They had stopped. The plane ahead was not one of the high-tailed modern transports, but a stout clumsy-looking machine with its tail near the ground and a big open side-door through which the rice was being loaded off a forklift truck by two khaki-clad Laotians.
‘Recognise her?’ said Ryderbeit: ‘C 46 — one of the veteran warriors of World War Two and still flying. Like the old Dak she’s about the toughest plane ever built. Only she’s well past middle age now, and like all the Daks she’ll have to go sometime.’
‘Don’t you use any of the modern ones — C 123’s or Caribous?’
‘Not on a high drop. I tell you, that old crate there wouldn’t fetch much, even as scrap metal. They can’t afford to lose the modern ones.’
Murray nodded, watching the tip-truck move out from one of the hangars, back up against the forklift and deposit its load of sacks with an almost soundless slither. The forklift then slid forward, raising its flat spatula lift like a great spoon and pushing the sacks through the side-door of the C 46, where the two Laotians rolled them away on a track of steel rollers, up into the belly of the aircraft.
‘You lose a lot of those planes?’ he said at last.
‘We lose ’em, but it’s not policy to talk about it. Not to journalists, anyway. I don’t know how much I can trust you — do I, soldier?’ He was sitting behind the wheel, watching Murray with a funny crooked smile. Murray wondered if this was just his usual way of welcoming inquisitive journalists — or whether there were something more conspiratorial in his manner? He decided to change the subject. ‘You’re from South Africa?’
‘Rhodesia. A bloody rebel.’
‘They ran you out?’
Ryderbeit started the engine. ‘Soldier, they’ve run me out o’ practically everywhere. Jo’burg, E’ville, Brazzaville, Rio, Caracas, Genoa — you name it, and you’ll find three dirty words — Samuel David Ryderbeit. South-East Asia’s about the only place that’ll still have me. Here, Bangkok, and old Saigon.’ He was driving back, more slowly this time, towards the snack bar. ‘Funnily enough, one of the few places I haven’t been thrown out of is Rhodesia,’ he added. ‘I’m right behind old Smithie, don’t get me wrong! I may be a Jew, but I’m not one o’ your soft-bellied white liberals. No-Entry back there’s about the only kaffir I’ve ever had any time for. Anyway, he’s only small part kaffir. His grandfather came from a very old Welsh family.’
‘So what happened in South Africa?’
‘Trouble. Domestic trouble — twice. You married, Mister Wilde?’
‘Not anymore.’
Ryderbeit gave his low cackle: ‘I’ve been married three times — the only man in the world who makes wedding bells sound like an alarm clock! And all three times to real rich bitches. First one divorced me after six months for extreme cruelty. Second one lasted nearly a year, then again I got the bounce — same thing again, hit the bullseye. That time I got out and made for the Congo. Third wife was the richest of ’em all — Venezuelan oil up to her nostrils, and lovely with it. It was third time round the track for me — but it wasn’t that that worried her. Trouble is, y’see, I’ve only been divorced once.’
Murray grinned: ‘So you came out here? Where did you learn to fly? Rhodesian Air Force?’
‘Who else? Taught me to touch down a Piper on a cricket pitch and take off again without knocking off the stumps. That was a good place, Rhodesia — except it’s too small, too many bloody little cocktail parties round swimming pools. Know what I mean?’
‘I haven’t been there, but I think I know.’
Ryderbeit had pulled up in front of the Hi-Lo Snack Bar and opened the door of the Moke, taking out a clipboard of weather charts. He paused. ‘I think you know a lot o’ things, Mister Wilde. What I want to know is why a celebrated scribbler like you should be so interested in some little old rice-drop over north Laos?’ He slammed the door and walked away towards the snack bar.
Murray sat for a moment, wondering if this was what George Finlayson meant by ‘finding two of the best pilots in South-East Asia’. With growing doubts he began to follow Ryderbeit into the shed, then stopped dead.
No-Entry was sitting where they had left him, opposite a figure whose back was turned to both of them — a figure in a loose leopard-spotted combat tunic, sitting over a cup of coffee, drinking with both hands. She turned as they came up, smiling briefly at them both, with no surprise at all.
CHAPTER 2
Murray and Jacqueline Conquest sat side by side, strapped into the canvas-webbed hammock seats just inside the open door. The eight tons of rice, in three layers of sacking stamped ‘Donated by the United States of America’, lay piled along the roller-tracks that ran up the aircraft floor like a miniature railway, round and back again, ending at the open door.
From the roof hung a number of parachute harnesses. The six ‘kickers’ — handpicked Thai paratroopers on loan to Laos — sat on top of the rice bags, wearing quilted uniforms but no safety belts. The inside of the aircraft was dim and oily and smelled of hot oven plates. It was impossible to talk above the rattling roar of the two massive prop-engines, as Sammy Ryderbeit and No-Entry Jones manoeuvred the machine round and lined her up at the end of the runway.
Great gusts of smoke blasted back past the door. Murray caught a glimpse of the three Ilyushin bombers — part of Russia’s ambitious aid programme in the early sixties, later abandoned when the spares failed to arrive — their gutted brown carcases lying in
