The starfields were brilliant in the dome of the night sky. Below me the darkness wasn't total: the moon was spreading its light across a vast ochre-coloured haze: the Sahara.

I felt isolated, minuscule.

Tell ya something, my friend, you're going to be lonely down there. And earlier Scalfaro had said when we'd boarded the plane, Maybe you're just crazy, I dunno. But I mean, where you're going, a hundred and sixty miles from Adrar, there's just desert. There's just sand, is all, the Sahara. I mean that's all you'll be too -just another grain of sand down there. I just hope you know what you're doing.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. It was all I'd got left of Solitaire, the fix, 26°03' north by 02°01' west, a point in the night, in the desert. And now I was there.

Drifting.

I looked at the glow of my watch-face again. I'd dropped six minutes ago, with a minute left before I hit ground. The ochre colour was lighter now, by a degree. Fine sand was pricking the left side of my face, and I put my goggles on and took a quick look above me. The moon's rim had lost its sharpness: there was sand blowing, close to ground level.

I looked down, waiting, as the desert rose against me in the final seconds of the drop and I sensed zero and pulled on the lines to break the impact and saw shapes in the distance through the blowing sand and felt hard ground under my boots.

It was fifteen minutes since I'd come down, and I had walked something like a mile across the violet-red clay surface in the moonlight, the fine sand blowing against my goggles and the scene ahead of me shifting as the wind came in gusts, so that the shapes out there took on substance and vanished again. Sometimes I could hear voices calling.

I'd tried to signal Cone on the radio but there was nothing but squelch. There was a power generator running somewhere, jamming the set.

I walked more slowly, trying to identify the shapes ahead of me, and heard another sound coming in now, a faint whistling. I stopped, trying to identify it, then without warning the generator was gunned up and the whole scene took on brilliance as a flarepath bloomed across the desert floor and lights flooded from the sky and I dropped into a crouch as the massive shape of an aircraft came drifting through the haze and settled onto the ground with a roar as it reversed thrust and I saw the blue and white Pan Am insignia on the tail.

Chapter 22: FLIGHT 907

Figures moved through the haze.

I was in cover, concealed by a stack of crates. The time on my watch was 11:14. I still had my goggles on. Others were wearing them too, as they worked in the blowing sand.

The last of the passengers were coming off the Pan Am plane. The Nemesis team was herding them into a huge group, two hundred of them, perhaps more; it looked a full complement. Their voices came thinly through the night. The flarepath had blacked out as soon as the plane had come to a halt and then turned, facing the way it had come. The generator was idling now.

This was a dry lake bed, not salt but clay, with a fine powdering of sand on the surface. It felt hard under my boots, brick hard. There were three other planes on the ground, smaller than the Pan Am jet. I recognised one of them as the company plane we'd flown from Berlin to Algiers. Klaus would have landed here in that, with Maitland and some of the guards. The second aircraft was a twin-engined freighter with no insignia. It would have brought these stores here, the crates. Not quite stores -they had markings on them, and lettering in French, with the skull and crossbones prominent on the cylinders where they showed through the slats. Most of them contained explosives; some contained gas.

The third aircraft was a tanker, and its generators were throbbing as the Pan Am plane took on the last of its fuel. It was going to take off again, and I knew when. It would take off at midnight.

Midnight One.

It was a time and a place, Midnight One. There was another time and another place in the Nemesis schedule: Midnight Two.

That would be the target.

Voices came on the wind, the passengers complaining, asking questions. I could hear children crying. Six guards stood at intervals with assault rifles levelled at the hip. Floodlights washed over the crowd, over their pale faces. I saw Klaus, standing halfway between the Pan Am jet and its passengers, fifty yards from where I was now. He was shouting orders, his arms waving with the precision of a traffic cop's. Maitland was nearer the jet, talking to the two Iranians, their figures floodlit by the lights of the tanker. A camouflaged jeep was on the move, providing liaison.

We're going to make the headlines, you know. They'll be interrupting television programmes, all over the world.

I tried the radio from time to time, got nothing. If I could raise Cone he might be able to alert the Algerian Air Force in time for them to intercept the Pan Am jet before Midnight Two, before it reached the target. It would be the final chance, if I could reach him. So I tried, every few minutes, but the generators were throwing out too much interference. There wasn't, quite clearly, anything else I could do.

There's a Pan Am flight reported missing, Cone had told me. It took off from Berlin at 6:17, and went off the screens twenty minutes later.

So it had been airborne for nearly four hours, airborne and off the radar screens. When it had landed here and the jets had whined into silence and the forward passenger door had come open, Dieter Klaus himself had greeted the first two men off the plane, throwing his arms around them. They would be the hijackers who had gone on board in Berlin.

There would have been no way to get Flight 907 off the screens except by losing altitude over water and getting below the radar, and that was what the pilot had been ordered to do: follow the English Channel and turn south across the Bay of Biscay and then East across Morocco into the Sahara. Morocco would have picked up the jet on its screens but wouldn't have been able to identify it.

The sand blew against my goggles; the air was cold against my face. They would be coming across here very soon now, to start loading the cylinders onto the Pan Am plane.

Two men were standing near the company jet. I think one of them was the pilot. Another man was crouching below the belly of the freighter, checking the undercarriage: perhaps it had been a bumpy landing. The tanker had people around it, watching the fuel going into the airliner. If I could break cover without attracting attention and go across there and get into any one of the aircraft I could send a Mayday call giving the position of Flight 907 and reporting it as hijacked, alerting the Algerian Air Force. But they couldn't put any aircraft down here before midnight unless they had a base nearer than Algiers.

Tried the radio again and drew blank.

So I had successfully infiltrated Nemesis, the target opposition network, and I had stayed with it all the way to the operation zone and I was there now, watching the steadily running procedures as the time ran out towards zero, but there was nothing I could do to stop them. So Solitaire was going to be the first mission I couldn't bring home, couldn't follow right through to the end phase, signal London and tell them to pick up that bit of chalk and put it on the board: Mission accomplished.

But I'd had to give it a try and I'd had to go it alone: there'd been no choice. I hadn't known what I was going into, but I know that in any ultrasensitive situation you can't send in support without risking confusion in the field, and sometimes I can persuade London to understand this: I'd got that clown Thrower recalled on that very point. In Algiers my director in the field couldn't have given me more than half a dozen people at the most at such short notice, and even if they hadn't been seen dropping out of the sky all over the place they couldn't have got this close, as close as one man could come – had come. And even if London could have raised a whole bloody platoon and armed it to the teeth there'd have been a war on down here the minute they landed, and half those passengers over there would have been caught in the cross-fire and there still wouldn't have been any guarantee that the Pan Am plane wouldn't take off on schedule at Midnight One.