“But I have heard of that!” she said excitedly. “Max has talked to me of it.”

“Really? Then I’m not telling you anything new.”

“Oh yes! He is only on the outside — outside part — ”

“On the fringe.”

“Yes. Fringe.”

“Well, the big question in all our minds over there is to do with the actual fit of these components.” I picked up her tortoiseshell comb from where she’d left it near her bag, which was still open a couple of inches. Going across to the mirror I said: “Expressed technically, the big question is: exactly how tight is a DUKS ARS?”

In the mirror I watched her listening intently, her blonde head on one side.

“Of course,” I told her, “we’re already on to a theory. But that’s top secret, and I ought not to — ”

“But darling, you said you would trust me!” She came up behind me and put her arms round my waist, resting her head on my shoulder. “You promised.”

“I suppose I did.” I stroked her head. “Well, our theory is that it must be watertight, or it wouldn’t float.”

“What about over there?” Ferris said.

The Galaxie transport was standing on the far side of the tarmac from the hangars, only just visible in the slanting rain. We pulled our collars tight and trudged across to it under the main perimeter lamps, looking for movement and not seeing any. It was only 6.15 in the evening but the weather had grounded all aircraft, and the crews were off duty.

At the top of the steps I asked Ferris: “Have you got permission to board this thing?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter.”

“As long as they don’t set those bloody dogs on us.”

The main fuselage was cavernous and we sat like a couple of half-drowned Jonahs. “We’ll only be here five minutes,” Ferris said, “because you’ve got most of it.”

I didn’t ask him if he’d had any new signals. In final briefing and recap the thing is to listen as hard as you can because it’s your last chance to get it right and if you don’t get it right you can blow the whole thing anywhere along the line.

Ferris lowered himself on to a stack of life-jackets and brushed some of the rain off his mac. The only light in here came through the small round windows, and we could hardly see each other.

“There are one or two things we didn’t spell out,” he said in a moment, “like motivation, the rationale for various phases and things like that. You ought to know, for instance, why they planned this kind of access. You’re being put into an area that nobody can reach from the West without an awful lot of complications; any form of public transport or the use of your own car would need months of form-filling for Intourist plus elaborate and substantial cover. A moon-drop wouldn’t work because you’d be shot down the minute you crossed the frontier any frontier. You could go in by road through Sinkiang from China or Afghanistan or Kashmir, but apart from frontier difficulties you’d have to spend half your time in ox-wagons if you could find a road that wasn’t closed by snow at this time of the year. So despite the delays we’ve had because of training procedures, the fastest access is by military plane, and that plane has to be Russian.”

My eyes were accommodating now and I could watch his face. Ferris was a talented director in the field and could put you through a maze without hitting a cul-de-sac, but he wasn’t an executive and he didn’t have a poker face and that was why he was worth watching. All I could tell at the moment was that he was having to force himself through the business of getting me to the start line, without any stomach for it. Even though we could now see each other he avoided my eyes, and this was uncharacteristic.

“The plane has to be Russian, and so has the pilot. The only way we could get the plane was by going through NATO and the USAF. Our debt to NATO is being repaid by taking some pictures for them at X and Y: the current satellite photo scans show two villages that weren’t there before and they’re believed to be missile sites for the Soviet six-MIRVed SS-9 with the built-in three-hundred-yard Circular Error Probable capability. The United States is also interested in air-surveying these two points, obviously, and the only way of getting really detailed resolution is by using a low-flying aircraft. Making sense?”

“In a way.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Fair enough, it makes sense. It’s just that I don’t like going into a mission with so many armies in the field. What the hell are we doing, Ferris, operating in the open like this with — ”

“We’re doing,” he said sharply, ‘what we’ve been told to do, and we don’t have any choice. Or at least, you don’t. And remember that within a few minutes of taking-off from this airfield, you’ll be working in complete isolation.”

I shut up and let him talk about mobile cover, local facilities, action phases. “You are to explore area Z, having photographed it.” He still didn’t want to look at me, but this might only have been because he’d obviously had new signals from Control. They’d thrown that Z at me without any warning and I didn’t know where it was. “We’ve got an agent in place there and you can contact him any time after reaching ground.”

“Where is it, for Christ’s sake? I don’t — ”

“You’ll be informed.”

“Oh, shit.”

Because you normally get the whole picture given to you with everything made perfectly clear before you leave London, and here I was in West Germany at the jump-off point and they were still chucking new directives at me through Ferris and the reason was dear enough: those bastards were still in the planning stage while the clock was going round to zero in less than fourteen hours from now.

Sealed orders all the way.

“Do they want any el int I asked Ferris. I’d looked for fancy electronics in the cockpit of the Finback last night and hadn’t found any, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a whole gang of deep-screened boffins putting the stuff in all day today.

“There’s nothing you can pick up on this flight that the satellites aren’t already getting, from radio programmes to rocket launch signals. All they’ve asked for are the pictures.”

He went over general considerations: alternate routes, backup faculties (there was a man in Tashkent who might local-liaise, if sufficiently harassed), and end-phase decision-making. He asked for any questions on the last subject and I said there weren’t any: I was damned if I were going to spell out what kind of decisions I was going to make when the show was winding up, because that was when they’d try to throw me to the dogs if they could.

“Have you got everything?”

I let him wait, while we listened to the soft roar of the rain along the enormous fuselage and the occasional creak of metal as the wind came in gusts under the wings. I’d been briefed enough times to know whether he’d left anything out but I went over it twice because on this one I was going to hell on a handcart and I wasn’t sure of the way.

“I’ve got everything,” I said, ‘that you’ve told me. Christ knows it’s not much.”

“You’re going straight into flight briefing,” he said impatiently, “when we leave here. That’ll fill in the rest.”

“Is it security?”

“Is what security?”

He knew what I meant.

“This lack of data.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t expect that

“From London?”

“Mostly from this end. These people are extremely security-conscious, partly because their eastern frontier is the Iron Curtain. You’ve no idea how difficult things have been, just to get their permission to take-off from here. Parkis had a bed put into a spare office near Signals, three weeks ago. It’s been like that.”

“The bastard’s actually been sleeping?” I got up from the crate I’d been sitting on and wandered farther into the tunnel of the fuselage and came back and said: “All right, I’ve got all you gave me. Now get me cleared.”