I took more suppressing fire from my right. It was working. I was pinned down in a game of full-contact murder in the dark. I needed to take out the shooters directly ahead of me – and then split. If I made it to Highway 178, and then kept tight to the treeline, there was a slim chance I could outmanoeuvre them. It was a gamble, but the snow was falling so thickly again that it might cover me enough to reach the frontier. But however fast and loose the Russians might play it, there was no way Jack Nazzar or the Wing would cross the border itself; if he was waiting, though, he’d know for sure by now what was going on.

I turned a tight circle and raised myself up to take a shot. A bullet clipped my left shoulder. Another passed between the inside of my left arm and ribcage, punching through the jacket, grazing skin. I pulled the trigger and felled one of the shooters as another round scored a line above my temple.

Go. Now.

But as I got ready to run, the snow in front of me lifted, filling the air with a thick white curtain. A deep, resonant boom filled my lungs. Shock waves expanded under me – flipping me into the air, twisting me on to my side. I clawed the ground, coughed blood into the blackness. My ears rang, chest heaved. Then another eruption, behind this time, knocked me forward, sprawling me headlong between the trees. White-hot shards of steel peppered the snow. A splinter of shrapnel gouged my back. Another tore at my left bicep.

Rifle grenades.

Deep snow had absorbed the impact of the blasts. As soon as one hit a tree I’d be in trouble.

I pushed up on to my elbows. More rifle shots zipped between the trees, the usual snap, crackle and pop of incoming rounds muted by the snow. I reached for the SV-98 but dropped it smartly as the stock split, cracked by a direct hit.

Moving forward was impossible. I hauled myself up and lurched back along the trail, head down. Every footfall was like driving a knife blade under my kneecap. I dodged around the trees as best I could, pursued by a stream of copper-coated steel. I was slow, snowbound. Fragments of ice blown from a tree-trunk ricochet blinded me momentarily. A round nicked my right calf; another, my left wrist. I stumbled on, twisting, ducking, zigzagging my way back to the Lada. However I was going to get to the border, it wasn’t going to be on foot – and it had to be fast.