Roper waits until the laughter fades: “All those war jokes Mickey used to tell, had ’em all in stitches? Mercenaries wearing strings of chaps’ ears round their necks and stuff? Remember?”
“Didn’t do him a lot of good, though, did it?” says the lord, further delighting his admirers.
Roper turns back to Colonel Emmanuel. “I told him, ‘Mickey,’ I said, ‘you’re pushing your luck.’ Last time I saw him was in Damascus. The Syrians loved him too much. Thought he was their medicine man, get ’em anything they needed. If they wanted to take out the moon, Mickey would get ’em the hardware to do it. They’d given him this great luxury apartment downtown, draped it with velvet curtains, no daylight anywhere—remember, Sandy?”
“Looked like a laying-out parlor for Moroccan figs,” says Langbourne, to the helpless mirth of all. And again Roper waits till all is quiet.
“You walked into that office from the sunny street, you were blind. Very serious heavies in the anteroom. Six or eight of them.” He waves a hand round the table. “Worse-looking than some of these chaps, if you can believe it.”
Emmanuel laughs heartily. Langbourne, playing the dude for them, lifts an eyebrow. Roper resumes:
“And Mickey at his desk, three telephones, dictating to a stupid secretary. ‘Mickey, don’t fool yourself,’ I warned him. ‘Today you’re an honored guest. Let ’em down, you’re a dead honored guest.’ Golden rule, back in those days: Never have an office. Soon as you’ve got an office, you’re a target. They bug you, read your papers, shake you out and if they stop loving you they know where to find you. Whole time we worked the markets, never had an office. Lived in lousy hotels—remember, Sands? Prague, Beirut, Tripoli, Havana, Saigon, Taipei, bloody Mogadishu? Remember, Wally?”
“Certainly do, Chief,” says a voice.
“Only time I could bear to read a book was when I was holed out in one of those places. Can’t stand the passivity as a rule. Ten minutes of a book, I’ve got to be up and doing. But out there, killing time in rotten cities, waiting for a deal, nothing else to do but culture. Somebody asked me the other day how I earned my first million. You were there, Sands. You know who I mean. ‘Sitting on my arse in Nowheresville,’ I told him. ‘You’re not paid for the deal. You’re paid for wasting your time.’”
“So what happened to Mickey?” Jonathan asks down the table.
Roper glances at the ceiling as if to say, Up there.
It is left to Langbourne to supply the punch line. “Hell, I never saw a body like it,” he says in a kind of innocent mystification. “They must have taken days over him. He’d been playing all ends against the middle, of course. Young lady in Tel Aviv he’d grown a bit too fond of. Some might say it served him right. Still, I thought they were a bit hard on him.”
Roper is standing up, stretching. “Whole thing’s a stag hunt,” he announces contentedly. “You trek, you wear yourself out. Things pull you down, trip you up, you press on. And one day you get a glimpse of what you’re after, and if you’re bloody lucky you get a shot at it. The right place. The right woman. The right company. Other chaps lie, dither, cheat, fiddle their expenses, crawl around. We do—and to hell with it! Good night, gang. Thanks, cook. Where’s the cook? Gone to bed. Wise chap.”
“Shall I tell you something really, really funny, Tommy?” Tabby inquired, as they bunked down for the night. “Something you’re going to really enjoy?”
“Go ahead,” said Jonathan hospitably.
“Well, you know the Yanks have got these AWACS down at Howard Air Base outside Panama City, for catching the drugs boys? Well, what they do is, they go up very, very high and watch all the little planes buzzing round the coca plantations over in Colombia. So what the Colombians do is, being crafty, they keep this permanent little bloke drinking coffee in a café opposite the airfield. And every time a Yankee AWACS goes up, this bloke’s on the blower to Colombia, tipping off the boys. I like that.”
