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Cayenne, they had seven.
     
    Zero Four was still burning at the end of the runway at Cayenne when One Eight touched down and raised a welter of spray as it dashed through the puddles with both pilots applying the brakes and reversing the propellers, shortening the landing run-out well clear of the wreck of the other Atlantique. Once halted, they sat for several minutes watching the flames consume Poseidon Zero Four .
    “Là, mais la grâce de Dieu vont I …there but for the grace of God go I” declared her captain with other crew members crowding into the cabin to crouch and peer through the windscreen at the conflagration, which until a short time before had been an identical aircraft to their own.
    The crew of Zero Four stood over by the military end of the airfield, a fenced off cluster of huts and tarmac ramp. They had escaped death or injury but showed no outward sign of relief as they watched their aircraft’s death throes.
    Zero Four lay on its starboard side, upon the ruined wing and collapsed landing gear. The port wingtip was visible in the light of the flames when the thick swirling smoke was not clinging to it like a shroud.
    The best efforts of the Cayenne Airport fire service could never extinguish those flames given the equipment they had. A single tender, such as theirs, was judged sufficient to carry out a rescue of the passengers and the crew of an aircraft, but a minimum of three tenders would have been required to save the airframe and engines from further damage.
    The raised port wingtip first sagged as the main spar buckled in the intense heat, and then launched upwards and outwards, cartwheeling into the jungle a hundred metres away as the port wing tank finally exploded in a spectacular display of petrochemical based violence that any Hollywood SFX technician would be proud of.
     
    Bombing up Poseidon One Eight and hot refuelling the aircraft, the refilling of the fuel tanks without first shutting down the engines, took place even closer to the terminal than it had before. If the airport manager had any fresh objections to these further breaches of regulations he kept them to himself.
    With six depth charges and four Mk-46 torpedoes in the bomb bay, virtually all the remaining available ordnance, plus two active and five passive sonar buoys in the belly launch tubes, One Eight taxied further down the tarmac, disappearing into the acrid black smoke before pivoting to face back up the runway.
    The enshrouding smoke was whipped away by the twin Rolls Royce Tyne turboprop engines as they ran up.
    Two hundred metres behind, the flames flared, fanned by the prop wash and sending myriad sparks gusting away.
    With two hundred metres less runway to play with, full tanks and a full bomb bay, the brakes remained on until the Atlantiques nose dipped, like a bull pawing at the earth. The brakes were released and the Atlantique rolled forward, the engines temperature gauges right on the limit of tolerance but they could not reduce the rpm. One Eight stayed stubbornly reluctant to leave terra firma until well past the point of no return, committing them to the take-off and only then reluctantly, did the nosewheel become unglued.
    Poseidon One Eight left the tarmac perilously close to the runway’s end and raised its undercarriage immediately, roaring just above the trees before banking left across sleeping Cayenne, and out over the Atlantic once more.
     
    A satellite’s life is dictated by its fuel supply at the time of having stabilised at its correct orbit. Ten to fifteen years of use remains before it is boosted away from earth into a scrapyard orbit, three hundred kilometres further, out once only three months’ worth of normal station keeping fuel is remaining.  and a commercial satellites fuel use is mainly spent on north-south station keeping in geostationary orbit.
    The small communications satellite lofted towards geosynchronous orbit above the Volga River by the Italian Vega rocket carried a