Bowman stared in shock at the breach, his stomach knotting. The KUF rebels must have crawled right up under our noses, he thought. We were busy watching the forest, waiting for more rebels to appear, while they were rigging up the fence with explosives. It wouldn’t have taken much to bring the fence down. An ounce of PE on each post would have done the trick. The gunshot must have been the signal for the team to detonate.

These guys are good at fieldcraft. They had a plan to distract us from the breach and it worked perfectly.

He glanced quickly round the rooftop, wondering if the rebels had sent any more teams to sneak around the flanks or the rear. His heart was beating so hard it threatened to burst out of his chest.

We’re about to get hit hard.

‘I see them!’ Loader bellowed. ‘They’re coming!’

Bowman swung back round. He gazed out across the northern fringe of the woods. As the smoke cleared, he saw a long line of figures charging out from the treeline. He counted roughly sixty of them. They were spaced widely apart and decked out in olive-green T-shirts, military jackets, dark jeans. Some wore black berets or armbands. Two rebels in each group brandished large machine guns with bipods mounted to the barrels and metal ammunition boxes attached to the underside of the receivers. Bowman had seen such weapons before. PKMs. Manufactured in Russia. Similar to the Gimpys, and just as deadly.

Webb and Mallet scrabbled over from the other end of the parapet wall. They dropped down and went into prone firing positions beside Bowman and Loader in the north-west corner.

‘Alex!’ Mallet roared. ‘Start lobbing mortars on the treeline! Fire for effect!’

The rebels charged across the exposed ground. Then Bowman heard the hollow pop of the mortar firing as Casey and Lanky got to work. The bombs crashed down on the ground in front of the treeline with a series of explosive crumps, vaporising half a dozen rebels towards the rear.

‘Pull back twenty metres,’ Mallet ordered. ‘Fire for effect.’

Smoke veiled the clearing. More bombs fell on the area close to the rebels, churning up the soil. The ground was starting to look like something out of the Western Front. Metal shredded a trio of rebels on the left of the line, taking them out of the fight. The others held their nerve and ran on towards the breach. Determined not to lose the momentum of their advance, in spite of the death raining down on them from above.

These guys are different to the Machete Boys.

They’re motivated. Trained.