It was another part of the jungle. They landed and the ground crew winched the helicopter into the trees, where a couple of old transport planes were parked under netting. The airstrip was cut alongside a stretch of river, so slender that until the last moment Jonathan was sure they would belly-flop into the rapids, but the metaled runway was long enough to take a jet. An army personnel carrier collected them. They passed a checkpoint and a notice saying BLASTING in English, though who would ever read and understand it was a mystery. The early sunlight made a jewel of every leaf. They crossed a sappers’ bridge and drove between boulders sixty feet high till they came to a natural amphitheater filled with jungle echoes and the sound of tumbling water. The curve of the hillside made a grandstand. From it you looked down into a bowl of grassland broken by patches of forest and a winding river, and embellished at the center with a film set of cinder-block houses and seemingly brand-new cars parked along the curb: a yellow Alfa, a green Mercedes, a white Cadillac. Flags flew from the flat rooftops, and as the breeze lifted them Jonathan saw that they were the flags of nations formally committed to the repression of the cocaine industry: the American Stars and Stripes, the British Union Jack, the black, red and gold of Germany and, rather quaintly, the white cross of Switzerland. Other flags had evidently been improvised for the occasion: DELTA, read one, DEA another, and, on a small white tower all its own, U.S. ARMY HQ.
Half a mile from the center of this mock town, set amid pampas grass and close to the river’s path, lay a mock military airfield with a crude runway, yellow wind sock and dapple-green control tower made of plywood. Carcasses of mothballed aircraft littered the runway. Jonathan recognized DC-3s, F-85s and F-94s. And along the river bank stood the airfield’s protection: vintage tanks and ancient armored personnel carriers painted olive drab and emblazoned with the American white star.
Shielding his eyes, Jonathan peered at the ridge overlooking the north side of the horseshoe. The control team was already assembling. Figures in white armbands and steel helmets were talking into handsets, peering through binoculars and studying maps. Among them. Jonathan made out Langbourne with his ponytail, wearing a flak jacket and jeans.
An incoming light aircraft skimmed low over the ridge on its way to land. No markings. The quality was beginning to arrive.
It’s hand-over day, thought Jonathan.
It’s the troops’ graduation ceremony before Roper collects.
It’s a turkey shoot, Tommy boy, Frisky had said, in the over-familiar manner that he had recently adopted.
It’s a firepower demo, Tabby had said, to show the Colombian boys what they’re getting for their you-know-what.
Even the handshakes had a finite quality. Standing at one end of the grandstand, Jonathan had a clear view of the ceremonials. A table of soft drinks had been set up, with ice in field containers, and as the VIPs arrived, Roper himself took them to the table. Then Emmanuel and Roper between them presented their honored guests to the senior trainers and, after more handshakes, led them to a row of folding khaki chairs set in the shade, where hosts and guests arranged themselves in a half-circle, talking self-consciously to each other in a way that statesmen exchange pleasantries at a photo opportunity.
But it was the other men, the men who sat out of focus in the shadows, who commanded the close observer’s attention. Their leader was a fat man with his knees apart and farmer’s hands curled on his fat thighs. Beside him sat a wiry old bullfighter, as thin as his companion was fat, with one side of his face scarred white as if it had been gored. And in the second row sat the hungry boys, trying to look assured, in over-oiled hair and watered leather boots, and Gucci bomber jackets and silk shirts and too much gold, and too much bulk inside the bomber jackets, and too much killing in their fraught, half-Indian faces.
But Jonathan is allowed no more time to scrutinize them. A twin-engined transport aircraft has appeared over the northern ridge. It is marked with a black cross, and Jonathan knows at once that today black crosses are the good guys and white stars the bad guys. Its side door opens, a stick
of parachutists blossoms against the pale sky, and Jonathan is rolling and spinning with them as his mind becomes a pageant of army memories from childhood till here. He is at parachute camp in Abingdon, making his first balloon jump and thinking that dying and getting divorced from Isabelle don’t have to be the same thing. He is on his first field patrol, crossing open country in Armagh, clutching his gun across his flak jacket and believing he is finally his father’s son.
Our paras land well. A second and a third stick join them. One team scurries from chute to chute, gathering up the equipment and supplies, while another team gives covering fire. For there is opposition. One of the tanks at the edge of the airfield is already shooting at the men—which is to say its barrel is belching flame, and buried charges are exploding around the paras as they hasten into the pampas grass for cover.
