Chrome of the aerial shining, the low wind moving its tip.

3 MHz.

Channel 2.

Mike.

Tango.

It sounded strange, a human voice in so desolate a place.

Tango. Tango.

The same stars, these same stars, would be there above the gilded cupolas where the rats ran among the rotting palms. The town would be asleep.

Eyes closing and I opened them again quickly and took a breath, steadying. Fifty-six hours ago I'd got off the plane from Tokyo and the metabolic clock was still trying to get the time right, a feeling of not quite being here, of not being anywhere, just afloat on some kind of tide.

Tango. Tango.

A domed ceiling and a cracked mosaic floor, three faded Arabesque screens and the shabby appurtenances of a fifth-class hotel.

The other end of the lifeline.

What frequencies would you use in this area?

7 MHz for daytime propagation conditions, 3 MHz at night.

Tango. Tango.

The sand blown by the wind, its fine grains hitting the side of the polyester box with a dry whispering, the only answer.

Already in the past hour the sand had almost covered the spread of nylon: in the starlight I could just make out the few dark folds that remained. Soon it would cover the harness, then the box, and then if I went an sitting here like this, like a man in prayer, it would cover me as well, a desiccated mendicant forgotten by his gods as he intoned for their deaf ears the mystic word, until he was buried, grain upon grain, beneath his sins.

Tango. Tango.

One of them would be there. Loman might have had to leave base to contact Chirac or use a phone if the wire had come adrift again on the junction-board or he could have gone down there to the hall to fix it but in that case Diane would be manning the transceiver, and would answer.

The wind gusted, scattering the sand.

A faint gleam on the aerial and the chrome rims of the dials. It was a good-looking set: a matt-black case with a neutral grille and the controls tapered and finely-knurled, the on-off switch recessed so that a chance movement wouldn't activate it. The illuminated dials were dark.

No adequate excuses. Flight-disorientation, the blast-wave, the general wear-and-tear of getting here alive. Not really adequate.

I put the switch to the “on” position and checked the frequency again at 3 MHz.

Tango.

Tango. Base receiving.

A good signal, loud and clear.

I'm down.

Are you in the target area?

I don't know.

He waited and I didn't say anything so he came in again.

Do you have any problem?

Not really.

He waited again.

I wasn't being very communicative. You're supposed to volunteer a bit of information, not leave your director to tease it out of you. Thing was, I wanted to go to sleep now.

Was the drop made successfully as concerns bearings?

Oh yes.Put the little bastard out of his misery or he'll keep you talking all bloody night.On Chirac's reckoning I'm somewhere near the target, but it's too dark here to see anything. There aren't any rocks on the skyline. Going to take a dekko in the morning.

Silence again.

Are you perfectly fit?

What?

Are you in a fit physical condition?

Of course I am.

Bloody sauce. Resented that. I told him:

Listen: there's a telescopic rifle in Kaifra. Christ sake watch out for it. And the Mercedes is a write-off.

He was thinking about this.

We heard some shots.

Kaifra was a small-oasis town and you'd hear the stuff coming out of.44 Magnum wherever you were.

They were the ones.

You are not wounded?

No. Another thing is that I think there's more than one network trying to penetrate our operation. Been working a few things out and there's one or two inconsistencies.

He considered this.

You're talking about their apparent indecisiveness during the pre-jump phase?

Their inconsistency.

Yes. This has already been the subject of signals with Control but we're glad to have you confirm.

A pat on the head for a good little ferret, dear Lord you banish me unto the wilderness and the only company you can find for me is Loman's.

One star, the bright star that had guided me here, was going on and off at intervals and I took note of it.

When will you start looking for the objective?

At dawn.

Not before?

Rather quick.

It's too dark. Instructions?

On, off. On, off.

It wasn't the star doing it. I was doing it myself. The star was lying exactly on the horizon and my head kept going down, fatigue, reaction setting in, so the star looked as if it were goingon and off.

Silence. He was sulking.

No instructions.

Tango out.

Quick fade of the image: the dome and the arabesque screens.

Mike back into the recessed clip and the switch down and next time don't forget to turn the bloody thing on when you want to call up base, save a lot of worry, I thought they'd had it, both of them, thought we'd all had it.

'Loman could do the worrying now. He'd got his executive into the field but the bearings were all to hell and we'd got to cool our heels for another three hours before we could get moving again and in three hours the opposition could make up a lot of ground. There'd been no security blackout for the take-off from the South 4 strip: London could have sent in a unit of screened ground-staff with a pre-arranged access to facilities but even then there would have been people at South 4 who knew that a glider had gone up, and short of requesting Petrocombine's co-operation in treating the event as a para-military secret it would have been impossible to keepthe thing hush. The opposition cells would be routinely combing the area for items of intelligence and if they picked up the news that a glider had been towed airborne they'd want to know where it had landed and if they drew blank at all the local airstrips they'd assume there'd been a desert drop and they'd send for a direction-finding unit, fully urgent, because radio would be the only means of communication between the field and base.

Once the opposition set up a D/Fing operation in a town as small as Kaifra I'd give our base twenty-four hours before it was blown.

There was a sleeping-bag in the container and I unrolled it and threw it down but it was no go: I'd have to make an effort, some kind of effort, to find out if I'd come down anywhere near the target. This before I could sleep.

Even if there were only a thin chance of locating the freighter's wreckage before first light it was worth having a go because in the night's cool the sweat-loss and water-intake would be less than a tenth of the quantities produced by the day's heat.

There was another thing: psychologically I'd been homing-in on the target since they'd shown me the picture of it in London. The smudge on the photograph had become the subject of intellectual attraction and I felt its influence on me now, stronger than before because it was closer.

It was impossible to judge how far I stood from the nearest dune: I could only see it in two dimensions, its dark spine humped against the stars and breaking the distant skyline. It was less than a thousand yards away but the desert is like the ocean: the chance of death by isolation is immeasurably greater, and values become changed. Go a thousand yards in the dark and you may never come back.

There was a torch among the supplies, with some spare batteries, but I wouldn't use light for a marker: you learn to conserve, to know the sudden pricelessness of ordinary things. There was a tin mug and I put it upside down on the tip of the aerial and waited for the wind to send it ringing; then I walked to the dune and climbed it.