And of course he’d go on like that. Those would be his orders: to deny any suggestion that they were asking for me. I had to volunteer, for the sake of their conscience. I had to ask them — if I could muster the guts. There wasn’t even any room for bargaining: I wasn’t in any position to do that, and they knew it.

“Tell them to go to hell,” I said.

“All right.”

He stood gazing at me with his quiet cat’s eyes, until looked away.

“They’re bloody usurers, you know that?”

He smiled faintly. “But they don’t advertise.”

He meant you had to go to them, when you were broke. And I was broke. They’d done this with Tucker and Wayne and Fosdyck and not many people knew about it but I was one. They’d been for the high jump, all three of them, and at the last minute they’d been thrown a final chance on the principle that letting a man go out doing something useful is sound economics: there’s a chance of some profit in the stuff he sends back before he blows up and it saves the expense of the end-of-the-line debriefing that has to be done before he can be sent out to grass without any risk to the Bureau. It worked with Tucker and it worked with Fosdyck: they never got back. The last I saw of Wayne was in a clinic in Northampton, where they were teaching him to write with his foot.

I looked at Ferris.

“There’s one thing I’ve got to know,” I said, “isn’t there?”

“I could think of several.”

“Just one. I don’t care about the rest.” I looked around at the bare trees, the coloured magazines, the goldfish hanging from the surface in the bowls, while I tried to think how to put it, so that he couldn’t fox me. He wouldn’t lie, because if he lied this time if would amount, in sensitive and subtle ways, to attempted murder. “If I don’t take this thing on, are they still going to fire me?”

He didn’t hesitate because he knew I’d have to ask,

“Yes.”

“With no other chance?”

“With no other chance.”

I turned away from him and we walked on through the shadows of the bare boughs.

“All right,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll find a phone.”

Something small was moving along a crack in the paving stones and Ferris took a step towards it and I caught his arm and said through my teeth, “Leave that one, for God’s sake. Just that one.”

Then the whole thing fell out of the sky and I shut down and checked the trim and noted the emergency jettison switch on the left of centre before she began yawing badly across the runway with the tail coming up and the wheels bouncing and taking her in a series of wild leaps that forced my shoulders into the harness, leaping again so I throttled up a degree but it looked like no bloody go.

The tower was trying to tell me something but it was just a lot of squawk and I didn’t take any notice. When I pulled the canopy control the thing slid back with a bang and I glimpsed a blob of yellow to my left, then another, the emergency vehicles coming up to run parallel as the ground speed came down to ninety, eighty, seventy while she gave another leap and the tail came up so high that I hit the throttle harder than necessary and waited for the kick in the back, but the power was gone and that was that: I’d got some brakes and steering but one of the tyres must have burst because she was dipping badly to one side and trying to start a ground spin and I got Worried because if she started doing that at sixty knots I’d be sitting in a centrifuge.

Stink of burnt rubber and kerosene and my own sweat as she went dipping again, dragging, freeing and dragging as I tapped the brakes at short intervals to see what would happen. They had the sirens going outside now and the two yellow blobs came back into the picture as they began closing in. The speed was still dropping and she had all three wheels on the deck but we were still doing forty knots when the burst tyre came off and she dug in and began spinning to the left in a series of sickening swings that blacked me out as the blood piled to one side of my head: there was a rhythmic screeching as the undercarriage took the strain and the bare wheel went gouging across the runway, and at some time or other I saw the two yellow blobs grow very big as we took a swing towards them. Blacked out again.

Sirens dying away.

A face looking down.

“You all right?”

“Shit,” I said.

They helped me out. Nearly fell over.

“You had some wind shear,” Gilmore told me. We started walking over to the buildings.

“You’re a bloody liar.”

“They were trying to tell you.” He linked his arm in mine and I shook it off. “Didn’t you hear them?”

“I suppose so. I was busy, that’s all.”

“You guys wanna hop on?” someone called out. A jeep was alongside us, still rocking on its springs.

“I’ll walk,” I told Gilmore.

“We’re okay!” he called back and they shot off, leaving a lot of dust.

“It could’ve been a lot worse,” Gilmore said cheerfully.

“Oh, could it? I don’t know how anyone ever manages to drive those bloody things.”

“They’re not easy, are they? But that could have happened to anyone at all you know what wind shear means, as well as I do.” He stopped suddenly and pulled me round. “Before we get in there and start putting it all down on paper you ought to bear it in mind that I’m your instructor, and as far as you’re concerned that means Almighty God. I’m going to report wind shear as the cause of that accident and if you’ve got any other ideas I’d like to hear them now, not later.”

“You’re running this show,” I said and walked on again, making him catch up. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the controls, I don’t mind telling them that.”

“That’s all I need.”

“Not really. A pilot might help.”

“Jesus,” he said with a forced laugh, very annoyed, ‘you’ve been flying these kites for just three weeks! You think you can bring them down on a dinner plate?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” he said, ‘you’re one of those.”

Later I went out and watched them haul the plane clear of the runway and start taking the wings off. There wasn’t a lot of damage but they were going to have to replace the undercarriage and make stress tests, alignment checks, so forth.

“Squadron-Leader Nesbitt?”

He looked down at me: I was sitting on the grass at the edge of the runway with my back to a numbered sign.

“Yes?”

“Joe says you have a ride into town tonight. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Joe was the Officer Commanding the USAF Base at Zaragoza. A ride into town meant a flight into Barcelona, a hundred and sixty miles east of here. One of the little things I’d learned since Ferris had sent me here was that Barcelona had not been the first available flight out of London. They could have put me on board a plane for Berlin or Paris or Rome about the same time or even earlier: there was a forty-five minute wait for the Iberian 149 and they’d shut me in the loo with a sack over my head because someone said the Yard had come out with an Identikit picture as a result of their interviews with the train passengers and it might look a lot like me.

But Berlin or Paris or Rome weren’t within a hundred and sixty miles of the USAF Base at Zaragoza, and Barcelona was. And there was another thing I’d learned since I’d got here: the RAF unit attached to the air base by courtesy of the American forces comprised only fifteen men, and their sole concern was with getting one pilot refresher-trained in advanced fighter handling. They might have got here before I was shot out to Barcelona I wasn’t sure, because whenever I started asking questions they pulled the zip but the pilot they’d sent out here to train was me, and no one else. Ferris had talked about ‘peculiar qualifications’ and I was the only shadow executive in London between missions and with an updated degree of experience in military jet operation: I was only three months out of the routine simulator course at Norfolk.