Then suddenly the tank is firing no more and will never fire again. The paras have taken it out. Its turret is askew, black smoke oozes from its interior, one of its tracks has snapped like a watch strap. In quick succession the remaining tanks get the same treatment. And after the tanks the parked aircraft are sent skidding and reeling across the runway until, buckled and quite dead, they can move no more.
Light anti-tank weapons, Jonathan is thinking; two to three hundred meters effective range; the favored weapon for killer patrols.
The valley splits again as defensive machine gun fire pours out of the buildings in a belated counterstrike. Simultaneously the yellow Alfa Romeo lurches to life and, remotely guided, races down the road in a bid to escape. Cowards! Chicken! Bastards! Why don’t you stay and fight? But the black crosses have their answer ready. From the pampas, firing on settings of ten and twenty bursts, the Vulcan machine guns drive streams of heavy tracer into the enemy positions, cutting through the concrete blocks, plugging them with so many holes that they resemble giant cheese graters. Simultaneously the Quads, in bursts of fifty, lift the Alfa clean off the road and hurl it into a coppice of dry trees, where it explodes and bursts into flames, setting light to the trees also.
But no sooner is this peril past than a new one besets our heroes! First the ground explodes, then the sky goes mad. But do not fear: once more our men are prepared! Drones—aerial targets—are the villains. The Vulcan’s six barrels can achieve an elevation of eighty degrees. They achieve it now. The Vulcan’s radar range finder is co-mounted, her ammunition load is two thousand shells, and she is firing them in bursts of a hundred at a time, so loudly that Jonathan has set his face in a grimace of pain as he presses his hands over his ears.
Belching smoke, the drones disintegrate and, like scraps of so much burning paper, tumble sedately into the jungle’s depths. On the grandstand it is time for Beluga caviar served from iced tins, and chilled coconut juice, and Panamanian Reserva rum, and single malt Scotch on the rocks. But no shampoo—not yet. The Chief plays long.
The truce is over. So is lunch. The town may finally be taken. From the pampas grass a brave platoon advances frontally on the hated colonialists’ buildings, shooting and drawing fire. But elsewhere, covered by the distraction, less conspicuous assaults are being launched. Waterborne troops with blackened faces are advancing down the river on inflatable dinghies barely visible among the reeds. Others, in special combat gear, are stealthily scaling the outside of the U.S. Army HQ. Suddenly, on a secret signal, both teams attack, tossing grenades through windows, leaping after them into the flames, emptying their automatic weapons. Seconds later, all remaining parked cars are immobilized or commandeered. On the rooftops, the hated flags of the oppressor are lowered and replaced by our own black cross. All is victory, all is triumph, our troops are supermen!
But wait! What is this? The battle is not yet won!
Attracted by the growl of a plane, Jonathan again glances up at the ridge, where the control team sits tensely over its maps and radios. A white jet aircraft—civilian, sparkling new, unmarked, twin-engined, two men clearly visible in the cockpit—skims over the hilltop, dives steeply and zooms low over the town. What is it doing here? Is it part of the show? Or is it the real Drug Enforcement Agency, come to watch the fun? Jonathan looks round for somebody to ask, but all eyes, like his, are fixed upon the plane, and everyone is as mystified as he is.
The jet departs, the town lies still, but on the ridge the controllers are still waiting. In the pampas grass also, Jonathan spots five men huddled in a fire group and recognizes the two lookalike American trainers among them.
The white jet is returning. It sweeps over the ridge, but this time it ignores the town and begins instead a rather vague ascent. Then from the pampas grass comes a furious, extended hiss, and the jet vanishes.
It does not break up, or shed a wing, or reel giddily into the jungle. There is the hiss, there is the explosion, there is the fireball that is so quickly over that Jonathan wonders whether he has seen it at all. And after that, there are the tiny sparkling embers of the aircraft’s skin, like golden raindrops, disappearing as they fall. The Stinger has done its work.
For a dreadful moment Jonathan really does believe that the show has ended with a human sacrifice. In the grandstand Roper and the distinguished guests are hugging and congratulating each other. Roper is popping Dom. Colonel Emmanuel is assisting him. Swinging round to the ridge, Jonathan sees delighted members of the control team congratulating each other also, wrestling hands, ruffling each other’s hair and slapping each other on the back, Langbourne among them. Only when he looks higher does he see two white puffs of parachute half a mile back in the jet’s flight path.
