‘Take it easy,’ Jones murmured from the end of the table.
Ryderbeit grinned. ‘I’m takin’ it nice and easy, No-Entry. Just want to know what this sweet little married lady’s been doin’ on my flight.’
‘You know what I was doing,’ she said stiffly. ‘I got the official clearance, just like Mr Wilde here. I came to take photographs.’
‘Photographs of a load o’ bloody cloud — or the mountains of North Vietnam? How many frames did yer take?’
‘That’s none of your business!’ Her eyes had high dark lights in them, emphasised by the sudden parched whiteness of her cheeks. ‘Just because you’ve saved my life doesn’t mean you can order me around like a servant!’ she cried. ‘I can look after myself very well — don’t worry, Mister Ryderbeit!’
Ryderbeit gave a crooked, downward smile at the fishpond. ‘I’m sure you can look after yerself, Mrs Conquest. Bein’ married to the Central Intelligence Agency gives you rather an edge over the rest of us. As for me, I expect to die every day of the week.’ He rolled another pellet of bread, dipped it in bourbon and this time put it in his mouth. ‘I just want to know what you were doing on my flight, that’s all.’
‘I’ve told you. I came to take photographs of a rice-drop. Anyway, what concern is it of yours?’
‘It’s every bloody concern of mine, Mrs Conquest. Because I’m the chief pilot — I was in sole charge o’ that plane — and it’s of the greatest concern to me who comes on my flights, and why.’
‘I’ve told you why.’
‘Cool it, Sammy,’ said Jones again; and Murray began to stiffen in his chair, watching Ryderbeit closely now, knowing the man was spoiling for trouble. Ryderbeit’s glass was empty. He reached out for the bottle and refilled it; then, tilting his chair perilously far back, he decanted a cigar from a pigskin case, getting his lighter out and grinning at Jackie over the flame like a snake with a bird. ‘So what yer goin’ to tell that bastard hubby o’ yours when yer get back, Mrs Conquest?’
‘He doesn’t even know I’ve come.’
‘Doesn’t even know!’ Ryderbeit brought his chair down with a crash, sounding genuinely surprised. ‘Why the hell not?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Murray snapped. ‘She’s told you why she came — to take some photographs, enjoy herself on a dull morning. Now just leave it at that.’
Ryderbeit turned, cocking one eye with a slow enigmatic smile. ‘O.K., soldier. O.K.! If you say so, I’m not goin’ to argue. Your business here is my business. If you’re not worried havin’ along the wife of the Central Intelligence Agency, then I’m not worried either. But’ — and he swung back to Jackie, jabbing his glowing cigar at her like a gun — ‘if you breathe one word to contradict the official report that that boy Wedgwood’s sending out — one little whisper about us transgressing North Vietnamese airspace — I’ll take your pants down and give your pretty little backside such a thrashin’ you’ll be takin’ your meals standin’ up for a week!’
She flushed darkly, and Murray closed his fist. But before either of them could speak, Ryderbeit suddenly laughed and sat back again, breathing smoke up at the square of grey sky above. ‘You wanted to hear about the Congo? I’ll tell you about the Congo — the best days o’ my life I spent in that lovely place.’
Anything, Murray thought, to kill time till the chopper arrived to take them to Luang Prabang. Ryderbeit’s mood had become more mellow, as he talked of his light twin-engined Piper Comanche and how he’d flown over the elephant grass with the other mercenaries going through like beaters after game, and how the Simbas had come running out in their lion-skin head-dresses, howling like dogs while he shot them down in rows with his fifty-calibre machinegun — sometimes splitting them almost in half, sometimes letting one run free for a mile or so, teasing him with low passes, waiting till he tried to dodge back into the bush, then knocking him flat with one short burst.
Some of his tales were scarcely credible for their horror; it was almost as though he were taunting them for some violent reaction, although he got practically none. Even his constant references to ‘munts’ and ‘kaffirs’ seemed to leave Jones totally unmoved — dozing with his head on his arms, as though he’d heard it all before, and didn’t much care anyway. Jackie sat pale and very straight in her chair, smoking and sipping her drink, without any discernible expression except mild boredom.
With more than half the bourbon gone, Ryderbeit seemed to tire of atrocity stories — torture, rape, cannibalism — and now moved to a lengthy dissertation on his fellow mercenaries in the Congo. Murray was scarcely listening, enjoying his bourbon and the relative peace of the hot sticky afternoon, thinking that the worst was over with Ryderbeit — just a nervous tantrum following the crash perhaps — when something rather odd happened.
Ryderbeit had admitted he wasn’t too keen on the Belgians: they were smug and fat and ran too fast when the going got rough. There were also a few Britons, mostly poor whites who’d run out of Kenya and Nyasaland; and a couple of public school boys who wanted to be heroes and were about as much use as two left boots on a one-legged munt. And some of the South Africans and his fellow Rhodesians weren’t much cop either — unemployed layabouts who wanted to earn an easy buck shooting black men. No, the ones he admired most were the French — the ones who’d
