We came to the edge of the trees and stopped. I whispered to Sasha, "We'll give it an hour," and we settled ourselves on the top of a bank which commanded a close view of the baffler at a point where it turned a corner and ran away down the slope.
Lying on our stomachs on a bed of old pine-needles, we looked straight on the fence, which was two metres high and topped by four strands of razor wire on overhang arms canted outwards.
Scanning past it with the kite-sight, I saw that the trees cut down to make way for the barrier hadn't yet been cleared. The trunks had been sawn into lengths, but the tops had simply been dragged out of the way and left in heaps. Perfect, I thought. Ideal for an OP. We can just burrow into one of them and become invisible. No digging or nets needed. We can pick the best spots for observing the villa and checking on patrols.
The more I scanned, the more evidence I saw that the fence was still being worked on. Lengths of metal and odd pieces of wire lay scattered on either side of it, and frirther up the hill, on the outside, was what looked like a small trailer which I assumed the builders had been using to bring up material. I'd been planning to cut our way through the bottom of the weidmesh, but with this amount of construction still in progress that seemed a dangerous idea. Instead, I decided to take a look at the stretch near the trailer, in the hope that it wasn't yet complete.
For the time being we were out of the wind, in deep shadow, on dry ground, and as comfortable as could be so I wasn't surprised when Sasha began to snore gently beside me. I turned to look at him, and saw that his head was resting on one arm. Let him sleep, I thought. One pair of eyes is enough here.
Forty minutes later, I gripped him by the arm. He came to silently and was immediately alert. I pointed downhill, along the wire, where I'd seen the glow of a cigarette being drawn on.
Then it came again, closer. A patrol was on its way round the perimeter.
I got the kite-sight aligned and saw the smoker immediately: a single man with a weapon slung on his shoulder. At his heel a German Shepherd was ambling, apparently loose.
"Get ready!" I whispered.
"He's got a bloody dog."
I felt for my knife, down my right leg. I hate guard dogs. You never know whether to shoot them and give away your presence by making a noise, or risk serious injury by trying to get a knife into the bastards.
We lay on the bank like logs. I felt we were going to be all right, because the drift of the wind was from the fence to us, and we hadn't put any scent on the ground by going to the wire itself.
Besides, the sentry was an idle sod: he was ambling along, not looking to right and left, but humming to himself between drags.
As he passed beneath us, within fifteen feet of our heads, the smell of cheap tobacco smoke filled the air around us. It wasn't surprising that the dog never deviated from its track.
We gave the pair a couple of minutes to get clear, then went for the fence. Close inspection revealed that none of the wire was insulated, and that there was no alarm system that I could see. We moved cautiously uphill towards the trailer, and found it contained drums of more razor wire. Fifty metres beyond it we found what I'd been hoping for: a section of fence not yet fitted with the overhang. In twenty seconds we'd both climbed the weidmesh and gained the cover of the heaped tree-tops.
I reckoned that by the time the sentry came round again if he made it at all our scent would have left the frosty surface. With the ground so soundly frozen, our boots hadn't left any traces on the fence itself.
We slipped out from our heap of pine-tops, back into the standing trees, and crept left-handed round the outcrops of rock, following the contour, the hill falling to our right. According to the map, which I'd tried to imprint on my brain from the satellite data, the villa would be below us.
From his station a pace behind me Sasha put a hand on my arm. I stopped to listen. He was pointing downhill. When I turned my head in that direction I heard what he'd detected: a faint hum, something like an air-conditioning unit. We moved on a few yards, looked over a rocky ridge, and saw the house rising tall from a levelled-out plateau below.
"Hell of a place," I whispered.
From Anna's photographs I recognised the steep roof and high walls, glowing pale in the moonlight, but the whole place looked more formidable than I'd reckoned. There were three main floors above ground level, a fourth with dormer-windows sticking out of the roof, and some kind of a basement. At the front, on our right, five cars were parked, and on the side facing us a ramp led down to a sunken garage.
"Jesus!" I whispered.
"It's just like the cellar at the Embassy."
"The Embassy?" I heard Sasha turn his head to look at me.
Suddenly I realised what I was saying.
"You know in the courtyard.." Christ!
"Oh no. Sorry. I was thinking you'd been with us. We stored some kit at the back of the British Embassy in Moscow. There was a garage entrance a bit like this."
Thank God, he didn't show the least curiosity.
"Beeg house," was all he said.
"Where are your men?"
He meant that it might be one hell of a job to locate them — and he was right. For the moment I concentrated on the layout of the place.
Akula had good com ms obviously: we could see a couple of dish aerials bolted on to the wall beneath the eaves. There were video cameras mounted on the corners of the building, and what looked like an infra-red device covering the driveway. But half an hour's observation convinced me that there was no patrol immediately round the house: Akula was relying on the fence to keep intruders at a distance.
From where we lay we could see the approach road snaking off down the mountainside to our right, and once I was confident that nobody was moving inside the compound, I decided to recce the track, right down to the barrack huts, or whatever they were, at the bottom entrance.
"Stay here and watch the house," I whispered.
"I'm going to recce the road. Back in an hour. If there's any development, call me on the radio. If there's a big drama, rendezvous back on the bank outside the wire. OK?"
Sasha nodded, and I slipped away down the slope, keeping off the road but following its line in and out through half a dozen hairpin bends. There'd be no problem about blocking it: in at least three places it came through narrow defiles where the rock had been blasted away; a single vehicle brought to a halt would stop everything coming up. A couple of guys with gym pis on the high ground nearby would be able to sort any number of defenders.
At the bottom I came across the guardroom and barrack block that the satellite had seen: low, solid-looking, single-storey structures either side of the weidmesh entrance gates, with several cars and small trucks parked outside. As I watched from above, I saw the guy who'd come past us along the fence return to base, shut his dog into a kennel beside the guardroom and disappear into the building. I checked the time: 4:20. That looked like the end of the night patrol. As I watched, I began to suspect that the reports we'd heard about Akula's private army being a couple of hundred strong must be grossly exaggerated. I reckoned the accommodation below me might house a couple of dozen men at most so, unless more were billeted somewhere off-site, we were up against a pretty small force.
I climbed back a bit, crossed the road and made my way up the eastern side of the compound. There was nothing of interest until, through the trees, I saw the line of a roof above me. This had to be the separate structure identified from satellite imagery, the building in which the trackers reckoned Orange had been housed, maybe a hundred metres east of the villa.