Murray was the first to meet them, coming round the side of the earth-moving machine with his carbine slung across his waist, standing in front of the track as it drew to a halt. Pol clambered out with a tired smile. ‘Félicitations,’ he called.
‘Salut!’ cried Murray, and they embraced. The tall pilot had already got out and was hurrying back with his companion, extinguishing the flares. ‘It’s all there,’ said Murray. ‘The whole damned lot! Don’t you want to look?’
Pol forced another smile. ‘I’ll believe you. I don’t like looking at too much money so early in the morning — it makes me nervous.’
Ryderbeit had switched off all the aircraft’s lights and they stood under the headlamps of the two heavy vehicles. Ryderbeit now appeared at the top of the tail-ramp with his M16 in one hand, waving at Pol with the other and shouting, ‘Where are the bloody pilots?’
‘Putting out the flares,’ said Murray. Ryderbeit nodded and skipped down. ‘Salut Monsieur Charlie!’ he cried with his abominable accent: ‘Not a bad landing, hein?’
‘Magnificent,’ said Pol.
Jackie and No-Entry came round and joined them, and Murray introduced Jackie with a slightly stilted formality. Pol bowed, unconsciously touching his kiss curl and stepping back on his tiny feet with an absurd modesty. ‘Enchanté, madame! Perhaps you would prefer to wait inside the hut until we are finished? Only —’ he paused — ‘there is a dead man inside.’
She shrugged. ‘There are also two dead men in the plane, monsieur.’
Pol turned with his hand held out to No-Entry. ‘Enchanté, monsieur.’ The Negro merely nodded. ‘Perhaps you would like a drink?’ Pol added. ‘My pilots will do all the unpacking.’
‘I’d like to meet these pilots,’ Ryderbeit broke in. ‘But Holy Moses, I’d like a drink too!’
Pol chuckled and took his arm, beginning to steer him back towards the hut. ‘The pilots are both new to Air U.S.A., mon cher Sammy. Their names are Ribinovitz and Taylor. Taylor is the short one,’ he added, nodding at the two men coming back down the darkened dam. ‘He doesn’t talk a lot.’
‘How much are we paying them?’
‘One hundred thousand dollars each — what we agreed.’
Ryderbeit sneered: ‘Two bloody lucky new boys! And the kickers?’
‘They’re down at the airport.’
Ryderbeit stopped and looked at his watch. ‘Light’s coming up. Sorry, Charlie, the drink’ll have to wait.’
‘You don’t want any?’ Pol said, frowning.
‘I’d like to help deliver my babies first — then I’ll drink all the booze in Asia!’
‘I’ll stay and watch too,’ said Murray.
‘Me too,’ said Jones softly.
Pol stood for a moment looking at all three of them; then shrugged and took Jackie’s arm, waddling back with her through the half-light to the hut at the end of the dam.
‘He seems in a big hurry to give us a drink,’ Jones murmured.
‘He’s half-drunk already,’ said Ryderbeit, turning as the pilots came up to them.
‘Hi!’ the tall one called. ‘That was a great landing you just made there, Mister Ryderbeit! I’m Jo Ribinovitz. This is Chuck Taylor.’
They all shook hands. ‘Mind if I see your I.D.s?’ said Ryderbeit.
‘Sure thing!’
Ryderbeit glanced at the familiar blue Air U.S.A. cards, each bearing a photograph with a just plausible likeness to its owner. He nodded and handed them back. ‘Just that I’ve grown a little suspicious in life, Jo. So you’re both new to this game?’
‘We’re new to nothing,’ Ribinovitz laughed. ‘We’re old hands.’
‘Where were your last jobs?’
‘Flying oil surveys over Alaska — goddam it! We quit a month before BP hit. Just our luck.’
‘Well your luck’s in now, Ribinovitz baby! So let’s get on with movin’ the baggage.’ Ryderbeit was still holding his M16 as he leapt up the tailboard, signalling to the thick-set Taylor who had already climbed back into the cabin of the caterpillar truck, with its digging scuttle wrenched up so that the steel teeth came just level with the top of the ramp.
Taylor manoeuvred the machine slowly but with skill. Murray guessed that he had once worked with a construction company — or that he must have been putting in some pretty stiff practice recently. Then he looked up at the man’s face, stolidly watching Ryderbeit’s signals from under those huge curling eyebrows — and there was something oddly, uncomfortably familiar about those flat features with the loose mouth and little button nose. They began to nag at him, like the memory of that crooked-faced boy at the Continental Palace giving the wrong directions to the cyclo-pousse driver — Jackie’s mysterious phone call on the same day — the rocket attack and the Red Alert — even Pol, the usually jolly twinkling Pol who’d even seemed so curiously subdued, almost sad when they’d just met. And now that blunt slack-mouthed face. Where the hell had he seen it before? — or one very like it? Was it all part of a pattern? They had seized the plane, taken off and escaped, dropped their paper-chase far to the south, and were now landed safely on the dam. Yet something, indefinably, was wrong.
He heard Ryderbeit shouting, ‘C’mon soldier, put a shoulder to it!’
He joined Ryderbeit, Ribinovitz and Jones at the top of the ramp, and they moved back behind the piles of money, lifting the top plywood raft and shifting it inch by inch towards the open vent. When it was just over halfway, it toppled up like a seesaw and the two-foot-square packages, with their wiring now cut, trundled down into the earth-moving scuttle below. By the time they had unloaded half the first pile the scuttle was full, and Taylor signalled them to halt.
They were dripping with sweat as they stood at the top of the ramp, watching the
