The black trees came up rapidly to meet us. We were over the southern edge of the clearing, sliding towards the centre. As we came in I pulled on both risers, staffing our descent.
"Get ready," I told Sasha.
"Start walking now."
Then I flared again: the chute came up and stalled, and a moment later we landed softly on short, frosty grass.
For a few seconds we crouched, motionless, listening. Not a murmur. The breeze carried a thin, clean scent of pines. The opening we'd landed in looked to be about two hundred metres by one hundred, with trees on all sides. Then it was out of the harness, weapons out of their ties and at the ready, and down in a defensive position, facing outwards. Sasha needed no instruction: he moved fast and instinctively.
My hands were lumps of ice. My fingers started to throb and burn as I worked them furiously, open and shut, to get the circulation going while I waited for my GPS to get a fix and confirm we were on the correct location.
As soon as the figures came up, and I saw they were right, we rolled our jumping kit into a bundle, shouldered our berg ens and set off towards the edge of the field in search of a place to hide or bury the evidence.
"Big experience for me," Sasha panted, still breathless with excitement as we hurried forward.
A sudden outburst of noise made me drop flat again. The commotion came from a distance, higher up the mountain to our left: an explosion of high wailing and howling in which several distinct voices rose and fell.
Sasha gave a chucide.
"Volki," he said.
"Wolves. We hear them often during the war. They sing to moon.
"Jesus!" I gasped.
"They gave me a fright. Do they attack humans?"
Sasha laughed again.
"Never! Wolf very shy animal keep away.
The chorus rose and fell for nearly a minute, then stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
By now the moon was on its way down, but still so bright that I hardly needed the kite-sight: the binos did just as good a job.
I swept them round, hoping to see some of the ghostly howlers, but they must have been half a mile away.
At the far end of the field, in the direction we wanted to go, there was some object in a corner. The kite-sight revealed it as an old wooden farm wagon, with a primitive hay-rake beside it.
"That thing must have come up a track through the forest to reach where it is," I whispered.
"Let's take a shufti."
We moved into the deep shadow at the edge of the trees, then advanced slowly to the corner. There was no fence round the edge of the grass, so I reckoned that herdsmen or boys must look after any animals that came to graze there. As there were wolves about, that made sense.
The wagon had wooden wheels, the back pair twice the size of the front, which were mounted on a swivelling yoke, and it took me straight back thirty years to my boyhood in the north of England.
"Vairy preemitive people, Chechens," Sasha whispered.
"Yes," I said, 'but look at this."
Beyond the cart was a drinking trough for cattle, carved out of a single tree-trunk. I reached down and felt a skim of ice in the bottom. Beside it was a broken-down hand pump for raising water from a well. Staring at it, I reckoned this was a summer pasture, on which some farmer made hay, but that now it had been abandoned for the winter. A moment later I'd found the well cover, made of planks, and lifted it. In went the para bundle, and that was one problem solved.
A rutted track led away through the wood, twisting downhill towards the east. For twenty minutes we followed it, but then the path turned right into the valley, no doubt heading down towards the village, and we had to continue as best we could through the trees, holding our height along the contour.
Our navigation proved spot-on. Seventy minutes out from the LZ, we saw something light-coloured through the screen of tree-trunks ahead, and with the kite-sight made out the perimeter fence of the compound: weidmesh on steel posts, all glowing coldly in the moonlight.
We came to the edge of the trees and stopped. I whispered to Sasha, "We'll give it an hour," and we settled ourselves on the top of a bank which commanded a close view of the baffler at a point where it turned a corner and ran away down the slope.
Lying on our stomachs on a bed of old pine-needles, we looked straight on the fence, which was two metres high and topped by four strands of razor wire on overhang arms canted outwards.
Scanning past it with the kite-sight, I saw that the trees cut down to make way for the barrier hadn't yet been cleared. The trunks had been sawn into lengths, but the tops had simply been dragged out of the way and left in heaps. Perfect, I thought. Ideal for an OP. We can just burrow into one of them and become invisible. No digging or nets needed. We can pick the best spots for observing the villa and checking on patrols.
The more I scanned, the more evidence I saw that the fence was still being worked on. Lengths of metal and odd pieces of wire lay scattered on either side of it, and frirther up the hill, on the outside, was what looked like a small trailer which I assumed the builders had been using to bring up material. I'd been planning to cut our way through the bottom of the weidmesh, but with this amount of construction still in progress that seemed a dangerous idea. Instead, I decided to take a look at the stretch near the trailer, in the hope that it wasn't yet complete.
