In the photographs, taken from the near-vertical, the definition of the shale upthrust had been vague, but I would expect a stratified configuration at ground-level in this region, like the rocks near Kaifra, sharp and broken and sloping, distinct from the curvilinear dunes. But I saw nothing like that, though I twice turned full circle. The skyline was uniformly smooth.

Then I began shouting and turned again, my voice going into the distant dark and dying there. Twenty or thirty feet high, the squadron-leader had said, so there'd be an echo from them if they weren't too far away.

Tang-o… Tang-o Vic-tor…

My feet burying deeper as I turned.

My eyes closed so that I could listen better.

Shouting, turning under the dome of stars.

Tang-o… Vic-tor…

Dying away.

All I could see from the height where I stood, all I could hear, was the margin of error, wide as the endless dunes.

11: SIGNAL

A sense of frightening exposure.

Last night there had been the stars, their names known and their order long ago established by the ancients. Now there was nothing. A map had been replaced by a blank sheet of paper. In the dark it had been possible to believe that when morning came I might see familiar shapes, however far away: buildings or trees. Morning had come and I saw nothing.

For another minute I lay with my eyes open, pinned to the earth's surface in infinite solitude. It was the sameness of this terrain that appalled: if there had been a range of higher dunes within sight, or a rock or a tree, any kind of feature to break the facelessness here, I could have related with it and arrived at some kind of orientation: I could have noted that it was on my left or on my right, in front of me or behind; and there could have been the idea that if I set out to reach it Imight find other features becoming visible beyond it as l approached.

There was nothing.

Nothing to see, nothing to hear. The silence was absolute.

During the night the low wind had died, and my sleeping-bag was only half-covered by drifts of sand; but my tracks to and from the high dune had disappeared. This was the desert, and if a man chose to disturb the perfection of these primeval sands, let it be shown that his passing shall leave no trace.

Idrank from one of the five-litrebidons and pressed the sides before screwing the cap on. The sun was a diameter above the horizon and I thoughtof opening for reception but Loman would only order a change of frequency for daytime conditions and ask if I'dsighted the objective and that wasn't a question I wanted to hear put into words.

I hadn't been delaying things since first light but there was a marked reluctance to go and find out the worst: and I could do that by going to the dune over there and climbing it. We don't mind if London's policy is to send us in with only a minimum of data but we always know that at any stage of an operation it can take us beyond the point of no return: and that point could already be behind me now.

Edwards had been in this position eighteen months ago in Jugoslavia: in the thick of a direct Control-to-field signals exchange in the final phase of the mission he'd found out by accident that if he failed to reach the objective he'd automatically become expendable — and he'd kicked. We didn't expect to see him back in London for at least ten years if he were lucky but he'd infiltrated a CIA courier line and did a fast deal with a batch of strict shut documentation and got a flight out of Zagreb with a party of chess-players on a cultural exchange and asked to see Parkis the minute he reached the Bureau and Parkis had flayed him alive and then fired him.

The point Edwards had been trying to make was that it's all right if an executive fouls up a job and Control throws him to the dogs before he can do any more damage, but it's not all right for the Bureau to send him out on a Curtain thing without telling him there's a high risk of his becoming expendableautomatically because the mission's been planned like that.

There's no middle line we can take on this one. The complexities of an intelligence operation don't even have a static design: its pattern shifts as the mission progresses, and values are changed hourly. Control can put a man in the field on a routine bugging stint at a pre-summit convention and the whole thing can suddenly hot up and he's out there trying to handle something so big that if he drops it he won't survive and all you can blame the Bureau for is not pulling him out for the sake of his own skin.

But that isn't what the Bureau is for.

Parkis had given us the picture after he'd fired Edwards: Parkis doesn't like unrest among the ferrets. During the end-phase of the mission it had been decided that the only way to get Edwards right through to the objective was by cutting him off from most of his escape lines and letting the opposition think that no one would attempt this brand of the impossible unless he were a lunatic. To an extent it came off because they withdrew a lot of surveillance and Edwards got through to the signals room of the Hungarian Embassy and was closing on the objective — his actual mission was a cipher-bust near the centre of the Jugoslavian network — when he'd seen what London had done to his escape lines and panicked and got out.

We don't like Parkis but we thought he was right. All we ask is that the Bureau doesn't plan a mission thatdepends on an expendable executive. That, in certain cases, would amount to murder.

In my case there was a fact among the unknown background data that I knew must exist and that I had tacitly accepted when Loman had given me final briefing at the Yasmina. It was obvious, and it was this: if I failed to reach Tango Victor I couldn't expect to be pulled out of the area. The entry in the book wouldn't readMission Failed butExecutive Deceased. In most cases it comes to the same thing but there's a technical nuance because the failure of a big operation creates a lot of depression at the Bureau and it makes the whole thing look a bit better if it can be shown that the executive lost his life in the attempt: it means that no one can say he wasn't trying hard enough.

London wanted me to find an aeroplane and examine its cargo and if I couldn't do it they'd want to make it very difficult for anyone else to do it. They'd taken great pains to put me down here in strict hush and if I couldn't find the objective they wouldn't allow Loman to make any noise pulling me out.

Understood and accepted.

But it seemed a long way to the top of the dune.

They were Zeiss 22–50's but I didn't use them until I'd turned full-circle and looked for the freighter with the naked eye because if I had to use a 22 magnification to pick it up it would mean it was a day's march distant and the sun was already hot on my skin.

From the low area among the dunes I had looked and seen nothing and from this height I looked and saw nothing but it was infinitely worse: down there the piled waves of sand had limited my range of vision but from here I could see for fifty miles in every direction andstill there was nothing. It was a dun-brown seascape, an area so vast that it had no end until it met the sky itself. The silence of it alone was diminishing to the spirit, adding lifelessness to endlessness: the semblance of a seascape, because of this, was only partial: there was no sound here of the wave's leap or the hiss of spindrift. Silence and stillness together cast the mind beyond the thought of death and held it in awe of this place where life itself had never been.

My shadow alone moved, turning as I turned, its giant pointer lying curved across the dunes.

An instant's hesitation of the hands, fear of confirming the negative findings of the naked eye, then I raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus to infinity. The red of the spectrum refracted at the edge of the field to leave a glowing ring, and through it passed the flow of images, repeated until they became meaningless: one sand-dune looked like another, and here they were spread in their millions.