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Yi’s, were fixing the outboard
     motor to the wooden transom of the little rubber boat.
    With the motor safely in place, the crewmen filled up its tank from the fuel can, and then
     both climbed back into the fishing boat.
    ‘Are you ready?’ the skipper asked. As Yi nodded, he continued, ‘We’ll
     see you in about a week.’
    The two black-clad figures then scrambled over the side into the inflatable, and one of the
     other crewmen passed down Yi’s haversack. The outboard motor started at first pull, the engine barely audible. The inflatable eased away from the side of the fishing boat and turned
     east towards the coast of North Korea. The sea was calm, which was just as well, because the inflatable had a long way to go. About twenty miles to the drop-off point, and another fifteen
     back to where the fishing boat would then be waiting.
    Within seconds the small craft and its occupants were invisible against the darkness of the
     water.
    Algeria
    The loadmaster reappeared in the hold, checked that everyone there was wearing a headset, and
     then gave Richter a thumbs-up as he sat down.
    ‘We’re about sixty seconds from the first landing strip,’ the captain
     announced, his voice clear enough through the intercom. ‘We’ll do a low-level fly-by to check the surface, and if it looks OK we’ll land. Check your belts are tight and hold
     on.’
    The Hercules sank even lower, then lurched up slightly, levelling at about one hundred feet.
    In the cockpit, the captain had switched on the set of landing lights filtered for NVG use,
     and was peering through his night-vision glasses at the ground below the aircraft. If he was going to land here, he wanted to be absolutely sure he could do so safely and, even more
     important, take off again afterwards.
    From the cockpit, the desert surface looked firm, and though there were plenty of rocks and a
     few stunted shrubs evident, none of them looked big enough to do the aircraft any damage.
    ‘Good enough,’ the captain said. ‘Let’s put her down.’
    He discarded his NVGs, pulled the aircraft round in a tight turn tostarboard, climbed back up to three hundred feet and started what at an airfield would have been called the downwind leg.
    ‘Landing checks.’
    The co-pilot ran through the list, as the rumble of the main landing gear being lowered echoed
     through the hold, audible even over the howl of the engines. The Hercules banked steeply to starboard, the pilot holding the turn and easing it onto a final approach heading. He levelled the
     wings, switched on the normal landing lights and pulled the throttles back, and the C-130 sank gently towards the ground.
    The SAS troops rapidly checked their equipment and weapons. Then they held on tight.
    ‘Alpha and Bravo, check in,’ Dekker ordered, and was rewarded by seven voices
     responding on their secure radios in proper sequence. Richter was the odd man out, in more ways than one, and he found himself using the radio callsign ‘Spook’, simply because
     Dekker liked the sound of it.
    Touchdown was much bumpier than Richter had expected, the Hercules bouncing violently several
     times as its speed dropped away. Even before the aircraft came to rest, and the piercing whine of the engines had fallen to a more bearable level, the SAS troopers had unclipped their
     seatbelts and stood up. Two of them were already releasing the securing straps on the Land Rovers before the loadmaster stepped across to the ramp controls. The remaining five men, plus
     Richter and Dekker, headed to the rear of the hold and waited. The loadmaster studied the group, noting that all the men had their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine-guns cocked and held
     ready, then began lowering the ramp.
    Immediately, the lights in the hold extinguished, and they saw a slowly extending oblong open up
     in front of them, a dark blue sky studded with stars. Then the surface of the desert itself appeared. The moment the ramp grounded, the SAS troopers