Louisa Hope can still remember how it felt in her body, the adrenaline dripping off her fingers, as she stood frozen, ready to die.

Despite the ear-splitting gunshots and intense flashing lights she stood perfectly still, hoping these men in black who were finally storming the Lindt Cafe would spot her standing there, see she was a hostage, and shoot the gunman instead.

Ms Hope, then 52, was chosen by the gunman as a human shield.

“It was very dark in the cafe and having waited all day, hoping the police were going to come in, and then suddenly it was peculiar,” she recalled.

“It was like the air got sucked out of the room in a way. And I could see lots of different coloured lights and all of a sudden the intense noise of the guns firing, it was like nothing I’d experienced before in my life.”

HOW THE LINDT CAFE SIEGE BEGAN

It was two “sliding door” moments that had led Ms Hope to the Lindt Cafe in the centre of Sydney on December 15, 2014.

She had stayed the previous night at the Hilton Hotel with her mum Robin because they had an appointment in the city that day. They tossed up whether to have breakfast at the Hilton but chose instead to head to the Lindt Cafe.

The next sliding doors moment came when they decided to linger for a second cup of coffee. By the time Ms Hope was at the counter paying for their breakfast and ready to leave, a crazed gunman had stood up and was ranting.

“He was carrying on. And I actually thought it was like we were on Candid Camera because it just didn’t seem real,” Ms Hope said.

“But of course, when he pulled out the gun, it was definitely real.”

She was worried her 73-year-old mum might antagonise him and spent the next 16 hours trying to keep her calm.

“My concern with Mum was that she would be a little bit angry with the gunman because she normally didn’t take kindly to nonsense, you know?

“At one stage, the gunman actually said to me, ‘Louisa, keep your mother quiet’.”

As the terrified hostages waited for the police to rescue them, and watched others take their chances and escape, Ms Hope waited and waited.

When the police finally stormed the cafe more than 16 hours after terrorist Man Haron Monis pulled out his shotgun, she stood frozen in time.

As the gun fire rattled around her, she felt a burning pain in her foot.

Suddenly someone yelled “Get down!”

“So I half staggered, fell from standing onto the floor, and the gunfire just kept going. It just didn’t stop,” she said.

“So I was on the floor and I had my eyes covered. My hands were covering my eyes and I thought, ‘My goodness, we’ve survived this whole day, but we’re going to die now’.

“And I thought, ‘If we’re going to die, I might as well watch’, right? So I took my hands away from my eyes, but you couldn’t see anything because the smoke was so intense through the shards of light that were coming in from outside.

“The gunfire just kept going and going and then all of a sudden it stopped as quickly as it started.”

POLICE STORM THE LINDT CAFE

Ms Hope sat up a little, checked her head and thought, “Well, I’m not dead”.

“I’m amazed I didn’t die. It was so intense and terrifying and horrific, really, that I thought we were going to die,” she said.

Instead Ms Hope realised there was a “huge chap” standing over her, shouting, “Get up, get up!”

The huge chap was Ben Besant, a member of the elite NSW Police Tactical Operations Unit (TOU).

He had just fired 17 shots into the terrorist who had traumatised Ms Hope, her mum and another 16 hostages for the past 16 hours.

He had a big backpack with wires sticking out, leading police to believe he was carrying a bomb.

“I knew I would continue to fire on him however many rounds it took to essentially kill him because I didn’t want him to detonate the bomb and kill all the hostages inside,” Mr Besant said.

“And I would do it again. I was just completely focused on getting him down.”

Both Ms Hope and Mr Besant, her hero, thought they were going to die that day.

“I was resigned to the fact,” Mr Besant said.

“I had been watching the gunman. He had a big, black backpack. It was very full and I could see two wires coming out.

“So from all the training, everything we’d done, I wholeheartedly believed it was a bomb. So as soon as we got the call to go in I knew for myself, the only hope was to get in as quickly as we could and try and kill him.”

Both Ms Hope and Mr Besant who are now close friends, have heard “armchair critics” talk about what should and shouldn’t have happened that horrible December day in 2014.

Ms Hope, for one, hoped the specialist police teams would have stormed the cafe sooner – before Monis had the chance to shoot dead 34-year-old cafe manager Tori Johnson – another one of her heroes.

