Opposite Numbers

The series ends where the Cold War actually happened: at a negotiating table, with a sniper somewhere up on the rooftops. SALT 3 is being hammered out in Valletta, Malta, and Burnside does not want it to succeed. He thinks the treaty is a bad bargain. But he is not above sabotaging it. His method is to encourage a Soviet double agent to defect at the worst possible moment, hoping the embarrassment scuttles the talks. It is a deliberate act of wrecking dressed up as an operation, and Burnside carries it alone, the way he carries everything.

The plan is as cold as anything he has ever run, and it works about as well as such plans do. Word comes from a KGB informant that he wants to defect, and suddenly the operation has a heartbeat. Then the bullet arrives. Willie Caine, going about his work in the middle of the conference's security, is shot down by a sniper, and the episode stops being a manoeuvre and becomes a loss. Nothing about the treaty matters after that.

Written by Ian MacKintosh and directed by Peter Cregeen, first shown on 28 July 1980. Roy Marsden leads as Burnside, with Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine at the centre of the tragedy. Alan MacNaughtan, Jerome Willis, Dennis Burgess as 'C', David Robb, Michael Cashman, John Alkin, Bob Sherman and Sue Holderness complete the cast.

Caine's death is the moment the series has been heading toward without anyone saying so. The show never sentimentalises him, and the episode doesn't either. He is just gone, a man shot in the line of work while his boss plays chess with treaties. The silence after it is the longest thing in the episode. No funeral scene, no eulogy, just the fact of it. That's the show's way, and it's the right way.