The football game had really warmed up now. Today's ball had mud caked on its matted grey hair and beard. I lowered my binos. I didn't want to see that shit. If they found me, the next head could be mine.

The ground below me was soft but sappingly cold. I wished the Regiment boys had left me a roll mat. Tensing my body, I wiggled my toes again and again, trying to generate some heat, but it wasn't working. Mladic had better turn up soon. I didn't have a picture of him with me because of opsec, but I'd burned one into my memory before I came out. I'd know his ugly fat face when I saw it.

The LTD was housed in a green metal box about the size of a breeze block. The tripod it was mounted on was extendable to about two feet, though I had it just inches off the ground. It had a viewfinder at the back, and a lens at the front, protected for now by a plastic cap, which would fire a laser about ten miles. There was also a laser range-finder, which was how I knew the target building was exactly 217 metres away.

The theory behind this kind of attack was very simple. A jet would come in from behind me, roughly in line with the beam from the LTD, but low, the other side of the mountain, out of sight and sound of the factory. When it was about nine or ten miles away, the on-board computer would tell the pilot to pull into a steep climb. At just the right moment he would let go of the Paveway, very much like bowling a ball underarm. By the time it had cleared the mountain, the jet would have turned and be on its way home.

The Paveway wasn't so much a missile as a standard 2000-pound lump of metal and explosive, with some fins strapped on its tail. Once it had been lobbed, the nose-mounted detector would look for the laser beam splashing on the target, lock on, and freefall to the target. This man-in-the-loop technology was all very well, but as I watched the soccer match, hoping I wasn't going to fuck up and become their next ball, I wished someone would hurry up and invent no-man-in-the-loop technology.