‘Stay here and watch the house,’ I whispered. ‘I’m going to recce the road. Back in an hour. If there’s any development, call me on the radio. If there’s a big drama, rendezvous back on the bank outside the wire. OK?’

Sasha nodded, and I slipped away down the slope, keeping off the road but following its line in and out through half a dozen hairpin bends. There’d be no problem about blocking it: in at least three places it came through narrow defiles where the rock had been blasted away; a single vehicle brought to a halt would stop everything coming up. A couple of guys with gympis on the high ground nearby would be able to sort any number of defenders.

At the bottom I came across the guardroom and barrack block that the satellite had seen: low, solid-looking, single-storey structures either side of the weldmesh entrance gates, with several cars and small trucks parked outside. As I watched from above, I saw the guy who’d come past us along the fence return to base, shut his dog into a kennel beside the guardroom and disappear into the building. I checked the time: 4.20. That looked like the end of the night patrol. As I watched, I began to suspect that the reports we’d heard about Akula’s private army being a couple of hundred strong must be grossly exaggerated. I reckoned the accommodation below me might house a couple of dozen men at most – so, unless more were billeted somewhere off-site, we were up against a pretty small force.

I climbed back a bit, crossed the road and made my way up the eastern side of the compound. There was nothing of interest until, through the trees, I saw the line of a roof above me. This had to be the separate structure identified from satellite imagery, the building in which the trackers reckoned Orange had been housed, maybe a hundred metres east of the villa.

I circled out to the right and came in above it: a rectangular storage shed with no windows and a corrugated roof of what looked like asbestos. I felt my heart speed up. Radio signals would pass straight through that roof. Without any real evidence, I became convinced that the bomb was there. ‘The Mafiosi are nervous of the device,’ I told myself. ‘They don’t want it inside the house, so they’ve put it here.’

Behind the shed was a big heap of what looked like freshly excavated rock. Maybe that was spoil from the nuclear shelter they were digging out of the mountainside. Maybe the shed covered the entrance to the bunker.