In another room a young assaulter dressed in full black kit had his equipment spread out on two tables for Sasha to look at. The Russian carefully inspected the guy’s primary weapon – an MP5 with laser marker and torch attached – and some of his EMOE devices. His close interest offered an unwelcome opening to the range warden, a retired RSM who’d been given a kind of grace-and-favour job keeping the place tidy and sweeping up empty cartridge cases. The old guy could be a pain in the arse, as he always tried to latch on to our guests, and now I had to prise Sasha away from him before we got any awkward questions about where he came from.

From Sasha I gained a more precise idea of our task. He had already explained that the personnel of the new Tiger Force were being drawn from various sources. Most were from Spetznaz, the elite military special force, controlled by the Ministry of Defence, or from Omon, the civilian militia, which came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior. Normally, Sasha told me, Omon dealt with problems inside Russia while Spetznaz worked in foreign countries; but the point of Tiger Force was that it should be a highly trained and highly mobile unit, ready to tackle emergencies either at home or abroad. When I remarked that this made it rather like the SAS, Sasha seemed surprised: he had always supposed that we only operated overseas.

He told me that Tiger Force would be directed by the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB, the largest remaining constituent of the old KGB, which had now been broken up into several parts; the bureau was in charge of security and counter-intelligence. The person in charge of our tour, our liaison officer and interpreter, would be an FSB officer.

‘And who will that be?’ I asked.

He spread his hands. ‘So far, no information. I find out when I am back in Moscow.’

As I guided Sasha round camp, his meetings with the CO, the ops officer and the rest of the team all went fine; but where he came into his own was in polishing up the diagrams we were preparing for the course. Technically he was way behind because we were working on computers, aiming to project three-dimensional diagrams from our laptops, whereas the Russians apparently were still using blackboards and overhead projectors – but he was very quick on the uptake.