‘Fantastic!’ Sasha breathed, on a high. Now I could hear him hyperventilating. ‘Breelliant!’ he went. ‘Otlichno!’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘take it easy, and don’t make too much noise.’

I steered for the open patch, glad of the bright moonlight for the view it gave us, but feeling altogether too conspicuous. At least the LZ looked fairly level.

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, stalling 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 bergens 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 chuckle. ‘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.