by Gavin Lyall
‘Throttle about half an inch,’ I explained. ‘Mag switch to “prime”, you can see the fuel pressure drop, then pick up and you’re ready.’ I pointed to the port engine and the crewman outside nodded and aimed his extinguisher vaguely in that direction. I wondered if he’d remember to set it off if the engine actually did explode.
‘Mag switch to start …’ The propeller grunted around and I rammed up the mixture lever and it spun and howled. I set the run-up for 1400 revs, turned on the alternator, and did it all again with the second engine.
The crewman wandered dreamily away. Of course, he might really be suffering from disappointment.
We sat and watched the oil temperatures creep up; these engines are touchy about that. The radio came in on somebody from the aero club asking for takeoff. We watched the little aeroplane, half a mile away, run along and bounce into the air, wings rocking nervously. It wouldn’t hurt to stay on the ground an extra few knots, with upcurrents like that coming off the hot tarmac …
Then I glanced at Ken and knew he was filing away just the same idea, along with his guess at the horizontal visibility, his own estimate of the wind, and whatever was happening around the airfield: that Piper Colt in the circuit, an Olympic 727 taxiing in that would bring a fleet of vehicles rushing out at any minute, a Trident loading but unlikely to move until we were gone.
I got taxi clearance and pressure setting and trundled us slowly down past the aero club and the RAF hangars and around to the run-up point for runway 32. The club Piper was weaving and twitching low on the approach. I ran up both engines, tested the magnetos and feathering. The Piper floated past our nose, bounced and settled down. You could almost hear the pilot’s sigh of relief.
The tower said: ‘Whiskey Zulu, line up and hold.’
I drove on to the runway behind the Piper. It scurried along and turned off. The tower said: ‘Whiskey Zulu, clear to go.’
I looked over at Ken. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, face quite expressionless. I slumped and let go of the controls. ‘Okay. Take her to Wyoming.’
He looked and grinned slowly and sat up. His hands trembled a bit as he settled them on the controls, then pushed the throttles smoothly forwards and we were both home again.
We levelled out at 5,000 feet – I’d elected to fly beneath the airways so that I didn’t need to keep applying for changes of course whenever I wanted to dodge a bit of the cumulus cloud I expected ahead – and Ken steadied her on 155 knots indicated, then trimmed her to fly hands-off.
‘She feels like a real aeroplane,’ he said grudgingly. He didn’t like the controls of most private aircraft and particularly not American ones. ‘Bloody heavy on ailerons, though.’
I was sorting through the Aerad guide for the Beirut approach charts. ‘They’ve got servo tabs working in the opposite direction.’
He stared. ‘You mean they deliberately make her feel like a DC-3? Why?’
‘Ask Beech; I only work here.’
He made a growly noise and went back to frowning at the instruments. I found the Beirut pages and set 351 kilocycles on the second Automatic Direction Finder compass, although we wouldn’t pick up any signals just yet. The first ADF was already tuned to the Dhekelia beacon on Cyprus’s south coast, and a moment later we went slap over the middle of it. You could tell by the way the needle shivered, uncertain which way to turn, before spinning round to face backwards.
Neat. He’d worked out our exact amount of drift and compensated for it in about two minutes, not having touched an aeroplane in two years and this one never before. The coastline and its fringe of vivid pale green water crawled away behind; I switched from Nicosia approach to the Flight Information Region and said hello, and that was about as much as I needed to do for the next hundred miles.
Ken seemed happy enough without any chatter, so I unstrapped and went back to the girls. ‘All okay?’
Mitzi nodded, Eleanor grinned – a quick expression that showed a lot of white teeth. ‘Fine, fine. Is that our in-flight refreshment?’ And she nodded at the boxes stacked a few inches ahead of her knees.
‘Sorry, no.’ The Queen Air isn’t pressurised (which was why I was going around rather than over the weather) but we could talk by using stage voices. ‘I’m just carting it around for a bloke until he decides what to do with it.’
Mitzi asked: ‘The plane is for the hotel, then?’ She’d seen the Castle insignia on the tail.
‘The hotel group, yes. But they don’t mind.’
