Two shots to allow for panorama montage.

Thank you.

There are about twenty more cylinders, same size, and the impact broke some of them away from their anchorage. It looks as if they were all stowed vertically between buffers of foam plastic. The nozzles have got protective caps. Three shots, close-up.

Blinding light and I waited, shutting my eyes and switching off the torch. First theories at random: the crew had known what theywere transporting on this trip and they knew it was lethal and perhaps explosive in terms of chemical expansion or in terms of gas compression sensitive to release. Possible risk of fire or gross reactive burning without flame, nitric acid, so forth. But I wouldn't have thought this kind of hazard would have induced actual terror in reasonable men.

Slid the switch, the beam less yellow now.

There were four racks, two on each side, padded with shock-resistant material and fitted with straps and clamps. For some reason the cylinders couldn't be shipped horizontally or in crates and their stowage precautions had been quite good to have left some of them still in place after the high deceleration loads of the forced landing. Five oblong crates filled the space between the racks, hard against the rear bulkhead, and they had been protected with a matt black liquid material with rapid hardening qualities: Bostik or a thermal sealing product. Two domed canisters were stowed one each side of the compartment with restraint bands and protective jacketing. A red label was common to every crate, cylinder and canister, with the wordsFlashpoint Zero: the Lloyds designation for dangerous cargo.

I gave Loman a general picture and began on the individual labels, starting with the containers that were easy to reach without clambering across the disorder.

Cylinder. Matt grey, three parallel red bands, metal tabs reading: PH/18179/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder same markings, tab reading PH/18180/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder painted matt green with four yellow bands. Tab: ZRG/635/2 — Cat. XII.

There were thirteen in one group, three in another, with markings that tied with one of the domed canisters. The crates contained identical material, all tabs the same.

His voice came faintly from outside.

Have you a problem?

What?

Have you a problem?

He meant was everything all right and I got annoyed because I'd only taken half a minute's respite: the heat was coming mainly from overhead and sweating was profuse. The need for concentrating on the labels was inducing nausea, the beam of the torch wavering, sensation of extreme fatigue.

No problem.

I'd been in this bloody oven for twenty minutes and I didn't want him to poke me to see if I was done.

Matt blue, two white bands. Tab says:.OTJ/487/A — Cat. V.

And somewhere in the background the failure to understand the urgency,he wished to inform me personally that your mission is the key to a critical situation of the highest international proportions, a top echelon director sent in with his signature on a 6-K form and the death-pill in his pocket, a shut-ended crash-priority mission with the final phase now running, and nothing going on to the tape except these hieroglyphs. Cylinders of BCW gas or something newer than that, something more lethal, but surely it didn't matter any more how destructive a weapon was or what it was made of within a given hour today or tomorrow the cities of New York and Moscow and Peking could effortlessly be laid waste and the present concern at the conference tables was how to dismantle, piece by piece, the structure of the kill and overkill. I didn't understand why I was here.

Matt red with black bands. Tab: YCJ/2829/E. There's no reference to any category on this one.

They wanted my report on the cargo of Tango Victor and they were getting it and it wasn't my concern to ask why. I was a ferret and this was the rabbit and my teeth were in its neck.

GF/A-9/Cat. XII. A point is that 'Cat.' might stand for 'catalyst', not for 'category'.

Noted.

I began work on the cylinders that had broken out of their clamps and were lying askew on the cabin floor. The nearest of them had smashed its protective cap and the brass nozzle had been snapped off at the neck, and this I reported to Loman. The metal tab was edge-on and I had to kneel between two of the other cylinders to read it. The torch beam centred on it and I struck out blindly to force the thing away but it screamed and I hit a shoulder and crashed across the loose sand with the blaze of the sun bursting over me as the wind came howling and threw me whirling over the roaring dunes and I spun dying, drifting and spinning, falling.

The world burning and the whirl of dunes rising as high as mountains round the dizzying horizon, dwarfing me and dominating, looming over me in darkness while the giant birds came screaming as they gathered for the carrion, red of eyeand enraged and swooping on me, scream of the mad Arab in my skull repeating, repeating,mountains in the sky, and great birds darkening the heavens, their long necks stretching and reaching and the first strike of a beak and my hands too feeble, the terror trickling in the blood as the sun burst and I fell again and lay sand-drowned.

Sharp pain finger, hit again, hideous, the beak hooked, hooking and a talon tugging, horror and their red eyes raging and the foul wind of their wings beating at the air and the sand flying up, pain again and tugging and my living hand for carrionthey will not and quicker and snatching at a wing with cunning, pulling and the gross black body closer, Irefuse and my fingers stronger, pulling again and now the talons hooking in a frenzy and my red blood running but a killing to be made, the bald head turning on the gristly neck, my hands closing and twisting on the last thin scream from the beak and the others fainter now, their cackling farther away, my legs buckling but up again and I stood with it, a dead weight dangling from the broken neck and I swung it, turning, swinging the heavy scarecrow body in a circle till the dead wings caught the air and flapped open and I let it go, you red-eyed bastards, show you, fall and breath knocked out and lying numbed, the sand bloodied and the night coming waves soundlessly breaking drowning.

Lightheadedness: the mind hollow as a shell but the few thoughts lucid and of an extreme simplicity, diamond-bright and surrealistic, a return to pre-maturity, A is for Apple, This Little Boy has Killed a Bird.

Ague, the limbs jerking, I would like to be somewhere warm, I am so cold here, S is for Snow but this is Sand. The big birds had attacked me and tried to eat me but I won.

The sand reddish, the spots becoming brown in the sun, one finger a curious shape and the white of bone shining, peck-peck yes I remember.

Remember all right, the memory functioning satisfactorily, somewhere the forebrain trying to seize on facts, desperate to know and to act but blocked, frustrating.

Tango.

They were circling, as theyhad been before. I thought I heard them making sounds like chickens, but the brain was so busy that it wouldn't let me listen properly to anything. It wanted to know the facts. Obviously psychochemicals but not related to mescaline or lysergic acid, not Sarin or the Soman-Tabun group although there was this jerking of the muscles but no paralysis yet. Vision unimpaired, on the contrary, the vultures had the exaggerated 3-D effect you see in stereoscopes, the outline of their moving wings very sharp against the sky.

Acetylcholinesterase, the memory super-clear like the vision, the GF, GE and VX group destroying this substance and thus blocking the nerve signals to prevent resetting, my legs jerking worse than my arms, nothing definite.