“You haven’t got long,” I whispered.

Burke nodded. “We’re dead on time. Don’t worry.”

A mile further on, Jaeger swung off the road and took us through sand dunes to the edge of a broad flat beach. As he switched off the motor another sound filled the air and a plane came in off the sea no more than two or three hundred feet above the surface of the water. Legrande produced a Verey pistol and fired a flare and the plane turned sharply and dropped in for a perfect landing.

It was a Cessna, I recognised that much as it taxied towards us, but there was no time to stand around. They hustled me forward as the cabin door swung open and pushed me inside. The others followed and as Legrande fastened the door the Cessna was already turning into the wind, her engine note deepening.

Burke held a flask to my mouth and I choked as brandy burned its way into my stomach. When the coughing had subsided, I smiled weakly. “Where to now, colonel?”

“First stop Crete,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour. Good thing, too. You could do with a bath.”

I took the flask from him and swallowed again and leaned back in my seat as a warm and wonderful glow spread throughout my body. Life began again, that was all I could think of. As the Cessna lifted into the air and turned out to sea, the sun died behind the horizon and night fell.

TWO

I FIRST MET Sean Burke in Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique in the early part of 1962 in a waterfront café called the “Lights of Lisbon.” I was playing piano at the time, one of the more useful byproducts of an expensive education, but wholly for money.

For reasons which aren’t important at the moment, I was an aimless drifter at the grand old age of nineteen, working my way from Cairo to the Cape in easy stages. I was in Lourenço Marques because I’d only had enough money to take me that far on boarding the coastal steamer at Mombasa which didn’t worry me particularly. I was young and fit, running so hard from the past that my only concern was to discover what lay beyond each day’s horizon.