For the time being we were out of the wind, in deep shadow, on dry ground, and as comfortable as could be so I wasn't surprised when Sasha began to snore gently beside me. I turned to look at him, and saw that his head was resting on one arm. Let him sleep, I thought. One pair of eyes is enough here.
Forty minutes later, I gripped him by the arm. He came to silently and was immediately alert. I pointed downhill, along the wire, where I'd seen the glow of a cigarette being drawn on.
Then it came again, closer. A patrol was on its way round the perimeter.
I got the kite-sight aligned and saw the smoker immediately: a single man with a weapon slung on his shoulder. At his heel a German Shepherd was ambling, apparently loose.
"Get ready!" I whispered.
"He's got a bloody dog."
I felt for my knife, down my right leg. I hate guard dogs. You never know whether to shoot them and give away your presence by making a noise, or risk serious injury by trying to get a knife into the bastards.
We lay on the bank like logs. I felt we were going to be all right, because the drift of the wind was from the fence to us, and we hadn't put any scent on the ground by going to the wire itself.
Besides, the sentry was an idle sod: he was ambling along, not looking to right and left, but humming to himself between drags.
As he passed beneath us, within fifteen feet of our heads, the smell of cheap tobacco smoke filled the air around us. It wasn't surprising that the dog never deviated from its track.
We gave the pair a couple of minutes to get clear, then went for the fence. Close inspection revealed that none of the wire was insulated, and that there was no alarm system that I could see. We moved cautiously uphill towards the trailer, and found it contained drums of more razor wire. Fifty metres beyond it we found what I'd been hoping for: a section of fence not yet fitted with the overhang. In twenty seconds we'd both climbed the weidmesh and gained the cover of the heaped tree-tops.
I reckoned that by the time the sentry came round again if he made it at all our scent would have left the frosty surface. With the ground so soundly frozen, our boots hadn't left any traces on the fence itself.
We slipped out from our heap of pine-tops, back into the standing trees, and crept left-handed round the outcrops of rock, following the contour, the hill falling to our right. According to the map, which I'd tried to imprint on my brain from the satellite data, the villa would be below us.
From his station a pace behind me Sasha put a hand on my arm. I stopped to listen. He was pointing downhill. When I turned my head in that direction I heard what he'd detected: a faint hum, something like an air-conditioning unit. We moved on a few yards, looked over a rocky ridge, and saw the house rising tall from a levelled-out plateau below.
"Hell of a place," I whispered.
From Anna's photographs I recognised the steep roof and high walls, glowing pale in the moonlight, but the whole place looked more formidable than I'd reckoned. There were three main floors above ground level, a fourth with dormer-windows sticking out of the roof, and some kind of a basement. At the front, on our right, five cars were parked, and on the side facing us a ramp led down to a sunken garage.
"Jesus!" I whispered.
"It's just like the cellar at the Embassy."
"The Embassy?" I heard Sasha turn his head to look at me.
Suddenly I realised what I was saying.
"You know in the courtyard.." Christ!
"Oh no. Sorry. I was thinking you'd been with us. We stored some kit at the back of the British Embassy in Moscow. There was a garage entrance a bit like this."
Thank God, he didn't show the least curiosity.
"Beeg house," was all he said.
"Where are your men?"
He meant that it might be one hell of a job to locate them -and he was right. For the moment I concentrated on the layout of the place.
Akula had good com ms obviously: we could see a couple of dish aerials bolted on to the wall beneath the eaves. There were video cameras mounted on the corners of the building, and what looked like an infra-red device covering the driveway. But half an hour's observation convinced me that there was no patrol immediately round the house: Akula was relying on the fence to keep intruders at a distance.
From where we lay we could see the approach road snaking off down the mountainside to our right, and once I was confident that nobody was moving inside the compound, I decided to recce the track, right down to the barrack huts, or whatever they were, at the bottom entrance.
"Stay here and watch the house," I whispered.
"I'm going to recce the road. Back in an hour. If there's any development, call me on the radio. If there's a big drama, rendezvous back on the bank outside the wire. OK?"
