‘How long till the drop?’ Murray asked, playing for time now.
‘Long enough.’ Ryderbeit unfastened his belt and stood up, taking Murray by the arm. The floor was sloping dangerously and Ryderbeit’s fingers, which were lean and supple like the rest of him, felt very strong. ‘Let’s go back and have a little chat, soldier.’
Jacqueline Conquest was sitting up again, staring out into the cloud. Ryderbeit shouted some gallantry at her, in fluent appalling French, then signalled Murray into one of the hammock seats a few feet away from her along the wall. Murray was beginning to regret having given her both his Bangkok Worlds. Ryderbeit, on the other hand, gave no sign of feeling the cold, which was becoming intense. Instead he took out his flask, offering it to Murray who accepted gratefully this time, then took a long drink himself, smacked his lips and grinned: ‘Well, what’s it all about, soldier? There can’t be much loot in working for a few crappy newspapers.’
‘I do all right, thanks.’
The Rhodesian shook his head: ‘Don’t waste my time, Murray Wilde, sir. What’s the game? Gold, guns, opium? Come on, you wouldn’t be the first to try and con a poor innocent Air U.S.A. pilot into running an unscheduled flight over some remote territory where the rule of law’s not too strong, and drop a few rice-bags that don’t necessarily have to contain rice, n’est-ce pas?’ And he gave Murray a hard slap on the knee.
‘I’ll have some more of that brandy,’ Murray said, as the floor began another series of shuddering bumps.
‘Don’t drink it all. We may need it before we’re down.’
Murray drank, screwed the top back on and waited. It was now quite clear how things stood. Finlayson, having sounded him out that first evening at the Cigale, and presumably been impressed, had acted swiftly; having found out that he was planning to go down on a rollercoaster, he had managed to arrange — probably through the obliging Luke Williams — that Murray’s chief pilot should be this Rhodesian mercenary, who gave every promise of being prepared to do anything for anybody, providing the price was right.
When Ryderbeit continued to say nothing, Murray decided it was time to get the matter settled, one way or the other. ‘You’ve been talking to George Finlayson?’
‘Old-Filling-Station! Well o’ course I know him. Vientiane’s a small place. Everybody knows Filling-Station.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘Ah now!’ — he raised his forefinger as though administering an oath — ‘I quote the Fifth Amendment on that one. On the grounds that it might incriminate our good friend George Finlayson. Shall we just say, he dropped a number of oh-so subtle hints? Filling-Station, as you may have already realised, Mr Wilde, is an English gentleman. At least he tries bloody hard to be. And in his imaginary armchair in White’s or Boodle’s — or wherever the British banking aristocracy still hole up in these dark days of Socialist rule — George Finlayson insinuated that you, an honourable British writer with a commendable career behind you at a Vietnamese university, might be interested in a certain business venture. O.K.?’
The floor slumped sickeningly like a lift going down too fast. Ryderbeit said, ‘Better strap yourself in — I’m going back to give Jones a hand. The drop’ll be coming up soon.’ He glanced across at Jackie Conquest and murmured, ‘I suppose that beauty realises there’s no toilet on this crate? We just hang on out of the door holding on to the parachute-lines. She might find that a bit awkward.’ His grin darkened to a frown: ‘What’s she doing on this plane, anyway?’
‘You tell me. Joy-riding, I should think. At least I hope that’s all it is.’
Ryderbeit stood considering Mrs Conquest with more than his usual lecherous leer. ‘Yeah, I hope so too.’ He paused. ‘We’ll have our little business talk later. Be seeing you, soldier!’ He turned and said something to the Thai kickers, who put out their cigarettes and began clambering off the sacks.
Sammy Ryderbeit walked back up to the cabin.
CHAPTER 3
Murray and Jackie Conquest hung over the edge, their wrists wrapped securely round the parachute-lines, and watched northern Laos move slowly below them. It was a landscape that changed with disconcerting rapidity, one moment a rumpled carpet of rich green mohair, suddenly moulting into bone and gristle carved with deep crevices and waterfalls spouting from immense heights. And now cloud — freezing, drifting through the door like smoke, leaving little beads of moisture on the metal fittings and parachute buckles. Then suddenly it would be clear again, but with a diffuse yellow light that gave the ground a strange shadowy effect, like looking down from a bathyscope on to the floor of the ocean — deep-green rocks overgrown with seaweed, full of hollows of purple darkness. The height — or depth — was also disconcerting. One moment they seemed to be flying at several thousand feet, then a shelf of mountain swept up so close that they could see the leaves on the treetops, a jumble of tiny huts, a path hacked out of the jungle.
The time was 8.40. They had been airborne for just over two hours. One of the kickers had a clasp-knife out and was slicing through the ropes that fastened the first batch of eight sacks to a wooden sledge, which the others now began to ease up towards the door. Murray and the girl stood back. The sledge reached the sharp bend in the roller-tracks; the Thais braced themselves, holding the load at the very edge of the floor while one of them wedged a block of wood between the sledge and the rollers. They were small men, but immensely strong. The load must have weighed nearly half a ton. The plane was now banking steeply, turning round the side of the mountain
