And then I stopped still, and breathed out, and accepted the deeply inconvenient truth that I was profoundly lost. I listened intently for my mother’s voice, racked my brain for any solution that did not involve retracing my steps. But I was blind and deaf and out of options.

I was almost out of time, too.

If Jack Nazzar had assembled a team on the border he wouldn’t, couldn’t, keep them there indefinitely, however much he might want to. And whatever it turned out that Frank really wanted, I could guarantee it wasn’t a land war on NATO’s eastern border. The wind dropped to a standstill. I bowed my head and listened again.

Above the gentle whisper of snow falling on snow, I heard the unmistakable sound of a man cough. I held my breath. Ten seconds. Twenty. And then again, muffled this time, as if the mouth had been smothered by a hand. Six to eight feet away. Low down. Directly in front. Unmistakable. A man for sure. I extended my right arm, aiming the Makarov down into the darkness.

The wind picked up again. Clouds scudded overhead. Moonlight flitted across the clearing. It took a heartbeat for the landscape to take form. When it did, the ground in front of my feet seemed to turn in on itself, churning shadows into the snow, whipping a branch towards me. But it wasn’t a branch. It was the barrel of a rifle. No one was trying to follow me. They were already here. A soldier in winter camouflage, lying prone on the forest floor, was turning to engage his target: me.

I fired first.

Two shots centre mass. The sniper’s white ghillie snowsuit turned him into an amorphous, abominable snowman. He fell back but not down. The muzzle of his rifle dipped. I couldn’t see my sights, but at that distance I didn’t need to. I fired again into his white balaclava as the moon hid itself again. He disappeared into the shadows. I was on him in an instant, firing another shot into his torso at point blank. But he was already dead.

The round from the Makarov had obliterated the mouthpiece of his comms set. I pocketed the pistol and pulled the headset free, holding it to my ear. An operator was asking him in Russian to confirm his position, confirm contact. I dropped the radio and picked up his weapon: an SV-98 – a standard-issue Russian sniper rifle fitted with a tactical suppressor, and a thermal scope mounted in-line with the optics. Good enough.