The Quality of Mercy — D.G. Compton

The time: 1979

The place: a top-secret US Air Force base in the Cotswolds

The actors: carefully selected, healthy-living personnel

The missions: long-range reconnaissance flights

The problem: is there any connection between these flights and the growing menace of a strange blood-cancer disease that is spreading through the world? Several of the more intelligent and intuitive realise that there is. There are those who retain their integrity, and doing so, lose their lives; and there are those who live silently in their knowledge, condemned to lives of emotional death.