They lay panting for a few seconds, accustoming themselves to their new location. Lockhart soon noticed their breath was lit up by the arc lights from inside the compound. The bushes would look as though someone was boiling a kettle in them, he thought. At Arisaig, they had taught him to put snow in his mouth, but there was no snow here. He turned to point it out to Niko and Christos, and then tucked his mouth under his shirt. They did the same.

He aimed his Sten gun down the length of the fence. If the dog spotted them, they would open fire and then run for it. There was no point waiting for the guards to react. Arisaig rules were to get the violence in first. Christos and Niko pointed their rifles in the same direction, their fingers slowly moving in and out of the trigger guards. Lockhart looked at his watch—two minutes to go. He laid his knife by his side. As soon as the guards passed, he would exchange the gun for it, get up, run up behind his man, clamp his left hand over his mouth, jerk back his head, and then draw the knife deeply across and into the man’s neck. It should take less than ten seconds. In theory the victim would not make a sound. In theory.

As if running to a timetable, the patrol rounded the corner two minutes later. Lockhart heard Niko draw in his breath sharply. Christos made no sound and seemed calm. Had he killed before? Lockhart hoped so.

Lockhart began to make out the faces of the two Germans. They looked older than he had imagined. Perhaps these really were, as he had told Manoli, the dregs of the Wehrmacht. One was talking, and the other was laughing occasionally. It sounded like a long-winded joke or anecdote. Lockhart prayed that whatever it was would last long enough to take them past the bushes. If the story ended before then, they might look around.

The one member of the patrol that wasn’t listening was the dog. Lockhart feared the Alsatian more than anything else. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, its tongue hanging out as it padded dutifully along. It was keeping its head to the ground, no doubt as bored of the circuit as its masters were.

Lockhart had never owned a dog, but he knew what one looked like when it had smelled something. The Alsatian’s head jerked forward in their direction, its whole body pulled by its nose. Its lead tightened; it started barking. The guards stopped their conversation and looked toward them. Arisaig rules, thought Lockhart. Goodbye, Germans; sorry, dog. He opened fire.

Manoli saw the flash of the guns’ muzzles in the bushes. Watching breathlessly through the binoculars, he saw the two Germans and the dog knocked back by the gunfire. Lockhart and his men must have emptied their magazines into them.