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stock in general, but not in particular. A simple chore that should have taken no more than ten minutes grew longer and longer. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. He backtracked from the warehousey bit into the store again, double-checked the aisle, location and product number, then marched forwards again, found the exact location. Nothing. He took out his mobile phone and captured where the shelving should have been. Joe showed it to one of the store workers – a big man with an edge of incivility about him – who grunted.
    ‘Can you not find this?’ Joe’s voice was cold with a kind of controlled anger.
    ‘No,’ said the worker. ‘Don’t snap at me, mate, or I’ll sort you out.’
    Joe clenched his fists tightly but did nothing. The man waited a beat, then called him a ‘pussy’.
    Joe walked off, found an empty aisle and closed his eyes.
    He was back in the hut they slept in at the terrorist training camp, in the mountains north-east of the capital. At five thirty in the morning, the very first thing he saw when the lights came on were the twin photographs of God the Father, the fat one with the Doris Day smile, and God the Son, the weird-looking Elvis impersonator with the bouffant hair and elevator shoes. Then getting dressed, and the six-mile run round the camp in the dark, knowing that whoever came last would spend the day in the pit and they all knew it would be Donnelly, again, and that Donnelly couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to take it. The pit was twenty feet deep, and so cold it made your bones creak.
    At the end of the run, Donnelly – flabby, whey-faced – was last, again.
    ‘The pit for you,’ said Chong, his stare impenetrable, his lack of humanity all too easy to read. Declan Donnelly was their brigade commander and had been a lion in West Belfast. Donnelly started to weep.
    ‘No pit today,’ said Joe.
    ‘Pit for you, too. All day, all night,’ said Chong.
    ‘I said, no pit today.’
    The others looked on, dry mouthed, fearful where this would end up. Joe was the bigger man, sure, but Chong was a lord of killing. The only sound was that of the breeze, coming down from the mountain tops, stirring through the pine forest.
    Chong moved towards him, angled his right hand and made to chop hard on Joe’s throat, but Joe put up his left hand and blocked him, and the combat started. The pit was on the far side of the camp grounds, a mile or so away from the huts and the other guards, who were out of sight.
    Chong recovered quickly and danced behind Joe’s back. Twisting suddenly, he caught Joe in an armlock and now his thumbs were edging towards Joe’s eyeballs. Joe gripped Chong’s wrists, but the master was too strong for him. Through clouds of mist, the sun was finally clearing the Rangrim Mountains to the east, the darkness ebbing into a dawn sky the hue of spilt blood.
    Joe could feel Chong’s fingers pressing against his eye sockets. He would be blind in five seconds, dead in ten. Sightless, but using the light of the rising sun to guide him, he charged straight ahead, carrying Chong on his back, and leapt into the pit. As he fell, he kicked outwards against the far wall of the pit, so that Chong landed first, with the entire heft of Joe’s body on top of him. The pressure on Joe’s eyeballs stopped.
    Winded, Joe rolled off Chong, who lay on the floor of the pit. Chong had been knocked out, but was still very much alive. When he came round, Joe knew, Chong would kill him, and Donnelly too, and anyone else who stood up to him. So Joe broke his neck and waited, shivering in the pit, until he was certain Chong was dead.
    His friends used the ladder left close to the pit to get him out.
    Donnelly told the others, ‘If any one of you breathes a word of what happened here, I will have you shot. This was an accident. Chong overbalanced and fell in the pit. That is what we all saw. We’re going home, boys. We’ve had enough of this place. We’re leaving North Korea.’
    The