by Gavin Lyall
‘Trying to give up cigarettes.’ Smoke seemed to be comingout of every corner of the pipe and me simultaneously. I worked on.
Ned snapped his fingers, ordered two more Bacardis. By the time they came I had the pipe, and my thoughts, fairly well under control.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s have the whole story.’
‘You don’t want to take any notice of that playboy. We have to have him because his old man’s a big landowner. You should see him on-‘
‘The story, Ned. The story.’
He frowned at his drink.
I said: ‘I didn’t ask how you knew I was in the Dove this afternoon, Ned. I just assumed you’d know all the charter pilots. But I thought the bouncing was just a private joke. Now that boy calls mearebelde. The story.’
‘There isn’t any story. Just take the job I’m giving you.’
‘I told you: I’m not getting mixed up in-‘
‘You’re mixed up already! They think you’re flying for Jiminez, for the rebels. I wastold to bounce you this afternoon, just a kind of warning.’
I felt very cold. The FBI thought it, the Repúblicathought it. Maybe everybody in the Caribbean thought it. Except me.
Ned said: ‘Take the job: you’ll prove ‘em wrongand make a bundle.’
‘Is that why you offered it, Ned?’
‘Just take it. You’d be good at it.’
‘Doyou think I’m flying for Jiminez?’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t know. You’re a tricky bastard, Keith. You wouldn’t be a good fighter pilot if you weren’t.’
‘I’m not a fighter pilot any more, Ned.’
He threw the rest of his drink down his throat, stood up, and stared down at me. After a while he said carefully:‘I’vedone everything except paint recruiting pictures for you. But I’ll do that if you like. Because next time I could get told to shoot.’
‘So? Who told you that was a guarantee you’d hit anything?’
He smiled slowly. ‘Who told you you weren’t still a fighter pilot?’ and he walked back into the hotel.
By now my pipe had gone out. I was still trying to work out if it was suffering from water in the fuel or just a blocked carburettor when somebody slipped into the empty seat beside me.
I looked and said sourly: ‘I might have guessed you wouldn’t miss the big picture. Sorry it had a happy ending.’
Agent Ellis smiled and said: ‘Naturally. You seem to know Colonel Rafter pretty well. Guess you must have known him a long time.’
I put the pipe down on the counter. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you.’ He produced a Chesterfield and lit it for me.
‘Thanks. It was in Korea. He was in 77 squadron, Royal Australian. They came out in Meteor 8s, to try and take on Migs. Turned out the Mig could out-climb them, outdive them, out-turn them, and was faster on the level. I won’t say they took a hammering, but they damn sure didn’t take a holiday. After that they were pulled back to ground-attack work. I was attached to a squadron of Sabres that used to fly high cover for them; I went to them as liaison officer for a time, me being British and all that. After that, I met Ned a couple of years later in London, just after he’d left the RAAF.’
‘And now he’s a colonel in the Fuerza Aerea Republicana. What’s he been doing between then and now?’
I gave him a look which I hoped he interpreted as chilly. ‘Probably knitting bedsocks for an Old Folks’ Home.’
Ellis looked pained. ‘Just a friendly question.’
‘And a friendly answer. If you want to put him on one of your little lists, do the hard work yourself. One cigarette doesn’t make me an FBI informer – not after being offered a job at $750 a week.’
There was a silence while he looked thoughtful and I tried to work out why the hell I’d said that. The Sheraton must have been giving me bigger measures of Bacardi than I’d credited them for.
Then he said quietly: ‘Seven hundred and fifty, heh? Did you take it?’
‘No. But it’s always nice to know somebody cares that much.’
‘You’d screw yourself up all over the Caribbean. No place’d let you land there – not after playing games in the República.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m not working for Jiminez, either.’
‘Of course.’ He nodded wisely. ‘Perhaps you have that lettered on a little sign on the dashboard of your plane? It’d screw me up all over the Caribbean.’
I said: ‘No, I don’t have.’
‘I’ll get you one made.’ He smiled. ‘It’d be silly to make a mistake that size just because you happened to forget.’
