The runway at Balashika was pretty short, and the captain of the aircraft warned us in advance that he’d have to do a tactical landing. In practice that meant that he banged the Here down so hard on the first impact that it bounced and flew on a bit before coming to earth a second time. Down in the back we all had a good grip of the cargo nets, and although we went weightless for a second or two, with legs and bodies flying up in the air, we were none the worse.

When the tailgate opened the night air struck surprisingly cool. Sasha was there to greet us, and as we shook hands I remarked on how cold it was.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Summer is feenished.’

But the temperature was good for unloading and, in spite of numerous well-meaning offers of help from waiting Russians, we insisted on humping all our own kit ourselves.

‘It’s kind of you to have kept them up,’ I told Sasha, ‘but we can handle this. Let them go to bed.’

We had everything out on the apron within forty minutes, and as the Here took off for home I watched its navigation lights disappearing into the sky with the same feeling I’d had when I’d looked at the head loadie before we went out on the HALO jump over France: Lucky bastards, I thought. They’re off home. A nice, comfortable stop-over in Berlin, and tomorrow they’ll be back. We, meanwhile, were left two thousand miles from base with fearful problems to solve.

As soon as I saw we had everything up together, I insisted that Sasha fall out. I knew he had a room in the officers’ mess on the camp, but he’d told me that at weekends he went home to live with his mother in her flat in Ostankino, a northern suburb of Moscow. At that time of night, he said, it was only fifteen minutes by car – so off he went, with promises to be back first thing in the morning.

The important stuff was locked inside green Lacon boxes, stencilled with white numbers – 1 to 27. We never let any of these boxes out of our sight. We lifted them on to hand-trolleys, wheeled them across to our designated block, and carried them up the steps ourselves. I was glad to find that Sasha had got strong hasps and padlocks organised on most of the doors, and I designated two rooms at the end of the corridor as stores, next to the kitchen on one side and the signal office on the other.