South-east of the Estonian village of Värska, Highway 178 – a single-lane road fringed by forest and farmland – slipped out of the Baltic state and into Russia. It continued across sovereign Russian soil for just over a kilometre before crossing back into Estonia again. It was a geographical oddity, a cartographer’s hiccup called ‘the Saatse Boot’. And because the road led nowhere, except from one part of Estonia to another, the border crossings were open to local traffic and almost completely unguarded. To the south-east, the highway connected a small patchwork of villages virtually cut off from the rest of the country by poor roads and a vast expanse of forest. But to the north-west there would be easy and inconspicuous access for Jack and what I hoped would be his rescue mob.

Halfway along the 178’s course inside Russia there was a junction with a forest path – which cut through the trees for two klicks from the Russian village of Gorodishche on the east. As far as low-profile easy-access exfil went, it was the only option. The track was too narrow for vehicles. But I was prepared to gamble that on foot, and with two hours to spare, I could make it down the track, along the road and over the north-west frontier of the ‘hiccup’ to freedom.

It was time to go.

I nosed back out on to the highway, pointing towards the backwater city of Pskov and the border a short drive beyond.

Twenty-one hundred.

I was close now. The frontier with Estonia was only eight klicks away as the crow flies. But the point at which I’d have to ditch the Lada was another twenty klicks by road. I turned off the highway and parked up in the village of Molochkovo-Dubenets – a bitterly cold clutch of houses that clung to the southern shore of Lake Peipus, two massive bodies of water, connected by a narrow sound, which were cut vertically in two by the border. Its frozen wastes stretched away to the north for a hundred and forty kilometres – not that I could see more than a few metres of the lake itself, even with the headlights aiming directly at it. The weather had closed in dramatically since the last of the daylight had bled out of the sky hours earlier. Thick squalls of snowflakes now filled the air, spun into great white gyres whirling away from the headlights.

I’d planned to hug the lakeside northwards along a winding rural road before cutting west to the jumping-off point, where I’d continue on foot. But the route ahead was already impassable. I was going to have to double back on myself and take a larger road that ran parallel to the lake, inland.