Sasha nodded, and I slipped away down the slope, keeping off the road but following its line in and out through half a dozen hairpin bends. There'd be no problem about blocking it: in at least three places it came through narrow defiles where the rock had been blasted away; a single vehicle brought to a halt would stop everything coming up. A couple of guys with gym pis on the high ground nearby would be able to sort any number of defenders.
At the bottom I came across the guardroom and barrack block that the satellite had seen: low, solid-looking, single-storey structures either side of the weidmesh entrance gates, with several cars and small trucks parked outside. As I watched from above, I saw the guy who'd come past us along the fence return to base, shut his dog into a kennel beside the guardroom and disappear into the building. I checked the time: 4:20. That looked like the end of the night patrol. As I watched, I began to suspect that the reports we'd heard about Akula's private army being a couple of hundred strong must be grossly exaggerated. I reckoned the accommodation below me might house a couple of dozen men at most so, unless more were billeted somewhere off-site, we were up against a pretty small force.
I climbed back a bit, crossed the road and made my way up the eastern side of the compound. There was nothing of interest until, through the trees, I saw the line of a roof above me. This had to be the separate structure identified from satellite imagery, the building in which the trackers reckoned Orange had been housed, maybe a hundred metres east of the villa.
I circled out to the right and came in above it: a rectangular storage shed with no windows and a corrugated roof of what looked like asbestos. I felt my heart speed up. Radio signals would pass straight through that roof. Without any real evidence, I became convinced that the bomb was there.
"The Mafiosi are nervous of the device," I told myself.
"They don't want it inside the house, so they've put it here."
Behind the shed was a big heap of what looked like freshly excavated rock. Maybe that was spoil from the nuclear shelter they were digging out of the mountainside. Maybe the shed covered the entrance to the bunker.
To complete my anti-clockwise circuit I had to cross the mountainside above the villa, and it was up there, a couple of hundred feet higher than the house, that I came across the helicopter pad a circle of concrete in the middle of a shallow natural bowl, from which the trees had been cleared. I could see at once that it was big enough to accommodate a Chinook, but not until I was moving away from the centre did I realise what was positioned on one side. From a distance the object looked like a crumpled garden hut. Creeping up to it, I saw that a tarpaulin was lashed down to rings set in the ground. Close inspection revealed a .50 machine gun, set up on a heavy tripod so it could engage targets in the air as well as on the ground. I felt under the cover and ran a hand down the barrel, thinking that the bastards probably had hand-held SAM systems as well.
Sasha had no action to report, so together we pulled off to a safe distance from the villa and settled in a hollow surrounded by rocks from which I could transmit without fear of anyone hearing.
By now the moon was down, and the night had become much darker. As I assembled the Satcom aerial I said, "Sasha -I'm working on the plan for tomorrow. I'm going to call for the HALO troop to drop in as soon as it's dark. But during the day I reckon we'll want to watch both the house and another building I've seen on the far side, over there. That means we need to man two separate OPs. You all right on that one?"
"No problem. Many times I do such observation."
"Good. We'll have radio com his with each other, anyway.
Now let's get this thing working."
I had the Satcom set up on a flat rock, and now turned it a couple of times until I got a strong satellite signal. Then I draped my sleeping bag over my head to muffle the sound of my voice, and seconds later I was through to the squadron base in Kars.
"Blue," said a voice I didn't recognise.
"Red here," I went.
"Can I speak to Bill Chandler?"
"Roger. Wait one."
I waited, imagining the hangar, guys in sleeping bags around the perimeter, and the squadron GO with his head down in some reasonably secluded corner.
"Geordie?" He sounded lively enough.
"How goes it?"
"Fine. No problems."
"Where are you?"
"Inside the compound. We've got eyes on the villa. We're maybe a hundred and fifty metres above it."
"Any sign of our guys?"
"Not yet."
"Or of the three heavy cases?"
"No, but I think I know where they are.
"Can you identif~j the site?"
"Not now.
"In the summerhouse?"
"Yes. Listen, the drop was spot-on. We've recced as much as we can in the dark. As soon as it's light I'll shoot some footage with the video, get pictures back to you. But basically the plan holds."
"So..." He paused, evidently looking at his notes.
"The same DZ?".
"Yep. It's an ideal place. Looks like a summer pasture.
Nobody within miles. I'll get myself up there with a Firefly to guide the lads in."
"OK, then. We're aiming to drop at 1900 your time. That's half an hour after full dark."