The watch-towers at the corners of the compounds were built on weathered wood stilts, and the dipping sunlight caught the barrels of the machine-guns jutting above the parapets. Between the compounds were four anti-aircraft defence positions, two with multiple-barrel Qerlikon guns and two housing a cluster of squat ground-to-air missiles. If it had not been for the friendship and the trust, Gavin Hughes, who was a salesman in engineering machinery, would never have gained access to the complex… He saw the entrance tunnel to the building with the buried concrete walls and bomb-proof ceiling, and that was Project 193. He saw the dun-painted building, into which he had never been admitted, that housed Project 1478. He saw the building where the hot-die forge was installed, where heated metal for the warhead cone was compressed and then cooled for turning and grinding and milling, the home of Project 972. The buildings were spread out across the bright sand, scattered inside the complex perimeter that stretched three kilometres in length and two kilometres in width, and contained the lathes, mixers, presses and machine tools. He would be asked the day after, or the day after that at the latest, what he had seen, what was different from before.

He dropped down into the back of the car and the driver closed the door behind him. He wound down the window and reached out to shake the project manager's hand, but still could not look into his eyes. He freed his hand and waved at the crowd by the double doors as the car pulled away.

They drove past the three-storey dormitory block that was used by the Chinese. He had never met them; he had seen them from a distance; they worked on Project 193, where the lathes shaped the solid fuel charges.." and past the tennis courts, which were floodlit in the cooler evenings and had been built for the Russians, to whom he had never spoken. He had passed them in corridors but his friends had never made the introductions; they worked on Project 1478 where the machines he had supplied mixed the coating capable of withstanding the temperature of 3,000 degrees generated in the core of the missile tube.." and past the volleyball court scraped from the coarse sand and stone by the North Koreans and played on in the half-light of dawn.