But he heard nothing from Skelton.

Come on, Geordie, he thought. What the fuck’s happening?

He felt blind, and vulnerable, and had an almost overwhelming urge to look around the corner, and to look back over his shoulder to see what was behind him, but he stayed firmly in position, trusting Kev to watch his back.

Skelton could only watch helplessly as the guard approached the corner.

For a moment, he aimed at the centre of the guy’s back, debating whether to take the shot, but he knew that a burst from the Minimi would compromise them, and blow the whole job.

He took his finger off the trigger, trusting Carr.

The sentry turned the corner, taking a big drag on his cigarette as he did so.

Smoking wasn’t going to kill him, but it helped: he was more interested in his fag than his patrolling, and was completely unprepared for what happened next.

He walked blindly around the corner, sucking on his fake Marlboro, and straight into the barrel of John Carrs’s Welrod.

Carr pushed the barrel forwards and squeezed the trigger.

A fraction of a second after that, the 9mm round should have left the muzzle with the merest ‘pop’ and entered the man’s head through the right side of his temple, just above the eye, smashing its way into his brain and out the back, taking half of his skull with it.

But what actually happened was nothing.

A faulty percussion cap had prevented the bullet from firing.

The Welrod was a single-shot weapon, which required a manual reload.

And there was no time for that.

Carr reacted instantly, hurling the pistol straight into the still-reeling sentry’s face and simultaneously reaching with his left hand for the handle of the Damascus steel fighting knife and drawing it quickly from its sheath.

He punched the blade directly into the man’s chest, and felt the impact as the blade stopped on one of the magazines on his chest rig.

That half-second was all it took for the guy to recover his wits.

As Carr’s knife glanced off the mag, the sentry reached for the cocking lever on his AK.

But the safety was on, and the lever stayed in place.

Frantically, too shocked to cry out, he raised the barrel of the rifle and stabbed it forwards at Carr, catching him on the right side of his collarbone.

The impact split the skin, pushing him back momentarily, but he caught himself, and surged towards the Chechen, ignoring the flare of pain in his shoulder, driven by the need to finish this quickly.

Free hand grabbing at his opponent’s throat, the knife hand drawn back, he pushed the man back and down onto the soft earth.