Mad got a pupil full of it. He'd be knocked out soon enough anyway, for shipment.

It seemed like hardly any time at all before I saw a haze of light. But wait, there was something wrong. The whole terrain was getting gray.

IT WAS DAWN!

With a sudden sickening I realized I had been too late! They couldn't make it in the short span of darkness that had been left.

I moaned softly.

The intensity of morning twilight increased. Bushes began to take on detail. The waves in the surf below were no longer just white streaks.

It stopped raining. There were clouds but even these were thinning.

The ships!

The Golden Sunset, two or three miles away, was growing distinct. It was obscuring nearly all of another craft beside it. I could not make out the kind of vessel the other was. A fishboat? A yacht? A patrol craft? All I knew for certain about it was that it wanted me! And here I was pinned down, hidden it is true, but trapped in Turkey, the very place I must not be.

To my left, lying out in the water, three islets emerged from the twilight. And then directly before us but some miles away there seemed to be a bulk of land.

Suddenly a random shaft of sunlight moved in under the scudding clouds. It was from directly behind us.

The sun rises in the east, I told myself. My cave in the cliff was facing due west. I was looking across the narrow strait at Chios. Any hope I had that Raht might be wrong collapsed. Even the sun said I was in Turkey.

There is something discouraging about having a thing you already know pounded home with sledgehammer force.

Chios was only a few miles away. A wild plan to swim for it folded up like a popped paper bag.

MEN!

They came from around an outcrop on the beach. One, two, three, four, five, six... BLACK JOWL!

They were working north along the beach. They must have landed in a quieter cove to the south, not choosing to dare the pounding surf opposite me where we had landed.

THEY WERE SEARCHING!

Scattered out they would examine the shore and then the slope above it with their deadly eyes.

Black Jowl was carrying a hand radio. He would pause and speak in it from time to time and look out toward the ships. Oh, Gods, on those ship radios he would be in communication with all the world. What was he ordering? A general mobilization of the armed forces of Turkey? Maybe at any moment now fighter planes would come screaming out of the dawn sky: I keened my ear for the clank of tanks, the scuttle of infantry. I scanned the horizon: maybe the Turkish navy would show up. After all, I had entered the country without passing through immigration: they would use that as a crime to turn me over to Black Jowl and then stand back laughingly as I was stoned alive. That is, if they did not kill me on the first frontal assault.

I looked to my machine gun. I upended the barrel. A stream of water came out. Never mind, it would still shoot. I braced myself on my elbows and drew a bead on Black Jowl. Then I paused. It was only a.22 caliber weapon and while I had heard that a.22 would travel a mile, I didn't think it had a very lethal impact at long range. I had better wait.

A shout rose up above the distant boom of surf. The men raced forward.

One was pointing.

Our inflatable!

Oh, why hadn't I pushed it back into the sea?

Black Jowl came and stood before it. He talked into his radio, looking at the ship.

How had they known the inflatable was there? And then I realized they had followed us in on radar last night. Probably the thing even had a radar target on it!

The men fanned out. I knew what they were looking for: footprints!

They found the trail! Probably blood from my broken feet. No, that would have been obliterated by the rain. But they seemed to be following something.

I cocked my machine gun.

Suddenly the black-jowled man shouted something to the rest of them. They halted.

The black-jowled man was talking into his radio. I could not hear what he was saying due to the hiss and boom of the sea. Oh, if I only had a listening device. But then, I didn't need it. From his gestures to the men it was very plain that he knew I was up there on that cliff.

But it was puzzling. They did not come charging up. They were just standing there three hundred yards away, looking first to the cliff and then to the black-jowled man.

His communication seemed very lengthy. I could guess what it was: he was ordering a full frontal assault by the combined forces of NATO! Then women with stones would act as the mop-up squad.

Then something very peculiar happened. Black Jowl removed his radio from his mouth and made an arm signal to his men.

They picked up the inflatable, punched the gas out of it and folded it up. Black Jowl was making sure I did not escape by sea!

Carrying the craft they filed off to the south. They vanished around a turn of the beach. Very soon, in two boats, they came into view again.

They headed for the ships.

I watched as they crossed the water. I looked up at the sky for any fighter planes.

At long last they boarded the vessels.

Sometime later the yacht, still obscuring the other ship, got under way. Both of them sailed northward. For Istanbul?

My radio went live. It was Raht, of course. Nobody else had a matching unit for this frequency. "Officer Gris?"

"Yes."

"I got a message for you here. Just sit tight. You'll be picked up about sunset."

"Thank Gods."

He clicked off.

"Another name?" said Madison. "Something Gris? That sure is a funny language. Sounds like Chinese but it's not Chinese as Chinese is in tones and I used to have to order my laundry in Chinese. It sure isn't Russian. Sort of liquid and lilting. I don't think I've ever heard some of those vowels. And that S isn't really an S. One does it by actually blowing one's breath. It sounds more like HIST."

"Shut up!" I snapped at him.

But never mind, he'd be meeting Lombar Hisst soon enough, the poor fool.

Something was bothering me. Sunset? It wouldn't be dark yet at sunset for this was late spring and the twilight was long even in these latitudes. Raht must have meant AFTER sunset. Yes, he was so (bleeped) inaccurate: he had probably just omitted the word after.

Now, if I could live through today without discovery, I thought all would be well.

Little did I know the forces of evil that were at that very moment churning in the world. And that I was at the very center of the vortex!

Throughout a long and worried day I suffered.

The goat cave stunk a bit more than even I could stand and that's saying something for an officer of the Apparatus.

Although we had hundreds of square miles of water to look at if you included both the strait and the Aegean beyond it, visible to the north, we didn't have a single drop to wet our parching throats.

About noon the rain clouds cleared away and the sun, moving westward, began to pour into the cave. It made things worse.

Madison kept turning on his radio and getting rock music. I recognized the Hoochi-Hoochi Boys that Nurse Bildirjin adored. They were singing Turkish with English slang.

Get stoned with me,

You oughta get stoned with me,

Can't you see I'm dead without you.

Take my joints,

I'll never puff them.

Grab my bhong...

"SHUT IT OFF!" I screamed at him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I just thought I ought to soak up some of the local folk songs. I'm in a culture lag. One minute you're talking a language nobody ever heard before that I know of and the next, I'm getting pop music in English and Turkish. What did those Turkish words mean?"

"Oh, shut up!" I begged him. I was getting feverish. You don't smoke marijuana continually as I had been for weeks past without acquiring a throat that is very sensitive to lack of water. What I wouldn't give for an ice-cold Seven Up. Almost instantly I saw, actually SAW, the green can before me, eight times as big as life, frosted with dewy drops. I steeled myself. I did not reach for it. It vanished.