an odd cry from his lips, and he turned to the boy for one last time.

Against a shimmering background of fire, Ansell saw MacConnachie’s face. It was covered in scratches and blood.

‘Tell me! Tell me! What – to – do!’

Ansell knew it wasn’t fear; tears ran down MacConnachie’s cheeks, but he wasn’t afraid. Ansell began to cry.

‘I don’t know!’

MacConnachie let out a grunt, then struck him in the face with the gun – not hard enough to knock him over, but painfully on the cheek-bone, a crude and yet refined blow. In shock, for an instant, Ansell saw clearly. There was thinner smoke, or paler smoke, behind MacConnachie. And something important was floating out of MacConnachie’s forehead.

‘Tell me!’

As MacConnachie raised the gun to strike again, Ansell refocused in the panic of a self-protective reflex, and saw the black dots wheeling in the sky beyond MacConnachie’s garish head.

‘There! Up there!’

But when MacConnachie turned, the writhing streaks of smoke were swirled together to shut off his view and Ansell let out a little cry of pain at the unfairness of it. Then the smudges whirled apart and the sky was visible again.

‘You see!’

‘They’re shite hawks, that’s all.’

‘There’s water! They circle over water!’

MacConnachie looked again with a growing sense of hope – to the birds, the ground, the birds, the ground. Forty yards. Maybe less. To the point over which the birds are circling. Can’t be the river. What is it? Who cares? Forty yards.

Ansell was shouting,

‘Come on, Mac! There’s water!’

‘Wait!’ He seized Ansell’s coat, restraining him, peering in the smoke for a sight of the chopper. He said firmly, ‘We wait.’

And then Ansell lowered his head, and MacConnachie knew that he had seen what MacConnachie himself had appreciated from the first: whatever the water, it lay on the far side of the raging left-hand wall. Ansell mourned.

‘Oh God, how can we reach it? How can we ever reach it?’

MacConnachie loosened his grip on Ansell’s coat and began absent-mindedly to stroke the back of Ansell’s head and neck.

‘We’ll reach it. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.’

His mind was on another problem.

The canopy of rushing smoke above their heads was getting thicker and thicker as the flames approached. It must be increasingly difficult, MacConnachie thought, for the pilot to keep track of us; if we wait until the very last and then run into the fire, they may lose us altogether. They might even think we’re dead. Of course if we don’t get through, we shall be. He watched the back wall of flames, waiting, calculating.