The Hanover section is the responsibility of the Federal Customs and is patrolled by the Bundesgrenzschutz and the British Frontier Service. It is a less sensitive area and reliance is placed on the barbed wire and mines. It. is not the only section where vigilance on the part of the East German Volkspolizei has become cursory: since the Frontier was fortified in 1961 more than two thousand of their own border troops have themselves crossed it from east to west.

In some places the wife has rusted and the loose boards of the watchtowers rattle in the wind; the warning signs lean from rotten posts and the patrols keep to the warmth of their huts unless a sound reaches them through the winter night. But the mines are there, sown invisibly across the thirty-metre strip of desolate land. Some people still get across. There is a match-seller who sits outside the Hauptbahnhof in the city of Hanover, legless.

South and east from Neueburg are pine forests, the haunt of wild boar, but a lot of timber has been cut and the land ploughed: in many places the horizon is low and distant across a waste of beet-fields. The wind has an edge when it blows from the north and there is not much shelter.

It was here that he led me, the man who Liked marzipan.

A notice leaned in the moonlight, propped on the barbed wire. Haiti Heir Zonengrenze. Achtung! Lebensgefahr: Wirkungsbereich Sowjetzonaler Minen. Haiti Following him I had looked back a dozen times, sighting on the ruin of the military depot and keeping in line with it so that if he turned his head I would be seen against its shape and thus perhaps not seen at all. Also I noted landmarks: a hump of withered bush, the skeleton form of a watchtower to my left, the ash-grey shape of what looked like a concrete bunker on the other side.

He went straight through the wire and I stood watching him, keeping quite still because as he stooped to pass between the strands the pallor of his face showed up. But he didn't expect to be followed: his head was turning to left and right and I saw a new shape, smaller than the bunker and farther away and with a vertical blade of light cutting its mass. It would be a guard-hut, the light showing through the join of a door. He checked it and then went on but more slowly because the sign had said Danger of Death.

I waited. He had stopped and stood motionless but I heard no sound anywhere. Then he began going forward again at an angle and I walked to the wire and went through it as he had. The barbs had been turned inwards with pliers along a metre of its length and as I straightened up I took another bearing and committed it to memory.

He had stopped again and his head was turning and I stood waiting. The white of his face was showing now and he had swung his body in my direction and for half a minute he made no movement at all. I wasn't sure that he had seen me. It was an eerie place, a landscape with dead figures: the posts leaning like gibbets and the web of the wire breaking the flat two-dimensional background into sections as if the whole scene were cardboard, a badly lighted stage. Perhaps it was difficult for him to believe in the unlikely: that a man was standing not far from him, thrown up from the waste of earth where armies had once passed, leaving their dead. Perhaps he was afraid of his own imaginings and even hoped it was in fact a man of flesh and blood that stood here, a creature he could deal with, natural, mortal.

Neither of us could move easily, move quickly, here. They were lying quietly, the brass-capped detonators, an inch below the surface of the earth, protected by their pitch-mouldings against the rain. He knew where they were but it was only another way of saying that he knew he mustn't move too quickly, here.

Then I was sure that he had seen me, recognized me at least for something that shouldn't be here, something that was neither a post nor a shadow thrown by the moon. His outline was changing slowly on one side and now the pale light flickered on metal in his hand. Softly: 'Who is there?'

I went up to him slowly, following the angle he had taken. The earth was crusty with frost.

'You can't use that,' I said. 'It'd make too much noise.'

He held it cocked up to aim at my face. It was his usual, the P38, and he remembered what he'd been taught: at close quarters it has to be the heart or the brain because anywhere else is too slow and even two or three in the stomach won't stop you from trying to take a man with you bare-handed if your blood's up. And you might have anything under a thick sheepskin coat: wallet, holster, so forth.

Sweat was on his face, a grey dew in the moonlight. His breathing was shaky and it confirmed what I'd felt about him two nights ago when he'd sat behind me in the 250 SE with this thing lined up with the bridge of my nose: he was gun-dependent.

'Don't move,' he breathed.

'Go on, then, get it over.' I was suddenly fed up because we were wasting time. 'Then see how far you'll get before they're out of that hut. They've got the real thing, rapid-fire.'

'Don't speak so loud.'-Soft panic on his breath. He'd crossed here before but he didn't like it.

'That's what I mean.' I'd been getting it ready over a period of several seconds, working out the exact way it would have to go, and the gun smashed upwards into his face and didn't go off because the blow was directly on the wrist-nerve to paralyse the fingers before the index could contract but there was risk attached and I had to sweat it out until the gun hit the ground with a negative thud and didn't blow our legs off.

He was worse then I'd thought, even though I knew what they were like, the gun-dependents: take their toy away and they break down blubbing. He just rocked stupidly with a hand up to his face and didn't do anything about me at all so I cancelled the second half of the trick — the knee-to-groin number — and picked up the P38 and threw it well across the wire where it would be all right.

'You go first,' I said.

Reaction was setting in and I wasn't feeling much better than he was; it had been a rough run from Neueburg in the dark and it had looked so many times as if the best I could hope to do was climb out of a smashed 17M just as I'd climbed out of a smashed N.S.U. and at every one of those times the whole mission had depended on which way a one-ton mass would swing when it left my hands.

Now I could relax.

There are mines here,' he said. His mouth had begun bleeding.

'I can read.'

'You'll have to go back.'

It was just because he didn't know what to do. A lot of them are like that: they work to strict orders and when there aren't any orders they beat the air. But I knew it would be all right: I had known since he'd looked at his watch just after he'd left the car. He had a rendezvous.

'You go first,' I told him. 'And start now. They're not going to wait for ever.'

He was staring into my face, intent on everything I said, hoping it might give him some kind of direction: and finally it did. He had needed telling almost in so many words that all he had to do was take me with him to the rendezvous where 'they' were waiting. Then he could ask one of them for a gun and he would be six feet tall again and I would be dead.

'It is heavily mined,' he said slowly. 'You will have to take care.'

A new thought had been worming its way through the sludge: he was worried in case I trod on the wrong thing and brought the guards out firing from the hip. He only liked shooting people: he didn't like people shooting him.

'We'll both be very careful, yes. Both of us.'

He nodded and turned away and went forward for three or four metres at a time, stopping to check bearings. There was something disgusting about the way I had to put my feet precisely where he put his, turning my head exactly as he did, it was just deep in my nature to resent being dependent on people, even people as good as Ferris, and now I was dependent on this gross creature, my life linked intimately with his.