Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, made clear that Zawahri remained high on the U.S. list of hunted militants.
After five hours of watching their feet as they hunted for him, he listened as they came up with a plan: they would let off a round of gunfire and tell the commander that Jean Paul had been killed.
It turned out to be his white whale; as he hunted it and obsessed about destroying it, it eluded him and succeeded.
She described having her voicemails intercepted as like being "monitored and hunted down by a sort of secret police, who were digging into our lives as much as they could in order to discover every possible detail about our private lives, as well as our professional ones, to use against us".
Bellamy is a hunter of the old school – a farmer with a broad Gloucestershire accent who has hunted all his life.
She tells me she farmed locally (one of the few women that did so on her own in the Cotswolds), has hunted for 70 years and rode until she was 80. "I loved riding," she says, "and was quite good.
"These species are commonly hunted where legal, sustainable and where populations need to be managed".
Bargain clothes can be hunted down at the iconic Bullring, one of Britain's most popular shopping centres, home to 160 of the usual high street suspects, from Topshop to Selfridges.
Their friendship was never affected; they hunted, skied and roomed together while team-mates at Juventus.
These two, who between them have hunted for 150 years (I discover later that Edwards, also still following the hunt by car, is 96), open my eyes to the crucial truth about hunting: for all the arguments over the ban, it had already changed irrevocably long before the anti-hunt campaigners got their teeth into it.
In real life, Cesare survived syphilis and malaria but was eventually hunted down and hacked to death at the age of 31 by an assassination posse of 70 horsemen.
