Last, but of equal calibre, was Pete Pascoe, the carrot-headed Cornishman, whose special skill was signalling. He, too, was an excellent all-rounder, his one defect being his volatile temper. In his first years with the Regiment this had been a real handicap, and he’d almost been RTU’d after he rammed a civilian car in the outskirts of Hereford. He claimed his brakes had locked and he’d skidded on a wet surface, but he only just escaped prosecution. Afterwards he had admitted that the fellow he bumped had been knocking off his girlfriend while he was away on a Squadron trip. Now though, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, he was calming down a bit and had become more reliable.

Our first action, when we heard about the Russian job, had been to put the team on an intensive language course, so that by the time we went across we’d at least be able to exchange courtesies with our opposite numbers and read Cyrillic script. Personally I found the language a pain, because so many of the characters were similar, which made words hard to read, let alone understand. But the lessons were enlivened by our Russian teacher, Valentina, a big, dark woman in her fifties, with steel-rimmed spectacles, a lot of teeth, and hair pulled back into a short pony-tail. Three times a week she swept in from London, gave us hell laced with smutty jokes, and swept out again, a whirlwind of energy. The only person who didn’t like her was Pete: she teased him once too often when he forgot something basic, and although he didn’t actually flare up at the time, for ever after he referred to her as BOB: the Bloody Old Bitch.

Lectures from a member of the Firm introduced us to the Russian Mafia. The main point seemed to be that it wasn’t a single organisation like its namesake in Sicily, under the control of one godfather, but comprised a whole lot of criminal gangs battling each other for supremacy. Since Russia had converted to a free-market system, our informant told us, every kind of racketeering had broken out: by sheer power of money the Mafia had risen above the law and made themselves impervious to normal justice. The police couldn’t control them, and corruption was spreading through every kind of business. ‘Once the disease had taken a hold,’ the guy from the Firm had told us, ‘there was no stopping it. Now it’s even eaten its way into government. Leading politicians are being bribed and pressured and threatened. If they don’t play ball, they’re eliminated. There’s a real fear in Western capitals that the whole of Russia is soon going to be ungovernable.’