Sometimes their shadows drifted near me as they crossed the sun.

At the four hundred and eighty-fifth pace I stopped.

Long. 8°3′ by Lat. 30°4′.

The sands were smooth.

Loman hadn't received confirmation from No. 2 Fighter Reconnaissance before I'd left camp: I'd told him I wanted a last chance to find Tango Victor before the helicopters got here. But I knew now that I should have waited, because give or take a few yards I was standing where the smudge had been on the photograph. Somewhere they'd made an error: the scale had lost a nought or the bearing had been inverted and this wasn't where the smudge was at all.

The wreck of Tango Victor was across the dunes there, or a thousand yards the other side of the rocks, not far away, ten minutes on foot in normal conditions. Here the conditions weren't normal and it could take me an hour or five hours to find it because the dunes were higher than I was and in some places I couldn't see more than a hundred yards: I was moving through a maze.

A bird's-eye view was the only way and five squadrons had been mustered and refuelled at the nearest airfield to these rocks: Fort Thiriet was a hundred and thirty kilometres distant and the helicopters had been deployed in a sweep formation of sixty aircraft on a twenty-five kilometre front to the immediate north of the Areg Tinrhales and they were heading this way while I stood and cursed some stupid bloody clerk in uniform who'd finished the mission for us before it began.

The pressure was finally on and there was nothing I could do about it. There was data streaming in so fast that I couldn't deal with it: the overall picture they never like giving us was coming up under the hypo. The Chirac security leak had been bad luck and not his fault but it had revealed the importance of the objective in the eyes of the opposition: all they'd been informed was that a camouflaged sailplane had been observed over the open desert at dawn today, but an entire arm of the Algerian Air Force had been assembled across the country and deployed from FortThiriet, an airfield right onthe Libyan border.

There'd been no time to put out even a token announcement of a “routine exercise” and this fact alone meant either that Libyan Intelligence was fully aware of the situation or that the Algerian government was so anxious to locate Tango Victor that it had risked embarrassment at high level between the two countries.

In addition to this was the indication that it was their last throw and that they were confident of locating the objective before anyone else: because if they failed, and if an opposing network succeeded, they would have made it obvious that their search had been for the crashed freighter, whose cargo was so politically explosive that the armed forces of two countries had been called in to assist the intelligence services.

The Bureau itself was intensely active and within a matter of days had brought its support communications to the pitch where half an hour ago Local Control could give me full details on the desert-reconnaissance operation including the precise area and width of sweep.At the same time the entire network was under general monitoring and if Analysis Section thought I'd be interested to know that an attempt had been made to assassinate General Chen Piao or that a missile-to-missile device had just come off the drawing-boards in Smolensk or that the Brazilian Minister for the Interior had handed in his resignation three weeks after accepting the post they'd pass it to Control for Local Control and the executive in the field and I'd get it almost as fast as a phone-call from London to Crowborough onthe priority line.

I wouldn't get it in so many words. The original data would go through filters until the essence was extracted and made available. Even if support communications hadn't been energized then general monitoring would have reported sudden air movement in Algeria by desert-reconnaissance units and Analysis would have jumped onit straight away because they had Algeria as thelocale of one of the listed ops currently running.

Behind me, as I stood here isolated in the desert wastes, was an organization striving to inform, direct and support me as I went deeper into the mission and closer to the target area; but now that I was here there was nothing they could do for me, and nothing I could do for them.

Loman had predicted a forty-five minute deadline for the arrival of the Algerian squadrons in this area and there were fifteen minutes to go in terms of their ETA. In terms of the actual mission my time ran out to zero as I stood here listening for their rotors, because even if I climbed the nearest dune and saw Tango Victor deadin front of me it was no go. London wanted photographs and a full radioed report of the freighter's cargo and fifteen minutes wasn't long enough for me to go back for the transceiver and bring it here.

The sands were quiet.

My shadow' lay prone, a spirit felled by the heat.

Something in my mind was trying to attract my attention and I was aware of it but unable to read its significance: it was like a sound heard but not identified. I let all thought subside, leaving the way open, while my body and its senses remained where they were as my mind ranged, released, finding images for me: the low wind and the pattering of the sand on the side of the box, the folds of the parachute half-covered, and the unexpected word in my head- beware — without either reason or coherence.

Drawn blank.

I turned back towards the rock outcrop and the sand hissed faintly across my boots. Halfway there I stopped and drank the rest of the water and left the cap of the flask dangling on its lanyard. Then the sky became gradually filled with infinitesimal vibrations, so faint that I thought the sound was only in my head, but as it strengthened I began moving faster and when I was certain what it was I broke into a clumsy run through the sand's obstructive softness, worried now that I'd left it too late to reach shelter before they came.

There seemed to be no particular direction to the sound: it was a steady thrumming under the sky as if the air itself had started to vibrate, to shake with some kind of cosmic disturbance. The vultures had broken their circling flight and were drifting southwards, driven away by the noise. It was loudening quickly now and for a moment I didn't see the helicopters because I'd been looking for them too high. They were detaching themselves from the skyline and growing bigger and I went into the niche I'd made for myself among the stowed 'chute canopies and lay flat with my legs drawn up, and waited.

Once they'd seen the freighter and landed near it I wouldn't be so exposed, but while they were still airborne they'd be checking this outcrop and for the moment I wanted to remain unseen. I didn't know what kind of orders Loman would give me when our mission ended a few minutes from now: it was just possible he'd ask me to observe the activities of the opposition at the site of their objective in case there was anything we could usefully tell London.

He would probably leave it to me, when the time came, to decide whether I should expose my presence and hope to live as long as the first implemented interrogation or crawl from here to the open desert and cut a vein. All London would require was that the opposition shouldn't learn anything from me and that was easy enough to arrange.

The noise was very loud now and the rocks were trapping the echoes. I pulled my legsup a bit more and managed to crawl another inch into the narrowing gap. Something was in here with me but I didn't know what: something alive and I suppose sheltering as I was from the throbbing sky outside. Telepathy at its lowest level is emotional and I was aware of fear, not my own but another creature's. There wasn't anything more for me to fear because neither I nor the mission were any longer under attack.