Eleanor said: ‘Something I wondered about: we’ve neither of us got visas for Lebanon. Does it matter?’
‘Not a bit. You can buy ’em before you reach the immigration desk. Costs a few dollars, that’s all.’ But that reminded me of something. I looked at my watch. ‘We’ll be starting our approach on Beirut in about half an hour. Anything you want, just stick your head through and shout. Not that we’ve got anything.’
Eleanor grinned again and I wriggled back through the doorway and into my seat. ‘How’re we doing?’
‘Just starting to get Beirut.’ Ken pointed at the second ADF compass; its needle was slopping about just left of centre.
I put on the earphones and got a faint steady tone, with every now and then the identification letters in morse: B-O-D. ‘That’s it. But something I thought of: what about your passport problem?’ Normally, each of us carried two passports so that we could keep the Israeli stamps on one, the Arab ones on the other. And the same sort of juggling with some African countries. But your second passport is only issued for a year, and Ken’s would be way out of date by now.
He shook his head. ‘No matter. My passport didn’t get stamped going into Israel and for some reason they didn’t bother going out. I’m clean.’
Well, perhaps that figured. I put a match to my pipe and the cockpit swirled with smoke.
Ken sniffed. ‘Now I know I’m really home. When’s your uncle going to sell the pig farm?’ He stretched and licked his lips. ‘You know – suddenly I miss not smoking. In jail it didn’t matter much. I’d never been in the coop before, so one more difference you didn’t notice. But in a cockpit … Maybe I’ll start again.’
‘More pilots lose their licences for heart trouble than anything else.’
‘Ahh, that’s just BOAC types overeating and worrying about the stock market.’ A tower of cumulus cloud stood straight ahead, its top well over 10,000. Ken turned us 30 degrees right and started the stopwatch hand of his watch. Then nodded over his shoulder. ‘That champagne—’
I looked quickly back, but though the little sliding door wasn’t shut, the girls obviously couldn’t hear.
‘That champagne: was the paperwork good?’
‘Very.’ I took the sheaf from my inside pocket. ‘Even this certificate of origin thing. God knows how they got that.’
‘Did you have the papers with you, that night? – when you got mugged but nothing taken?’
‘Yes.’ I touched the corner of my jaw reflectively.
‘Could it be they just wanted a look at the papers? To make sure you’d brought the cargo they were expecting?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘I mean, somebody is expecting that load, and they’ll have paid some in advance, maybe all. Had you thought they might start wondering if you’d sold it all for yourself and gone whoring on the proceeds?’
‘No, I hadn’t really thought that.’ Somehow, I just hadn’t had time.
‘Hadn’t you better start thinking it?’ he suggested gently. ‘I mean, besides sleeping with your back to the wall and your eyes open.’
‘It’s an idea. Only – why should anybody in Cyprus know what I was really carrying? It wasn’t for them and you wouldn’t exactly sling this sort of information around.’
He checked his watch; we’d been on our new heading just 90 seconds and the cloud was now behind the port wing. He turned us back 60 degrees to port and started the watch again. Another 90 seconds and a 30-degree turn and we’d be right back on our or
iginal track.
‘You got thumped around midnight, yes? But the news that Castle had gone bust and the aeroplane’s stuck at Cyprus must have come through about nine hours before. Plenty of time to catch a flight from Beirut. And they’d know exactly which hotel you’d be in.’
‘There’s that,’ I admitted.
We made the last turn of the dogleg. After a while, he said: ‘And you got hit on the chin. Couldn’t you see who did it? You can hardly get bopped on the chin from behind.’
‘You can if you try. He just spun me around and bomp. Anyway, it was dark. I just got the idea he was big and male.’
‘I’m glad it wasn’t small and female. But hell – nobody hits anybody on the chin except on TV.’
‘So maybe he was trying to break into TV work. Damn it all, it just happened.’
‘Well, next time try and remember to ask why.’
Chapter 13
As airports go, Nicosia is just a country way-station where you can usually get permission to back-track down the runway after landing. But Beirut’s something else. Not just the gateway to the East – or the West – but the main junction of the whole area. Where the north-bound routes from the Gulf and East Africa join the east-west traffic for Europe and the States and you may as well stop off for a few beers and a couple of barmaids between flights. Like what Cairo used to be and Damascus pretends it is.
