They'd know, as soon as he told them, that I was now within minutes of going into the freighter and if they could signal me direct there wouldn't be any problem: out here in isolation there was no risk of anyone raiding me and since I was on the point of moving into hazard they'd be prepared to warn me on the type of difficulties I'd be faced with. But theycouldn't do it.

They'd have to advise me through Crowborough, Tunis and Kaifra, exposing the signal to switchboard staff, cipher clerks and people in the same room with them. They could throw out a preliminary signal carrying a selected code structure and then follow up with the encoded material for me to break up but it still wouldn't be safe because the clerks in the Embassy cipher room could read it for themselves.

Bloody nuisance but there it was.

They were cackling again and my scalp got up. Bad sign, bag of nerves just when there was something important to do.

All right, Loman. Tell London they can go and stuff themselves. I'm going in.

Quite a long pause.

Very well. Please take all precautions.

How the hell can I when I don't know what's in there?

Not at all good, nasty show of nerves. Couldn't look away from the hole in the dune, getting obsessive, best thing would be to finish the job quickly.

Loman, what stage are you going to start running the tape?

As soon as you enter the aircraft.

They gave you an auto-destruct?

Of course.

They'd had to. They're not entirely witless in London they'd narrowed the risk down to a matter of minutes. They couldn't signal me any advice because nobody had to know about this cargo, not even Loman, but in a few minutes from now I'd be telling him and in precise detail and they'd covered the situation in the only way they could: the moment my report was finished he'd be putting the tape into an auto-destruct container and once he'd shut it and set the fuse the risk would be over because if anyone else tried to open it they'd just blow it up.

The precisely-detailed information on Tango Victor's cargo would remain only in Loman's head, and until now I hadn't realized that in one respect this was a shut-ended mission for him too. For her own sake he'd send Diane out of the room when I started reporting: she couldn't reveal what she didn't know, and most trained interrogators can tell whether you're lying or not when you say you've no information for them. But Loman would remain at risk and if the opposition located the base and raided it and went to work on him the auto-destruct thing wouldn't be a lot of use.

So this was a 6-K mission.

Not many of them are. It's mostly left to the discretion of the director and executive in the field because they're placed better than anyone else to decide what ought to be done, but sometimes an operation comes up where the area's so sensitive that they like you to sign one of their buff-coloured forms before they brief you. Of course you can refuse, just as you can refuse any specific mission for any of a dozen reasons, but once you've agreed to sign Form 6-K you're issued with a set of capsules and it's up to you to make sure they're dispersed among your gear so that if you've put one in your flight-bag and you leave the thing on a bus you've still got a spare in your pocket.

They can't force you to do what you've signed for: it's just that your professional pride has been brought into things and as far as I know they've never had anyone let them down. What gives us a giggle is that these capsules are issued to us in Firearms, it seems so bloody appropriate.

Some of us have pulled in a 9-suffix to our code name and they don't bother to make us sign anything: we've proved we can't be broken this side of unconsciousness, so we don't carry capsules on this kind of mission unless we've actually asked for some, to avoid possible unpleasantness during the operation. Not many directors have the 9 because they're far less exposed in the field than their executives and I knew Loman hadn't got one because there's a list and we know who's on it.

So he must have signed the form on this trip. There'd be no point in ordering him to put the tape in a bang-box if he was liable to get snatched and grilled. They're usually brightly-coloured with a distinctive pattern, so people don't confuse them with indigestion pills or anything.

Perhaps that was why he'd been so nervous. We all get a bit ragged towards the end-phase and this time we were having to cope with the heat as well.

The sweat was coming freely now and the pulse was about right so I told him I was ready to go.

Very well. We shall be off the air for a few minutes.

Going to signal Control, tell them we'd found the plane, three jolly cheers. I picked up the set and the camera and walked into the sun.

The first one had a thin moustache, rather well trimmed, bit of a lady's man and hardly the type who'd want to go into the album looking like this. Three shots from three angles and don't ask me why they wanted actual pictures, there was something important I was missing but there wasn't time to worry it out. The second one had either been pecked or caught his face on something sharp when he'd flung himself out of the cabin. A couple of close-ups of the dead vultures and one shot of the doorway making a hole in the dune.

A lot of dry cackling again, I suppose they were frustrated because I wouldn't let them get at the two cadavers. But their shadows were bigger and I looked up and saw they'd come quite a bit lower: their heads were turning on their long gristly necks to keep me in sight as they circled.

Then I had to wait, squatting by the transceiver and covering my neck against the sun, thinking of nothing in particular, how hot it was, what the hell did the snails eat, the way she'd looked at her fingertips.

Tango.

Hear you.

I'll be keeping open for you from now on.

All right. I'm immediately outside the freighter and I'm going to leave the set here and take the mike inside on the extension.

Understood. Will you -

Then there was a quick fade, as if he'd suddenly put a hand over the mike, and I thought the last two words had probably been spoken to Diane as he asked her to leave the radio-room before I began reporting for the tape.

Onset of chill, the hairs lifting on my forearms. The bodily changes due to the heat were being modified by the psychic unease aroused when I'd turned them over and looked at their faces.

Aircrews are practical men with a high threshold of fear and the durable brand of philosophy that is learned by living with the elements and acknowledging their infinite power. I would expect them, as the mountainside loomed through the fog or the explosion shook the airframe, to show natural and momentary fear before they concentrated on whatever action remained open to them. I would expect to find, on the faces of men who had died in a plane crash, an expression of anguish, fear, or resignation. Not of terror.

The brain is concerned with practical considerations: facts and figures, the interplay of kinetics and mechanical forces involved in high-speed collision. The psyche is more subtly concerned with abstracts ranging from ecstasy to nightmare, including terror. The raised scalp, the trickle along the spine are induced by things strange to us, or abhorrent: the silence of a slowly-winding snake, a leaping shadow, a howl in the deep of night.

I could think of nothing like this that could have struck terror in these two men before they died. But our people in London could.Photograph their faces, Loman had said.I am merely passing on instructions from London.

The birds cackled above me, wheeling lower, perhaps because I'd stopped moving. I wondered if I ought to go over and do something to protect the two bodies: Holt and his navigator wouldn't know what was happening but I didn't want to have a thing like that on my mind as well. In the end I did nothing because there wasn't anything to throw over them and even if I buried them the birds knew now that they were there.