With fifty feet on the depth gauge I was invisible from the surface and this was as deep as I wanted to go because the pressure was already tangible and it was urgent that I stayed free of narcosis. There was also a lingering sense of fear as I moved again in the deeps, watching the enemy above me through a dead man's mask.

Ignore.

I kicked with the fins, setting a steady rhythm, still swimming with my face to the surface in the hope of navigating. The compass was useless at this distance from the rig and I couldn't go up and check my bearings: all I could do was to keep the pool of sunlight in my wake and on my left. But it was amorphous and diffuse, its glare dazzling me. I shut my eyes against it. The boat's engines were idling now as they took the body aboard and examined it.

Desultory thought process: Mandarin was blown. The cover story Ferris had given me had been thin at best but now it wouldn't stand a chance because they knew by now that the diver hadn't just got into difficulties down there: his mask was missing and his air tube had been severed with a knife. The three secret service men who'd escorted Tewson to and from the Golden Sands Hotel were almost certainly on board the rig and there'd be a naval defence cadre with frogmen responsible for underwater maintenance and security and if they were good at their job they'd inspect the substructure down to the sea bed and find my gear and the radio.

I didn't see any point in going back to the rig when night came, just to get picked off by rapid fire or caught alive and grilled and taken to Pekin and grilled again and thrown on the heap.

I could hear the launch again, taking him back to the rig. The thing that narked me was that I couldn't tell Ferris we'd blown the operation and he couldn't tell London to switch that red light off and shut down the station on Mandarin. Ferris would go on brooding over the chart and haunting the radio room in Swordfish and Egerton would go on ordering trays of tea for his mission staff in Operations and punching out requests for a situation report and all they'd get was silence.

Well, they shouldn't bloody well ask me to do the impossible.

All right I'd done it before but there were limits and this time they'd blown the fuse. Some stupid pratt in the Ministry of Defence had seen the news about Tewson's shark thing and got the wind up and hit the button and told the Bureau to go and verify and set up an operation to get him out of Hong Kong if he was still alive. That was all right till we told them he was under an armed guard on Chinese territory in the middle of the sea: that was when Control should have told them to go home and shut up about it and maybe that was what Egerton had in fact done but they wouldn't listen.

Well, they'd listen now all right. Your bright little boffin's gone and run away from home and he's not coming back so you'd better change the combinations on the files and take that launcher off the secret list and stop his pension because there's nothing more we can do for you.

The sun was in my eyes.

It was all I had to steer by but it wasn't very precise: it was just a big dazzling area that changed shape sometimes when the swell ran heavy and created surface undulation, and if I went off course I'd waste time and air and energy and I didn't want to waste any of those things because they were the means of life. But the only hope of taking a straight line to the island was by surfacing and correcting my bearings and I was still only half a mile from the rig and the look-outs were alerted.

Sun in my eyes.

I closed them.

No go.

I had to watch the surface all the time to keep the flare of light in my tracks and on my left and I had to check the gauge every thirty seconds to keep at a constant depth.

Dazzle.

The sound of the engines was faint now but I could hear they were idling: they hadn't been shut off. The body was being put aboard the rig. Another sound was coming in, fainter still but regular, and I couldn't place it. I didn't think it was the riveter: that would make a sharper vibration through the water and they wouldn't have started work again so soon.

The sun was going down, its brightness flowing away to my left and leaving me in twilight. A kind of peace was coming into me, a stillness, and my eyes were closing of their own accord, drawing darkness across the last of the day, while -

Watch it.

The twilight deepening to night, where nothing -

Christ sake watch it will you!

Been rolling over, I'd been rolling slowly over, hypnosis induced by the dazzle.

Orientate.

But it was difficult because there wasn't anything for the eye to fix on except that shifting pool of light and if I didn't stay locked on to it. I could swim in a circle: in these weightless conditions with my only navigational reference tending to induce hypnosis there was no way of making the island unless I surfaced and took bearings and I couldn't do that because I knew what the sound was, the new one.

They were putting the chopper aloft I stopped kicking and hung there with the surface fifty feet above me and the sea bed fifty-six feet below. The rotor was producing a light fluttering sound, most of it screened by the surface, and the other noise was louder, transmitted directly to my ears from the screws of the launch. It was rising in pitch and increasing in volume: the thing was heading in this direction. The body had been found some distance to the north of the rig and I suppose it was the logical direction for anyone to take if they wanted to start a hunt for his assailant. They knew there hadn't been any kind of a boat near the rig and they knew his air tube had been cut clean through by a blade and it had happened underwater so they didn't have to make any guesses: they were looking for a frogman.

I'd shut my eyes while I was motionless and now it was dark again and I kicked with the fins to correct my attitude: I'd been drifting head-down without knowing it. I had approximately sixty seconds before the helicopter picked out the faint blob against the sandbars and signalled the launch where to find me and I didn't like either of the two things I could do but I was going to have to do one of them. I could start swimming nearer the surface and wait till the chopper sighted me and then I could put out a cloud with the shark repellent and dive and leave it for them as a decoy while I tried to get clear, or I could go straight down to a hundred feet where they couldn't see me and swim face-up with the sun as a bearing and try to hit the island before narcosis reduced me to a drifting piece of flotsam and the air in the tanks ran out.

The launch was throttling down.

As near as I could judge it was at a horizontal distance of a hundred yards: I could see its faint smudge moving slowly across the surface against the dazzling light, cutting a vee from the fluid gold and spreading it towards me.

Assume starting square search.

A shadow passed suddenly over me as the helicopter swung in from the south-east, lowering across the sea. Both the launch and the chopper would be armed and if I tried the decoy thing they might decide to open fire instead of bringing in divers to pick me up and hand me over for grilling, so I jack-knifed and put my arms to my sides and felt the pressure mounting as I plunged to the dark sands below.