Heading up the Channel, down below, was a powerful cabin cruiser. It seemed to be making for a small port on the Somerset coast. I thought it was an odd time of year for a luxury cabin cruiser to be out, but then it went from my mind as Huntspill Head nuclear power station appeared in view, hunched menacingly on the shore. It looked formidable and oppressive. Its four round domes and square vacuum chambers, in pale grey concrete, rose from the ground looking like the tomb of a Martian emperor. I wondered what was going on in there, whether it had already begun, if we were too late to do anything about it and were going down to certain death – and that didn’t worry me. What did worry me was a girl in London, a pissed-off girl whose boyfriend had stood her up for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, who had hung up on him when he’d called to apologize and tried to tell her that she had to get her ass out of London. I wasn’t going to let that crazy gorgeous girl get her lungs full of plutonium, and her thyroids full of iodine and her stomach full of gamma rays. I thought of a fanatic young black student, and a weak civil servant, and an anonymous zealot who dreamed of a free Ireland. I checked the magazine of my Beretta, took the safety catch off, switched to automatic fire, nodded to Quoit to follow me, and leapt to the ground before the skids of the chopper had even settled.

A figure came hurrying across to greet us. It was the man I had met only a few months ago, when I had come to see a nervous lecturer, Doug Yeodall, who was now dead, assure the world’s press that a nuclear power station could never blow up. Ron Tenney held out his hand. ‘Hi there, did you have a good flight?’ he said with his soft voice that had a hint of an Irish brogue.

I nodded back and gave his hand a firm shake, which were all the pleasantries I had time for. ‘Tsenong and Whalley,’ I said, ‘where are they?’

‘Why, what’s up?’

‘Do you know where they are?’

‘Sure I do. They’re at the number three reactor face.’

‘At the reactor face?’

‘Carrying out support point inspections.’

‘Is there a problem with your support points?’

‘No, not that I know of.’

‘Whalley’s meant to be on holiday in the Seychelles. What’s so special about your support points that he left his wife, without taking the time to tell her, and flew straight back to England to come and have a look at them?’

‘I don’t understand what you mean?’