As they did so, Vronsky made a quick call into his mobile phone. As Petrov and Zadonov emerged from the bar, four men appeared from a side street and followed them.

0945 hours, Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Ādaži Training Camp, Latvia

“A MUCH BETTER effort, guys. Fast, aggressive—you still need to work on the fire control orders. But you’re heading in the right direction.”

Captain Tom Morland, leader of a five-man training team from 1st Battalion, the Mercian Regiment, sent by Britain to provide training support to Latvia, was debriefing a section of sweating Special Tasks Unit soldiers, Latvian Army Special Forces, who had just completed a “live” section attack exercise on the firing range.

Morland had been in Ādaži, surrounded by nothing but endless miles of virgin pine forest and training areas, for three weeks now, and he was enjoying himself. The training was tough, realistic and fun; the Latvians were eager students and great guys to work with and to cap it all, he had the weekends off to explore Latvia and Riga, which was only forty minutes away.

Morland, 6 feet 2 inches, dark-haired and lean, was now a self-disciplined, tough professional but, if it had not been for Oxford and the Army, he knew he might now be one of those noisy, drunk Brits in Moloney’s Bar, hoovering down too much Latvian Labietis beer and chasing the girls on a stag weekend away. In fact, it was already his team’s favorite Riga bar and he had soon been informed that it was now official Team HQ.

The son of a butcher from Bridgnorth, in the West Midlands, he’d first found an outlet for his over-abundance of energy and natural aggression as a fanatical Wolverhampton Wanderers fan, by picking fights with other fans after Wolves games at Molyneux Stadium. All that had changed when Ted Hunter, a grizzled former Para corporal who lived in his street and knew the family, had decided there was more to Morland than street fighting and, probably in time, prison. One Saturday evening, soon after the start of the new football season, Hunter had spotted the fifteen-year-old coming home, sporting a black eye. He had started chatting. Without any lecturing or sermonizing, Hunter soon had the young Morland captivated with stories from Northern Ireland and the Falklands War.

In his spare time Hunter coached at a local boxing club so, one day, he took Morland along. There Morland found an outlet for his physicality and aggression and he quickly became an accomplished boxer. While he still went to football matches, he increasingly stayed out of trouble. Boxing taught him that a man doesn’t need to fight; unless in self-defense or to protect others.