– were split-second. As he spoke the sonorous last words,

Amirante was alongside. .. we therefore commit his body to the deep..

There was a sharp explosion, a puff of smoke at Amirante's stern. The ungainly coffin cartwheeled high into the air.

Cameras locked on the grey object as it hurtled upwards and news commentators, hanging on to the stern rails with one hand and with microphone in the other, gave their word pictures. Slowly the thing rose up and up. It arced downwards. I thought almost I heard the splash above the destroyer's engines. The C-in-C allowed the raw drama to sink in. The chaplain was silent, too, before the Benediction. An officer pressed a button at the rear of Loch Vennachar's bridge. The deck trembled and shook. Four missiles leapt from the cruiser's launchers in a flurry of flame. Four others rose from an

American cruiser. There seemed scarcely any time between the launch and a thunderous detonation overhead. Then a helicopter was over Peace's grave and a huge wreath floated down at the end of a parachute.

As it hit the sea, I felt a sudden impulse. Something of Peace for Peace's end. I reached out my hand' I wouldn't waste a good cap,' said a prim voice.

Peace had spoken of that voice a thousand times: didactic, precise. The DNI stood next to me, screwing up his eyes at the water. Like me, he was not in uniform.

I held my cap-the Skeleton Coast cap-uncertainly.

Ny anivon riaka,' he said, articulating the words with a slight forward throw of the lips, like an actor. He smiled. My Creole isn't the best, but it means, " that which is in the midst of the moving waters." Mam'zelle Adele says Creole was once a French patois, but no longer. Everything in Limuria seems to undergo a sea-change.'

Could this indeed be the man whose influence over Peace had been so great? I could not equate his blathering about an obscure language in an obscure ocean with his knowledge of submarines and underwater strategy, which, Peace claimed, was greater than that of anyone living.