Barrister Katrina Dawson, 38, died too, hit by a stray police bullet fragment before dying in Mr Besant’s arms.

A coroner agreed NSW police did not act quickly enough and calls for help from the hostages went unanswered.

Then there’s the fact that Monis, the lone gunman, was out on bail despite being charged with being an accessory to murder and more than 40 counts of sexual and indecent assault.

Mr Besant is also perplexed about the narrative to this day that a sniper should have been ordered to take a shot at Monis.

“I’m also a trained sniper and the reality is that was never a viable option,” he said.

“I know there is someone out there saying it should have been but for me it was never an option.

“You shoot him and the bomb goes off then everyone in the cafe is dead. That’s ridiculous. You’d never take that risk.

“And every time I saw him, he always had a hostage in front of him. Whether the shotgun was in the back or on the head, whenever he moved past the window or anything, he always had the shotgun on them.

“So we all know from our training that if you get shot and you don’t hit the perfect spot, hit the top of the brain stem, the body’s natural reaction is to jerk. So if you shoot him and you don’t hit it perfectly, which is a very difficult shot in this situation. The best case scenario is that you’re going to kill one hostage, so for me it was never a viable option.”

“The cafe used to be a bank and the windows had been strengthened (were bullet proof) and that increases the difficulty of a sniper shot.”

Instead Mr Besant did what he was trained to do. Watch and wait until he heard the command Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!

He stormed in with his Alpha team, activated his light source and laser.

“And then I’ve just scanned the room, looking in to try and find him. He was wearing a white shirt and I managed to see him.

Monis was initially looking towards a window as police fired shotgun rounds into the window in an attempt to get sand and flash grenades into the cafe — their only means of distraction — but then he noticed Mr Besant’s light and laser pointer on the centre of his body.

“I watched him turn with his shotgun and face me and we literally locked eyes on each other.”

Monis fired back, at one point hitting the top of the shield carried by the team’s shield man Pauly.

“But my whole focus was on him, the terrorist. So I continued to walk towards him and fire on the move, which we’re trained to do.

Each time I fired I let my rifle restabilise, ensuring the laser was on his chest and then I continued to fire and move towards him.

“He fired on me again. I became very aware that there was nothing in between him and I was completely unprotected, and he’s probably only seven or eight metres in front of me at this point.

“So you’re doing well to miss with the shotgun at that range and I still vividly remember just squinting up behind my rifle, just waiting, waiting to be hit, wholeheartedly believing that if he hit me I would have my face blown off. But I didn’t, which is a good thing.”

In just three to four seconds he fired the shots required to render Monis dead then rushed to the injured Ms Hope.

“They were telling me to hurry, hurry, I thought ‘what’s the rush?’ but from their point of view, I now understand they were concerned about bombs,” Ms Hope recalled.

“I’m saying ‘I can’t, my foot’ because I’ve been injured and he was holding me up. This big TOU guy helping me up saying ‘well, can you hop?”

“I had shrapnel in my abdomen, I didn’t know at that stage. And the pain in my foot, it was such intense pain. I felt it when all the shooting was going on but I couldn’t shout out because they were still shooting and I didn’t want to alert the gunman to where I was. It was literally terrifying really.”

Ms Besant and his colleague scooped up Ms Hope and took her outside, laying her on the ground on Phillip Street.

It would be several years and lots of correspondence with the NSW Police Force before she got to see her hero again.

Police protocol aimed at protecting the identity of the elite Alpha team made it challenging.

Unfortunately her mum died before she got the chance.

“All of us who were there, we knew what happened at the end and how horrible it was and how brave some people were, so it creates a silent bond. So it was great to finally meet Ben.

“I wished my mum had had the chance to meet them because certainly she was caring about them and loving them as well.”

With a tear in her eye she remembers her other hero, Tori Johnson.

“Tori was profoundly brave and, I mean, he chose to stay. As things panned out over the next 12 months, I realised from mum that he had chosen to stay with her, which was incredibly brave.

“He would have known how to get out of that cafe all day, but he took his responsibility seriously. So that’s a great sadness for all of us, his family, and also for mine in lots of ways, you know.

“We know that his bravery gave us a bit more time with mum, but that’s some consolation for his family.”