Now he lay ' slung atween the roundshot '-not old Sir John's way, perhaps, but as near as they could get to it in this age when men had already stepped on to the moon; for Geoffrey Peace's wasn't an ordinary coffin at all. The coffin at which I looked was steel, fashioned like a cylinder: it 7 might have been a section of torpedo-tube or, more likely, a length of discarded missile-casing from a cruiser in the bay. No, it couldn't be that, I realized, bending closer. The metal Was riveted, not welded, and a missile needs a smooth bore. I ran my fingers unseeingly along the line of grey-painted metal studs. Perhaps if the sight of my dead comrade-inarms had not affected me so greatly, I might then have suspected something of the secret which was to shock the world and the United States in particular.

The sound of a powerful jet engine overhead jerked my attention away from the dead man's face. Here were the top brass coming to pay their last tribute to Geoffrey Peace. The plane circled the anchorage. Peace was ' lying in state' aboard his own luxury motor-yacht, Bellatrix. In the bay, backed by palm-fringed islets, I could see the American Seventh Fleet, a magnificent array of fighting ships. Among them were two of the new Shenandoah-class nuclear subs, replacing the first Polaris-firing George Washington class, which had become obsolete in the early 1970's. To the north-east lay the Royal Navy's new Limuria Squadron, a crack task-force which had again raised the Navy's battle ensign of glory after the long starved years of the 'fifties and 'sixties. It did my sailor's heart good to see the lean, deadly silhouette of two Lochclass cruisers, Loch Vennachar and Loch Torridon.