We sat down at the little table and I said don't wait for me so they started stirring and the short one said:

'Lovely weather, isn't it?'

There weren't many people around: the boy making the coffee behind the bar, a holy man wrapped in hisgandourah and his dreams in the corner by the Kodak stand, a young French couple perched half-asleep on a pile of baggage, a clerk in a fez coming through the doors and crossing the hall. There was no sound of any flying.

Thoughts not a hundred per cent coherent because the pressure had come off, total energy output in progress fifteen minutes ago and now I was waiting for a cup of coffee and the nerves were having to adjust. But present situation comfortable and that was a help and besides she'd have reached base by now: I'd dropped her as near as it had been possible without exposing the image of the ambulance all over the place, no this one's Diane, our youngest, we've just had a call from her today, as a matter of fact, from Tunisia, she sounded quite homesick but otherwise fit. Yes, isn't she pretty?

Satisfactory.

'What?' I asked him.

'I said the weather's nice.'

'Yes. The trouble is it brings the insects out and you get them all over the windscreen, one firefly after another.'

So the tall one got the envelope out and gave it to me and I opened it and looked at the three photographs, mug-shot coverage with two profiles and a full face, and began tearing them up while they drank their coffee.

Everyone still looked all right, but the clerk in the fez had gone into the phone-box near the check-out counter and it occurred to me that they could have been his headlights I'd seen in the mirror when I'd turned into the car park.

I drank my coffee. It was hot and bitter and I could taste the caffeine and I needed its heat and its alkaloid and I took it into my mouth slowly, as if it were ambrosia. They talked to each other about nothing in particular, a wonderful place to bring their wives, all those stars and palm-trees, talked to each other as if I weren't there or wouldn't be interested, letting me drink in peace, perhaps, and gather my strength.

Presumably without significance: a lot of people would come here to the airport to use the phones, the post office wasn't open at this time of night.

'How big's this thing?'

'I'm sorry?'

'This thing you've got for me. How big is it?'

I was getting fed-up because one or two bits of glass were trying to work out and I smelt of singed hair and they were obviously wondering where the hell I'd been and I wasn't going to tell them, none of their bloody business.

Then they were talking in short embarrassed sentences and the penny dropped and I pulled my sleeve up higher, looking at my watch, after all they'd got their orders and they'd brought something pretty deadly for me in the Marauder.

'We could go and look at it,' the short one said. 'I expect you've been told it's flashpoint-zero freight.'

'Well, I didn't think it was a piss-pot.'

They shut up for a bit and I finished my coffee, wondering how far he'd been, Ahmed, from the scene of the fire when I'd left there: he'd been on his way and the ambulance was a distinctive vehicle and I hadn't been feeling bright enough to worry too much about headlights in the mirror so long as they didn't come any closer.

I didn't know what he looked like, Ahmed.

Incipient torpor and I was aware of it objectively, didn't feel at all like making an effort but there was a lot to do and I jerked my head up and thought watch it you're not safe.

'Let's go and look at it then.'

They said all right and we got up and they paid and the padded nylon legs of their flying-suits made a faintzoop, zoop, zoop as we walked through the hall.

The clerk in the fez had left the telephone-box and was crossing towards the main doors. I didn't know whether he looked like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed.

It was better in the fresh air and I lost the dangerous urge to fall asleep as the caffeine began working on the nerves. There was a police guard on the Marauder, a young Tunisian with a peaked cap and white gauntlets and a holstered pistol, very smart and rather self-conscious because he wasn't used to being on special duty. We walked into the smell of kerosene and hot alloys and PVC and the short one climbed aboard so I assumed he was the pilot and the tall one ushered me on to the metal step and followed me up.

The flight cabin was roomier than I'd expected, with a chart-table and an astrodome and two freight lockers: the Marauder Mk XI was a modified version of the original Mk IX short-range bomber and Tactical Air Command used it for the kind of work that the standard models would have jibbed at.

'Shut that door, will you?'

'Right.'

The pilot opened the lockers and brought out two black rectangular containers with top and end grips and brass combination locks, one of them looking lighter than the other by the way he handled them. Both had Bostik airtight sealing with rip-wire opening provision but there weren't any labels and I assumed it was because anyone in charge of this cargo would know what it was without having to read about it.

I picked them up one at a time. The smaller one was very heavy, about four times the weight of a medium portable typewriter but not much bigger.

'What are they?'

'M'mm? Not sure, actually.'

'Oh for Christ's sake can't you — '

'No, we can't. Awfully sorry.'

Typical armed services security attitude, so bloody coy about everything, of course theyknew what this cargo was. In any case I didn't want more than three guesses because in London-to-base signals exchanges it was called a 'device' so these were obviously two components of one unit and you'd have to fit them together before they'd work. The only thing I didn't really know was why Control was sending me a nuclear bomb with no prior instructions.

'I'll bring the car over.'

'Fair enough.'

They slid the door back for me and I climbed down and began walking across the tarmac and saw a pair of headlights just dimming out among the trees on the far side of the car park where the ambulance was. Three more cars had got here since I'd arrived and I could see movement along the road from the town: a string of vehicles using only their sidelights. So he did in fact look like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed, and he'd called in the whole of his reserves and there wasn't a hope of getting that device as far as base, not a hope in hell.

18: CHRONOMETER

Receiving you.

Shook him a bit: he was having to think.

Q-Quaker high Rharbi imp trans mat awheel.

Dation?

Croydon indigo.

I'd had to get him on the Embassy wavelength and use speech-code because this thing hadn't got an auto scrambler. Chirac had either left my KW 200 °CA in the desert or brought it back for Loman to pick up and whichever it was he'd know I couldn't use it so he would have shut down that wavelength while he was in signals with London through the Embassy.

UMF?

I asked one of them and he said twelve minutes.

Synchronize please.

Double-oh two nine.

Plus twelve.

UMF double-oh four one.

He didn't say anything for a minute and I left him to it and looked down at the lights of a village as we began turning. The pilot had agreed we ought to set our course for Malta because that was where he'd told Kaifra he was going. Then we'd turn back and make a loop across the desert and go in from the south.

'Are we off their screens?'

'I don't know their range at Kaifra but fifty miles ought to be good enough because there's no other traffic.'