Different special forces units around the world had different philosophies as to what was the best way to conduct close-quarters fighting. In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons. Knees, hips, shoulders, and elbows should be used as fluidly as the soles of one’s boots. Hands, though, should be reserved for holding things, such as guns. Sokolov had been trained accordingly and had maintained that standard of training for as long as he had stayed in Spetsnaz. After he had moved into the private sector, he had continued to practice SAMBO: a Soviet martial art, similar in many respects to jujitsu, that involved a huge amount of falling and rolling. He had done this because, when you were working as a security consultant, trying to keep things safe for private clients—clients who might be, say, movie stars at ski resorts or CEOs’ wives at shopping malls—there were times when you just wanted to get someone on the ground or place them in a submission hold as opposed to riddling their corpse with bullets and shotgun pellets.