The air was cool.

Monoxide and spearmint and above our heads the stars in their millions flowing peacefully across the curve of the Perspex. Course north-east.

Overflying the Roches Vertes drilling-camps at two thousand metres I thought I heard a change in the Fauconnet's engine-noise: a slight increase in volume and pitch. I waited for Chirac to remark on it but he said nothing and I looked at the instruments.

Airspeed unchanged at 110.

Angle of climb unchanged at 18°.

They were the only two that would reflect the altered note of the Fauconnet ahead of us but they remained constant. Batagnier hadn't increased his speed and he hadn't pushed up his angle of climb and I didn't like it.

Red light moving below, very distant on the starboard side.

No. 3 Philips tower.

Impossible to tell whether a new sound had come into the immediate area. There should only be one source: the 1000V twin-engined Fauconnet.

No mirrors, either inside the cabin or outrigged in nacelles.

The blindspot rearwards of this pod-and-boom design was rather large. The air was cold now but I was beginning to sweat because London had done their best but it might not be good enough, not quite good enough. If their decision to charter a glider for final access to the target area meant that the opposition had set up listening-posts to monitor aircraft movement in this region, then the sound of the Fauconnet was at this moment being registeredon their scanners. There hadn't been anything we could do about that: Chirac had ordered this course north-east from South 4 because it was an established airlane across the drilling-complex and if we'd made any kind of circuit to avoid the camps our sound would still have been picked up and we would have been immediately suspect.

The probability that theywere picking us up now was all right because they wouldn't investigate every aircraft movement across this region provided it followed a routine pattern: what they were listening for was unusual traffic and especially an unscheduled flight from any of the strips near Kaifra in the direction of the open desert. Each post would essentially have its own facility for the immediate investigation of suspect aircraft movement: a machine standing by with its engine warmed and a pilot ready for take-off.

The danger wasn't there. It was in the possibility that our own operation had been penetrated without our knowledge. It had been necessary to engage people outside our own cell and although Chirac and Batagnier must have been screened it wouldn't have been advisable to let the ground-staff at South 4 know that this flight had a clandestine aspect, even though there had been no secrecy about the take-off.

London had done its best but if the change in the engine-note of the tow-plane was in fact an illusion created by the additional noise of another aircraft flying behind us the mission would end here, two thousand metres above the desert and a hundred kilometres from the target: Tango Victor.

The aft structure of the glider provided a blindspot big enough to conceal a bomber, The glider itself provided a blindspot for the Fauconnet even if it carried outside mirrors. If there were a third aircraft now flying a north-east course towards No. 3 Philips tower only the pilot of that aircraft would know.

'Chirac.'

'J’ecoute.'

'Have you noticed any change in the engine-note?'

'When?'

'A minute ago.'

'Oh yes — he went into coarser pitch.'

'He's got variable props?'

'But yes. And we are quite high now.'

'Isee. Have you got any spare gum?'

Altitude 3000.

Chirac watched the instruments.

Thirty seconds later the Fauconnet began levelling off.

I couldn't see the No.3 tower light any more from starboard: over the past ten minutes it had been drifting slowly out of sight towards our midline as Batagnier changed course to overfly it directly.

The engine-noise was flattening to a steady drone as he throttled back to compensate for the increase of speed at level flight.

It was now very cold in the cockpit.

'You will please check your seat-belt.'

He went on watching the instruments.

I checked and reported.

'Very well.'

He pulled the release and the cable snaked awayand the force of the deceleration thrust me hard against the belt as the nose went down. I caught sight of the tow-plane once more, quite small as it wheeled against the horizon to retrace its course, then we were drifting, alone in the night sky.

9: DROP

There was only the wind's sound.

Sometimes it changed, subtly or grossly, as. Chirac searched the heights for their currents. The air rushed inaudibly over the wings and the sound was not from there but from imperfections in the streamlining of the cabin: the landing-gear housing, the flanges of the hood-runners, the edge of the drop-trap.

A sibilance came from them, a whistling through the teeth, then as we swung to meet the wind and headed into it the sound changed to a low fluting, eerie and musical, then died to a whisper as we drifted across the current, the long wings lying against it.

'South-west,' said Chirac, listening to the sounds. 'Maybe ten knots.'

A head-wind for our flight-path. That was why we'd come here. But he could have been wrong about the prevailing air-movement and it was reassuring to have his forecast confirmed.

'We can go straight in?'

'Not yet. In a little time. I want to know more.'

He sat listening, touching the controls a degree and bringing them back, feeling the air as sensitively as if his hands were spread open against it, his fingers sifting it for information. Below us the landmarks turned slowly, the lights of the three camps revolving inside the greater orbit of the radio tower.

00.46.

Nerves all right but a thought insisting, a reminder of the margin of error that no one had wanted to talk about, neither Loman nor Chirac nor I myself.

I'd asked Loman about the duration and he'd said flexible and I'd asked Chirac what the chances were and he'd said fifty-fifty, and it meant the same thing: with the target at this distance and the run-in made by dead-reckoning the margin of error for dropping me with accuracy was critically wide and the break-off point was anywhere on the invisible circle drawn around the mission objective where I couldn't survive long enough to do any good.

Ignore.

The wind whispered past the Perspex hood and above us the starfields turned, their vastness diminishing us, making of us a mote of dust adrift in the dark.

Altitude 2900, must keep to facts.

Keep to the facts, in any case, that don't add up to despair: it's too soon for that.

The starboard wing lifting and our weight shifting and the air desolate in its crying, the sound the winter wind makes under the doors. The nose going down and a scream coming into the sky, dying awayas we climb suddenly, the squab seat pressing up and the harness creaking, a shelf of air where we hover and then slide away, circling, the wind plaintive, its voice the voice of the mad Arab, whimpering…mountains in the sky…and great birds darkening the heavens…

The air cold, a blade of it cutting across my face from the crack in the hood-runner. My whole body cold, and stiff with its bruises and in no mood shortly to be hurled from its minuscule shelter among the stars.

'Very well.'

A certain philosophy in his tone, a note of fatalism, no time left for the little Gallic ironies, none of themon ami as we swung through the figures on the compass scale towards the south-west, our final flight-line.

'Are you going in?'

He said yes and I unzipped the case of the Sony.