Seven minutes wasn't going to be long enough.

Thing is to keep control and remember that all we've got to do is get airborne and then raise the Embassy and get Ferris to do the rest: he could put a NATO battalion into the field so long as communications with London held up.

Leave it to Ferris.

Look, do you really think you can just light a cigarette and sit back and -

Voices and this time raised voices, 01:01, they'd missed Yang and now they'd start looking for him and they wouldn't take long to find him and then they'd start looking for me.

Running feet and more voices.

Give that bloody thing another two minutes to burn and then give it up and get out of here and take to the mountains and let them put the light out over the board for Jade One in London, but Jesus Christ I'd got close, I'd got bloody close.

Voices again, Sinitsin's among them now, Where is he, and so forth, he'd strip the hide off them for letting me get away.

01:02.

Give it another minute. One more, and then if -

Fireball.

The camouflage net shivered as the chopper alongside rocked on its landing gear to the shock of the explosion as the tank went up and hurled flames into the night, their bright banners catching the net and firing it as I pushed open the cabin door and got ready to jump because if the whole lot went up I was getting out, stop panicking and shut that door and keep low before they see you, haven't you seen an explosion before, get down.

Voices again above the roar of the flames, and I dropped low behind the front seats because the pilots would be first here and there'd only be one thing they could try doing.

The night was orange now, with the flamelight flooding into the cabin and the net shaking as the men below started hacking at it with knives to free the rotor. Someone wrenched the door open and lunged in and dragged the extinguisher off its hook and threw it down to the others, shouting something in Korean. Then he swung out through the doorway and I saw the flash of a blade as he clambered onto the roof of the cabin; I could hear the tramping of his feet as he worked at the net, hacking it away from the rotor.

The night was full of cries, one of them shrilling as the flames caught a man. Black smoke was pouring from the chopper alongside and enveloping the cabin; two or three times I lifted my head but could see nothing but the darkness curdled with the light of the flames; the man on the roof was choking now in the thickening pall of smoke. Firefoam hit the perspex window and a man shouted, quite close, words I didn't understand. Smoke began drifting into the cabin and I buried my face into my jacket and stayed absolutely still. Something smashed: I think the man had kicked the window in as he came dropping from the roof; I felt the machine lurch as he threw himself inside and slammed the door against the smoke; then the turbos began moaning.

The warm-up time for these things would be around three minutes but I didn't think we had that long; the fuel had sent a wash of flame across the ground and it was still spreading; there was the sickly smell of rubber on the air as the tyres began burning. There was nothing much to think about as I crouched face down in the dark. This was either going to work or it wasn't; there'd been a whole complex of unpredictable elements and it hadn't been possible to put them together and come up with any kind of certainty; it had just been the only thing I could do, short of putting Tung Kuo-feng at risk in a shoot out. So I kept still and left it to karma, and listened to the rising moan of the turbos and then the sudden jerk as the rotor was cut in and began turning.

He wouldn't wait for all the needles to reach the green sectors: this wasn't standard take-off procedure; but he'd need close to ninety per cent rotor rpm and that was going to take another sixty seconds or more and there was nothing he could do about it except sit there with the flames washing under the wheels. Now that he was in the right-hand seat I could raise my head as far as the perspex window, but couldn't see anything but figures darting through the smoke, their shadows thrown grotesquely against it by the livid orange of the flames. But the long blades of the rotor were getting up speed, and the smoke began surging lower in the downdraught until all I could see was the wash of flames beneath us; they were fanning out as the draught caught them, pulling them into a fiery disc and blowing the smoke clear of the area.

Through a gap between the seat and the cabin wall I could see through the undernose perspex, where two men were dragging something blackened to the edge of the flames; then there was nothing but the flames themselves, flattening into a giant Catherine wheel as the rotor picked up speed and the machine lurched as a tyre burst, then steadied and began lifting with the bright disc of flame falling away below.

"Seoul," I told him, and dug my centre-knuckle hard into his spine at the fifth vertebra jerking him forward and snapping his head back. "Kimpo Airport."

Most of his shock was at finding he wasn't alone, and his smoke-reddened eyes were wide as he moved his head to look at me. I bunched the knuckle again and drove it into the middle of his spine this time, sending a flash of pain through the central nerves.

"Kimpo Airport, Seoul."

Sweat shone on his face. The glow of the flames was dying away now, leaving the greenish illumination of the facia panel; when I looked into the windscreen I saw him watching my reflection, and shook my head slowly, meaning don't try anything; then he tapped the fuel gauge and looked up at me with a shrug, so I got the map on its clipboard and slammed it across his knees and jabbed a finger at Seoul and then hit the median nerve of his left arm enough to warn him because the fuel gauge was at half full and that was ample for the run in to Kimpo and he knew it.

I got the headset off its hook behind the navigator's seat and started work on the radio panel, getting an answer in Korean from the Embassy and then losing it two or three times because there was a hell of a lot of static from the rotors. We'd gained a thousand feet by now and he'd got the thing on an even keel but I wasn't trusting him: he was a fanatic and he wanted to put this machine down near the monastery again, even if it had to be on the roof, because Sinitsin and his group were now cut off.

5051 kHz was answering again and the voice sounded English so I told them Eagle to, Jade One and repeated it but the static was appalling and I couldn't even tell whether it was Ferris responding or someone else.

The time was now 01:09 and I checked the airspeed indicator and gripped the pilot's fist, turning the throttle and telling him to stay at maximum speed, using words he didn't understand but a tone of voice that told him he'd got to do what I wanted. The floor shifted under my feet as the power came on, and I grabbed at the seat-back and then tried to raise the Embassy again. It was difficult to tell if they were getting my signal with any clarity so I left the set open and kept repeating what I wanted them to know.

Eagle to Jade One. Hostage Tung Chuan and KGB captors due to board Cathay Pacific Flight 584 from Seoul to Pyongyang ETD 02:18. You must stop them and take Tung Chuan alive. This is ultra priority, this is ultra priority, my voice probably unintelligible, reaching them in an ocean of static, while the red light came up on the facia panel and the reflection of the smoke-blackened pilot's face watched me impassively from the windscreen, Eagle to Jade One, can you hear me?

I bent over the map and read the call sign for Kimpo tower and switched to that wavelength and tried to raise them with the call sign for the aircraft but all I could get was slush, the red light beginning to worry me now so I looked at it and saw it wasn't on the facia panel, it was at the edge of the curving windscreen, the bastard had been turning full circle all the time and that was the fire down there, the one at the monastery -