On their first sortie together, Nellis and Yazid flew to Daru, which, as luck would have it, lay at the far end of the helicopter’s fuel limitation envelope. As Nellis recalls, the place was close enough to the Liberian border to mean trouble and the only people there were some Nigerian soldiers and a squad or two of Sierra Leonean Army troops who were so doped that they didn’t know day from night.

‘We’d barely got down and joined some of the guys on the ground, who were busy preparing their daily ration of rice, when the shooting started … there was incoming coming from all over the place.’ The situation was extremely hazardous so Nellis urged his crew to get going, and waited impatiently for everybody to board.

Yazid, meanwhile, had occupied the co-pilot seat and seemed to view the process with the kind of detached equanimity that might have been better suited to a Sunday drive back home. Surprised, Nellis leant across: ‘You’re aware of course that we’re being shot at?’ he asked, his faced creased with a smile.

‘Yeh, reckon so,’ the youngster replied, ‘but what’s there to do about it?’ Point taken. His laid-back approach both impressed and pleased Nellis. Yazid might be useful in a tight spot, he thought

Just then, eager as hell to get the hell out of there, Nellis upped the revs. Indicating with his hands, he told the others that he was about to lift off. It was the only way to settle everybody. With that, a Sierra Leonean Army sergeant major moved forward and brusquely ordered a Nigerian corporal out of the engineer’s seat. ‘Get up. I’m sitting there!’ he barked and promptly sat down between Yazid and Nellis. He was a big guy, Nellis recalled and, anyway, it was no time to argue.

The NCO had barely strapped in when an AK round came though the fuselage and went straight into his leg. The exit wound it made was the size of a man’s fist and, although it would have been worse had he taken a gut wound, the crew had a job on their hands trying to stop the man bleeding to death.

‘Fucker had it coming’, exclaimed Yazid when he told the story afterwards. ‘Better him than me. But that bullet did come right between Nellis and me and hit him square on, so it must have been sooo close!’ He said, laughing.

George Yazid flew regularly with Nellis and the boys after that. In the end, he proved to be a useful acquisition, although the group never had any money to pay him. However, he saw good action and used his newfound experiences to eventually get a job with PAE.

By mid-February, 1999, Juba Joubert had returned to Sierra Leone with a pair of Mi-24 helicopter gunships, which were crated in an Ilyushin transport aircraft. There were also great piles of ammunition on board, along with several Russian technicians, who were there to put the package together, and a Moscow-based test pilot. Nellis recalls:

We didn’t really need the man but, what the hell, he was there. About the third afternoon, I was tasked to fly to Lungi with a load of rations, and asked our illustrious test pilot friend if he’d like to come along for the ride. Trouble was, he spoke no English and I knew no Russian. He settled straight into my right-hand seat in the Mi-17 and I didn’t argue. If he wanted to fly the chopper, I’d let him. It was probably the worst decision of my life.

For a start, he’d been drinking vodka, by then probably half a bottle of the stuff. I could also see that, being accustomed to the cold climate of Eastern Europe, he’d underestimated the effect heat would have on the chopper lifting off. He started rolling forward and when he got to transition, he just lifted the collective to takeoff, which meant that the helicopter dropped away at the end of our all-too-short runway. I would have liked to think that he was also aware that at 88 per cent power, everything cuts out, including autopilot and the machine’s electrical system.

I saw what was coming and grabbed the controls, but the Russian wouldn’t let go: he simply froze. Sindaba, sharp guy that he is, quickly turned round and slapped the man across the face with a powerful backhand. Only then did the Russian yield, allowing me to control once more.

Just then, the helicopter was over the swamps and water that surrounded the base on two sides out of three, and my only option was to come down on power and allow the engines to build up revs. Several observers at the base said that they could see that our wheels actually touched the water several times. Had we gone into the drink that day, it would have been my third crash.