“Likee?” Roper inquired in his ear.
Like a nervous impresario, Roper was moving among the other spectators collecting opinions and congratulations.
“But who on earth were they?” Jonathan demanded, still reluctant to be mollified. “Those crazy pilots? What about the plane? That was millions of dollars of stuff!”
“Couple of clever Russkies. Hell-bent. Slipped down to Cartagena airport, pinched a jet, put her on automatic pilot second time round and bailed out. Hope the poor owner doesn’t want it back.”
“That’s outrageous!” Jonathan declared as his indignation gave way to laughter. “That’s the most disgraceful thing I ever heard!”
He was still laughing when he found himself caught in the cross-gaze of the two American trainers, who had just arrived from the valley by jeep. Their similarity was eerie: the same freckled smile, the same gingery hair and the same way of resting their hands on their hips while they studied him.
“You British, sir?” asked one.
“Not particularly,” said Jonathan pleasantly.
“You’re Thomas, aren’t you, sir?” said the second. “That Thomas Something or Something Thomas? Sir.”
“Something like that,” Jonathan agreed, more pleasantly still, but Tabby close beside him heard the undertow in his voice and placed a restraining hand discreetly on his arm. Which was unwise of Tabby, because in doing so he enabled the close observer to relieve him of a wad of American dollars nestling in the side pocket of his bush jacket.
Yet even at this gratifying moment, Jonathan cast an uneasy glance after the two Americans in Roper’s train. Disenchanted veterans? Settling a grudge with Uncle Sam? Then get yourselves a couple of disenchanted faces, he told them, and stop looking as if you ride first class and charge the company for your time.
Intercepted handwritten fax relayed to the Roper jet, marked MOST URGENT, from Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw in London, England, to Dicky Roper care of the SS Iron Pasha, Antigua, received 0920 hours and transmitted to the jet at 0928 hours by the Iron Pasha’s skipper, with a cover note apologizing if he had taken the wrong step. Sir Anthony’s handwriting bulbous and illiterate, with misspellings, underlinings and the occasional eighteenth-century flourish. The style telegraphic.
Dear Dicky,
Re our conversation two days ago, have discussed matter with Thames Authority an hour ago and have ascertained that offending information is documentary in your hand,
and irrifutable. Am also led to beleive that the late Dr. Law was used by unfriendly elements to squeeze out previous signatory in favor present incumbant. Thames are taking evasive action, suggest you do same.
In view of this crucial assistance, trust you will send another immediate ex gratia care of usual bank, to cover further essential expenses your urgent interest.
Best, Tony.
This intercept, which had not been passed to Enforcement, was surreptitiously obtained by Flynn from a source in Pure Intelligence sympathetic to his cause. In his chagrin following the death of Apostoll, Flynn had difficulty overcoming his native mistrust of the English. But after a half-bottle of ten-year-old Bushmills single malt, he felt strong enough to slip the document into his pocket and, having driven pretty much by instinct to the operations center, present it formally to Burr.
It was months since Jed had flown on a commercial flight, and at first she found the experience liberating, like riding on the top of a London bus after all those dreary taxi rides. I’m back in life, she thought; I’ve stepped out of the glass coach. But when she made a joke of this to Corkoran, who sat beside her as they headed for Miami, he sneered at her condescension. Which surprised as well as hurt her, because he had never been rude to her before.
And at Miami airport he was equally unpleasant, insisting that he pocket her passport while he went in search of a luggage trolley, then turning his back on her while he addressed two flaxen-haired men hanging around the departure desk for the onward flight to Antigua.
“Corky, who in heaven’s name are they?” she asked him when he returned.
“Friends of friends, my dear. They will be joining us on the Pasha.”
“Friends of whose friends?”
“Of the Chief ’s, actually.”
“Corky, they can’t possibly be! They’re absolute bruisers!”
“They’re additional protection, if you wish to know. The Chief has decided to raise the strength of the security to five.”