London would be sweating because what ought to have happened was that I should have taken the device by road from the airport to base for Loman to brief me on it and what had happened was that I'd arranged for us both to be sitting here with the thing on our lap and hoping to Christ nobody found us before we got airborne. At the first sign of an adverse party in this area Loman would quietly melt into the middle distance because the director in the field is never actually meant to operate in the field but only from local base, on the double principle that he's not trained in unarmed combat and if a mission blows up there has to be someone to take home the pieces and have them analysed to the hope that one fine day someone's going to profit from the lesson.

Loman would take the device with him because it was expensive and injurious and that would leave me on my own to do what I could but I wasn't in a condition to do very much and although he'd told them that Q-Quaker was able they wouldn't think much of my chances. So London was having the sweats.

Tango.

Tango receiving.

Embassy wants a repeat on 'redmins'.

They can have it.

She went off the air.

'Is that my end of the blower you've got there?'

'No,' he said.

I believed the little bastard. He'd told Chirac to leave my transceiver in the desert when he'd picked me up because I'd need it again and there wasn't any point in dropping it a second time in an area where there were rocks that could bust it up.

'Are you sending me back there, Loman? '

'We don't know yet.'

'Oh yes you bloody well do.'

Throp-throp-throp.

01.17.

Chirac shut off and the rotor began slowing above our heads. I hadn't taken a lot of notice when I'd come aboard but I had a look around now and saw that the little necessities of life were here all right: two parachutes and the two black containers.

'What's in that thing?'

'Cous-cous, mon ami.'

'I'm not hungry.'

'You will be,' Loman said. He sat peering through the curved Perspex like a goldfish in a bowl. From what I could see of it we were ina gassi between low dunes.

'Where are we?'

'In agassi.'

'I know that.'

Chirac set the fuel taps at off. 'We are ten kilometres from Petrocombine South 5 and eleven kilometres from Kaifra.'

I tried to think where that was, but any kind of mental effort induced a kind of grey-out and I gave it up because it didn't seem to be anywhere in particular.

'Why here, Loman?'

'It's neutral ground.' He'd stopped peering through the Perspex bubble and was watching me critically. 'You have three hours in which to get some sleep, so I suggest you do that.'

He looked so depressed that I felt sorry for him, as far as you can feel sorry for a man like Loman.

'All right.' I wanted to ask him a few things because it was now 01.18.55 on the Zenith and he was going to let me sleep till 04.18.55 and that meant he'd got me lined up for a dawn drop unless Control threw us a new one during the night; but if he was in the mood to give me any answers I didn't want to have to work them out, singing in the ears, a sensation of floating, the tick-tick-tick of the chronometer near my head. 'Loman.'

'Yes?'

'Have we still got a mission running?'

All I heard as his voice went faint was something about London and I suppose he was saying depends on.

First stage, second stage and detonator.

He showed me three times: annular clamp, by-pass conduit, main body-locking with three-start threads. It was easy enough but I didn't object to the repetitions because you had to do it properly or the thing wouldn't go off.

'It's essential that no sand enters these threads.'

'Noted. How powerful is this model?'

'It has the equivalent of one hundred tons of trinitrotoluene. The Americans have used similar devices in the Sahara for blasting wells, but this one has been modified for a groundburst operation, reducing fall-out and giving a low Mach wave with a relatively small residual radiation range.'

'In figures?'

'One thousand yards. In still air with low humidity you will be safe at one mile, and should set the timer accordingly.'

So it was a mini but the soot-black finish and the castellated retaining nuts and the knowledge that it would bring down the Post Office Tower at one blow gave it a potent aspect. It was so very quiet, standing on its flat end with the three of us crouched around it.

'Pouf!'said Chirac,'hein?'

He turned away and opened the polyester picnic box and took out the Thermos ofcous-cous. There was no meat with it and we used two of the plastic bowls. Loman said he'd eaten not long before we'd made the rdv at South 6 and so had Chirac probably but you'll get a Frenchman joining you at any time and in any place and with whatever kind of menu but especially an hour before dawn in the Sahara if it'scous-cous.

I'd slept for most of the allotted period but Loman had been talking to London quite a bit and I'd partly heard some of the panic: a lot of the trouble was that the signals had had to go from here to Kaifra to Tunis to Crowborough to London and back and had involved three automatic scramblers and two codes and the normal telephone delay between Crowborough and Control, but most of the panic was over the need to liaise the Bureau's international monitoring facilities with the controller running the mission and to do it within the few hours left before dawn. The local situation here was known and the risks calculated, but additionally London was using what amounted to a scanner that would pickup any event internationally that might have a bearing on the end-phase of the Tango mission: if for example the president of the United Arab Republic happened to be assassinated at any given moment then London would get the news almost immediately through the monitoring facilities and Control might realize straight awaythat an Egyptian cell operating in Kaifra could conceivably get orders to cease all action.

I didn't think it would happen. Nor did London and that was why London was having the sweats. I wasn't long out of sleep but it didn't take a lot of brain-think to see that Loman was now driven to mounting a last desperate throw, because the Marauder thing had made it clear to. every local opposition cell that I was still very much in business and therefore the UK was still certain that Tango Victor was somewhere in this area. Chirac had made the short hop from South 6 to the gassi here without picking up a tag from any one of the airfields around Kaifra but when we took-off for the open desert we'd be running a gauntlet of ground observers and acoustic units.

Loman had said I'd need something like forty minutes after the drop to set up the device in safety and trigger it and if Chirac could fly me into the target zone and leave me with that amount of time to work in without drawing in a whole pack of opposition agents I thought he'd be bloody lucky.

'What's that glow?' asked Loman.

'The moon rising.' Chirac spooned hiscous-cous.

'Why is it diffused like that?'

'It is a sandstorm over there.'

'Will it affect your mission?'

'Pas du tout.It is two hundred miles away and moving to the west. I have been watching it and there will not be any trouble.'

Loman drew the spigots and freed the clamp and boxed the device into its separate containers. I decided not to look at my watch so frequently: it was becoming a habit and it was a sign of nerves. If we took off at the appointed time we would do it in eleven minutes from now.

'So what does London say?'

Loman didn't look at me. He doesn't like briefing you until there's precisely time enough left to give you the whole story without leaving an interval before the go, and he's perfectly right because it allows a psychological sag and you'll start mulling over the things and asking silly questions but I couldn't help that. There were things I wanted to know and he was going to tell me.