So you slot yourself into a queue of big jets whose approach speeds are higher than your flat-out maximum and go hammering down the glidepath feeling their big snouts snuffling up your tail and praying the flaps won’t tear off. In over the permanent bonfire behind the docks where they burn the old crankcase oil from the taxis (at least that’s the story and I’ll believe anything about Beirut taxis); slicing across the width of the city towards the sea again, parallel to the sudden suburban hills like Beit Mery that the locals insist are mountains – and finally you float half the length of runway 21 waiting for the speed to unwind before you drop her on. I did the landing; Ken would have done it better.
The radio told us to park on a ramp way down by the eastern hangars, which left us a long way to walk but out of sight of the terminal building, which might just help.
We trudged across the warm concrete sniffing the sharp smell of burnt jet fuel that I still find vaguely exciting because to me it still means fast fighters and not airliners. That dates me. Eleanor asked innocently: ‘Is the champagne going to be all right in there?’
‘Should be,’ I said. ‘The aeroplane’s locked; anybody stealing stuff still has to get it through Customs … If we just forget about the problem, maybe it won’t go away.’
Ken switched hands on two pieces of Mitzi’s luggage – she had as much as the rest of us together – and let the girls get a few paces ahead, then said quietly: ‘When somebody finds out that aeroplane’s in town they’ll bust the course record for corrupting a Beirut Customs officer.’
‘Impossible. Anyway, they must have corrupted one in advance, just for this cargo. Then the handling agent brings it through when he knows that one’s on duty. I’m rather counting on that. The agent daren’t do anything until he’s got these papers, and even if the Customs bloke recognises the aircraft he won’t blow the whistle if he’s still hoping for a payoff. Given the usual foul-up in communications, I’d think we’ve got most of twenty-four hours.’
‘I hope you’re right. Incidentally, the copper in Nicosia’s going to be spitting blood, ours for choice, if we don’t turn up for the inquest.’
I shrugged as well as I could with two handfuls of luggage. ‘He didn’t subpoena us. Anyway, he’s only interested in Mitzi and maybe you.’
‘Turn off the extinguisher, Jack, I’ve stopped burning, huh?’ he said dryly. ‘Well, maybe we’ll be back in time anyhow.’
Ken took the girls through immigration and Customs while I made my number with control, paid my landing fees and generally sniffed the official air. It smelt calm. By half past five we were in a Ford Galaxie taxi going sonic down Khalde Boulevard. Beirut driving is terrible, but that’s all. It doesn’t get really aggressive, such as you find in Israel.
‘Where,’ Mitzi asked, ‘are we going to stay?’
I knew what Ken would say – and he did: ‘The St George. Is there anywhere else?’
‘For God’s sake come down to our price bracket. We’ll stay at some small place in the same area and do our drinking in the St George.’
But the girls decided they, at least, would go for the St George itself. I think they were both just a little apprehensive about Beirut and felt that in a big western hotel there’d be less chance of anybody throwing them across the crupper of his Cadillac and galloping them off across the burning sands.
Well, things do happen in Beirut, if not quite that.
Anyhow, we made sure the girls got rooms at the St George, then took the taxi on and found ourselves a small place on the Rue Ibn Sina, about five minutes’ walk away but no sea view. We had a rendezvous in the St George for half past six, and Ken and I made it with just twenty minutes to spare.
The St George bar has the air of a London club-room that got a bit bleached in the sun. Not that much light gets in past the long drapes; if you want to do anything as touristy as get tanned, you sit outside overlooking the swimming pool. Real Beirutis prefer the leather armchairs, the unhurried waiters, the elegant pale woodwork, the incense of diplomacy and big business.
A waiter took our order, gave an unspoken opinion that our clothes belonged out by the pool if not in it, drifted away.
I asked: ‘How did it feel - the aeroplane?’
‘Nice to be back. But a bit small for our business. What d’you think we should get once we’re back in the money?’
