At 22:40hrs, the same nervous rating led the four men up to the helideck, where the rotors on the AgustaWestland Wildcat were already turning at close to take-off speed, and they hopped smoothly aboard.

Cummins leaned forward in the darkened cockpit, tapped the lead pilot’s shoulder, and gave him the thumbs-up by the low red light.

A few moments later, the heli started to lift. As soon as it was clear of the ship, it dipped out of sight of onshore radar to 30ft above the waves – a task requiring extreme skill, at night, over the vast, dark, unfathomable sea, at not far shy of 200mph – and pointed its nose south-west.

Time to target, twenty minutes.

The four men in the back stayed focused but relaxed, gaming the likely events ahead of them, thinking through the plan, mentally going over the images which had been supplied by London, and which showed the locations of the three bodies at the target beach.

Ten minutes out from the Al Hoceima grid reference, the pilot keyed his mike and passed this information on to Dave Cummins, who alone was plugged into the aircraft’s comms system.

In turn, the big staff sergeant nudged his men and held up both hands, fingers spread, to show all ten digits.

Each member of the team responded with a thumbs-up.

At five minutes, Cummins showed one hand, and the doors on each side of the helicopter were opened as the run-in to target began.

A blast of warm, damp Mediterranean air filled the back of the helicopter, and raised the noise level inside the speeding aircraft.

Each man was now utterly focused; they would be at their most vulnerable at the moment their boots met the ground.

The pilot confirmed the beach was clear on his forward-looking infra-red optics, and sixty seconds later he flared to a stop, and landed-on.

The team stepped off, two on each side, and knelt on the stony shore – each man taking up a firing position covering his arcs, and scanning the area through his rifle’s night-sight for any sign of trouble, while being blasted by sand and gravel thrown up by the helicopter’s downdraft.

Behind them, the Wildcat lifted off and moved away, low and fast, into the deep purple sky, to its air holding area over the water, where the pilot would remain until the call to come back in to extract the team.

The SBS men listened to the roar of its twin LHTEC T800 engines, and the wacka-wacka of its rotors, dying away.

Silence came remarkably quickly, but still they waited.

It was a lonely spot – the nearest settlement of any size, the small town of Rouadi, was approximately ten kilometres away – but there were isolated hamlets and buildings closer in, and the possibility of passing fishermen or goatherds making their way over to find out what a helicopter had been doing so close in could not be discounted.

Even worse – local police.