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could clearly see us even through the drift and making certain that none of us tried to drop off the sled, and of blinding us so that we were quite unable to see what he was doing, even to see whether he was watching us at all. It was frustrating, maddening. And, for good measure and to prevent any desperate attempt at escape in the occasionally blinding flurries of snow, he brought Margaret and Helene up into the cabin and bound their hands: they were the surety for our good conduct. That left eight of us on the tractor sled, Theodore Mahler and Marie LeGarde stretched out in the middle, three of us sitting on each side. Almost immediately after we had moved off and pulled a pair of tarpaulins over ourselves for what meagre shelter they could afford, Jackstraw leaned across and tapped me on the shoulder with something held in his hand. I reached up and took it from him. "Corazzini's wallet,1 he said softly. For all the chance of his being overheard by either Smallwood or Corazzini above the roar of the engine and the voice of the gale, he could have shouted out the words. "Fell from his pocket when Zagero knocked him down. He didn't see it go, but I didsat on top of it while Smallwood told us to squat in the snow." I stripped off my gloves, opened the wallet and examined its contents in the light of the torch Jackstraw had also passed acrossa torch with the beam carefully hooded and screened to prevent the slightest chink of light escaping from under the tarpaulin: at this time, Smallwood had not yet switched on the searchlight. The wallet provided us with that last proof of the thoroughness, the meticulous care with which these two men had provided themselves with false but utterly convincing identities: I knew that whatever Corazzini's name was it wasn't the one he had given himself, but, had I not known, the 'N.C." stamped on the hand-tooled morocco, the visiting cards with the inscribed 'Nicholas Corazzini' above the name and address of the Indiana head office of the Global Tractor Company, and the leather-backed fold of American Express cheques, each one already signed 'N. R. Corazzini' in its top left-hand corner, would have carried complete conviction. And, too late, the wallet also presented us, obliquely but beyond all doubt, with the reason for many things, ranging from the purpose of the crash-landing of the plane to the explanation of why I had been knocked on the head the night before last: inside the bill-fold compartment was the newspaper cutting which I had first found on the dead body of Colonel Harrison. nikon digital still camera I read it aloud, slowly, with infinite chagrin. The account was brief. That it concerned that dreadful disaster in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where a commuters' train had plunged through an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay, drowning dozens of the passengers aboard, I already knew from the quick glance I had had at the cutting in the plane. But, as I had also gathered in the plane, this was a follow-up story and the reporter wasted little time on the appalling details: his interest lay in another direction entirely. It was 'reliably reported', he said, that the train had been carrying an army courier: that he was one of the forty who had died: and that he had been carrying a 'super-secret guided missile mechanism'. That was all the cutting said, but it was enough, and more than enough. It didn't say whether the mechanism had been lost or not, it most certainly never even suggested that there was any connection between the presence of the mechanism aboard the train and the reasons for the crash. It didn't have to, the cheek-by-jowl contiguity of the two items made the reader's own horrifying conclusions inevitable. From the silence that stretched out after I had read out the last words, I knew that the others were lost in the same staggering speculations as myself. It was Jackstraw who finally broke this silence, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. "Well, we know now why you were knocked on the head." "Knocked on the head?" Zagero took him up. "What do you" "Night before last," I interrupted. "When I told you I'd walked into a lamp-post." I told them all about the finding of the cutting and its subsequent loss. "Would it have made all that difference even if you had read it?" Zagero asked. "I mean" "Of course it would!" My voice was harsh, savage almost, but the savagery was directed against myself, my own stupidity. "The fact of finding a cutting about a fatal crash which occurred in strange unexplained circumstances on the person of a man who had just died in a fatal crash in equally strange and unexplained circumstances would have made even me suspicious. When I heard from Hillcrest that something highly secret was being carried aboard the plane, the parallel would have been even more glaringly obvious, especially as the cutting was found on the manan army officerwho was almost

He went galumphing back.

affected my normally unimaginative mind to a degree quite unprecedented in my experience. Or maybe it was a combination of all three that triggered open the floodgates to the atavistic racial superstitions that lurk deep in the minds of all of us, the nameless dreads that can in a moment destroy the tissue veneer of our civilisation as if it had never been, and send the adrenalin pumping crazily into the bloodstream. However it was, I had only one thought in mind at that moment, no thought, rather, but an unreasoning blood-freezing certainty: that one of the dead pilots or the flight engineer had somehow risen from his seat and was walking back towards me. Even yet I can remember the frenzy of my wild, frantic hope that it wasn't the co-pilot, the man who had been sitting in the right-hand pilot's seat when the telescoping nose of the airliner had folded back on him, mangling him out of all human recognition. Heaven only knows how long I might have sat there, petrified in this superstitious horror, had the sound from the control cabin not repeated itself. But again I heard it, the same metallic scraping sound as someone moved around in the darkness among the tangled wreckage of the flight deck, and as the touch of an electric switch can turn a room from pitch darkness to the brightness of daylight, so this second sound served to recall me, in an instant, from the thrall of superstition and panic to the world of reality and reason, and I dropped swiftly to my knees behind the high padded back of the seat in front of me, for what little shelter it offered. My heart was still pounding, the hairs still stiff on the back of my neck, but I was a going concern again, my mind beginning to race under the impetus invariably provided by the need for self-preservation. And that self-preservation entered very acutely into it I did not for a moment doubt. A person who had killed three times to achieve her ends -1 had no doubt at all as to the identity of the person in the control cabin, only the stewardess had seen me leave for the planeand protect her secret wouldn't hesitate to kill a fourth. And she knew her secret was no longer a secret, not while I lived, I had stupidly made my suspicions plain to her. And not only was she ready to kill, but she had the means to killof the fact that she carried a gun and was murderously ready to use it I'd had grisly evidence in the past few minutes. Nor need she hesitate to use it: apart from the fact that falling snow had a peculiarly blanketing effect on all sound, the south canon power shot a digital camera wind would carry the crack of a pistol-shot away from the cabin. Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead menfive, including the co-pilotperhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle. It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin. I brought up my automaticthe thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mindand squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground.Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target I was presenting, I leaned far out of the window. Again I was lucky, again I had another brief sight of the figure, this time scurrying round the tip of the left wing before vanishing into the snow and the dark. Three seconds later I was on the ground myself. I landed awkwardly but picked myself up at once and skirted round the wing, pounding after the fleeing figure with all the speed I could muster in the hampering bulkiness of my furs. She was running straight back to the cabin, following the line of bamboo sticks, and I could both hear the thudding of feet in the frozen snow and see the wildly erratic swinging of a torch, the beam one moment pooling whitely on the ground beside the flying feet, the next reaching ahead to light up the bamboo line. She was moving swiftly, much more

