‘If you would. But make it slowly this time. You’ve woken them up, now we want them to see you as well as hear you.’

‘Can do. One minute.’

Hanna lowered the microphone and I said, ‘That’s some air force. Where did you get them?’

‘They’re Phantoms from the US Navy base at Guantanamo. The Americans agreed to co-operate when they learned that half the passengers on that Boeing were American citizens.’

This time the fighters came in line astern and close together, all lights on, and flying at about five hundred miles an hour. They stooped in a shallow dive and I’ll swear they couldn’t have been more than thirty feet from the ground when they went over the airstrip. The night was filled with their noise.

Hanna said, ‘Is that public address amplifier switched on?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the captain.

The radio coughed. ‘What now, Superintendent?’

‘I’d like you to circle around for a while,’ said Hanna. ‘Just so you can be heard.’

‘You want us to orbit that airfield?’

‘That’s right.’

‘We can do that,’ said Auerbacher. ‘But not for long. We had to travel real fast to get down here in time and that uses fuel. We can stay up for maybe twenty minutes, but then we’ll have to put down at Benning.’

‘Damn!’ said Hanna softly. He raised his voice. ‘Can you detach a plane to land, refuel, and then come back?’

‘Sorry, no can do,’ said Auerbacher. ‘They don’t have our sort of juice at Benning.’ He paused. ‘Maybe I can stretch it to a half-hour, but that’s the limit.’

‘Thanks, Commander,’ said Hanna, and handed the microphone back to the radio operator.

I said, ‘If I was up there I’d have been scared witless.’

‘That was the intention,’ said Hanna dryly. ‘But by now they’ll have started to think.’ He took another microphone and tapped it. The taps were hugely magnified in the loudspeaker horns. He took a deep breath and raised the microphone to his lips. ‘This is Superintendent Hanna,’ the horns boomed. Echoes sounded from the hill. ‘You up there – Haslam, Philips – I want to talk to you.’

We listened to the echoes dying away but there was nothing else. ‘You can’t escape,’ he said. ‘The airfield is surrounded. The fighters have orders to shoot down any plane taking off from your airfield.’

Still nothing happened. Leotta said quietly, ‘Is that true? About the fighters?’

‘God, no!’ he said. ‘There’d be hell’s own row if American fighters started to knock civilian planes out of the sky.’ He nodded up towards the hill. ‘But will they realise that?’

Possibly not, I thought. That sudden assault from the sky would have been enough to jar loose anyone’s thought processes. My own brains seemed pretty loose in my head right then.

‘Haslam, Philips, I want to hear from you,’ the speakers blared. ‘I’ll give you sixty seconds.’