I shrugged. ‘I was thinking something like a Britten-Norman Islander. Second-hand, you can pick them up for around £30,000 complete.’
Ken made a sour-smell expression. ‘A third-level job? Little feeder-liner like that? Hell, it wouldn’t carry more than a ton.’ Our Scotches arrived and he stirred his ice with the plastic stick. ‘I’ll bet you can still get a DC-3 for ten thousand, four-ton payload and all.’
‘And all those hungry horses to feed.’ An Islander’s engines churn out just 600 horsepower total, a DC-3 Dakota gives 2,400 – and the fuel costs are about in proportion, let alone your servicing bills. I could get you a four-engined jetliner, 80 seats and no more than fifteen years old, for just over £100,000, but if you wanted to stay rich you’d use it as a garden ornament instead of the concrete gnomes. It’s when you start operating an aeroplane that you go broke.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we could stretch to a Skyvan with a ton-and-a-half.’
‘Still third-level,’ Ken grumbled.
‘Look, chum, third-level’s the only place for small operators these days. Short field, rough field, stuff. Everything bigger’s got jets flying into it. Nobody wants to ride in a DC-3 any more. That’s one reason you can get them for ten thousand.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about people.’
‘Nor strawberries nor monkeys?’
He finished his Scotch and clattered the ice in his glass. ‘No, hell, but … what else do we know?’
‘Jail?’
He took a deep breath and then nodded briefly and waved at the waiter leaning on the bar.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘what are we doing here?’
‘Helping Mitzi track down her father’s sword … Sounds like something out of a folk song, doesn’t it?’
‘What are we getting out of it?’
‘I liked Bruno – and he pretty well promised me a piece of the action once we got out.’
‘D’you think Mitzi accepts that as a debt against the estate? She might just say Thank You very prettily. Even if we find the bloody thing.’
‘Look, Roy, she needs me – us – a private aircraft, just as much as her father did. Nobody can walk aboard a scheduled flight carrying a three-foot sword; the Lebanese would nick it and swear it had been found
in Tyre or Sidon. It could just as well have been.’
‘Have you been swotting up the Crusades?’
‘What the hell d’you think Bruno and I talked about in jail? Women? Cold beer?’
‘Sorry.’ Then the girls arrived. Changed, of course, since women can’t unpack a suitcase without putting on something fresh, but in Eleanor’s case a good idea too: Beirut’s a bit stuffy about women in denim pants. Now she had on a plain white shirtwaister with a wide pleated skirt showing a nice pair of slim brown legs. I wondered if she was sun-tanned all over and then wondered why I wondered it.
The waiter took an order for a couple of vodka tonics and the girls said their rooms were fine and how were ours and we said fine, although in fact we’d only hired one and it was lousy, and finally Mitzi said: ‘We rang Mr Aziz—’
‘Did you?’ Ken was a bit surprised.
‘There are many pages of Aziz in the telephone book. I would not have found his number without the address.’
‘Big family,’ I said. ‘I thought I knew the name.’
Eleanor said: ‘They can’t all be one family. You should have seen how many.’
‘Better word would be a “clan”, like the Campbells or Stewarts. The clans run the country. Not so much Beirut, there’s too many foreigners and foreign money here, but certainly the rest.’
‘What did the man say?’ asked Ken.
Eleanor was still looking at me. ‘It sounds positively feudal.’
I said: ‘No, it’s all done through Parliament. In the Smiths’ district you get a Smith standing as Conservative candidate, a Smith for the Liberals, a Social-Democratic Smith and so on … the peasants get a free vote, and if that isn’t democracy, what is?’
Ken snapped: ‘What did he say?’
Mitzi said: ‘Come to a party.’
‘That’s Beirut,’ Ken groaned. ‘Where and when?’
‘At his house in … in Beit Mery. After dinner.’
‘I’m hungry,’ said Ken.
It was dark when we started up the hill, which was probably good for the girls’ nerves. But I knew what sort of drop there was beyond the low walls on the outside of the hairpin bends, and the taxi driver was – as usual – practising for his fighter-pilot badge. From the way Ken talked between clenched teeth, he remembered those roads, too.