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mines,” said the pilot. “If it weren’t for them, the whole damned country could be evacuated and given back to the mob that lived here in the first place. There’s the town, by the way.”
    Manuel Ortega raised his eyes and saw a gray-yellow plain, diffuse and rugged and endless. In the middle of it he could see a group of square boxlike buildings, looking as if someone had happened to drop a collection of white-painted building bricks and then had not bothered to pick them up again. Diagonally down toward the town ran a dead straight gray-white ribbon which must be a highway. When they got nearer he saw that there was some sort of jumble of buildings around the tall white structures, and also a slope with villas and some tentative, dusty grass.
    The helicopter droned in a wide curve around the western outskirts of the town, swept over the roofs of a row of large gray barracks and sank toward the ground.
    The pilot let his machine down slowly and with infinite care, swearing all the time.
    “If the Bolshies want to take this bloody country from us, then they’ll have to use parachute troops. No sane person can land here.”
    “What Bolshies?”
    “Well—the Bolshies,” said the pilot, vaguely. “Down there.”
    He made an indefinite gesture toward the hazy mountains far away in the south.
    “The government in the country you’re alluding to was not Communist,” said Manuel Ortega pedantically. “At the most it was Socialist and democratic. Moreover, it fell, as you perhaps know, three weeks ago and was replaced by a right-wing one.”
    “Thank God for that,” said the pilot.
    At last the helicopter was standing on the ground. The pilot switched off and the shrill whistling of the blades above was heard as the engine gradually turned over more and more slowly. He climbed out of his seat, opened the hatch, and jumped down to the ground, stretching out his hand to the woman. She took it and jumped down lightly. Manuel Ortega noted that she smiled swiftly and automatically as her eyes met the pilot’s. He himself picked up his briefcase and raincoat, put one hand on the pilot’s shoulders, and jumped. His right leg gave way under him and he nearly fell headlong.
    As he looked around he felt the hot, uneven asphalt burn through his thin soles. The heat was unbearable. He was already soaked through with sweat.
    The airfield was very small and surrounded by a double row of barbed-wire fence. The ground was covered with coarse gravel and the buckled asphalt runway was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards long. At the far end of it lay the burnt-out wreck of a small aircraft which had crash-landed.
    “Yes,” said the helicopter pilot. “That was their Piper Cub. Now they’ve got only the Arado left.”
    In one corner of the enclosure was an arched corrugated shed. In front of it stood a gray sedan. It had evidently beenwaiting for them; before the rotor blades had stopped whistling, the car began to roll across the bumpy field. It stopped, and a tall man in a crumpled striped linen suit got out.
    “My name is Frankenheimer,” he said.
    He put his hand in his pocket and produced his identity card. Manuel Ortega recognized his brother-in-law’s flourishing signature.
    The wail of a siren rose from behind the iron shed, and a white jeep swung onto the field. The man in the linen suit glanced at it and said: “Our car is a good one, though it’s small. I and my colleagues drove down in it. I suggest that you use it while you’re here.” Then he said: “I think so. In fact, yes.”
    The car was French, a CV-2 type Citroën. Manuel had seen some like it in Sweden.
    The jeep braked a few yards away from them, and two police officers in white uniforms climbed out of it. The one who had the most stripes on his sleeve saluted and said: “Lieutenant Brown of the Federal Police at your service. I bid you welcome. Unfortunately neither General Gami nor Colonel Orbal was able to meet you personally. They have asked us