The inside of the plane was dark and roomy and as cool as a cathedral. The seats had been removed, and perforated green shelves like meccano had been fitted to the walls. Carcasses of pig and guinea-fowl hung from the roof. The rest of the cargo was stowed in the gangway, starting from the tail-end, which gave Jerry no good feeling about taking off, and consisted of fruit and vegetables and the gunny bags Jerry had spotted in the army trucks, marked “GRAIN,” “RICE,” “FLOUR,” in letters large enough for the most illiterate narcotics agent to read. But the sticky smell of yeast and molasses that already filled the hold required no labels at all.
Some of the bags had been arranged in a ring, to make a sitting area for Jerry’s fellow passengers. Chief of these were two austere Chinese men, dressed very poorly in grey, and from their sameness and their demure superiority Jerry at once inferred an expertise of some kind; he remembered explosiveswallahs and pianists he had occasionally ferried thanklessly in and out of badland. Next to them, but respectfully apart, four hillsmen armed to the teeth sat smoking and cropping from their rice-bowls. Jerry guessed Meo or one of the Shan tribes from the northern borders where Charlie Marshall’s father had his army, and he guessed from their ease that they were part of the permanent help.
In a separate class altogether sat the quality: the colonel of artillery himself, who had thoughtfully supplied the transport and the troop escort, and his companion, a senior officer of customs, without whom nothing could have been achieved. They reclined regally in the gangway on chairs specially provided, watching proudly while the loading continued, and they wore their best uniforms, as the ceremony demanded.
There was one other member of the party and he lurked alone on top of the cases in the tail, head almost against the roof, and it was not possible to make him out in any detail. He sat with a bottle of whisky to himself, and even a glass to himself. He wore a Fidel Castro hat and a full beard. Gold links glittered on his dark arms, known in those days (to all but those who wore them) as C.I.A. bracelets, on the happy assumption that a man ditched in hostile country could buy his way to safety by doling out a link at a time. But his eyes, as they watched Jerry along the well-oiled barrel of an AK-47 automatic rifle, had a fixed brightness.
He was covering me through the nose-cone, Jerry thought. He had a bead on me from the moment I left the hut.
The two Chinese were cooks, he decided in a moment of inspiration—“cooks” being the underworld nickname for chemists. Keller had said that the Air Opium lines had taken to bringing in the raw base and refining it in Phnom Penh, but were having hell’s own job persuading the cooks to come and work in siege conditions.
“Hey, you! Voltaire!”
Jerry hurried forward to the edge of the hold. Looking down, he saw the old peasant couple standing at the bottom of the ladder and Charlie Marshall trying to wrench the pig from them while he shoved the old woman up the steel ladder.
“When she come up, you gotta reach out and grab her, hear me?” he called, holding the pig in his arms. “She fall down and break her arse, we gotta whole lot more trouble with the coons. You some crazy narcotics hero, Voltaire?”
“No.”
“Well, you grab hold of her completely, hear me?”
She started up the ladder. When she had gone a few rungs, she began croaking and Charlie Marshall contrived to get the pig under his arm while he gave her a sharp crack on the rump and screamed at her in Chinese. The husband scurried up after her, and Jerry hauled them both to safety.
Finally Charlie Marshall’s own clown’s head appeared through the cone, and though it was swamped by the hat, Jerry had his first glimpse of the face beneath: skeletal and brown, with sleepy Chinese eyes and a big French mouth which twisted all ways when he squawked. He shoved the pig through, Jerry grabbed it and carted it, screaming and wriggling, to the old peasants. Then Charlie hauled his own fleshless frame aboard, like a spider climbing out of a drain. At once the officer of customs and the colonel of artillery stood up, brushed the seats of their uniforms, and progressed swiftly along the gangway to the shadowed man in the Castro hat squatting on the packing-cases. Reaching him, they waited respectfully, like sidesmen taking the offertory to the altar.
The link bracelets flashed, an arm reached down, once, twice, and a devout silence descended while the two men carefully counted a lot of banknotes and everybody watched. In rough unison, they returned to the top of the ladder where Charlie Marshall waited with the manifest. The officer of customs signed it, the colonel of artillery looked on approvingly; then they both saluted and disappeared down the ladder. The nose-cone juddered to an almost closed position, Charlie Marshall gave it a kick, flung some matting across the gap, and clambered quickly over the packing-cases to an inside stairway leading to the cabin.
