'So Kearns needs this one,' Holmes said at last, 'if they push ahead with a new director.' His eyes were on me again. 'You could probably twist their arm and get it for yourself, since you're more experienced and everything. But — ' he left it with a shrug, didn't take his eyes from me.

Then the door opened and Baker came in, one of the shadows, and dropped into a chair and tilted it back, one hand on the stained plastic table. 'Jesus Christ, they'll never get him out at this rate.' He must have been the man who'd just come out of Signals.

'Vereker?' Holmes asked him.

'Yes. Support can't get near him, radio contact's gone and his DIF hasn't got a clue where he is. Caffeine, Daisy old dear, for the love of God.'

Vereker had been on all our minds for the last sixteen hours. When you're mission-hungry you spend half your time in the Caff and the other half in the signals room listening to the stuff coming in from the various fields, so I knew what the score was with Vereker. He was in the thick of a sticky end phase in Bosnia and had started asking for help at one o'clock this morning, GMT, the transmission fading and coming back, and his director had been signalling through the mast at Cheltenham for instructions every hour from then on.

It's the worst place there is, the signals room, when some poor bastard's got a wheel off out there in the field; it's like sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's listening to a drill going next door.

'He'll be all right, love,' Daisy told Baker as she brought him his tea. 'Don't you worry.'

She always said that, but often the truth is different.

Holmes was still watching me, waiting. He'd made an appeal to my hypothetical better nature: let Kearns keep his mission, try and do things better this time, earn his stripes.

I was aware of anger simmering. A mission where the DIF was already a dead duck before the action had even started was the kind of thing I could handle better than most.