Then, as the head of the crowd filled the Vermanes Gardens, there was a guttural roar as the mass of marchers were charged by a counter-demonstration of hundreds of nationalists from behind the university buildings.

The police lines were overwhelmed, caught between two masses of humanity hell-bent on killing each other. Nationalists hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks at the ethnic Russians, who fought back with bricks, glass shards from smashed windows and batons hidden under jackets. More cars burned and running fights flowed up and down side streets, as the pent-up anger and bitterness of the ethnic Russians exploded.

Morland looked back at the leaders and, through his binoculars, saw the Russian speak into his mobile phone; brief, to the point. He was giving an order.

A moment later, from the roof of the university, came three deliberate, aimed shots: the unmistakable sound of a sniper. Morland realized he had heard that sound before on the range only a week earlier, when the Latvians had given his team a demonstration of Russian infantry small arms. In fact, he had been allowed to fire it himself and its high-pitched crack was distinctive, as was the weapon itself, the special sniper rifle developed for the Spetsnaz: the VSS, also called the Vintorez or “thread cutter.” It fired a subsonic, 9 millimeter, armor-piercing cartridge, tipped with tungsten, and was capable of penetrating a 6 millimeter high-density steel plate at 100 meters.

Morland remembered joking how he hoped he never got on the wrong end of one of these and here he was now, a week later, and some bastard was using one to fire into the crowd below.

Then, a second later, there was a haphazard burst of half a magazine on automatic. “That’s a bog standard AK 47M,” Morland muttered to himself. Now the shooting sounded as if it was the work of a lone lunatic and no longer a trained professional.

Morland saw the crowd part and start to run and, unable to see exactly where the shots had come from, he switched his binoculars there. On the ground, gushing blood, writhing and twitching in their death throes were the targets.

A TV crew from Russia Today, conveniently close by, rushed to get their close-up shots: three young, ethnic Russian girls murdered by a crazed, doubtless “nationalist,” gunman. But shot, Morland would swear, by one or more Spetsnaz snipers from the top of the university building. Those terrible images would be circulating the globe in moments.

Any more victims? No. That extra burst had definitely been for deception and had been aimed to miss. But Morland knew that the black-fleeced Russian with the mobile phone, the man whose picture he had in his camera, was the man who had planned this atrocity; the man who had given the kill order and who had as good as pulled the trigger.

“One day I’ll get you, you bastard,” he vowed.

0700 hours, Wednesday, May 18, 2017

National Defense Control Center, Moscow