Jerry clambered after him and, having settled himself into the co-pilot’s seat, silently totted up his blessings: We’re about five hundred tons overweight. We’re leaking oil. We’re carrying an armed bodyguard. We’re forbidden to take off. We’re forbidden to land, and Phnom Penh airport’s probably got a hole in it the size of Buckinghamshire. We have an hour and a half of Khmer Rouge between us and salvation, and if anybody turns sour on us at the other end, ace operator Westerby is caught with his knickers round his ankles and about two hundred gunny bags of opium base in his arms.
“You know how to fly this thing?” Charlie Marshall yelled as he struck at a row of mildewed switches. “You some kinda great flying hero, Voltaire?”
“I hate it all.”
“Me too.”
Seizing a swatter, Charlie Marshall flung himself upon a huge bottle-fly that was buzzing round the windscreen, then started the engines one by one, until the whole dreadful plane was heaving and rattling like a London bus on its last journey home up Clapham Hill. The radio crackled and Charlie Marshall took time off to give an obscene instruction to the control tower, first in Khmer and afterwards, in the best aviation tradition, in English. Heading for the far end of the runway, they passed a couple of gun emplacements and for a moment Jerry expected an over-zealous crew to loose off at the fuselage, till in gratitude he remembered the army colonel and his lorries and his pay-off.
Another bottle-fly appeared and this time Jerry took possession of the fly-swatter. The plane seemed to be gathering no speed at all, but half the instruments read zero, so he couldn’t be sure. The din of the wheels on the runway seemed louder than the engines. Jerry remembered old Sambo’s chauffeur driving him back to school: the slow, inevitable progress down the Western bypass toward Slough and finally Eton.
A couple of the hillsmen had come forward to see the fun and were laughing their heads off. A clump of palm trees came hopping toward them, but the plane kept its feet firmly on the ground. Charlie Marshall absently pulled back the stick and retracted the landing-gear. Uncertain whether the nose had really lifted, Jerry thought of school again, and competing in the long jump, and recalled the same sensation of not rising, yet ceasing to be on the earth.
He felt the jolt and heard the swish of leaves as the underbelly cropped the trees. Charlie Marshall was screaming at the plane to pull itself into the damn air, and for an age they made no height at all but hung and wheezed a few feet above a winding road which climbed inexorably toward a ridge of hills. Charlie Marshall was lighting a cigarette, so Jerry held the wheel in front of him and felt the live kick of the rudder. Taking back the controls, Charlie Marshall put the plane into a slow bank toward the lowest point of the range. He held the turn, crested the range, and went on to make a complete circle. As they looked down on the brown roof-tops and the river and the airport, Jerry reckoned they had an altitude of a thousand feet. As far as Charlie Marshall was concerned, that was a comfortable cruising height, for now at last he took his hat off and, with the air of a man who had done a good job well, treated himself to a large glass of Scotch from the bottle at his feet. Below them dusk was gathering, and the brown earth was fading softly into mauve.
“Thanks,” said
Jerry, accepting the bottle. “Yes, I think I might.”
Jerry kicked off with a little small talk—if it is possible to talk small while you are shouting at the top of your voice.
“Khmer Rouge just blew up the airport ammunition dump!” he bellowed. “It’s closed for landing and take-off.”
“They did?” For the first time since Jerry had met him, Charlie Marshall seemed both pleased and impressed.
“They say you and Ricardo were great buddies.”
“We bomb everything. We killed half the human race already. We see more dead people than alive people. Plain of Jars, Danang—we’re such big damn heroes that when we die Jesus Christ going to come down personally with a chopper and fish us out the jungle.”
“They tell me Ric was a great guy for business!”
“Sure! He the greatest! Know how many offshore companies we got, me and Ricardo? Six. We got foundations in Liechtenstein, corporations in Geneva, we got a bank manager in the Dutch Antilles, lawyers, Jesus. Know how much money I got?” He slapped his back pocket. “Three hundred U.S. exactly. Charlie Marshall and Ricardo killed half the whole damn human race together. Nobody give us no money. My father killed the other half and he got plenty plenty money. Ricardo, he always got these crazy schemes always. Shell cases. Jesus. We’re going to pay the coons to collect up all the shell cases in Asia, sell ’em for the next war!”
