In the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, a long line of broken mud cuts across the meadows. If you go anywhere near it, camouflaged guards carrying automatic weapons emerge from the forest beyond.
These guards in the Borjomi region of Georgia - trained by US army and SAS veterans - are pawns in a new great game gripping Central Asia: their job is to protect the oil pipeline buried 10ft below.
'A terrorist attack is the greatest threat we face,' says the guards' commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Giorgi Pantskhava, an energetic Georgian in desert fatigues and aviator shades.
The $4bn (£2.2bn) BTC - Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan - pipeline comes on stream today It is key in American plans to reduce dependency on Opec oil producers in the turbulent Middle East. Pumping oil 1,000 miles from the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, it will avoid Russia - increasingly seen by the US as a resurgent superpower prepared to use control of energy resources as a political weapon.
Terror alert as Caspian oil pipeline opens
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