Ayub’s remaining sensations were confused and brief and unpleasant.

There was a bright flash a metre to his left, and then he was picked up and thrown across the room, as though by a giant hand.

He was knocked unconscious, but he came round after a few seconds, puzzled as to why he was on his back, on the floor.

A moment later, the pain hit – the fireball from the 66mm HEAT explosion had roasted the entire front left side of his body.

He couldn’t see anything – his eyeballs had both been cooked to opacity – and he couldn’t hear anything, either. The initial blast wave had been followed immediately by a rapid and transient depressurisation, and this sudden double change in the local air pressure had destroyed his inner ears.

It had also ruptured his lungs and his gastro-intestinal tract, and he would probably have died of these injuries in a matter of hours.

But what was actually going to kill him, much more quickly, were the devastating injuries caused by the fragmentation from the warhead and scabbing from the wall which had hit him at colossal speed, ripping open the front of his body.

He made to stand up, but found that he couldn’t, and when he reached down he found that his legs were gone from the thigh down.

He lay there for a few moments, his lifeblood spreading across the marble tiles of the floor, encircling empty cartridge cases and chunks of masonry and jagged lumps of steel.

He was confused but just before he slipped away he smiled through cracked, blackened lips: he was on his way to paradise, sent there by a brave warrior who had stood like a rock in the sea.

In the hallway outside, Shishani had hit the ground again at the sound of this second, bigger blast.

And now he watched in horror as a wounded fighter – he couldn’t recognise his burned, bloodied face – stumbled from the room, blood pumping from multiple holes in his body.

‘Ayub is dead,’ choked the man, whom Shishani now saw was one of the Egyptian mercenaries. ‘Ayub is dead. They’re all dead.’

With that, the man collapsed onto his knees, and died where he knelt.

Shishani closed his eyes and looked deep into his own soul.

He could still hear the sound of automatic fire, though most of it seemed to be incoming now.

He could also hear men screaming and wailing.

Whoever was outside, they were good.

There must be many of them.

All those years earlier, fighting with Basayev and the 055 at Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan, that shell splinter which had ripped away half of his calf – even as he’d lain there, bleeding and waiting for help, he’d known that this was a lucky wound.

A wound that would get him out of there, with his head held high.

He was recovering in a makeshift field hospital even as his comrades were butchered.