Prelude

      The port of Aden is located on a peninsula enclosing the eastern side of Bandar at-Tawahi, Aden’s harbour. It is bounded to the west and north-west by Yemen, to the north by the great desert known as the Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, to the east by Oman, and to the south by the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Though a centre of trade since the days of antiquity, and mentioned in the Bible, the city in 1964 looked less than appealing.

      Standing beside his wife, Miriam, on the deck of the P & O liner Himalaya, Norman Blakely, emigrating to Australia from Winchester, where he had taught ancient history at the renowned public school, realized he had known all these facts since his own school days. He certainly recognized the features he had often read about, yet he felt a certain disappointment at what he was seeing, not least the surprising modernity of the place.

      Even from this distance, beyond the many rowing boats and motor launches dotted about the mud-coloured waters of the harbour, Aden was no more than an untidy sprawl of white-painted stone tower buildings and warehouses surrounded by an ugly clutter of jibs and cranes, immense oil tanks and huge lights raised high on steel gantries – all hemmed in on two sides by the promontories of Jebel Shamsan (Aden) and Jebel Ihsan (Little Aden). Both of these short necks of bleached volcanic rock thrust out from, and were dominated by, an equally unattractive maritime mountain range that varied from 1000 to 2000 feet and was constantly shadowed by depressing grey clouds.

      Rising up the lower slopes of the mountains behind the town, about a mile beyond it, was a roughly triangular maze of low, white-painted buildings, which Norman assumed was the old commercial centre known as the Crater. What he did not know – even though he and the other passengers had received a leaflet gently warning them of the ‘occasional’ dangers of Aden – is that it was the home of the most dangerous anti-British terrorists in that troublesome country.

      ‘If the town’s as depressing as it looks from here,’ Norman said to Miriam, ‘we’ll take a taxi up to the Crater. It’s almost certainly less commercialized than Aden proper – and hopefully more like the real thing.’

      ‘That leaflet said not to wander too far from the port area,’ Miriam