We’d put our covert radios on listening watch, and agreed that from 0700 we’d come up on the air to compare notes on the hour and half-hour – unless we wanted to alert each other at any other time, in which case we’d give a double jab on the pressel.

At first we hadn’t much to report. Sasha told me that a couple more cars drove up to the villa, and one went down. Work started on the fence. I couldn’t see the site, but when I heard an old tractor spluttering up and down and men chatting quite close behind me, to my right, I thanked my stars that we hadn’t cut the wire.

Once again the weather was fine, but I sensed a change coming. Soon after dawn the sky began to haze over and the air moistened, as if snow was on the way. My priority task was to get video footage of the villa and send it back to Kars, so that the guys would have extra information to back up the satellite imagery and could start working out their assault plan. Now I reckoned I’d better go pretty soon, before the landscape got blotted out.

Breakfast consisted of slimy, cold lasagne which came out of its foil bag tasting of mud, and cold water that tasted of plastic. With that feast down my neck I slipped out of my hide, taking my 203 with spare mags in my pouches, but leaving my bergen, to give myself greater mobility.

The mountainside was so broken by gullies, rocky outcrops and stands of trees that I found it easy to keep in dead ground, hidden from the wire above me on one side, and the villa below on the other. Not that I didn’t keep a sharp lookout: before I crossed any open space I scanned repeatedly with my binos in case sentries were posted on vantage points.

I filmed the helipad on my way past, hoping that shots of the .50 mounted on its tripod would give an idea of scale, and came out on a high point above Sasha’s LUP. Lying face-down on a rock under some trees, I got good footage of the house, first the front, then the western side with its underground door – making sure I kept each take long enough for members of the QRF to spot detail. I zoomed in for close-up shots of the security cameras and IR devices, then filmed the road going down towards the barracks and the gate. I contemplated going down and taking in the barracks as well, but decided that any extra information I might gain wouldn’t be worth the risks involved. My gut feeling told me it was the villa and the summerhouse that we were going to assault. With any luck we wouldn’t need to go near the barracks: we’d just block the road to anyone trying to come uphill.