CRACKING international drug rings, chasing villains in speedboats and working from a naval command centre.

This may sound like something out of a James Bond movie but for one 20-year-old Hampshire man it is just another day in the office.

Daniel Cole, from Harefield, – known as Smokey – was one of a 15-strong Royal Navy team who recently seized a haul of drugs worth £33m from a souped-up speed boat in Caribbean waters.

The former Wildern School boy, who is now a warfare specialist aboard HMS Iron Duke, spotted the crew desperately trying to offload the class A drugs overboard as the counter-narcotics vessel closed in on them and was carefully compiling evidence with a high-tech night vision camera from the deep within the ship’s nerve centre.

After the packages were seized from the boat and the water Able Seaman Cole was then put on standby to help with a fingertip search of the vessel before helping secure the illicit cargo.

The Navy then turned its machine guns on the speed boat to sink it.

Daniel said: “It is always really exciting when you can be involved in something like this and I still get a thrill out of it.

“To begin with I was in the radar room operating the equipment and then I was out with everyone loading up the stuff.

“I love it when people ask me about my job and when something like this happens I get loads of email from friends and families asking me what’s happening and I have to check to see if I can tell them.”

This is not the first time the sailor has hit the headlines and last year the Daily Echo revealed the ship brought down another drugs ring worth £45m.

He was also was involved when the ship was made part of a taskforce delivering disaster relief to the hurricane-ravaged islands of Turks and Caicos.

In four years in the Navy he has visited the Caribbean, Gibraltar, Madeira, Lisbon and Key West in America and is about to meet up with his girlfriend from Eastleigh during a brief break in Barbados.