Faces

A masked gang hits an armoured security truck, and for once the case comes with a name attached. Carter's informant points at Tober, an ex-soldier, and the trail leads to a junk shop that is doing more business as a headquarters than as a shop. There the gang plans the next job, this one for a client who turns out to be a German political terrorist. It is a very seventies mixture, and the show handles it without blinking.

Then the Secret Service turns up, always a bad sign in this universe. They have a man inside the gang, and Regan is told, in that polite way that means it, to back off and let the operation run. But Regan being Regan, he goes ahead with the ambush anyway. The result is a collision between the squad's blunt methods and the careful, patient world of intelligence, and watching which one wins is the fun of the hour.

Colin Welland gives Tober the solid, dangerous presence the part needs, and Barry Stanton's Otto Schmidt is properly chilling as the man paying for the mayhem. William Brayne directs, handling the security van robbery and the junk shop showdown with the show's usual muscular efficiency. Murray Smith and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it.

Around them, the regulars do their work: Haskins keeping the wheels on, Major Carver and DC Jimmy Thorpe in support, with Keith Buckley, John Cording and Grahame Mallard filling out the gang and the edges. The ambush, when it comes, is worth the wait, a proper scrap among the tat and the packing cases. It is the kind of episode where the politics matter more than the punches, and the punches are still good. Regan's instinct is to act, whatever the spooks say, and the episode backs him, which is exactly the sort of thing that kept viewers on his side.