‘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: weld-mesh 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 barrier 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.