The nose dropped and he hauled it up again with a foul French oath. “Latex! We gotta steal all the latex out of Kampong Cham! We fly to Kampong Cham, we got big choppers, red crosses. So what do we do? We bring out the damn wounded. Hold still, you crazy bastard, hear me?” He was talking to the plane again. In the nose-cone, Jerry noticed a long line of bullet-holes which had not been very well patched. Tear here, he thought absurdly.
“Human hair. We were gonna be millionaires out of hair. All the coon girls in the villages got to grow long hair and we’re going to cut it off and fly it to Bangkok for wigs.”
“Who was it paid Ricardo’s debts so that he could fly for Indocharter?”
“Nobody!”
“Somebody told me it was Drake Ko.”
“I never heard of Drake Ko. On my deathbed, I tell my mother, my father: bastard Charlie, the General’s boy, he never heard of Drake Ko in his life.”
“What did Ricardo do for Ko that was so special that Ko paid all his debts?”
Charlie Marshall drank some whisky straight from the bottle, then handed it to Jerry. His fleshless hands shook wildly whenever he took them off the stick, and his nose ran all the while. Jerry wondered how many pipes a day he was up to. He had once known a pied-noir hotelier in Luang Prabang who needed sixty to do a good day’s work. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, he thought.
“Americans always in a hurry,” Charlie Marshall complained, shaking his head. “Know why we gotta take this stuff to Phnom Penh now? Everybody impatient. Everybody want quick-shot these days. Nobody got time to smoke. Everybody got to turn on quick. You wanta kill the human race, you gotta take time, hear me?”
Jerry tried again. One of the four engines had given up, but another had developed a howl as if from a broken silencer, so that he had to yell even louder than before.
“What did Ricardo do for all that money?” he repeated.
“Listen, Voltaire, okay? I don’t like politics, I’m just a simple opium smuggler, okay? You like politics you go back below and talk to those crazy Shans. ‘You can’t eat politics. You can’t screw politics. You can’t smoke politics.’ He tell my father.”
“Who did?”
“Drake Ko tell my father, my father tell me, and me—I tell the whole damn human race! Drake Ko some philosopher, hear me?”
For its own reasons, the plane had begun falling steadily till it was a couple of hundred feet above the paddies. They saw a village, and cooking fires burning, and figures running wildly toward the trees, and Jerry wondered seriously whether Charlie Marshall had noticed. But at the last minute, like a patient jockey, he hauled and leaned and finally got the horse’s head up, and they both had some more Scotch.
“You know him well?”
“Who?”
“Ko.”
“I never met him in my life, Voltaire. You wanna talk about Drake Ko, you go ask my father. He cut your throat.”
“How about Tiu? Tell me, who’s the couple with the pig?” Jerry yelled, to keep the conversation going while Charlie took back the bottle for another pull.
“Haw people, down from Chiang Mai. They worried about their lousy son in Phnom Penh. They think he too damn hungry, so they take him a pig.”
“So how about Tiu?”
“I never heard of Mr. Tiu, hear me?”
“Ricardo was seen up in Chiang Mai three months ago,” Jerry yelled.
“Yeah—well, Ric’s a damn fool,” said Charlie Marshall with feeling. “Ric’s gotta keep his ass out of Chiang Mai or somebody shoot it right off. Anybody lying dead they gotta keep their damn mouth shut, hear me? I say to him, ‘Ric, you my partner. Keep your damn mouth shut and your ass out of sight or certain people get personally pretty mad with you.’”
The plane entered a rain cloud and at once began losing height fast. Rain raced over the iron deck and down the insides of the windows. Charlie Marshall flicked some switches up and down; there was a bleeping from the controls panel and a couple of pin-lights came on, which no amount of swearing could put out. To Jerry’s amazement they began climbing again, though in the racing cloud he doubted his judgment of the angle. Glancing behind him in order to check, he was in time to glimpse the bearded figure of the dark-skinned paymaster in the Fidel Castro cap retreating down the cabin ladder, holding his AK-47 by the barrel.
