Began running again. Heard the whine of the twin jets, then they cut off and there was only the buffeting of the wind: he was keeping to his cover situation and going through the motions of running out of fuel; either that or for some very good reason he'd been loafing about over the sea to use up the reserve tank to the point where he'd have to come in, to give the whole thing credibility if anyone decided to take a look at the fuel gauges.

He was coming in very low indeed and I had to veer a bit without breaking my run because he wouldn't be able to avoid me if I got it wrong. There was the smell of kerosene as the wind shifted and the light shone bright on the silver-grey fuselage and I could see the nose wheel turning very slowly as the airstream caught it, then he was alongside and I veered again into the wind and got a rear-oblique view of him as he reached the stalling-point and dropped tail first and bounced and tilted and bounced again and then bucked forward and dug the nose in and flipped over in a wave of mud. I kept on running.

Chapter Two: LONDON

The momentum hadn't been completely exhausted when the Pulmeister had nipped over, and the razor-thin trailing edges of the tail unit had been thrust into the soft earth like a dart driven backwards with force. The front end of the thing was sticking up at something like twenty degrees from the horizontal and of course it was upside down. It looked as if he'd tried to get out because the cockpit hood was open and I could see part of his head and one elbow.

The wave of mud had sloshed upwards into the cockpit and it was difficult to see any detailed objects against the glare of the sky but I knew one thing: if I couldn't pull him out very soon the weight of the front end would prise the tail unit out of the mud and bring the cockpit down on both of us, so I crawled underneath and felt for the release clip of his helmet. He didn't move.