Height 1,500 feet, still climbing with the hills. Speed more than 200 knots. Throttle full out, holding steady as Jones called: ‘Last ridge ahead!’ — and the branches swept up, seeming almost to brush the wings this time. Ryderbeit jerked the stock forward. The nose went down and they dropped like a lift.
‘We’re over the top,’ said Jones. ‘Welcome to Cambodia! And the Phantoms seem to be holding off.’
Ryderbeit let out a great sigh and sat back. ‘I bet they are! The U.S. Navy’s goin’ to be really popular tomorrow down in Trang Bang. Murray boy, let’s take a look at a few more of those greenbacks — big ones. I want to touch ’em, stroke ’em, kiss ’em. Jackie darling, you did beautifully! The Red Alert went out sweet and loud and right on time.’
‘Too bloody well on time,’ said Murray. ‘It was only a couple of seconds late.’
‘Late? What d’yer mean?’
‘You didn’t notice? There was a major VC attack going on down there — and those boys don’t let off their Russian rockets just for fun.’
Jones interrupted: ‘Steer east-south-east — one-seventy.’
‘You haven’t told me what you’re getting at,’ Ryderbeit went on, moving the controls as he spoke.
‘You think the attack and the alert just coincided?’
Ryderbeit jerked round in his seat, looking straight at Jackie. ‘You did send that alert?’
‘Bien sur.’ She began to frown: ‘You don’t think I’ve earned my passage?’
‘She sent it all right,’ said Murray. ‘Only somebody also tipped off the Viet Cong — just to make it seem all the more convincing perhaps. I’m just wondering who — and why.’
PART 10: HAPPY LANDING
CHAPTER 1
Pol sat on the swivel chair, elbows on the desk, streaming with sweat despite the air-conditioner which was turned up full. In front of him were two glasses and a bottle of Johnny Walker three-quarters empty, standing beside his double-barrelled shotgun.
It was a small low-ceilinged room with sealed windows, filing cabinet, wall-safe, refrigerator, a nude calendar pin-up and a big two-way VHF set in the corner. It might have been any cheap, run-down office in any big American town — except that outside the jungle kept up its ceaseless shout against the empty night.
Across the table from him were three men. Two of them wore the silver-grey flying suits of Air U.S.A. and all were about the same age, in their early fifties. One was a tall man with a face like a pickaxe, eyes slanting above a high-peaked nose and a rigid but slightly sardonic mouth. The other pilot was short, heavy-shouldered, with wide flat features and massive eyebrows curling up from a button-nose.
The third man was slumped in the far corner from Pol, his rheumy eyes open with a pained, faintly puzzled expression, his big red face already taking on a sunken look, one short-sleeved arm in a checkered shirt flung out across the table, the other hanging at his side. He had been dead for about three minutes. It would take an experienced doctor — and there were few in the Kingdom of Laos — to separate the symptoms of death due to cardiac failure from those resulting from amethine-cyanide administered with a scratch from a sharp point just behind the left ear.
Pol poured himself another Scotch. He did not offer any to the pilots. ‘I want it understood again,’ he said, speaking slowly in French, ‘that there is to be no unnecessary violence. No shooting, no trouble of any kind. All quiet and normal.’ The two pilots nodded together. ‘A perfectly routine flight according to the book. There is no reason why anything should go wrong.’
He sighed. It had been a long exhausting thirty-six hours since he had left Cambodia: crossing the border at an unofficial and uncomfortable point, making his way up to Champasak, then joining a sampan with an under-powered motor which had struggled against the heavy current of the Mekong up as far as Thakhek where he’d taken a crowded local bus to just south of Vientiane, to be picked up by the two pilots in the Land Rover which was now parked outside.
‘All three men will be armed,’ he went on, his eyes flicking from one man to the other. ‘And at least two of them know how to shoot. The third, the Irishman, also has a knowledge of the Vietnamese language, so it is essential he has no chance to converse with the others.’
‘It is all perfectly understood, Monsieur Pol,’ the tall pilot said, speaking fluently, but with a thick accent. ‘Unless any of these men makes problems, there will certainly be no problem from us. It will, as you say, be a normal flight.’
‘I hope so,’ said Pol. He looked again at the dead engineer from Pittsburgh whose life had been all washed up, with a broken marriage, one dead son in a car smash and no idea where his daughters were — a depressing man whom they’d listened to for nearly an hour, just long enough to get half a pint of whisky inside him, before Pol had killed him. He’d done it with a rare twinge of conscience, because the man had been an innocent, a sad stupid bit of flotsam washed up in Asia with the tide of a slow war. Someday, thought Pol, someday I may finish like that.
He looked at his watch. ‘We have about an hour,’ he said, nodding at the VHF set in the corner. ‘We’ll turn it on only at the last minute. If all has gone well, there’ll probably be a full alert even here.’ But he might have been talking to himself; the two men seemed to have heard it all before. He finished the whisky, wondering for
