Our PJI – the Parachute Jump Instructor from Hereford – stepped along the line of bulky figures, giving our kit final checks. The hold was so dark he was doing most of the work with his hands, following lines and straps with his fingers, pulling on rings and clips. Then the red jump-warning lights came on, like half ping-pong balls one either side of the tailgate. Two minutes to go.

Our kit made us cumbersome: GQ-360 chutes on our backs, oxygen tanks on stomachs, 120th bergens clipped upside-down on the backs of our legs and tucked high under our chutes, so that they rested against the backs of our thighs from knee to arse. Our weapons, 203s or Minimis, were tied with para-cord to our left legs. With that lot on I had a job to waddle to the rear of the plane.

As leader of the team, I’d be the first to jump.

Stars wheeled across the big, square opening as the pilot put in his final turn. I glanced to my left at Harry Price, known to all as Pavarotti, the hefty Welshman famous for singing in the showers and for the eyes tattooed on the cheeks of his arse. He’d had them done one night when he got pissed in Cardiff, by a Chinese bloke for a fiver a side, and the eyes were a bit slitty.

Now, under his helmet, goggles and oxygen mask, not much of his face was showing, but I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he swallowed. He was thinking the same as I was: for fuck’s sake, let’s get out of this damned aircraft and on our way.

Anyone who says he’s not nervous when about to free-fall at night wearing full equipment is bullshitting. All eight of us were crapping bricks. A night-time HALO – a high-altitude, low-opening drop – is no picnic, however many times you’ve done it before. After two seconds you’re heading for the ground at 125 miles per hour. You roar through the first thousand feet of air in ten seconds, the next in five, and so you keep going.

A clean free-fall is one thing; a drop with full kit something else, because of the risk that your load may move and render you unstable. Tonight we were jumping at 22,000 feet and dropping to 4,000 before we popped our chutes: a free-fall of ninety-five seconds. This way, on this moonless night, we’d come out of the blue – or rather, out of the black – as far as anyone on the ground was concerned: until our chutes deployed nobody would see a thing.

Our target was a clearing among the chestnut forests of the Cevennes where, according to the exercise scenario, partisan forces would be waiting to guide us in, meet us and take us to safe houses.