The camera was 200 yards forward of the hide and set in a hedgerow above a steeply sloping field. The camera was well placed. On the close-up it could monitor the farmhouse and on the wide-angle it could take in the Nugent bungalow. The bungalow, set close to the narrow road leading up the mountain towards Inishative, west of the village, was sixty paces nearer the camera position than the small farm and its rusted metal outbuildings.

The camera and the cables that controlled its zoom and focus functions had taken two weeks to get into position. It had been in operation now for a month. It was the best that the technical support could manufacture. The camera, twenty-five inches long and with the capability of night vision, was concealed in an old log that had been removed under cover of darkness from the hedgerow, taken back to the Mahon Road barracks in Portadown, hollowed out, and replaced before dawn. In the course of six more nights the control cable had been buried. The ground under the hedgerows had been eased back with the sort of tool normally used for edging lawns, a half-moon blade, and then the slit had been painstakingly pushed back together by hand. Only after that, back up the mountain slope, had the hide been dug out and the command panel installed.

The positioning of the camera, its army serial numbers removed, was regarded as of major operational priority.

Day and night, through close-up and wide-angle, the camera oversaw the comings and goings, and the movements at the Donnelly farm and the Nugent bungalow.

It was easier to speak into a dictaphone than to write the log in the lightless cramped hole that was the hide.

A faint voice, "Attracta and Kevin, taking a bale from the barn to the cow shed, zero nine forty three."

There was the bare click of the dictaphone being switched off, then the faint rustle of a sheet of tin foil being unfolded.