And he went away.
FIVE
The next day I got a charter for a bunch of non-cost-conscious fishermen down to St Kitt’s, and when I got back to San Juan Ned and the Vampires had gone. I flew out for Jamaica in the late afternoon, staying well south of the Repúblicacoastline and using the fair-weather cumulus that builds up after midday for cover.
I wasn’t worried about radar. I didn’t think they had any, and even if they had, I didn’t believe they’d know how to use it properly yet. Ned had probably caught me the day before just by following the position reports I’d been dutifully radioing out. On this trip I kept shut up.
It was a long drag against some rare west winds and without the Repúblicaas a refuelling stop. In fact, things were getting pretty thin all round at this end of the Caribbean. Cuba was out; only Pan American could get any sense or fuel out of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and that only by damn near buying up the whole airport; now the Repúblicawas out. Apart from trips inside Jamaica, short hops to the Grand Cayman and an occasional long slog up to Nassau or out to Puerto Rico, it looked like being a long quiet summer. The next day proved it.
I was living in a two-room flat over a night club in Kingston’s East Street, which made for free calypsos while I was trying to get to sleep. I staggered out of bed around eight, flying strictly blind, set the coffee going, and spent ten minutes searching every pocket and drawer I owned in case I’d left a cigarette around. I hadn’t. So I lit the first pipe of the day, which tasted like a fire in an old clothes warehouse, and sat around gulping coffee and promising myself that next week I’d find a nice quiet place over in Port Royal, where the airline crews lived.
That made the day normal so far.
By nine I was more or less shaved and dressed in more or less clean khaki drill shirt and trousers and down getting pushed off the pavement by the Kingston crowd. I put the rotor arm back on the jeep, wondered for the several-hundredth time whether anything in such a state was really a good advertisement and if I shouldn’t scrape the Keith Can, Charter Pilot for Hire, Twin-engined Plane off the side. I decided, as usual, to do it when I moved to Port Royal, and drove off to start getting pushed off the road by the Kingston traffic.
Palisadoes airport lies halfway around a curving spit of land enclosing Kingston harbour, with Port Royal on the far end, about five miles on. I reached the airport at nine-twenty and sat down in my daytime office – a canvas stool on the shade side of the Dove – and lit the second pipe of the day. That only tasted like a leaking exhaust, so things were improving.
Still a normal day.
I spent a little time wondering if I should be tracking down a leak in one of the air-pressure systems which was feeding out air at about the same rate that the engine compressor was feeding it in. The Dove lives on air pressure – for the undercarriage, flaps, brakes – so I’d have to do something about it eventually. But meanwhile I had a duplicate systemand an emergency undercarriage lowering bottle in working order, so I decided to let it wait until it got bad enough to spot more easily. Anyway, I had an appointment for ten o’clock and it’s poor sales psychology to let the customer find the plane with its inspection panels off and wires dangling.
For once the customer was on time: the Canadian High Commissioner and a Canadian trade delegation wanting to take a fast look at a bauxite mine in the hills. The HC himself had obviously hea
rd enough about me to have preferred doing the trip in his air-conditioned Buick, but he wasn’t going to let down the morale of the party, so he just scratched his moustache and remarked that both engines still had propellers and off we went.
It was only a half-hour trip on to the mine’s airstrip, and the delegation couldn’t take more than an hour of breathing raw bauxite dust, so we were home again soon after midday.
I was drinking a beer in the Horizon Bar of the terminal building and thinking about going out on to the ‘waving gallery’ to buy a hamburger when I got customer number two, Mr Peterson, who was the managing something of an hotel chain on the north coast. Dressed in the local uniform of dark trousers, white short-sleeved shirt, he was big, enthusiastic, and Negro – which was a rare thing in the hotel trade; it isn’t famous for promoting Jamaicans to responsible jobs.
And he had an idea. ‘Mr Carr – you know we can’t really buy good beef on the island. So we want you to fly it in, frozen, from South America for us.’
I frowned and said: ‘Exactly where from?’
