His eye watched me with the look of a wild creature assessing the presence of another, of a smaller creature who could offer no threat but might be considered prey. The ice along my spine was because of this look he was giving me, robbing me of my identity. I was nothing, his look told me, human. There was also the similarity between this man's head and the dog's, because as the dog had leapt for me I had buried the machete in it, splitting open the skull.

Sunlight, pale and slanting, was coming through one of the gaps in the wall, and around the man's feet were motes of fibre drifting, still airborne from the final movements of the kata, of Bassai. The place smelled of damp, of fungus, of the jungle, a raw blend of animal droppings, fresh blood and chlorophyl. The shadow of Colonel Cho leaned right across the earthen floor, thrown by the low-angled light, its head against the whitewashed wall.

I waited, still in the kneeling position. There was nothing else I could do.

The bombs must have blown the rest of the building down, and there'd been fire afterwards. One wall was missing altogether, and on that side the room was criss-crossed with fallen girders, plaster and timber-work, festooned with creeper. The flooring in here must have been burned away, and he'd cleared the ashes, dumping them into the jungle, taking great care: there was no trace of them. He'd also found some whitewash, and covered most of the blackening the fire had left on the walls. The roof was still in place, a tilted expanse of corrugated iron, almost intact. The door I'd entered by was behind me; it had been open, and 'Qui etes vous?'

Flicker along the nerves.

'Un ami, Sempai.'

Acknowledging his rank. I would have said go-dan.

' Veus etes arrive comment?

'By air,' I told him.

'En francais.'

So I went back to French; it was the tongue we were going to use, obviously. 'We made a moon drop,' I added.

'When?'

'Just before midnight, Colonel.'

He hadn't moved yet. I wasn't looking forward to that. His movements in the kata had been swift and powerful, and underneath his chilling calm he must have been enraged to find me here. This place was more than just his territory; it was his refuge, his only haven in a world where he was an outcast, because out there he would have had to see people flinch when they looked at him. In coming here I had violated his very soul.

'How did you get past the door?'

His French had the over-correctness of those who speak a foreign language learned formally and not through usage.

I could have lied, but he would have known. And on the wall was a faded picture of Funakoshi, and there was the ingrained principle in me that disallowed my lying to a sempai. But by God it was a risk.

'I had to kill one of them.'

He was silent for so long that I didn't think that any kind of change was taking place; he was standing perfectly still, as before. Then I saw that something was happening to his face; it was altering its shape, moment after moment, in a way I didn't immediately understand, until I saw that his eye was now almost hidden by his nose and the raised flesh of the scar. He'd been turning his head, and by such infinitesimal degrees that I hadn't noticed. He was now sighting me, rather than watching me, and the impression I had was that he'd withdrawn behind himself, to observe me from concealment.

This was my first intimation.

'Why?'

It was a whisper.

'It would have killed me.'

Silence. At the edge of my vision I saw another rat on the move, and heard its faint squeaking.

'Then I shall throw you to the others. But not yet.'

There was something coming into his voice, too, a different tone that I couldn't quite identify; but it reminded me of the way Fosdick had spoken to us when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt.

One of the dogs barked outside, the sound coining a deep chest, resonating; others took it up, excited by some-thing, an animal they'd sighted. I showed nothing.

'Who is your sensei?'

'Yamada.'

'In London.'

'Yes, Sempai.'

He was still sighting me in that strange way, as if hiding behind himself - this impression was quite clear; it wasn't my imagination. It was bringing a chill to the nerves: they were vulnerable at the moment because I hadn't law whether I was going to come down the wrong way and smash my legs on the building and then there'd been the Doberman with its jaws wide open and then the sickening business stopping the thing short and now there was Cho standing there and I was perfectly sure he meant what he'd said about throwing me to those bloody hounds.

'You may rise.'

'Os.' I made the ret and got to my feet, and then something screamed outside and the sound of the dogs took on a different note: it was a kill. He was listening to it, Cho. His maimed head lifting a fraction. But his eye was still sighting me.

'How many are there?'

I hesitated. 'Dogs?'

'No. There are seven dogs.' His eye disappeared as his head was turned, and then sighted me again with an expression of exaggerated cunning, aided by the set of L mouth. 'Six, now.' A flash of revelation came to me, then vanished before I could grasp it. 'How many men?

'Where, Colonel?'

'Out there. How big an army?'

Mother of God.

Yes, the same tone that had been in Fosdick's voice when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt with the burns from the electrodes still on him and that strange light in his eyes - the East Germans had put him through implemented interrogation for three weeks and it had driven him mad.

'I don't know,' I said carefully.

Because what could I say?'

I didn't know what they'd done to this man before they'd tried to kill him but it could have been that massive head injury alone that had affected his brain. He was probably as big a danger to me as anything out there in the jungle and if his mind were damaged he could blow up at any minute and come for me or call the dogs in. The only chance I might have could be in humouring him.

'But you must have seen it,' he said.

The army.

'I came down in moonlight, Colonel. All I could see was jungle.'

His face was changing again as he brought his head back by infinite degrees, and I noted this. The movement could be significant: his way of 'sighting', of seeming to hide behind himself, might indicate the times when his brain went out of phase. He was facing me now and asking normal questions again.

'Why did you come here by air?'

'I was told you like your privacy.'