The tone sounded another two times before a familiar Texan drawl came online. 'This is Cody Zero One. Identify yourself. Over.'

The signal strength was fine, but sound quality wasn't that good and there was a delay of about one and a half seconds. He sounded like he was doing lengths in a swimming-pool. The software was very much first-generation. It had to take what I was saying, bounce it off whatever satellite they were using, encrypt it, bounce it down to Cody and back to me once Cody started gobbing off. We had to follow radio voice procedure.

I pictured Cody in his air-conditioned bunker twenty metres under the Nevada scrublands, with his desert camouflage uniform starched to fuck, and his perfect teeth and white walled haircut. Alongside him would be a jug of coffee and a box of Krispy Kremes, and in front of him a set of massive plasma screens projecting real-time satellite pictures of the target about twenty miles from my balcony.

The al-Kibar complex was a nuclear reactor. Specifically, it was a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor, a carbon copy of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor in North Korea. As you'd expect, the Israelis were unhappy about having one of these on their doorstep, especially one that was tooling up to produce nuclear weapons for a country they had technically been at war with for sixty years. To make things worse, North Korea and Iran were both implicated. Iran was going to use al-Kibar as a secondary facility for its own nuclear programme.

Tonight's operation was going to take less than an hour from start to finish, but it had taken nearly a year to confirm and plan. Luckily for me, it was the UK that had put one of the two final nails into the coffin of al-Kibar. I was holding the shitty end of the stick, but that didn't matter to me: I was here to fly the Union Jack. Fucking about in another country, getting things done and, more importantly, getting away with it, that was the juice for me.