then paced the distance between the rubber smears.
    ‘That looks the size of something like a twin-prop. Something with the range to get to Frankfurt, like an Aviocar or a Skytruck. CIA and US Special Ops have a few. They dogleg at Frankfurt to get to places like Cyprus or the Middle East.’
    Fuzz tapped on her Android phone for a while. ‘Here we go… PZL M28 Skytruck… wheel track eleven feet… wheel base fourteen point three…’
    She paced it out again. Then she paced a point where there was one smear to the left. She came back and looked at me. ‘Yep. It was a Skytruck.’
    We looked around at the lines of antenna