But as we arrived in camp, the shit hit the fan. We hadn’t even drawn up at the back of the accommodation block when Mal came running down the steps to meet us.

‘Geordie,’ he said, ‘I need to have a word.’

‘Walk this way, then.’

We went a few yards down the track into the woods, and as soon as we were out of earshot Mal said, ‘Somebody’s been tampering with number two laptop.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘They’ve killed the disk with the plans on it.’

‘Killed it?’

‘The contents have been wiped. Somebody must have tried to get into it without using the password.’

I stopped walking and turned to stare at Mal, who was barely visible in the dark. ‘Is it possible the person could have read the contents and then deliberately destroyed them?’

‘Not a chance.’ He sounded fairly confident. ‘They tried a wrong password, and that did it.’

Jesus, I was thinking. Are we compromised, or what?

‘If they’d got into the disk they wouldn’t have wiped it,’ Mal added. ‘They’d have left it intact to cover their traces.’

‘True. But who the hell was messing about in the office?’

My first instinct was to blame Toad, whose duty it was to maintain security. But of course he’d been with us in the city. In his absence, the two scalies, Steve and Terry, should have been in occupation.

‘When did this happen?’

‘It must have been some time this evening, while everyone was out working.’

‘So who was in the block?’

‘Only the scalies.’

‘What do they say about it?’

‘I haven’t asked them yet. I only just discovered it. I tried to boot up the laptop and found the floppy was still in the slot.’

‘Grip them, then.’

I was enraged. Trust those arseholes of signallers to foul up our entire enterprise.

I rushed into the building and dragged Terry off his pit. ‘Dozy wanker!’ I yelled. ‘Get into the ops room, NOW!’

No. 2 laptop, a Toshiba, stood open on the ops room table with its screen raised and the floppy disk still in the port on the right-hand side.

‘There’s been a major breach of security,’ I started. ‘Who used that computer last?’

I glared round, but one by one the lads shook their heads. None of them had been on the laptop that day, they declared. They’d been out of doors, on the ranges, then on a night-movement exercise.

‘Well then, how the fuck did that programme disk come to be in the port? It should be locked inside the filing cabinet. Everyone here knows that.’

Still there was silence.

Suddenly Rick said, ‘Wait a minute. There was the Colonel.’

‘The Colonel?’

‘Anna!’

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘You mean she came in here? What did she want?’

‘She said something about her phone having gone down. She asked if she could use ours.’

‘And you let her in here?’