The others were all in their late twenties, although Rick Ellis, our best linguist, looked younger, being fresh faced, with curly light-brown hair already receding from his forehead. He had a very good brain, and had worked closely with the Det – the intelligence-gathering unit – in Northern Ireland. Maybe it was his appearance that caused him so much trouble with women. The thing about Rick was that he could never burn his bridges: as each affair petered out, rather than simply saying goodbye he’d keep phoning the woman or sending flowers, in case he became desperate for a shag at any time in the future.

Pavarotti Price’s speciality, apart from singing in the bath, was explosives. He took great delight in dropping anything, from a bridge to an obsolete cooling tower – the bigger the better. A hulking six-footer, he came from a mining family in the Rhondda valley, and was probably the strongest man in the party. Sometimes, after a few pints, he could be persuaded to perform his party trick of bending six-inch nails with his bare hands. Yet he had one failing which he tried to keep under wraps: a fear of confined spaces, which seemed to stem from his background. For generations his ancestors had worked in the mines, but his elder brother had been killed in an old shaft; they’d been playing with some other boys when part of the roof had collapsed. Pav had escaped unhurt, but the disaster had left him with a horror of mine-workings and tunnels in general.

Another big fellow was Mal Garrard, a dark and rather quiet man who had originally came to the UK on a two-year secondment from the New Zealand SAS, then did Selection at Hereford, passed, and served for six years as a fully fledged member of the Regiment. For a few weeks after his arrival people had given him stick about his accent, pretending they couldn’t understand what he was saying; but he’d taken it in good part, and had made himself well liked, not least because he was brilliant on computers.

The team medic was Dusty Miller, son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, much addicted to horses, racing and betting particularly: a compact, dark-haired fellow with a very powerful upper body, heavily into weight-lifting. You could see him coming a mile away, because he had a peculiar walk: he moved with his toes turned out, and rose on to the balls of his feet like a duck. Doctoring was only one of his skills; apart from anything else, he was a hell of a pistol shot, and often went out on unofficial rabbit-shoots around one of the training areas, blowing the heads off his quarry with some grossly over-powered weapon like a Colt .45.

Johnny Pearce, as I said, was as tough as they come: a fearsome kick-boxer and an ace mountaineer. No doubt his physical nature, and the many hours he spent in the open air, contributed to his ruddy complexion.