Knee-deep in an open sewage drain outside Kabul airport, the former British Army interpreter’s hopes of rescue were quickly vanishing.
Like hundreds of would-be refugees he, his wife and six children, were stuck queuing in a putrid ditch some 500 metres away from an airport entrance.
Their only hope was that soldiers standing on a nearby perimeter wall would pluck them out from the desperate hordes and take them to a new life.