‘Venezuela. We reckon it wouldn’t melt in the time you took. It’s been done before.’ It had, too: somebody had started running beef up to Miami, with a refuelling stop here, in a converted bomber. But he’d had a bad brake fire, sold off the aircraft, and the idea seemed to have died away.
I asked: ‘How much does a side of beef weigh?’
He waved a big pink hand. ‘I’d say around three hundred pounds.’
‘Caracas is 800 nautical miles. I could just about scrape out with 1,500 pounds of payload – say five sides. But-‘
His face exploded into a grin. ‘Man, that’s wonderful. I’ll just-‘
‘But,’ I said firmly. I hated to kick that grin in the teeth. ‘But Caracas means a ten-hour round trip. I’ll shave my profit for a regular long job – but I can’t shave my costs. I’d have to charge you about £235 per trip.’
The grin vanished, all right. ‘But – but that’s about – about nearly fifty pound a side on just transportation.’
I nodded.
He stared at me suspiciously, then shook his head. ‘Man -1 thought the hotel trade had fierce costs, butflying…’
‘You’re playing my song.’
‘You couldn’t bring it down just a bit?’
‘I know the words. I just can’t remember the tune,’
He smiled briefly – on and off like a light switch. Then he said, sadly: ‘You don’t want our business, Mr Carr?’
‘Your business is what any charter pilot dreams of: regular, dependable work. But it still costs me £22 4s. an hour to keep that Dove in the air. I’m charging you just over £1 an hour for myself. And a check four coming up.’
‘A what?’
‘Check four: happens every 1,800 flying hours. A bunch of engineers tear the whole plane apart, tell you it’s in fine shape and stick it together again. Costs you up to £3,000. Then you’re all licenced to fly again.’
He smiled again, this time a little more sincerely. ‘Man, you reallyhave got costs. Well, I’ll put it to my board, but… I suppose the trouble is we’d be paying you for going out there empty. Right?’
‘Right. Just find me a regular cargo for Caracas and it’ll half your cost.’
He nodded wearily. That’s the real problem with the Caribbean: it’s really just a string of suburbs. If you’re travelling anywhere on business or pleasure, you don’t go to another suburb, you go into town – Miami, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam. The islands just don’t want to know about each other.
That’s why the idea of federating Jamaica and Trinidad sprang a leak: Jamaicans and Trinidadians never met except in London and didn’t much like each other there. Why not federate Malta and the Channel Isles? – they speak just as much English and they aren’t any farther apart than Jamaica and Trinidad.
Mr Peterson climbed off his stool. ‘Well, Isaid I’d put it tothe board of directors.’ He looked at me and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’ And went away.
I looked at my watch, decided I hadn’t quite got time for another beer, then ordered one anyway.
It was a mistake. The fuelling supervisor came out of the dining room where most of the airport senior staff eat, saw me, and came over.
He asked me how it was going and I said so-so and he said he was sorry and I said so was I but more so and he said he doubted it.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘you owe us £165. We’ve just sent off our final demand.’
‘I’ll let you have a hundred by the end of the week.’
He smiled. At any rate, he showed me his teeth. Tm sorry. The whole amount – or we stop serving you. You must have something tucked away.’
‘Something – and a check four coming up.’
‘Oh-ho. I’d hate to see you squander it on a major overhaul when you really owe it to us.’
‘Squander it?’ I glared at him. ‘I’ll make it a hundred this week and another hundred in two weeks’ time.’
‘Keith – you’re taking £60-worth of fuel off us aweek.’
‘So just let me run up a bill until I know how much the check’s going to cost.’
He shook his head. ‘Keith, I like you, and I like your business. But most of all I like your money. Anyhow, I’ve already got you and your business.’
I groaned. ‘They’re issuing joke books to fuelling supervisors, yet.’
He gave me another quick look at his teeth. ‘£165. Within a week. Good luck, Keith.’ And he went off downstairs.
It was still a normal day.
