‘Orange has turned up in Grozny,’ the boss told me. ‘We’d been talking to the Firm, and we were expecting it. We’ve also been in touch with the Turks about using an airforce base in the east of the country.’

‘Kars?’

‘Probably. That looks like being our FMB. We should have that confirmed by eleven ths morning.’

‘When are you launching?’

‘If all goes well, later tonight. The stand-by squadron’s squaring everything away right now.’

At the risk of stating the obvious, I said, ‘We’re not certain where the target’s going to end up. The last I heard, Orange was still moving.’

‘Yes. But we can only assume it’s the Chechens who lifted our guys, and that the hostages are with the device. There’s no point in hanging about. We’re going to stage through Cyprus, so we’ll get the squadron on its way. If the Turks play ball about Kars, the Here can change crews at Akrotiri, refuel and fly straight on.’

From that moment the Satcom phone was in continual use. At 5.30 Tony came back on to say that Orange had stopped at a point just north of a village called Samashki, fifty kilometres west of Grozny.

‘There’s a river running east and west,’ he said. ‘The terrain is hilly – looks like the foothills of the main Caucasus range. The site’s one kilometre north of the river.’

‘Samashki,’ I said. Somewhere, sometime, I’d seen that name before. ‘Thanks, Tony. Tell me if the target moves again.’

An idea had developed rapidly in my mind. The site was going to need recceing. The Russians were stipulating that Sasha should co-ordinate the hostage recovery. He’d told me earlier in the night that they didn’t want foreigners crashing around unsupervised in their territory, and I reckoned the same would apply, although more so, in Chechnya. What better plan than that I and he should drop in together? A HALO descent.

He was a trained parachutist, but had never done free-falling. Therefore we’d have to go in tandem, strapped together under one canopy. As it happened, at that time I was one of only three tandem masters in the Regiment. Where the other two were, I didn’t know, but I decided to try it on the head-shed, anyway.

They remembered Samashki in Hereford, all right. ‘Jesus!’ said Dick Trafford, the ops officer. ‘That’s where the Russian army murdered more than a hundred people. Burnt the houses. It was tactically pointless – just a show of strength. It became one of the most notorious incidents in the war.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve had an idea about the recce . . .’ I explained what I’d been thinking, and added, ‘I want to volunteer for the job. We can get down to it much quicker from here than you can from there. Why don’t we do it?’

‘OK,’ said Dick cautiously, ‘but who’s Sasha?’