To-day will your hangman be?"

first-class medical attention?" Miller said hopefully. "Looks that way, doesn't it?" Mallory smiled down at the still kneeling Miller. "But that wasn't what I meant at all. Come, gentlemen, we have some business to attend to." "Me, all I'm good for is blowin' up bridges and droppin' a handful of sand in engine bearin's," Miller announced. "Strategy and tactics are far beyond my simple mind. But I still think those characters down there are pickin' a very stupid way of comn?ttin' suicide. It would be a damned sight easier for all concerned if they just shot themselves." "I'm inclined to agree with you." Mallory settled himself more firmly behind the jumbled rocks in the mouth of the ravine that opened on the charred and smoking remains of the carob grove directly below and took another look at the Alpenkorps troops advancing in extended order up the steep, shelterless slope. "They're no children at this game. I bet they don't like it one little bit, either." "Then why the hell are they doin' it, boss?" "No option, probably. First off, this place can only be attacked frontally." Mallory smiled down at the little Greek lying between himself and Andrea. "Louki here chose the place well. It would require a long detour to attack from the rearand it would take them a week to advance through that devil's scrap-heap behind us. Secondly, it'll be sunset in a couple of hours, and they know they haven't a hope of getting us after it's dark. And finallyand I think this is more important than the other two reasons put togetherit's a hundred to one that the commandant in the town is being pretty severely prodded by his High Command. There's too much at stake, even in the one in a thousand chance of us getting at the guns. They can't afford to have Kheros evacuated under their noses, to lose" "Why not?" Miller interrupted. He gestured largely with his hands. "Just a lot of useless rocks "They can't afford to lose face with the Turks," Mallory went on patiently. "The strategic importance of these islands in the Sporades is negligible, but their political importance is tremendous. Adolf badly needs another ally in these parts. So be flies in Alpenkorps troops by the thousand and Stukas by the hundred, the best he hasand he needs them desperately on the Italian front. But you've got to convince your potential ally that you're a pretty safe bet before you can persuade him to give up his nice, safe seat on the fence and jump down on your side." "Very samsung l600 6mp digital camera interestin'," Miller observed. "So?" "So the Germans are going to have no compunction about thirty or forty of their best troops being cut into little pieces. It's no trouble at all when you're sitting behind a desk a thousand miles away. . . . Let 'em come another hundred yards or so closer. Louki and I will start from the middle and work out: you and Andrea start from the outside." "I don't like it, boss," Miller complained. "Don't think that I do either," Mallory said quietly. "Slaughtering men forced to do a suicidal job like this is not my idea of funor even of war. But if we don't get them, they get us." He broke off and pointed across the burnished sea to where Kheros lay peacefully on the hazed horizon, striking golden glints off the westering sun. "What do you think they would have us do, Dusty?" "I know, I know, boss." Miller stirred uncomfortably. "Don't rub it in." He pulled his woollen cap low over his forehead and stared bleakly down the slope. "How soon do the mass executions begin?" "Another hundred yards, I said." Mallory looked down the slope again towards the coast road and grinned suddenly, glad to change the topic. "Never saw telegraph poles shrink so suddenly before, Dusty." Miller studied the guns drawn up on the road behind the two trucks and cleared his throat. "I was only sayin' what Louki told me," he said defensively. "What Loiiki told you!" The little Greek was indignant. "Before God, Major, the Americano is full of lies!" "Ah, well, mebbe I was mistaken," Miller said magnanimously. He squinted again at the guns, forehead lined in puzzlement. "That first one's a mortar, I reckon. But what in the universe that other weird looking contraption can be" "Also a mortar," Mallory explained. "A five-barrelled job, and very nasty. The Nebelwerfer or Moanin' Minnie. Howls like all the lost souls in hell. Guaranteed to turn the knees to jelly, especially after nightfallbut it's stifi the other one you have to watch. A six-inch mortar, almost certainly using fragmentation bombsyou use a brush and shovel for clearing up afterwards." "That's right," Miller gowled. "Cheer us all up." But he was grateful to the New Zealander for trying to take their minds off what they had to do. "Why don't they use them?" "They will," Mallory assured