SIX
Iate Acouple of hot dogs on the gallery and was back at the Dove by two. Now the day was really coming to the boil. On the airport it was just plain hot, but across die bay in Kingston, sitting in its bowl between the hills, the air in the narrow streets would be like breathing under a sweaty electric blanket. Out in the box-top shacks of the nameless town built on the city dump up by the oil refinery, there would be sudden, vicious fights over a choice piece of rubbish. And up in the rich suburbs beyond Half Way Tree, dignified elderly gardeners would move listlessly among the mangoes, feeling the long sharp edges of their machetes and thinking of the owner’s wife asleep in the air-conditioned room upstairs.
Kingston, the perfect natural harbour – except that it’s on the south coast and die cool summer breeze comes from the north. So it only blows – no, it doesn’t blow, just breathes politely – on the private beaches and modern houses and big hotels of die north coast. So move up there, man; nobody’s stopping you. All you need is the money. And you think you’re going to get rich in Kingston? Haul your rice, man; emigrate. Maybe London isn’t paved with gold, but it’s cool, man. Yes, you’ll find out how cool.
Perhaps the heat was getting at me, too. The Dove was too hot to touch without gloves and there was a faint haze over the fuel tank vents, so I was wasting petrol by evaporation. Well, I hadn’t paid for it, anyway.
Customer number three was late. He always was, but he was still the only regular income I had. A young Venezuelan businessman named Diego Ingles who’d got the idea that his company would buy him a brand-new twin-engined aeroplane the moment he’d qualified to fly it. He hired me twice a week for twin-engine instruction.
Personally I had my doubts that his company could go crazy enough to hand him a £35,000 aeroplane, but perhaps it couldhappen. He obviously came of a genuine aged-in-the-money family back in Caracas, and that counts for a lot in Venezuelan business circles. Anyway, it was his money and my pocket.
All that apart, he was a nice young lad: in his early twenties, shortish and slightly tubby, with a flat cheerful face, a bush of dark hair and the politely rakish manner of an old Spanish family upbringing.
He finally appeared at twenty past, with a long graceful apology which boiled down to the fact that he’d only just got out of bed, and not even his own.
With die heat and the tall thunderclouds building up on the Blue Mountains I wanted to get away from the airport, so we skipped th
e circuits-and-landings and I gave bun a dead-reckoning navigation exercise out to the Pedro Cays, about eighty miles to the south-west. No radio to be used: he had to do it on maps and weather reports alone.
It wasn’t his favourite type of flying: quiet, steady, accurate. Like most of Latin America he believed that aviation was a branch of sports-car racing. I’d had to keep taunting him about becoming a ‘fair-weather pilot’ to keep him looking at -and believing – his instruments, maps, and forecasts. This time I was feeling irritable enough to taunt him into making a near-perfect landfall over North-east Cay within a minute of his ETA.
I remembered to tell him I’d noticed.
He smiled very charmingly and asked: ‘So perhaps you think I am good enough?’
I looked at him. ‘For what? You could probably get your licence uprated to a “B”, so you could fly this size of thing privately. That’s if you’ve been doing any book-work. D’you want me to arrange a test?’
‘Not quite that, Señor. I mean – doyou believe in me? Can I use an aeroplane like this – anywhere – at any time?’
‘Nobody can. You still think an aeroplane’s a miracle with a starter button. Some weather, even the birds are walking.’
‘I understand there may be risks, Señor, but…’ He took his right hand off the wheel and fluttered it delicately.
‘Just try and remember,’ I said slowly, ‘that if God had intended men to fly He’d have given us wings. So all flying isflying in the face of nature. It’s unnatural, wicked, and stuffed with risks all the time. The secret of flying is learning to minimise the risks.’
‘Or perhaps – the secret of life is to choose your risks?’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘But I think you were a fighter pilot, and yet you talk of minimising risks?’
‘That’s where I learnt it. Don’t fall for the King-Arthur-of-the-air stuff about fighter pilots. Clean knightly combats and all that. It’s the one trade where the whole point is to catch a man by surprise and shoot him in the back. That’s how the top men made their scores. And if theycouldn’t catch a man like that, they didn’t tangle with him.’