Certainly the Commander of the Western Group of Forces had taken the President’s orders as his personal command and had stopped at nothing to locate them. Their communications specialists had only a few short intercepts of data-burst transmission to work on. However, despite the considerable efforts of whoever was transmitting to avoid creating a pattern, computer analysis allowed them to zero in on the deep forest in the northern, most remote part of the Guaja National Park, close to the Gauja River, an area almost unmapped and visited only by the occasional hunter.

Aerial searches by Zastava drones carrying full-motion video and multispectral imaging sensors, integrated with forward-looking infrared capable of detecting the radiation from a heat source beneath the forest canopy, next revealed a number of potential hiding places deep in the forest that suggested recent habitation. Although, whether by humans or bears was a moot point and required boots on the ground, rather than a heat-seeking lens in the air.

And then, four days ago, the searchers had struck lucky. A short text message from a mobile phone had been picked up from within a hundred meters of one of the possible forest hide locations. Surveillance drones had then revealed movement on both foot and by cross-country motorcycle. The link was made with the President’s attackers two weeks ago—they had escaped on scramblers—and Vronsky had been ordered to mount the operation as a matter of urgency.

Time had been short and while Vronsky was confident of his Spetsnaz team’s ability to find, attack and neutralize the insurgents, he was very much less confident of the professionalism and combat experience of the battalion that would establish the all-important inner and outer cordons. But they were all that was immediately available.

At least the fact he had been personally selected by the President gave him the ultimate say in how the operation should be executed. Nevertheless, as a major, Vronsky still had to take account of the lieutenant colonel commanding the conscripts of the local Motor Rifle battalion, who would provide the cordons. Vronsky assumed that they must know the local area by now, but even on that count he had been disappointed; the nervous young soldiers had started off by patrolling into the woods, but as the numbers and effectiveness of the resistance increased, ever fewer came back out. Now they kept to the roads and their defended blockhouses as they were too few, and the forest too large, for them to be able to patrol in strength.