Four.

Airstream variable and therefore unpleasant because windspeed variation could make a mess of what I was doing on the Sony and I could come down anywhere.

'Now, please?'

'Seventy-six.'

He wanted to count up for distance and I wanted to count down for time which was a bit more logical but he'd stuck his heels in about it and said he didn't feel comfortable 'working backwards' so I let it go.

Three.

'Ninety-one point eight-five.' He watched the instruments.

'Repeat the briefing, please.'

His voice had gone dull suddenly.

'Free the belt. Slide back the hood. Wait for the order. Jump and look out for the leading edge.'

'Very well.'

Didn't really seem necessary but he'd dropped people before and he knew his onions: at the last minute when you're thinking about the imminent free fall you can cock the whole thing up by getting your feet caught in the belt or bashing your head on the hood you forget to open, do it by numbers and it's foolproof.

'Where shall I put this thing?'

'Leave it on the seat.'

Dull, toneless, because she was pretty and one was five, the other seven.

01.48.

'Ninety-three point six-five kilometres.'

'Bien.'

Two minutes.

I didn't have anyone,nothing of value, no next of kin, but that kind of comfort's really an intellectual pursuit because we've all got a skin and that's what the organism says we've got to save, yelling its bloody head off, couldn't care less about the insurance.

'Ninety-five point six-seven.'

'Okay.'

One minute.

The night seemed vast.

The stars gave a sense of orientation but only in one plane and all they did was show which way was down and that was where I was going, down through the dark to the endless night-lying waves of sand, of silence.

The 8 looks so like a 9 and they're side by side. Slipshod maintenance, dead flies in the pitot-head. A change in the wind.

Ignore.

'Ninety-six point two.'

'Very well.'

Twenty-eight seconds.

The old feeling that we were arriving somewhere. Difficult, here where the night was as vast as it had been before and the dark as featureless, to understand that our journey together was over. No control tower or platform or jetty or gates, nothing to mark a junction or a terminal, only the dark and the delicate pointer going its rounds.

Tick-tick-tick.

'Ninety-six point five.'

'So. Be ready then.'

He brought the column back just a little.

Level flight.

Ten seconds.

We had agreed that at this point I would stop computing. Ten seconds represented a quarter of a kilometre and that much distance could be critical if I dropped wide but if I went on computing to zero as a refinement it wouldn't allow for the time I needed for getting out.

Tick-tick-tick.

French keen on shaking hands, frustrating for him, control-column too sensitive, no go the niceties. I hit the belt clip.

Tick-tick.

Hood back and a blast of air roaring.

Leave the Sony on the seat.

Altitude 75 metres.

Tick.

Good luck Chirac.

Adieu!

Free fall.

One, two, three.

Blood in the head and the stars swinging below me

Less horizontal buffeting, more vertical.

Four, five, six.

Free fall velocity rising very fast.

Air less cold.

Seven, eight, nine.

Pull it.

Crack of the pilot 'chute.

Then the jerk and the drag and oh Christ -

Blackout.

Swinging gently.

Couldn't quite relate anything yet.

Nearly did it again and thought I'm not going to and the pain didn't stop but at least I stayed conscious. It had been the shoulders, that was all, the bruising on the pavement in Tunis and then the ricochet of the.44 tonight and then the awful wrenching from the harness because I'd been more or less upside down when the main canopy had filled and the fall velocity had been braked from more than a hundred kph to less than fifteen and the pain had overcharged the nerve channels and that was that.

Still very uncomfortable, feeling of being on fire, inability to concentrate on other things but the forebrain functioning well enough to alert the organism and I began looking downwards so that I'd see the sand coming up and have a chance of relaxing the muscles because if I hit it the wrong way I'd pass out again and I had a lot to do.

No particular visual definition yet: a certain lightness below, with darker areas, but could be illusory.

I could make out the figures on the dial of my watch without needing the phosphorescence, not much point in wanting to know the time but it helped me to feel I was getting back into some kind of control over things. Time was important: ask London.

There was something I ought to be checking on but it didn't matter for the moment, couldn't be expected to look after everything when there was this Godawful sensation across my shoulders. Be easier when the harness was off. Swinging gently, the rhythm soothing, the night air soft against my face.

It does matter.

Bloody well wake up and have a look, can't see it, don't panic, use your suspension lines, pivot full circle, none too easy, monkey on a string, now keep looking because it's very important indeed.

Couldn't see the bloody thing anywhere.

Rest. Relax. Watch the ground.

The whisper of wind in the shrouds.

He couldn't have forgotten to pull the release. You think of such extraordinary things when your life's on the teeter, of course he'd pulled it, he was an experienced flyer and he'd dropped people before. But he'd had to give me five seconds to get clear so that the 'chutes wouldn't find each other and I couldn't see it because it would be above me and the canopy was in the way, thirty feet across and right over my head, what the hell would you expect.

A lot of pain, it wouldn't go.

Then bloody well shut up about it.

Nothing below with any definition: it just didn't look like empty sky, that was all, the desert was there all right.

If I hadn't punched an 8 instead of a 9 and if some slipshod instrument-basher hadn't left enough dead flies in the pitot-head to affect the airspeed reading and if the wind hadn't changed I was now floating above the only point on the surface of the earth describable as Long. 8°3′ by Lat. 30°4′ and it was less than forty-eight hours since they'd put on the show for me.

Run it back, will you?

Stop.

Back another fraction.

Stop.

Yes, that's the one. I've got it now.

An ash-grey smudge on the photograph.

Tango Victor.

Somewhere below me now but very difficult to believe because Loman had said flexible and Chirac had said fifty-fifty and that meant the margin of error was horribly wide and although the wreck of the twin-prop short-haul freighter was certainly within a few kilometres of the point where I was due to come down I might never reach it, never see it, because this was the desert.

Look, they don't do this to you without thinking about it first: even those arthritic old tarts in London aren't as bad as that. When they send a ferret down the hole they don't tell him much but they've done it with me so often that I've managed to pickup the odd clue about the way they think. It wasn't lack of planning in the advanced pre-briefing phases that had left us with a critical margin of error at the access point, and it wasn't indifference to the question of my survival or otherwise that had let them send me out here where the chance of life was small. They just had to do what they could.

This was thebest they could do, not the worst. This wasall they could do, instead of nothing.