The girl beside him sat calm and upright, eyes front on the dangling rubber boots of one of the ‘kickers’ sitting up on the rice sacks. Murray had recovered from the shock of seeing her. At first he had stood in the Hi-Lo Bar and gaped at her, while Ryderbeit wasted several minutes’ flying time leering solicitously and offering her his brandy flask, which she had declined. Murray was now trying to work out the implications. The reason for her being here was simple enough: she fancied herself as an amateur photographer, had heard from Luke at the Embassy yesterday that there was a fairly hairy rice-drop fixed up, and having nothing else to do, had decided to come along for the ride. Murray should have recognised the type earlier. South-East Asia was full of them — bored girls trailing round the trouble-spots, all rigged out in man-sized paramilitary kits, working off their various neuroses by being right there where the action was.
The only difference was that this girl, apart from being a great deal more attractive than most, was married to a man in the Central Intelligence Agency. And this, on Murray’s present mission, was something that could — to say the least — prove embarrassing.
They were off the ground at last, wheeling over the town, away from the great looping brown river, the sun coming up over the rim of the earth, glinting off the mosaic of rice fields that looked like fragments of a shattered mirror. The Thai paratroopers began to smoke — one of them offering his packet of king-size filter-tips to Jacqueline Conquest, but she shook her head with a small artificial smile. A girl that didn’t drink or smoke or smile, thought Murray. What did she do? The camera in her lap was a massive Japanese device, with telescopic lens and grip-handle like a miniature bazooka. He noticed that she carried no extra clothing, and her combat tunic, open at the neck, showed only bare lightly-tanned skin. The slip-stream from the door was no longer warm. He unfastened his safety belt and began unwrapping his extra sweatshirt, then paused, considering whether to offer it to the girl. There would be complications here, with the six Thai paratroopers watching them with inscrutable intensity. Instead he offered her the two Bangkok Worlds, shouting to make himself heard.
She accepted, and began unbuttoning her tunic without any ostentation, folding the newspapers across her flat belly, under an amply-filled unboned bra of white silk, while the six kickers went on smoking and watching, expressionless.
A moment later Murray’s attention was distracted by the appearance of the Nam Ngum Dam passing far below in a great fold of rainforest — the scarred earth and tiny yellow machines scattered about like the playground of some bored child. The reservoir, hidden beneath the slanting sun, was as black as ever. Nothing would ever show in that water, he thought — unless it were floating. He stood in the open doorway, one hand gripping one of the parachute-lines, the other snapping away at the Leica slung round his neck. They were flying at perhaps four thousand feet, climbing hard. The dam was gone and he sat down again, shivering.
‘What do you hope to get out of this trip?’ he yelled at the girl in French: ‘A few souvenir photos of the Chinese border?’
She shrugged: ‘We don’t go that near China.’ She spoke less loudly, leaning very close to him, and for the first time — above the oily stench and icy slip-stream — he caught a drift of delicious perfume. ‘I should ask the same of you,’ she added. ‘You’re not a photographer, are you? So why does a well-known writer want to take pictures of one of these rice-shits?’
The phrase, shiage-de-riz, surprised him; but not as much as the content of what she said. And he thought, Here we go again! First this frightful Rhodesian Jew, and now this unsmiling graceful-limbed French wife of a CIA man, both wanting to know what an Irish journalist was doing bumming a ride on a rackety rice-drop over north Laos. He wondered if he had been just unlucky. Most of the time a journalist could wander round this country and no one asked a question from one day to the next. Perhaps he was being over-suspicious — as well he might. He shouted back at her: ‘I illustrate my own articles. American magazines pay money.’
‘Are you interested in money?’
‘Like everyone else. Aren’t you?’
She shrugged again, with that curious disdainful boredom he had noticed at the reception in Vientiane; then leaned back against the canvas webbing and closed her eyes.
It was getting very cold in the aircraft. Murray put on the extra sweatshirt under his jacket and began to pick his way up between the rails of rice-sacks to the pilots’ cabin. It was much warmer here than in the body of the plane, with ventilators under the seats pumping out blasts of hot metallic air that joined with the rich fug of Havana leaf from a Romeo y Julieta cigar jammed between Ryderbeit’s teeth. Everything in the cabin seemed very old and worn and dirty; there were cigarette ends and crumpled paper cartons on the floor, and a lot of naked dangerous-looking wire spilling out of a panel in the wall like a bunch of entrails.
No-Entry was at the main controls, still wearing his dark glasses as he held the stick back, climbing over ridges of jungle into a mauvish mottled sky. Ryderbeit glanced up at Murray. ‘And how’s our lovely fellow-passenger?’ he cried, taking off the earphones.
‘Asleep.’
Ryderbeit shook his head: ‘We got her up
