There were three or four rows of tip-up seats and we sat down and the WRAF hit the button and threw a desert on the screen and I remembered Tilson saying, 'I think you'll need tropical kit.'

Eastlake said: 'Ask what questions you like as we go along, will you? We did this with a cluster of four 35mm Nikons and a restricted field of 25 degrees. Filters were yellow, green and two reds and the film's been cut and joined for continuity, all right?'

'What altitude?'

'Sixty-five thousand feet.' He'd hesitated a fraction because it was classified so I thought this must be the Mk II version of the Albatross and started looking for missile installations dolled up as mosques.

But so far there was only desert, a sugar-brown terrain filling the screen and looking like a sheet of corrugated cardboard with a fold here and there.

'What are those rocks?'

'Shale upthrust, nothing very high, perhaps twenty or thirty feet.'

The pattern of dunes and rills spun slowly as we circled clockwise so I focused my eyes on the centre but couldn't see anything.

'This isn't a dummy run?'

'No. These are the pix we went for.'

I still couldn't see anything interesting on the screen but 1 was beginning to see a lot more of the job that Tilson and those other bastards were trying to pitch me into: a stinking Robinson Crusoe lark in an area defined on this frame-scale three miles across with nothing in it but a bunch of rocks and something else so small that only people like these could see it.

The ground resolution looked close on ten-tenths, with a shade of grain on the light-exposed side of the shale upthrust but the rest very clear, and I began getting frustrated because they'd sat me down to show me something and they knew I couldn't see it and I felt a bit of a lemon.