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pistol swung towards him. In a whisper, he ordered, ‘Get ready.’
    Dimitriy was angry. The night-vision goggles puzzled him, but the dark boiler suits and ski masks told him only one thing. He had watched and wept when the Moscow theatre siege ended in explosions, clouds of poisoned gas and gunfire. He had no doubt the rescuers had been incompetent, but the reason 129 innocents had died was because men like these brought terror into his country. ‘Move and I shoot,’ he warned and he meant it. The torch moved between the three men, the light magnified and eyeball-scorching in the lens of the goggles, but the leader saw his opportunity. The armourer partly shielded the mercenary carrying the other end of the crate. ‘Hit him when you get a clear shot,’ he said calmly in English.
    ‘What did you say?’ Dimitriy demanded. ‘You—’ He didn’t have the opportunity to finish the sentence. The man in the centre of the trio moved faster than he’d ever seen a man move and he flinched at the muzzle flash before the bullet from the GSh-18 hit him low in the belly. Despite being half-blinded by the torch the soldier had had a clear aim and he believed to his last heartbeat that he’d fired a killing shot. But Dimitriy wasn’t just a fat man in a bad suit. He had once been a thin man wearing the uniform of the Guards Airborne Assault Brigade among the super-heated rocks of the Panshir Valley and as his body absorbed the energy of the bullet he got off a round that took the other man in the right eye and dropped him in a spray of blood and brains. Dimitriy knew the damage the bullet had done to his insides but, even with his strength failing, he tried to raise the gun for a second shot just as the armourer fired his first. The 9mm parabellum round left the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 1,100 feet per second and hit the cylinder of Dimitriy’s Kobalt revolver. It struck at an angle which made the grotesquely misshapen bullet ricochet upward with a force that blew off most of Dimitriy’s lower jaw and part of his left cheekbone before hurling his body off the door jamb into the cellar.
    ‘Fuck,’ the leader cursed, now struggling to hold the crate on his own. He willed himself to be calm. Everything had turned to shit, but that was nothing new in his world. The key was to keep a lid on it and to get the fuck out before things got worse. He shouted an order to the armourer. ‘Make sure of that bastard and get back to help me with this.’ But before the man was halfway to the cellar door he took another glance at his watch. They had just over one minute before the lights came back on. The clock was ticking, their timings out. ‘Belay that. He’s dead or close enough. We need to move
now
.’
    Abandoning their comrade’s body they struggled up the stairs and through the museum. The others were waiting in the van as the leader and the armourer pushed the packing case into the rear. They didn’t ask where the third man was, they didn’t have to.
    ‘Drive,’ the leader shouted into his throat mike.
    Inside the cellar Dimitriy was only vaguely aware of his terrible wounds. His world came and went in alternating waves of trauma-induced shock and agonizing pain. He still had eyes though, and his conscious mind identified a sight that had been common enough in the Russian-occupied rear area of Afghanistan. The object in front of him was certainly a TM-57 anti-tank mine. Normally it would take the weight of a large vehicle to detonate it, but he noted the wire leading from it to the contraption in the centre of the floor. He knew the damage it would do. Dimitriy began to claw his way towards the trigger mechanism.
    When the assault team reached the outskirts of the city, the leader ordered the driver to stop the van. He nodded to the armourer, and the bomb maker retrieved a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his overall. By now the men had removed their masks and they leaned forward in anticipation as the armourer