Lighter, faster, flatter: his round hit first. The shock of it took me off my feet as my own slow, heavy shot streaked out towards the hovering bird. I let the Martini–Henry fall away and rolled clear of the window, winded. I was on my back, struggling to breathe. Everything hurt – my old wounds from the cottage, my head from the stun grenade and now my ribs from the .308. I put my right hand up and under the flak vest: thumping, bruising pain – but no blood. I sat up, gulping air back into my lungs. His bullet had struck high and left. It had been caught by the vest’s ballistic plate with an inch to spare, a neat black hole drilled through the white shirt I’d pulled over it.

Through the impossibly bright arc of the spotlight my own bullet had hit home, too. I didn’t hear it, couldn’t see it. But the ball of soft lead once used to cut down the enemies of the British Empire now did its job for me. The arc light juddered and leapt and swept away from the window, plunging the room back into darkness. I went back to the window. I’d hit the enclosed tail rotor dead centre, sending the huge rifle round directly into its pitch-control mechanism. As I knew from personal, frightening experience, once the tail rotor fails, you can’t pull power. The pilot had gone immediately into autorotation, trying desperately to get his spinning ship down on to the lawn that flanked the driveway. It was a bumpy ride. The main rotor blades clipped a branch and then the front of the house. Huge lengths of metal sheared off. The ambulance crew took to their heels. And then, just as the bird went over on its side, the bedroom door was blown off its hinges. The tallboy still covered half the entrance but immediately the beams of the assault squad’s torches combed through the room. I picked up the discarded Heckler & Koch, clicked the fire selector to semi-auto and fired high and wide.

Keep your heads down, boys.

I emptied the magazine around the doorway. Plaster and wood vaporized under the stream of lead. In reply: CS gas. I dropped the assault rifle, touch-checked the Browning in the back of my jeans and pushed myself out of the window followed by shouts and shots. My right hand caught the limb of a wisteria branch that curled below the windowsill, but my weight snapped it as I fell. Fifteen feet down into a thick laurel hedge. I landed on my back, stunned by the fall, but cushioned enough by the evergreen not to break my spine.