It was difficult to see clearly, with the gas mask on. Who would warn me? Voiced were muted: there were no echoes here.

Most of them spoke in Thai, a few in American English.

Who would warn me?

It kept repeating itself in my mind, but there was no answer yet. It was important for me to know, but apart from that, what I'd missed was now being brought home to me.

Another yellow plastic bag was zipped shut and taken away.

We were north of Chathaburi, in deep jungle. A light breeze was blowing, taking the fumes away to the east. Upwind we could take our masks off and exchange information, but they had to be worn in the vicinity of the wreckage itself. Rattakul, the Thai intelligence officer who'd brought me out here, said it was raw opium burning, though God knew what opium was doing on a flight from Singapore to Bangkok.

There was mess wherever I looked: smashed bulkheads, seats, torn panels, windows, and lengths of white wire, thousands of lengths, miles of it, buried or half-buried in the churned, scorched earth of the jungle. Some of the bits and pieces were painted with yellow-green inhibitor that the fire hadn't reached, and had serial numbers on them; when you pulled just one piece of wire you'd unearth a tiny electronic component, a miniature junction or relay or fuse. I didn't pull at any wire, I'd just seen one of the wreckage analysis team doing it. I was here to hunt inside the unburnt forward section.

Flight 306 had come down windmilling, someone told me, cutting a swathe through the heads of the palm trees and the tropical undergrowth like a spinning scythe, and then the rear section had broken away and taken fire and was still smouldering, sending a whitish stream of smoke into the emerald green undergrowth, eastwards on the breeze. The choppers had come down in the clearing to the west, upwind of the wreck; there'd been five of them here already when our own had brought us in more than an hour ago - two Red Cross, a military and two civilian machines. Work had been delayed because of the fumes: they'd sent one of the military aircraft up again to fetch the gas masks.

A young rescue worker, with no one to rescue, said there was a tiger half a mile to the east: he'd seen it as the chopper had come down. 'If there's a tiger there," the American analyst had said, 'then he's stoned out of his mind.'

Another yellow bag was zipped shut and lifted by two men; one of them let his end slip from his hands and drop; he got it up again and they trudged off through the mess of torn earth and leaves and ash and soot, their boots tripping on the webs of white wire everywhere.

Who mould warn me? I should have been in one of these yellow plastic bags now, but for the voice on the paging phone this morning. Who was she? At a guess, she must belong to whatever group had brought down Flight 306. It had been a strictly clandestine action, and anyone outside the group wouldn't have known what they were going to do.

There will be no survivors.

Even with the gas masks we couldn't shut out the bittersweet smell of cremated flesh; it was heavy on the air before we put the masks on, and got trapped inside. Sweat was running on me, stinging and itching under the hospital dressings, and my left wrist burned. I didn't know if there was anyone here, among these twenty or thirty men, who'd been sent to finish me off somehow; I wasn't in good shape and it worried me. But I couldn't have stayed away: the death of Lafarge had cut off the access I'd hoped to gain, and if there were a new thread to follow I'd find it here.

At the end of an hour I'd covered the first row of seats in the forward section, looking carefully at the debris for the body I was looking for. It was going to take time because the explosion - the American analyst had said yes, there'd been an explosion first - and the windmilling action and the final impact had turned the inside of the plane into a maelstrom, and the fire had smothered everything in ash and silver-grey soot. You didn't expect to find people still sitting in orderly rows: the cabin was tilted almost upside-down in the thick vegetation. It was worse in the rear section, where they were hunting for the black box, because of the fire.

Rattakul had presented his credentials to the chief of security here and got me cleared, and now he was covering me, watching everything as the rescue team worked alongside, their movements slow and their gloved hands gentle. There was no hurry now, and this was sacred ground.

I took a break. 'Find out, will you,' I asked Rattakul, 'who everyone is. I'd like to know.'

It was partly to get rid of him for a bit; he haunted me. But it would also be useful to know if there was anyone here who couldn't be accounted for; he'd have the authority to question them.

