I suppose the pilot thought that if things had gone this far it couldn't do any harm to go the whole way and the squadron leader would slap him down in any case if he made a mistake.

'You see,' he said with a perfectly straight face, 'we were tooling around in Malta on a friendly visit and then we got these orders from on high. So we planned a suitable exercise and went in at our best altitude so we wouldn't annoy the scheduled airlines. Then we sort of lost our way a bit and after we'd got back on course for home we found Charlie here had made a silly mistake and left all the cameras running. I really don't know what things are coming to, in this mob.'

The squadron-leader was looking out of the window. He didn't say anything.

'You must have been tracked by radar.'

'Bound to have been.'

'How long were you overflying Algerian territory?'

'Not long enough to sort of cause too much comment.'

'Did they put up interceptors?'

'Don't actually know. You see, from that height we can go rather fast in quite a short time, by pointing things downwards.'

It was all I wanted to know and I left it at that.

When Eastlake took me down the corridor he said: 'Where exactly do you fit in with this little circus?'

'You can't see much from those photographs. I suppose they'll send me in to have a closer look at the bloody thing.'

Therewas nobody around in Field Briefing so Tilson sat me downand folded his chubby hands and said:

'Well, what shall we talk about?'

I said I wanted to know who my director would be if I took job on.

'It depends who can get there first.'

'Where?'

' Tunis.'

'Who's been sent for?