It seemed like an eternity they’d been out here, but it had in reality been no more than two minutes.

And they were starting to win the firefight.

They’d never know how many men they had killed, and how many had been wounded or had just lost their nerve, but the weight of fire coming back at them was definitely dropping.

But it was not finished.

‘We need to get the fuck out of here,’ shouted Geordie Skelton.

‘No fucking shit,’ said Fred.

Come on, John, thought Geordie. Our luck won’t last forever.

And just then he heard Carr’s voice in his earpiece.

‘Geordie, Fred. Stand by to give rapid fire and blow the gates on my call. We’re getting ready to come out.’

‘Roger,’ said Geordie.

Over to his right, Fred West was already reaching for his detonator.

Skelton resumed a steady rate of fire into the building.

Chapter 100.

100.

KHASMOHMAD KADYROV and Argun Shishani had barely lain back down on their mattresses when the first shots rang out.

Shishani sprang up, heart beating hard, and hurried down the corridor to Kadyrov’s room.

This time, he barged in without knocking.

‘They found us, brother,’ he said, his voice high with an unexpected panic.

Outside, there was the sound of an explosion.

‘Calm yourself, Argun,’ said Kadyrov, reaching for his AKS-74U Krinkov. ‘Who has found us?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Shishani. ‘The shooting… I just thought…’

Kadyrov cut him off, irritably.

‘Fear is for women, and stories are for children,’ he said, clapping the younger man on the shoulder. ‘I need to know what is happening, not what you think is happening. Go and find out.’

As Shishani left the room, he almost collided with a tall, well-built man.

It was Ayub – head of the military side of the operation, and a man who had been fighting almost constantly, and fearlessly, since Podrinje in 1992.

He was shouting, ‘To arms, brothers. Prepare yourselves. To your fighting positions, quickly, quickly.’

As he spoke, he shook his head: he’d warned Kadyrov that the whores should be inside the main building, where they could be guarded more closely, but the great emir had refused to sleep under the same roof as them.

He’d asked also for more battle-hardened Chechens like himself, but had been given only four. The rest were a rag-tag group of assorted Libyans and Egyptians – men who could barely shoot straight, despite his drilling, and had been chosen only because they could be liquidated when all of this was over.

He’d been promised reinforcements from the south, but they had never shown up.

Well, now perhaps his warnings were coming home.

‘Ayub,’ said Shishani. ‘What’s going on?’

Ayub stopped. He had little time for Shishani, sensing a weakness behind his bravado; while he was in theory answerable to the other man, he respected only Kadyrov, and regularly went to him over Shishani’s head.