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constant pain, a feeling deep in his core, every time he thought of Miranda.
    She couldn’t be dead, he told himself over and over again. There was no body, according to Patti, who desperately wanted to believe Miranda was hiding, or maybe alive but lost in the African bush.
    ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ the CO had said to him on the dusty roadside at Bagram, ‘but it seems Miranda has been killed by a lion in Africa.’
    For a moment he had thought the colonel was joking. Everyone in the unit knew his daughter was researching carnivores in Africa. The guys in Special Forces were hard men and, Lord knew, some of them had twisted senses of humour, but one thing a guy would never do was joke about another man’s kids.
    It was no joke, but it was absurd. Miranda had lived in the African bush for six months and she had repeatedly told Jed in her emails that she knew how to take care of herself. Also, he remembered her reassuring him in one message that when she camped out in the field there was always an armed ranger or safari guide in the party. What had happened to the guard? For the man’s own sake, Jed hoped he was dead. If not, he would be by the time Jed finished with him.
    Boston looked cold and bleak through the gaps in the cloud cover. He had never liked coming here, although the thought of meeting Miranda had always made the trip worth it. Nightmarish scenes played over and over in his head as he prepared to face Patti. The thought of his baby being torn apart by a wild beast was too much to bear. He screwed his eyes tight for a couple of seconds to rid himself of the recurring image. He was tired, fall-down tired, but there would be time to sleep on the next flight, later that evening.
    He pulled his green suit bag from the overhead locker. He had about an hour with Patti. He doubted he could take more than that.
    She was waiting for him when he emerged from the air bridge. They stared at each other for a few seconds. She was wearing jeans and high-heeled boots, a white T-shirt and a cropped black leather jacket. Her golden hair was piled carelessly high, stray wisps framing her face. She was a little fuller in the face, but still as beautiful as the day they had met. He saw Miranda in her eyes and mouth. It was all he could do to fight back the tears.
    Patti Vernon had transferred to his school in his senior year. They had started dating a week after she arrived. She lost her virginity to him on prom night. It seemed as though they would live happily ever after, until he made a spur of the moment decision to join the Army instead of going to college.
    They had planned to marry as soon as possible, and he wanted to start earning money. She had reluctantly become a soldier’s bride, on the promise that he would eventually go to college with the money he made from his first enlistment.
    Their teenage passion lasted for the first year of marriage. Patti was on the pill and took it religiously, except for the weekend between Jed’s basic training and advanced infantry training. They went away to a country hotel and she forgot her oral contraceptive packet. They risked it. Patti fell pregnant.
    Jed loved his baby girl, but he was being seduced away from his overtired wife, who seemed to blame him for the fact that she had to drop out of college and could barely afford to make ends meet.
    Domestic duties left Jed cold, particularly when compared with the excitement of airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and ranger training in the Florida swamps.
    Grenada, in 1983, was the first time America had seriously flexed its military muscles since Vietnam. The brief conflict also marked the beginning of the end of Jed and Patti’s marriage. The Army had shaken off the shame of defeat in south-east Asia and Jed Banks had discovered that he was born to be a warrior.
    Patti’s lower lip started to tremble and Jed walked to her. He folded her in his arms as she started to cry.
    ‘Oh, Patti,’ was all he could