His head was forward, as if guarding her, hiding her breasts and her hands and her lap. Away from her watch, looking through the porthole window, the visibility was stunning and the daylight spreading, the fields sharp and the roads clear and a city laid out as a model. She took three photographs quickly, and the camera slipped back into her bag, and she grinned at him and eased him back so that he was fully into his seat. Then she kissed him, behind the ear, a fast peck.

He was a pig on a lead, and he didn't have the strength to argue.

The vapour trails of the airliner were brilliantly clear five and a half miles above the ground surface. The first airliner of the day, and a lorry driver leaned from his cab to watch the slow progress of the puffy white scars in the blue skies. The lorry driver was delivering prefabricated walls for a factory development on the east side of Charkov. The factory development was an extension of 260,000 square feet, and when in production would manufacture one-piece cast turrets for the T-72 tank.

It was the evaluation of the boffins in British and American Intelligence who concerned themselves in such studies that the T-72 main battle tank was technically superior to those of the NATO forces. The factory, when enlarged, could greatly increase its output of the low silhouette turret, so low that the crews fighting in them could be no taller than 5' 4". To have a photograph of the tank turret factory extension would not be an Intelligence coup, but it would be useful. There were few coups in that painstaking world, but much that was useful. The size of the extension would enable the analysts to calculate the increased output of new T – 7 2 S.

The vapour trails bowled on. The lorry driver reached the building site gate.

At a military airfield west of Moscow, an Antonov transporter bearing the insignia of the Air Force of the Syrian Arab Republic was in the final stages of loading.