A chopper was taking off from the clearing, and the turbulence from its rotors stirred the smoke, swirling it in a vortex, and we put our masks on again. Silence came back when the machine had gone, an eerie silence disturbed by sounds muted by the echoeless jungle: men coughing inside their masks; the clink of metal as someone used a fire-axe to clear the debris; the cackling of a monkey high in the tropical vines.

Rattakul came back in half an hour. 'The Minister of Civil Aviation is here, and the chief of the National Transportation Safety Board, also the president of the airline. The rest are their staffs, the Red Cross workers, the rescue teams and the wreckage analysts.' He watched me wiping out the inside of the mask. 'I've asked all of them for their identity cards, all of them.'

'Thank you.' He was short, compact, impeccably dressed in the ubiquitous khaki tunic and slacks, and had the eyes of a man I'd rather count a friend than an enemy. 'Whenever a chopper arrives, check it out too, will you?'

I went back into the wreckage, helping one of the rescue team clear the debris from the seat area. At some time after the jet had come down the wind must have changed, because the whole of the front section was smothered under a pall of ash and soot, and as we picked gently at the shapes still hanging from the seat-belts or lying huddled or spreadeagled among the jungle leaves, we unearthed bright colours suddenly, the red of a child's T-shirt, the brash gilded cover of a paperback, the stripes of a silk tie. Sometimes - often, during the next hour - the rescue workers would stop and put their gloved hands together in brief prayer; one of them, working alongside me, just stopped moving and crouched there in the mess of soot and began shaking, and when I touched him he broke down completely and I led him away and left him with someone.

Then Rattakul came over, masked and beckoning, and I followed him through the swathe of vines, where men were working with machetes to clear them. When we could take off our masks Rattakul took me to talk to the American analyst, who was crouched over some kind of mess: that was all there was here, an assortment of different kinds of mess.

'Hi. It was a bomb.' He prodded fragments and pointed to things, one of them a man's head. 'He blew himself apart with it. Look at this, here's the central source of the blast, see these panels? His body's over there, no clothes on it, blew them away. No identification.'

I was tidal-breathing; we all were; in the past hours the reek of death had been growing stronger. 'What nationality would you say he was?'

'For me that's not so easy.' He looked up at Rattakul. 'I guess you'd have a closer idea.'

'I would say Burmese.' He crouched with us, narrowing his eyes as he looked at the head, the face; then he looked away and stood up.

'Why's it so undamaged?' I asked the American.

'It was the way the blast went, mostly into his body before it took off through those panels. His head was forced upwards and back from under the chin - see here, and this flap of skin.'

'Why would a Burmese want to blow up this plane?'

'Be a drug connection, I guess, not political. The opium should've been unshipped in Singapore, but maybe there was a check in progress, so they had to ferry it back.' He gave a shrug. 'Listen, most major crime in this area is drug-connected, and there's intense rivalry.'

I went back to the forward section and started work again. The thing was, how had anyone got a bomb past one of 'the most sophisticated security systems in the world'? It could have been sheet plastic, pressure-detonated.

In the heat of the mid-afternoon the mosquitoes came in, and the Red Cross people handed out citronelle. Later they brought sandwiches and coffee, and we sat on the cool fibrous earth clear of the wreckage to take a break. A light plane was circling, with big red letters on it: TV-2 Bangkok, banking sharply to get the camera angles it wanted. Choppers were leaving regularly now, returning regularly, taking the bodies out and bringing in supplies - parka jackets, torches, tools. Every time a machine landed, Rattakul went across to it as soon as the rotor began slowing; then he came back to tell me who had arrived. Four priests were now among us, a Catholic and three Buddhists in saffron robes. Incense blended with the other smell, the thick, overall, inescapable smell; the wind had died and the freight had burned out under the fire foam; the air was still and sounds seemed louder, and we spoke even more quietly.

Towards dusk they found the black box and brought it clear of the mess. It looked intact; it had been in the tail section but was fireproof. The American carried it to his chopper, tenderly; later he'd listen to the voices that had been silenced here among the trees as the big jet had come whirling through them from the sky, mortally crippled and carrying only the dying. It was easy to believe, as dusk turned to dark, that the spirits of the departed were stealing through the shadows thrown by the floodlights the rescue team had rigged - because we were tired now, and the stress of what we were doing had soaked us in our sweat; we itched all over because of that and the mosquitoes. Things had got worse, progressively, because the more ash and soot and debris we removed from the mess, the more we discovered of people, their faces, hands, feet, the colours of their clothes, the things that had belonged to them that had been so important, a nun's rosary, jade Buddhas with the price still on, a tennis racket -Kangaroo King.

