“Irish,” Dillon said cheerfully. “A full Irish breakfast, and who am I to refuse an offer like that? One-two-four it is.”

He turned onto the new course, climbing to two thousand feet as the weather cleared a little, whistling softly to himself. A Serbian prison did not commend itself, not if the stories reaching Western Europe were even partly true, but in the circumstances, he didn’t seem to have any choice and then, a couple of miles away on the edge of the forest beside a river he saw Kivo, a fairytale castle of towers and battlements surrounded by a moat, the airstrip clear beside it.

“What do you think?” the Mig pilot asked. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“Straight out of a story by the Brothers Grimm,” Dillon answered. “All we need is the ogre.”

“Oh, we have that too, Mr. Dillon. Now put down nice and easy and I’ll say goodbye.”

Dillon looked down into the interior of the castle, noticed soldiers moving toward the edge of the airstrip preceded by a jeep and sighed. He said into his mike, “I’d like to say it’s been a good life, but then there are those difficult days, like this morning for instance. I mean, why did I even get out of bed?”

He heaved the control column right back and boosted power, climbing fast, and the Mig pilot reacted angrily. “Dillon, do as you’re told or I’ll blast you out of the sky.”

Dillon ignored him, leveling out at five thousand, searching the sky for any sign, and the Mig, already on his tail, came up behind and fired. The Conquest staggered as cannon shell tore through both wings.

“Dillon – don’t be a fool!” the pilot cried.

“Ah, but then I always was.”

Dillon went down fast, leveling at two thousand feet over the edge of the forest, aware of vehicles moving from the direction of the castle. The Mig came in again firing his machine guns now and the Conquest’s windscreen disintegrated, wind and rain roaring in. Dillon sat there, hands firm on the control column, blood on his face from a glass splinter.