They continued climbing, the rain ended, and the night surrounded them like another country. The stars broke suddenly above them, they jolted over the moonlit crevasses of the cloud-tops, they lifted again, the cloud vanished for good, and Charlie Marshall put on his hat and announced that both starboard engines had now ceased to play any part in the festivities. In this moment of respite, Jerry asked his maddest question.
“So where’s Ricardo now, sport? Got to find him, see. Promised my paper I’d have a word with him. Can’t disappoint them, can we?”
Charlie Marshall’s sleepy eyes had all but closed. He was sitting in a half-trance with his head against the seat and the brim of his hat over his nose.
“What’s that, Voltaire? You speak at all?”
“Where is Ricardo now?”
“Ric?” Charlie Marshall repeated, glancing at Jerry in a sort of wonder. “Where Ricardo is, Voltaire?”
“That’s it, sport. Where is he? I’d like to have an exchange of views with him. That’s what the three hundred bucks were about. There’s another five hundred if you could find the time to arrange an introduction.”
Springing suddenly to life, Charlie Marshall delved for the Candide and slammed it into Jerry’s lap while he delivered himself of a furious outburst.
“I don’t know where Ricardo is ever, hear me? I never don’t want a friend in my life. If I see that crazy Ricardo, I shoot his balls right off in the street, hear me? He dead. So he can stay dead till he dies. He tell everyone he got killed. So maybe for once in my life I’m going to believe that bastard!”
Pointing the plane angrily into the cloud, he let it fall toward the slow flashes of Phnom Penh’s artillery batteries to make a perfect three-point landing in what to Jerry was pitch darkness. He waited for the burst of machine-gun fire from the ground defences, he waited for the sickening free fall as they nosedived into a mammoth crater, but all he saw, quite suddenly, was a newly assembled revêtement of the familiar mud-filled ammunition boxes, arms open and palely lit, waiting to receive them. As they taxied toward it, a brown jeep pulled in front of them with a green light winking on the back, like a flashlight being turned on and off by hand. The plane was humping over grass. Hard beside the revêtement Jerry could see a pair of green lorries and a tight knot
of waiting figures looking anxiously toward them, and behind them the dark shadow of a twin-engined sports plane. They parked, and Jerry heard at once from the hold beneath their penthouse the creak of the nose-cone opening, followed by the clatter of feet on the iron ladder and the quick call and answer of voices. The speed of their departure took him by surprise. But he heard something else that turned his blood cold and made him charge down the steps to the belly of the plane.
“Ricardo!” he yelled. “Stop! Ricardo!”
But the only passengers left were the old couple clutching their pig and their parcel. Seizing the steel ladder, he let himself fall, jolting his spine as he hit the tarmac with his heels. The jeep had already left with the Chinese cooks and their Shan bodyguard. As he ran forward, Jerry could see the jeep racing for an open gateway at the perimeter of the airfield. It passed through, and two sentries slammed the gates and took up their position as before. Behind him the helmeted flight-handlers were swarming toward the Carvair. A couple of lorry-loads of police looked on, and for a moment the Western fool in Jerry was seduced into thinking they might be playing some restraining rôle, till he realised they were Phnom Penh’s guard of honour for a three-ton load of opium. But his eye was for one figure only, and that was the tall bearded man with the Fidel Castro hat and the AK-47 and the heavy limp that sounded like a hard-soft drum-beat as the rubber-soled flying boots hobbled down the steel ladder.
Jerry saw him just. The door of the little Beechcraft waited open for him, and there were two ground crew poised to help him in. As he reached them, they held out their hands for the rifle but Ricardo waved them aside. He had turned and was looking for Jerry. For a second they saw each other. Jerry was falling and Ricardo was lifting the gun, and for twenty seconds Jerry reviewed his life from birth till now while a few more bullets ripped and whined round the battle-torn airfield. By the time Jerry looked up again, the firing had stopped, Ricardo was inside the plane, and his helpers were pulling away the chocks. As the little plane lifted into the flashes, Jerry ran like the devil for the darkest part of the perimeter before anybody else decided that his presence was obstructive to good trading.
John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels Page 80