He swigged a mouthful from his water bottle, extracted his bivvi bag from his daysack, felt the forest floor to make sure he was not placing it over any stones or protruding roots that would keep him awake and then unrolled it. Next he took off his webbing vest and laid it carefully beside him, ready to pull on at a moment’s notice, and wriggled into his bivvi bag, boots still on. If anything happened out here, this close to the Russians, there would be no time to pull them on and lace them up. It had only been this level of attention to infantry drills by every member of the team that had meant that when the Spetsnaz—and he was convinced that only their Special Forces could have got that close to their camp undetected by the Forest Brothers—had ambushed them in the forest, five long-and-grueling weeks ago, he had been armed and ready for action in seconds.

Thank God though for those negligently fired shots and the machine-gun fire that followed it. Morland could still remember the sudden sound of the distant rounds as they shattered the silence of the forest, startling him into shocked wakefulness. He knew full well, and Wild had not stopped reminding the team since, that it was only the speed of their constantly rehearsed bug-out drills that had enabled them to escape the well-placed trap.

As he went through his now all-too-familiar “lying-up” routine, he was conscious of the faint rustles of the others doing the same; quietly, systematically and professionally. In mere minutes the movements stopped. The forest fell silent, except for the hoot of an owl and the scuffling of a distant wild boar rooting around for food in the undergrowth.

However, desperate for sleep as he was, with their objective now so close by, Morland found himself on full alert, ears cocked, listening for anything that might indicate they’d been compromised. Try as he might to convince himself he was imagining things, he kept seeing the face of the Russian Spetsnaz commander who had stared so intently at him when he’d roared past on the back of an escaping scrambler bike as the dawn light penetrated the forest: medium height, early thirties, close-cropped, dark hair, and wearing green combats, with no identifying insignia or badges. The man who had orchestrated the riot in Riga, the man he’d seen talking into his radio just before the snipers opened up on the crowd in the Vermanes Gardens, the man who had ordered the cold-blooded execution of those young girls. One glance had been enough, but when they had finally stopped at the next secret bunker, he had checked the pictures on his camera. It was the same man.