It gave me a strange feeling to be looking at buildings I’d seen a thousand times in pictures. As a young soldier, during my early years in the army, I’d spent hours in classrooms doing recognition training, staring at black-and-white slides of Soviet tanks and missiles until we could pick out T54s, T64s and T72s in our sleep and name all the main types of ICBM. The place all these weapons were photographed most often was Red Square, during big parades on the anniversary of the 1917 revolution and suchlike – so now the buildings in the background were like echoes from the past.

Rick’s mind was moving on the same lines. ‘Think of all the military hardware that’s rolled along here,’ he said.

On our right the low, squat hulk of Lenin’s mausoleum sat hunched against the wall of the Kremlin. Wherever a light was shining on the wall, we could see it was made of dark red brick.

‘Funny there aren’t any guards on the mausoleum,’ said Whinger. ‘You’d expect there to be some official presence. Isn’t it a national shrine?’

‘Not any more,’ Rick told him. ‘I read on the Internet that they’re arguing about what to do with the old bugger. The die-hards are all for keeping him, but a lot of people want him out.’

‘Burning’d be too good for that bastard,’ said Whinger bitterly, surprising me with the anger in his voice. ‘If anyone sent the Russian government a bill demanding compensation for all the misery he and his bloody ideas have caused, this country’d be bankrupt for the next thousand years.’

‘That’s why they’re not paying the Regiment anything for our job here,’ I said. ‘All the funds are coming from the States or the UK.’

Ahead of us in the distance rose the multi-coloured onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, some striped horizontally, some vertically, some segmented like the skins of pineapples. Even I, ignorant as I am about church architecture, sensed that there was something wild and barbaric in those amazing shapes and colours.

‘What about that German kid who landed a light plane here?’ said Whinger. ‘Some feat, that. I bet it made them cut about a bit. The Russkies must have been fairly shitting themselves when they found out how easily he’d got through their defences without the aircraft even being called.’

‘Rust, his name was,’ I said. ‘Mathias Rust. He landed up the slope.’ I pointed ahead. ‘That means he must have come in from that direction, towards us. Didn’t the cheeky bugger get a job at some travel agency in Moscow, once he’d come out of gaol? I think so. It just shows how times change.’