It would have been an exercise in total futility, calling up my director in the field and having him signal London and all that tra-la, an exercise in total bloody futility. All it would have done would be to put the matter down in the records: Mission unsuccessful, executive safe.

So there wouldn't have been any point in staying on the ground in the desert. It wouldn't have achieved anything. But there'd been no point in taking off on board this aeroplane either because I was in a strictly shut-ended situation. I had no argument that would persuade the Iranians to put this aircraft down somewhere and call the whole thing off, and if I got control of them I couldn't put it down anywhere myself: I'd had no training on anything half this size and it'd have to be brought in like a feather on the breeze or we'd blow up the airport.

Teddy bear.

The subconscious, then, is not always reliable, is not always so bloody clever. You would do well to remember that, my good friend. It can send you to your bloody doom.

Teddy bear on the floor. Dropped I suppose by one of the children when they'd all been herded through the exits. Or was it perhaps a naughty teddy bear, that would blow my head off if I picked it up, blow the whole plane to bits? But it wasn't worth worrying about: the stuff in these forty-eight cylinders we'd stacked in here was measurable in mega-teddy-bear power.

There were two kinds of labels on them, both in red and white and with the skull-and-crossbones symbol. At least four of the cylinders contained Trinitrotoluene and carried another vignette, an explosive flash in red. There might be more of these in the stack; I didn't know, because the labels weren't all visible. The labels on the other cylinders read Nitrogen Tetraoxide and carried four symbols: the skull-and-crossbones, the explosive flash, a man's head with a gas mask on the face, and a coat on a hanger symbolising protective clothing.

As an explosive, nitrogen tetraoxide is dramatically potent. When Geissler had put me under the strobe in the garage last night I'd repeated the story Samala had told me. An airman dropped a nine-pound socket from a spanner inside a Titan silo, and it punched a hole in the skin of a fuel cell and started a leak. There was a 750-ton steel door on the silo and when that fuel went off it sent it two hundred feet straight up in the air and dropped it a thousand feet away.

It was 1:32 when I checked my watch again. The time was important, because I would very soon have to do something definitive.

The empty cabin made a soundbox for the soft rush of the jets. The lights had been left on in here, turned low on the rheostat. Something was rolling on the floor, pinging against one of the cylinders, and I picked it up. It was a lipstick, and I put it onto the counter of the galley, and bent again to pick up the teddy bear – freeze – but it was all right, nothing happened, and I sat him on the counter too, with a sense, I suppose, of restoring order while I sipped my coffee and thought things out and eventually reached conclusions, deadly conclusions.

Solitaire was in the end-phase, and if all went reasonably well I could bring it home, though only metaphorically. I would remain somewhere in the Atlantic, distributed piecemeal on its surface to be plucked at by fish – and I say this without bitterness, because I'd rather have them than the worms. In the end-phase of a mission when we realise the executive's status is terminal it's rather like drowning, in that we look back over the events that led us here, and at this particular moment I found myself thinking of that clown Thrower and hoping that Shatner would learn from his mistake and not send him out again unless it was to direct a shadow who could work comfortably with a bloody schoolmaster. I also thought of Helen Maitland, and hoped that one day she would shatter the self-image she'd been stuck with, and start fresh again; and as I considered these things I came to know what was happening: I was putting off the moment when I must set in motion the necessary procedures, because they would bring my death, and the sweat was crawling on me and the adrenalin was firing the motor nerves as I drained the cup with the Pan Am crest on it and put it into the sink.

Polaris had been high on the starboard side when I'd checked our heading through one of the windows and the time was now 1:46, so we were somewhere west of Morocco and over the Atlantic.

Procedures.

Three of the nitrogen tetraoxide cylinders were stowed vertically just aft of the galley and secured with straps, and I loosened a buckle by one notch and pulled a cylinder away from the others and let it fall back. It had the deep musical sound of a. bell.

Did it again.

Remember the orders, don't knock these things around. He'd been the leader of the work group, the jeep's driver. Knock two of these together a bit too hard and we're goners, kerbooom, so for Christ's sake be careful.

Did it again.

Boom…

This was all right, I wasn't knocking them about.

There was a shipping label on the loose cylinder, half torn away, printed in French. It had been shipped – they had all, then, presumably, been shipped – out of Libya.

It's believed that Dieter Klaus has the substantial backing of Col. Moammar Gadhafi. It had been in my Berlin briefing.

Boom…

The voice of one of the pilots cut through the rushing of the jets. He was telling his friend, I would have thought, that he was going to take a look: there was some cargo shifting, so forth.

Boom…

I saw his shadow now, moving across the wall of the cabin on the other side. I let the cylinder fall back again and backed away, staying close to the galley bulkhead. The Iranian reached the three cylinders, and saw what the trouble was.

I searched him and found a gun and emptied the chamber and dropped the bullets into the trash container in the galley and put the gun into the refrigerator. The edge of my right hand was throbbing but that was normal: the strike had needed great speed and great force so that he didn't have time to cry out. He'd started falling towards the cylinders and I'd steered him away and let his body down gently, then dragged it behind the galley bulkhead.

Then I straightened up and tightened the buckle on the strap securing the cylinders and went forward onto the flight deck.

The pilot said something, asking what the problem was, I suppose, and I didn't answer so he looked up and his face opened in surprise and he brought his right arm across his body and I waited until the gun was in his hand and then broke his wrist and worked on the gun and threw the bullets into the cabin and shoved the gun into my coat, bugger was throwing up for Christ's sake, the bugger was lolling over the control column with his face white, all right, there's a lot of pain with a broken wrist but you don't have to go into histrionics, do you, and I told him in French:

'Get that control column, watch what you're fucking well doing!'

A lot of anger coming out, it had been suppressed for a long time now, and there was some fear in it, I knew that, because the chances of getting out of this thing alive were so terribly thin.

I pulled him upright, slapped his face, got him more or less conscious again, I suppose he'd got a low pain threshold, some of us are like that, it's a matter of sensitive nerves, but I didn't want him messing about when he was meant to be flying a jumbo load of explosives through the dark.

I said in English: 'What's our destination?'

He looked at me with his eyes trying to focus. 'Come on, for Christ's sake! What's your target?'

There was 15° north of west on the compass but that didn't tell me enough.

He shook his head.