Over the next few days, with basic range-work satisfactory, we began teaching the theory of house assaults, starting small, with two-man teams, making the students work in their pairs, showing them how to go through a room and clear it. We then moved on to four-man teams, through an assault on a single room to one on a house with four rooms and a corridor, still using one team. Then we progressed to having several teams operating together: eight or a dozen men entering different rooms at the same instant. Next came multi-floor tactics, with guys bursting in through doors, windows and skylights, all their movements precisely co-ordinated by radio.

At first we worked in classrooms, using magnetic boards and coloured counters to demonstrate formations, but soon we started moving men through actual rooms, and finally took them out for live firing practice in their primitive Killing House. The Russians were full of energy and enthusiasm, and they fairly threw themselves into the work. But what they lacked was precision: several times, when left to themselves to make a plan, they managed to have one assault team come face to face with another in the stair well, and we had to drum into them the vital importance of logical thought in command and control.

All this was interesting and good fun – a challenge for both sides, and one that we all enjoyed. But the trouble was that, for me, the days began to slip away at an alarming speed. In no time at all it was Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday. Our first week had almost gone, and we’d had no chance to recce either of our prospective nuclear sites.

The other aggravation was that on only the third night Rick did a runner. After supper he simply disappeared, and there were a few moments’ panic before Mal, who was sharing a room with him, suddenly said, ‘I bet I know where he’s at. He’s gone to screw that woman he met on the recce. I heard him on the phone to her this morning.’

‘Not Natasha!’ I said. Bloody hell! I knew he’d taken her address but I didn’t realise he’d made contact again.

‘Yeah – laid himself on a taxi, too.’

I wasn’t going to sit up half the night waiting for the randy bastard to come back, and I never did hear what time he rolled in. But after breakfast I lit into him for taking off without letting me know what he was doing.

‘Can’t you see?’ I told him. ‘It’s plain bloody stupid. If anything had happened to you we wouldn’t have had a clue where you were. If you got picked up by the Mafia, for instance, the whole team would be in the shit.’

He saw the point of that, and apologised, but I still warned him that if he couldn’t control himself, I’d have to send him home.