It was Sasha who showed us round and explained the facilities. I said nothing as we toured the camp, because in the Regiment you work with whatever assets you’ve got, and don’t start criticising others when they are doing their best. But I couldn’t help noticing that most of what we saw was way out of date: again and again I was reminded of conditions when I’d joined the army nearly twenty years before.

The camp had its good points, one of which was space. Beyond the drill squares, the barrack blocks and other buildings, the land ran straight out into ranges and training areas. Several thousand acres were taken in by the surrounding wall, which struck away through the forest at the back and disappeared out of sight. You could drive or even walk to the various ranges without leaving the base’s perimeter.

At the Killing House, our hosts put on a demonstration of hostage rescue – no doubt in return for the one we’d given Sasha at home.

As Sasha warned me, their building was nothing but a hollow square formed out of old lorry tyres filled with sand and cement and stacked on each other to make walls about eight feet high. Because the room had no roof and was open to the elements, we had a good view down into it from our vantage point on the observation tower. As at Hereford, the guards either side of the prisoner were represented by figure targets, much the same as our own, but the hostage between them, far from being a live human being, was only a dummy.

When the assault went down, the explosive charge failed to blow the barricaded door first time, and when the assaulters opened up with their sub-machine guns, instead of firing a couple of short bursts, they sprayed the inside of the house with dozens of rounds. The entire exercise was marked by a lack of precision. There was also a worrying lack of emphasis on safety. The assaulters had no flame-proof clothing like our black gear, only standard DPMs – and as the day warmed up I saw several guys remove the heavy Kevlar plates from the fronts and backs of their flak-jackets. Without the plates the jackets would stop secondary impacts like ricochets, but not live rounds. And whereas at home we always have a fully equipped ambulance standing by, manned by two paramedics, the Russians had nothing but an ancient meat-wagon, with jack-shit kit on board and only two squaddies in control.

Sasha seemed amazed when I told him that the SAS had only ever lost one man in the Killing House. Plenty of guys had broken arms and legs when they fell off buildings while abseiling, but in the Killing House itself only one man had died; he’d been shot in the femoral artery and had bled to death in seconds.

‘Reelly!’ Sasha seemed impressed. ‘We lose one or two men a year.’