He was in the navigator's seat, the tall one. They were both cheerful enough but we all knew it was going to be a real swine and some of the jokes had got a bit thin since we'd taken off.

I watched the glow of the village and the white dome of a mosque reflecting the starlight as we came round in the turn.

I suppose we needn't have taken the trouble to head for Malta before we got off their screens but the Ahmed cell was badly up against it and they might decide to go into the control tower and ask questions at gun-point.

Loman was still sulking. He'd been thinking everything was all right because when I dropped her I told her I was going to the airport to keep the rendezvous and pick up the device and now he knew everything was all wrong because I ought not to be somewhere over Rharbi at ten thousand feet and he was having to face an entirely new pattern of hazards at zero notice. Well, that was what he was for.

'Feeling the cold?'

'We're not going to be stuck up here forever. '

'Frankly I wish we were.'

He laughed but we didn't join in. They'd jibbed at first but I said they'd got to try so they'd worked things out and the pilot had said all right we'll have a go but this dolly weighs sixty-three thousand pounds with the amount of fuel she'll have on board at our ETA and if we can't pull up she'll drag half the strip into the desert, so long as those oil-drilling chaps don't mind.

It occurred to me that base might have gone off the air.

Hear me?

Hear you.

Is Fred all right?

Perfectly.

Reprimand in his tone and he could bloody well keep it. Fred was the standard speech-code name for any third member of an active cell and I wanted to know how she was because the last time I'd seen her there'd been tears running down her sooty little face and if anyone of us survived this trip I'd see those scaly bastards wrote her off the books before they did anything else.

My eyes kept shutting and the navigator said something and I missed it and got my head up again.

'What?'

'Isthere any chance of a flarepath on that strip?'

'No. They don't night-fly.'

'I see.' He said it rather stiffly.

'You've got landing-lights, haven't you?'

'Fortunately, yes.'

He didn't like me any more than Loman did but I couldn't help that. I think he was trying to find an excuse to call up the Air Ministry through Malta and get official permission for the captain to hazard his ship but he couldn't do it in front of me because it'd be embarrassing: they'd been ordered to make this rdv with an over-ranking contact and that meant that whether they were pilot officers or air-vicemarshals they still had to do what I told them, otherwise they'd have turned me down flat about the South 6 thing and I knew that.

Quaker.

Hear you.

Friday Croydon indigo.

Roger.

I gave them back the headset.

Friday was rdv so he'd meet me at South 6 and presumably I wouldn't have to lug these rotten things as far as base and that was something.

Then I suppose I just went to sleep because there wasn't anything else I had to do. She was rolling about in the flames and I was trying to pull her clear and he was saying we'll be down in three minutes so you'd better get into this thing.

'What thing?'

He was rigging some fabric stays across the freight-locker section and I gave him a hand because even if we didn't hit anything we were going to turn on an awful lot of deceleration on a strip that short and I didn't want to go through the front window.

'Have you got room to turn round?'

'Just about.'

'Okay, then turn round and squat down with your back to it.'

The pilot moved the flaps and we began running through eiderdowns and they were both rather young considering their responsibilities so I said:

'I'm sorryabout this.'

'Oh that's okay. It's just that these dollies are so terribly expensive and we're always being told about the tax-payers money.'

The noise waspretty hellish because of the surface and the reversed thrust and I thought the nose-leg must have folded back on impact but the angle was still roughly horizontal. Then the brakes came on and I was pressed backwards into the fabric sling like a pea in a catapult and one of them was shouting to the other one, something aboutdistance but I couldn't hear the rest of it. A lot of low-pitch vibration coming in as the air-frame took the strain, smellof hot rubber, be awkward if we hit a bad patch and the lockers burst open, not that anything could go off but we'd been to a lot of trouble getting it here, vibration starting to hammer and someone yellingwon't make it and I thought oh Christ can't we ever get anything right, the front leg taking the brunt of the shocks and everything trying to shake loose in the flight compartment, of course they'd known it would be like this and that's why they'd looked at me as if I was barmy when I told them we'd got to do it.

Hit my shoulder when they dropped me through and a hand caught at me and then there was a dreadful quietness and there was Loman sitting sideways on the front seat with his arm hooked across the squab and his pale eyes watching me and I said we got down all right did we?

'Yes.'

He didn't look very pleased.

I absorbed the environment: Chrysler. I was on the back seat with a rug over me.

Zenith: 00.56. The ETA had been 00.41. I don'tlikegaps in the timing.

'What happened?'

'In what precise way?'

Talked like a schoolmistress. He was very rattled.

'To the aircraft.'

'They wrote off the undercarriage.'

'Isthat all?'

'It's quite sufficient.'

There was an engine starting up somewhere but I couldn't see anything. We were parked alongside the hangar and the echo was coming back, sounded like a chopper. I listened to it and Loman didn't talk: he'd stopped looking at me now and sat watching the road that ran from the main gates of the camp to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock drooped against the starfields.

'Is it for me?'

'What?'

'That chopper'

'Yes.' He sounded edgy, even for Loman.

I suppose the waiting was getting on his nerves. The Ahmed cell had seen the Marauder go up and it wouldn't be long before they heard it had come down all over the South 6 strip instead of Malta and they'd get here as fast as they could. Loman knew they were on to it because if there'd been no one getting in my way at Kaifra Airport I would have left there by road.

The helicopter was being warmed up, a comfortablethropthrop-throp from its rotor, aurally hypnotic, my head going down, then she said London wanted to know the position, her voice about normal. not still upset or anything.

Loman said he'd send it direct.

Situ Croydon indigo point skygo redmins point Q-Quaker able light-time standby ending point object present go conditters point Tango out…

I thought he was being a bit optimistic but I suppose he was worried about getting a blast if he sounded too doubtful: they were already having to absorb the Marauder switch into their thinking and it didn't take much to send them hysterical. The whole of this area was on the plotting table at the Bureau and they'd just received a situation signal and in spite of Loman's optimism they knew we were in a distinct red sector because the Marauder had made a lot of noise coming down and every opposition cell would have been alerted: they'd got me out of the plane before anyone had come along to see what had made the crump but quite a gang of day-shift drillers had gone down the airstrip from the living-quarters and the crew were still there explaining about engine trouble and forced landing conditions and all that cock and it wouldn't be long before every camel-driver in Kaifra knew that a foreign military aircraft had gone into South 6 by night.