Within a couple of hundred metres gunfire sounded. He suppressed his instinct to stop and duck since the noise had come from far away, a distant neighbourhood. Sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire were a regular feature of city life, along with the pungent smells – cooked food and raw sewage only metres apart. Even as his hand flinched towards his gun, he didn’t long to be somewhere else. The captain flourished in extreme conditions. Life in Russia with his wife and children was of little interest to him. After only days at home he became irritable. He was not a good father and he accepted that – it was a skill he would never master. He needed to be tested every day: that was the only way he felt alive. There was no military duty open to a Soviet soldier more dangerous than Afghanistan and for that reason alone there was nowhere else the captain would rather be.

A member of the elite Spetsnaz troops, he’d arrived three months ago, the vanguard of an invasion force sent to save the year-old Communist Revolution from falling apart under ineffectual rule. There were Soviet advisers already based in the city, but they were no more than diplomatic guests of an independent Afghan state. The captain was part of the Soviet Union’s first foreign invasion in two decades, a complex logistical operation across a vast terrain. Quick success had rested on the gambit that the Afghan Communist regime would not recognize that they were being invaded by their allies, a bold military premise and one that the captain embraced. On Christmas Eve 1979 he’d flown into Kabul airport at the same time as other Spetsnaz troops were flown into Bagram airbase in the north, pretending to be an extension of the substantial military aid already provided to the regime. The first test occurred at Kabul airport when the captain and his men disembarked from the planes that landed without permission in violation of international law, approaching the Afghan government troops stationed there, troops with no warning of their arrival. Several Afghans had raised their weapons, cocking their Soviet machine guns at their Soviet allies. In this moment the invasion had rested on a knife-edge and the captain had been the first to react, dropping his gun, running forward, arms high in the air as if greeting a much-loved comrade. He’d expected a chest full of bullets. No shots were fired and the invasion continued er the guise of a military aid programme. New ammunition was promised for the Afghan 7th and 8th Divisions, neutering their guns as shells were neatly lined up in the sand waiting for replacements that would never arrive. Afghan tank units were told they’d be receiving new tanks and ordered to drain their fuel to power them. With the fuel in cans, taken away, the heavy armour sat useless as Soviet tanks crossed the border.