Later the moon rose and the jungle held back a little, the shadows shifting as more lamps were rigged; the throb of the generator motors was constant, punctuated by the cries of birds and monkeys, restless and uneasy among the trees.

By midnight we were shivering, and the jackets were passed round. The night had taken on the semblance of a slide-lecture without sound as consciousness took pictures, sometimes out of sequence: a man flicking away a half-dead snake with a bamboo stick; a Red Cross worker standing perfectly still with tears streaking the soot-film on his face; a panel breaking away and a body falling to the jungle floor, groaning as the air was forced from its lungs - to be surrounded at once by a dozen of us, but that, yes, was all it was; just the air in its lungs.

By three in the morning we were working without any more pauses for breaks, because every time we took a rest we knew what we had to go back to, and it was easier to stay with it and get it over, though by now it seemed we'd been here all our lives, been born here just to do this, and would go on doing it, and never be done. Our eyes, fatigued and losing focus, had to keep on adjusting as someone moved a floodlight on its stand and the moon brightened and the landing lights of another helicopter flooded the scene and froze us in a silver-grey wash.

Then I found Lafarge.

He was flattened against a bulkhead that had been thrown thirty feet from the cabin section; his seat-belt had snapped and he'd been catapulted forward. It had taken an hour to clear the debris away from him and get a look at his face. I'd seen him at the airport and he was still recognizable, though his face was now ashen and his scalp had been ripped away. The briefcase was still chained to his wrist, and when I wiped the soot away I could see the initials D.J.L., heavily embossed in gold. His keys were in his pocket, and I tried the smallest of them first, opening the chain-lock and bringing the case away, the chain with it.

Rattakul took me across to the chief of the Thai police unit and I signed the necessary form, undertaking to return the under-mentioned passenger's personal effects, these being one leather briefcase and contents not herein identified.

Then we picked our way, Rattakul and I, across the web of white wires and the lamp-cables and the torn tree-roots to where our small military helicopter was standing.

'This is what you came for?' he asked me.

'Yes.'

It was all he said, and all I said. We were dog-tired, dirty and depressed, and my mind kept shifting focus - from the comfortable air-conditioned gate area where the nuns had gathered the young girl to them, her pale face upturned, and the Australian had gone running past me - Hey, Charlie, tell 'em to wait! - shifting focus to the grey and shapeless grave that we were leaving behind us in the jungle night.

As the machine lifted and the pilot opened his set and reported departure at 04.03, two thoughts came together in my mind. One was that Mariko Shoda hadn't ordered Flight 306 destroyed, because Lafarge, the chief source of her arms supplies, had been on board. So it had been someone else, and they might have ordered the bomber to carry out his mission for the same reason: that Lafarge had been on board, and on his way to meet Shoda.

So what worried me, as we headed south for Chathaburi, was that the briefcase that had been chained to Lafarge's wrist was now chained to my own.

10 VOICES.

'This side's the Flight Data Recorder, which does pretty well what you'd think.' The American wiped the bright orange casing with his soot-smudged handkerchief. His name was Bob Ryan. 'It records the time, speed, heading and altitude of the airplane and every movement it makes - climb, descent, turns, gravitational forces, acceleration, stuff like that. This side's the CVR - Cockpit Voice Recorder. It picks up from a mike in the flight-deck ceiling - every sound there is, radio speech and ordinary conversation between the crew.' He glanced at me with his red-rimmed eyes; it was now gone six in the morning and we still hadn't slept. Rattakul had talked to the chief analyst, a Thai, when we landed in Chathaburi, and arranged the meeting.

I wanted to know whether the crash of Flight 306 had in fact been 'drug-related', as the analyst had said, or not. It wasn't anything I could find out from the black box directly, but it might give me a lead.