Searchlights combed the landscape around us, but their beams struggled to cut through the still-falling flakes. I brought Boynou to a walk with a low whistle and patted his flank, soothing him. The wound in his neck was superficial, the bleeding light, and he seemed hardly affected by the gallop.

A small creek opened up ahead of us. He stepped down one hoof at a time. The ice held. Four paces and then we were out again, on to the lake shore. I turned us left and rode west for another three hundred metres at a sitting trot, picking my way as carefully as I could along the edge of the frozen water. The land bulged into the lake.

Another two hundred metres and that was it: the point of maximum vulnerability.

Estonia was quarter of a klick to the west; Kulisko five hundred metres to the east – and there was nothing between me and either side except a flat, white sheet of ice. I stood up in the stirrups and faced Boynou towards the border. I prayed that Jack Nazzar was waiting on the other side and stepped out on to the ice.

I didn’t hear the launch charges go off.

But I heard the mortars land. First one, then another. The bombs fell on to the ice, fifty metres wide of us, detonating with a deep thud. Hard as iron, the ice topping the frozen lake absorbed none of the blast. Instead, shrapnel spread out from each explosion unhindered, spewing thousands of searing-hot, razor-sharp shards well beyond the usual kill radius.

A third round fell, closer. Boynou spooked and reared. I leaned in and tried to calm him. It was a short, deadly sprint to freedom. I looked back towards Kulisko. More incoming. Not bombs, but bright white flashes that popped and burned on the ice. Five, ten, fifteen of them. Within seconds the inlet was on fire.

Flares. Fuck.

It was too windy to launch them over me, so they were firing them directly at the lake. The entire southern shore was burning with blinding white magnesium.

‘No, poshel!’ I shouted at Boynou. ‘Yah!’

His pent-up power unleashed itself into a massive leap forward. We rode out on to the ice, dangerously silhouetted by the flaming Schermulys. Another mortar round landed, spattering the ice with spiked steel. Boynou galloped on, legs, flanks cut by needle-fine splinters of shrapnel. The wind drove into my face. We were in the middle of the inlet now. I lashed Boynou on with the birch switch. As I did so, a mortar bomb landed in front of us, filling the air with a hissing swarm of killer metal. I felt a punch in my chest. I gasped as the impact winded me. My jacket was torn open, ripped by shrapnel.

Boynou rose up.

A heartbeat.

Then pain.