So yes, those two or three evenings, they were very, very physical but also mentally draining as well.

Co-written with Sunday Times no 1 bestseller Damien Lewis, Des Powell takes readers into the dessert and behind enemy lines. His slavery documentary told the story of a young girl from the Nuba tribe, seized in a raid and sold into slavery in Khartoum, Sudan's capital city, and of her epic escape.

Des Powell is an member of the Parachute Regiment who got selected for the SAS and during a twenty year career with them he was involved in Op Granby as part of the Scud hunting patrols Bravo One Zero, Bravo Two Zero and Brave Three Zero. There was a point near the end, when I felt almost gobsmacked and yet, to a degree unsurprised, by a certain revelation that is made, almost casually, about the failed comms links.

The last book I read that he was involved in was the one with the Apache crews - not the Ed Macy books. Coburn's account suggests that during the planning phase of the mission, Syria had been the agreed-upon destination should an escape plan need to be implemented. That the SAS, Britain's fighting elite, would do what appears to be an 'arms plot' move in the build up to a war; would equip patrols going into an active enemy environment so badly, and would give such poor weather, intelligence and signals briefs. Peter Ratcliffe (RSM at the time) on his book Eye of the Storm also mentions the first patrol as "Bravo One Nine" and the only patrol that used vehicles with Bravo Three Zero aborting their mission immediately on seeing the terrain they had to operate in. Over the preceding fifteen years Lewis had reported from many war, conflict and disaster zones – including Sudan, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Burma, Afghanistan and the Balkans (see Author's Gallery).

According to Ratcliffe, the change in plan nullified all efforts over the following days by allied forces to locate and rescue the team. Because of a malfunctioning emergency radio that allowed them only to send messages and not receive them, the patrol did not realise that while trying to reach overhead allied jets, they had in fact been heard by a US jet pilot.