When Sasha started talking about the war he grew animated, cursing the brutality and incompetence of the whole operation.
He'd been in charge of one of the Omon special units, and had done what he could to keep his own men under control, but Kulikov, the overall commander of Russian troops in the south, had gone round inciting officers and men to kill every Chechen they could get their hands on.
"Not only Chechen people," he told me.
"One Omon unit attacked farm. They shoot fifty cows, kill them all. They set fire to cows' food hay bum down barns, destroy machines. It was all crazy, mad. What had the cows done to annoy them?"
"Did you get to hate Chechens?" I asked.
"Not hate them. Chechens ordinary people. Not like Mghanis.
Afghanis fanaticals. Some Chechens good, some bad."
As we flew down over the Ukraine there wasn't a great deal to see. The rolling wheatlands had been harvested and most of the stubble had already gone under the plough, so that vast tracts of black earth were showing.
The second leg was a different matter, however.
"We go on the left side," said Sasha as we re-boarded.
"Then we see mountains."
As we lifted out of Krasnodar, lying beside a lake in the plain, the pilot climbed slowly on a southerly heading, and soon the Black Sea came in sight, away to our right. Over the coast the plane made a slight left turn and started following the shoreline down, just inland of the water.
"Famous health resorts," Sasha said, pointing at spots on the map.
"Sochi, Sukhumi, Batumi many sanatoriums.
By then the sun was setting over the sea, and on the other side of the aircraft our left it threw fantastic light over the forested hills which piled ever higher into the distance until we began to see snow on the peaks.
"Soon we see Fibrus!" called Sasha excitedly.
"Highest mountain in Caucasus. Highest mountain in Europe."
Screwing round my head to look, I spotted two rounded, snow-covered humps, so high above everything else that they were still catching the last of the sun.
"They're pink!" I exclaimed.
"Like a pair of bloody great tits."
"Precisely!" Sashsa beamed.
"This is what we would say kak dye siski, like twin tits." Then he pointed left ahead: "Grozny over there, behind." He started in about the war again how the Russians hadn't been able to make headway against the guerrillas, and had no proper military objectives, so that the soldiers took it out on anyone who got in their way.
He was still talking as the sun's rays at last left Bibrus. The smooth boobs quickly turned a dirty white, stars began to show in the clear sky, and night settled over the Caucasus range.
On our descent into Kars I wondered how the pilots would communicate with the tower. Did someone down there speak Russian, or did both sides talk in English? I never discovered but we landed safely, to find that the Here from Cyprus was already in.
Tony's stand-in had been right about the temperature too. As we stepped out of our little aircraft, the cold bit. On that high plateau our breath condensed in the air, and frozen mud crunched under foot. All round the horizon frosty-looking mountains showed faintly in the starlight. Great was my delight when I found mates from the squadron, settling themselves into an empty warehouse with big blower heaters blasting from the corners.
There was no time to socialise or piss about. I said hello to a few of the guys, then quickly sought out the OC of the standby squadron, Bill Chandler, who'd got himself an office of sorts in a cabin at one end of the big shed. A scalie had already got his Satcom set up, and Bill was talking to Hereford.
As I approached, he looked up at me, gave a grin and said into the phone, "Yes. He's here. He's made it."
When he came off the air, my first question was, "How do we stand on security inside the squadron? I mean, how many of the lads know about Orange?"
"Nobody yet," was his answer.
"It's on a need-to-know basis.
Obviously the HALO team are going to have to know. It's them and the Chinook crews who'll have to exfil the damn thing. I'm going to tell them at their final briefing. As far as everyone else is concerned, it's purely a hostage rescue mission."
"That's fine." I nodded.
"Just remember that Sasha, my Russian partner, doesn't know about Orange either."
"Christ! This is getting complicated. He's going to find out sooner or later."
"Not necessarily. If he does, I'll square him. But I'm doing my best to keep him in the dark."
"That's your problem," said Bill.
"Meanwhile, can you tell me what Orange looks like? You're the only person here who's seen it."
"Three components," I told him.
"Two identical black steel cases, roughly three foot by two foot by one. One box about eighteen inches cubed."
"Weight?"
"The big components eighty kilos each, the small one forty."
"OK, thanks." Bill made some notes.
"Tell you what," I said.
"When Sasha and I go in, WI get eyes on Orange and have to refer to it over the Satcom, I'll call it "three heavy cases". All right?"
"Thee heavy cases," Bill confirmed.
"The latest satellite imagery suggests that they, or it, are in some outlying building to the east of the house."
"Then that'll be the summerhouse."
"The summerhouse," he repeated, scribbling again.
"We're still waiting for confirmation of exfil by Chinook. As soon as we get it we'll pass it through." Then he said, "You and your pal had better brief the air crew. The captain wants to be on his way by ten.
The R.A.F had set up a temporary base in what was obviously a training wing a classroom of sorts, with a blackboard, tables and chairs of tubular metal, and garish, incomprehensible Turkish posters round the walls. The only member of the crew I'd met was Alec, the co-pilot, who introduced me to his captain, a solid, fair-haired Scot called Dan. They had maps spread out over two of the tables pushed together, and were using rulers and compasses to mark them up, punching figures into a lap-top.
"OK," said Dan, inviting me into the discussion.
"There's not much civilian air traffic over this godforsaken area, but there is the occasional night flight coming up over Grozny from Baku, down here on the Caspian. Therefore our aim is to fly a normal civilian track. Your target's Sarnashki, right?"
"Yeah we're aiming for an opening in the forest three ks north-west of the village."
"Roger. The wind's about five ks on two-four-zero, so if we tip you out ten ks west, you should be able to fly yourselves in.
I nodded.
"That'd be fine."
"Good. That'll keep us well clear of Grozny. So…" He stood up and stretched before running through a quick recap.
"We go out on zero-eight-four and hold that heading till we cross the civilian track from Baku. Then we turn left on to two-eight-eight and head up between Grozny and Ordzhonikidze. Our marker point for the turn is this peak here, Dyltydag. It's over four thousand metres and fairly isolated, so we should pick it out all right but if we can't, the computer will hack it."
"What height will we be flying at?"
"Twenty-eight thousand. You'll want plenty of clothes on.
I nodded again, wondering at the sight of all those peaks on the map a range running for two or three hundred miles, northwest to south-east, with numerous 15,000-footers among them.
We were going to fly right over the whole lot. All I asked was, "How long will it take to get there?"
Alec did a few more calculations and came up with, "One hour five to the turn, then twenty-five minutes to the DZ overhead. It should be no problem to get you there. It's not you that's bugging us, though."