Piet stood in the background, a wad of sticking plaster moulding his left ear, Legrande beside him. The South African simply didn’t look at me as I went to the table.

“This is one hell of a good idea,” Hoffer said, rubbing his hands together. “Colonel Burke tells me it’s primarily your suggestion.”

Burke’s voice was flat and colourless as he cut in. “The trouble is getting to Serafino before he realises we’re in the area. His camp, as we understand it, is about four thousand five hundred feet up on the eastern slopes of the mountain. The idea is that we make a night drop on to a plateau about a thousand feet below the summit on the western side.”

“Then you cross over and catch him with his pants down?”

Hoffer’s choice of phrase was unfortunate under the circumstances, but Burke nodded. “We should get over the summit at least by dawn. On the other side there’s a forest belt about a thousand feet down. Oak, birch, some pine, I understand. Once we reach that we’ll have plenty of cover on the final stretch.”

Hoffer seemed genuinely excited as he examined the map. “You know something? For the first time I really believe there’s a chance. Let’s all have a drink on it.”

“Another time if you don’t mind,” I said. “I could do with an early night. It’s been a long day.”

He was pleasant enough about it and as no one pressed me to stay, I left them and went up to my room. Not that I could sleep when I did go to bed. I lay there with the French windows open because of the heat and after a while it started to shower. It was round about that time that Rosa arrived.

She took off the silk kimono she was wearing. “Look, no trouser suit.”

When she got in beside me, she was shivering, though from desire or cold was uncertain and whether she was there for herself or Hoffer didn’t really seem to matter. It was nice, lying there in the darkness holding her in the hollow of my arm, listening to the rain, even when she fell asleep on me!

AS I FOUND out later, Burke didn’t go to bed. Instead, he flew to Crete in the Cessna to pick up a few things we were going to need and was back just before eleven on Saturday morning.

Sunday, being the conventional day of rest, seemed as reasonable a time to catch Serafino napping as we were likely to find, which meant going in that night. There was almost a full moon, which didn’t please Burke much, but he was impatient to be off now that the ball was rolling again and bustled around, full of energy, checking everything.

We used a small private airstrip not far from the villa, a cow pasture really, with a hangar that was barely large enough to get the Cessna inside.

The plane was the 401 model with eight seats and we had those out for a start. A particularly good point was the Airstair door amidships which would give us a clear exit, something we badly needed if all four of us were to get out in time to drop in a nice tight group.

The pilot, a man called Nino Verda, was ex Italian air force, about thirty from the look of him and according to Hoffer the best money could buy. He needed to be. To fly that kind of country in the dark, graze a six-thousand-foot mountain and give us an eight-hundred-foot drop over that plateau was going to take genius.

We were using the X type parachute, the kind British paratroopers used before they changed to the new N.A.T.O. one. Burke preferred the X type. It got you down faster and could be guided with greater accuracy. The reserve chutes were of the same type, and identical with those we had used in the Congo.

Our weapons were unconventional by some standards, but proved in combat, the only realistic test. We were using the Chinese A.K. assault rifle, probably the most reliable automatic combat rifle in the world at that time and the new Israeli sub machine gun, the Uzi, which was better than the Sterling in every way.

Two grenades each, a commando knife – the list seemed endless. Burke even had a kit inspection with each man’s camouflaged jump suit laid out together with every item of equipment.

And he went over the operation with the map and a stop-watch so many times that even Piet Jaeger looked sick by late evening. Towards me he seemed no different and I suppose any touch of formality in our relationship could have been put down to the exigencies of the situation.

At dinner, Hoffer was joviality personified. Only the best was good enough although Burke put his foot down as regards alcohol. But the food was excellent. Surprisingly, I found an appetite for it and Rosa was there, wearing her best, looking absolutely magnificent.

Afterwards, Burke took us through the plan again in detail, including the walk-out if everything went well, which he estimated would take eight or nine hours to the point on the Bellona road where we were to be met by Hoffer himself with the necessary transport.

He shook hands with us all solemnly when Burke had finished and made a little speech about how much he appreciated what we were doing and how he hoped before long to have his stepdaughter with him again, God willing, which I thought was pushing it a bit far.

Later, when I was changing in my room, Rosa appeared. She zipped up the front of my camouflaged suit and kissed me on the cheek. “From you or from Hoffer?” I said.

“From me.” She touched my face briefly. “Come back safe.”

She hesitated in the doorway, and looked at me, a strange expression on her face. She wanted to speak, wanted like hell to tell me something and was desperately afraid of the consequences.

I felt a sudden rush of affection for her, shook my head and smiled. “Don’t say it, Rosa, not if you’re truly afraid of him.”

“But I am,” she said, her face white. “He can be cruel, oh, so cruel, Stacey. You couldn’t imagine.”

“Tell me about it when I return, when it doesn’t matter any more.” I opened the door and kissed her as a woman should be kissed, moulding her ripeness into me. “I survive all things, Rosa Solazzo, especially the Hoffers of this world.”

After she had gone, I buckled on my belt with the Smith and Wesson in its spring holster and adjusted my beret. The man who stared out at me from the mirror was a stranger, someone from before the Hole. What then was he doing here? It was quite a thought, but the wrong time to be asking questions like that and I left and went down to join the others.

The cruising speed of the Cessna 401 is up to two hundred and sixty-one miles per hour which meant that we could expect to be over the target in twenty minutes. We delayed take-off for an hour because the night was still too bright for Burke’s liking, but the overcast promised by the met forecast didn’t materialise and he reluctantly gave the word to go at one A.M.

Verda had logged an internal flight to Gela with the authorities at Punta Raisi, just in case questions were asked, which meant flying through the great divide anyway. A minor divergence would take him into the area of the drop and within minutes he could be back on course again.

Including the training Burke had given us in the Congo, I had jumped nine times in all, so this would make ten – a nice round number. I had never particularly enjoyed the experience. A paratrooper is a clumsy creature, hampered by the requirements of his calling. The X type parachute weighs twenty-eight pounds and the reserve chute around twenty-four. A fair weight to start with. Add to that a supply bag carrying anything up to a hundred pounds and it’s hardly surprising that the only movement possible is downwards.

Even removing the passenger seats from the interior gave us barely enough room to manoeuvre with all that equipment. Burke had rigged a static line of his own devising and he and Verda had carefully removed the Airstair door which was fine as long as no one fell out before we got there.