This agreed with what Parkis had told me: 'It's not really about aeroplanes.'

I said: 'We're interested in why somebody's trying systematically to knock out a cold-war weapon.'

'Why,' Ferris said, 'and who.'

That's not all.'

'All for the moment.'

I sulked for a bit and he didn't break the silence. I don't like being used as a hooded falcon. I couldn't do anything about it, of course. You're cleared, briefed and sent in, and if you ask any questions outside the prescribed limits of the briefing they think you're nosey or windy and they're usually right. The man in the field isn't given the overall picture because there are always background factors that might worry him if he knew what they were. It works all right but on the other hand we always go into a mission knowing there's an awful lot going on in the background on any level from the Foreign Office to the hot-line and we tend to worry about it because we don't know what it is.

When the girl came for the trays I pulled out the stuff they'd given me in Credentials. My name was Martin and I was an aviation psychologist attached to the A.I.B. team operating at the Luftwaffe base at Linsdorf where two of the pattern crashes had happened. I assumed they'd picked on Martin because it could be either English or German according to which I wanted to be at any given time. There was nothing special in this lot and it looked a bit thin on the face of it but that might be because I'd pushed them into dropping Waring at the last minute.

Ferris saw me looking at the papers.

'How's your German?'

'West Hartlepool accent.' I said to show him I was still narked at not being told anything.

'You shouldn't need much cover.'

Perhaps that was why it looked a bit thin.

'Where do I start?'

The thing is, there are two ways of going at the Striker problem.

You can analyse the bodies and the wrecks to find how the planes or the pilots are being got at. That's what everyone's already doing at Linsdorf and other places and they've not turned anything up. Or you can jump the queue and try to find who's getting at them and why.'