Shooting Script

TWENTY-ONE

She was the third ugly sister of the season – Annette and Belinda having come and gone in the usual way: a couple of days snarling around outside Barbados and Martinique, then crawling off north-east to die in some uninhabited corner of the Atlantic.

Clara had started the same way. But that night she came toa near-stop a couple of hundred miles north of Antigua, wound herself up into fury and headed westwards. By nine o'clock in the morning, when I first heard of her from die Palisadoes met office, she was already north of Puerto Rico and still coming.

I had another cup of coffee while I thought about it, diengot the desk to call me a taxi – the art director had confiscated my jeep the day before – and went up to the church location, where they were supposed to be starting filming. They were -or at least, everybody wasdiereand well into me day's snoozing and poker playing. It was as quiet as I'd learnt to expect it: the only sound was a monotonous drone that was half the generator truck, half the sound man swearing at his equipment.

Roddie's church was a pretty impressive affair: fifty feet tall, twin-towered, built of 400-hundred-year-old stone widi moss in die cracks. You had to get within a few feet to see the stone was rough-plastered boards, the moss plastic, and die whole thing justa façadepinned on scaffolding.

J.B., Luiz, Whitmore, and Miss Jiminez were sitting around my jeep under die shade of a palm at the edge of the plaza and drinking coffee out of paper cups. Whitmore seemed pleased to see me; Miss Jiminez looked as if she could have managed without.

'She all ready to go?' Whitmore asked.

'Getting on that way."

J.B. handed me a cup of coffee.

'Thanks. ' I thought of telling diem about Agent Ellis popping up over here, but decided not. If I rnought he represented an extra risk, it was up to me to say so – and cancel die raid. I was still a free man – as J.B. would have pointed out.

I said: 'I need to see the bombs before I do the final work. Heard any more about them?'

Whitmore grunted. 'Supposed to be sailing yesterday. We should get 'em maybe tomorrow.'

'All good modern stuff, non-corroded, guaranteed to explode in die right time and place and not before. Am I right?'

He shrugged. 'Fella, we just got to wait and see.'

I nodded, looked up at die church. 'How long were you planning on shooting here?'

'Today, maybea couplascenes tomorrow.'

'I should try and get it finished today; there may be a hurricane heading this way.'

The director called: 'Walt: we're ready to go.'

He said to me: 'Stick around,' then climbed into the jeep. Several people shouted 'Quiet', the camera crew laid down their cards, and Whitmore drove the jeep upin front of the church, stopped, got out, looked around, lit a cigarette.

The director shouted: 'Cut!' Then they did it three more times.

Luiz passed me a script so that I could see what was going on. Bolivar Smith comes into the plaza with his load of guns (the back of the jeep was stacked with empty rifle boxes) to meet the rebel chief but can't find anybody but a lovable old priest. However, the lovable old priest goes into a bit of useful dialogue which tells the audience that (a) Amazonia is a poor but lovable country run by a cruel dictator, and (b) Whitmore is a hard-hearted gun-runner who's ready to sell his goods to the dictator if the rebels can't find the pesos to pay for diem.

This, of course, is before the love of a peasant girl (the girl whose scenes Whitmore had shot in a hurry a month before because he couldn't stand her) converts him not only to handing over the guns for free but leading the rebellion for them as well.

And they live happily ever after in a real democracy with a stable economy.

He walked back, leaving the jeep in front of the church while the camera crew produced a burst of energy and shifted the camera a few yards forward.

'So what's about this hurricane?'

'The eye can't get here in less than two days even if it's coming and it probably isn't. But it sounds pretty wide, and you can get some rough stuff at the edges. You remember Hurricane Flora, a couple of years ago? It hit Cuba, two-three hundred miles north – but we got sixty-knot winds and several inches of rani down here. It washed out half the mountain roads, knocked out telephone Unes, and fouled the water supplies.' I nodded at the church. 'And I don't thinkthat'll take sixty knots.'

'You're damn right, fella.' He frowned thoughtfully.

'And I may want to get the Mitchell off the island. She won't take sixty-knot winds, either.'

'Yeah. Well – let us know if you're going. Now – Anything more you want for the plane? Howsabout armament?'

I shrugged. 'If you can find a couple of Browning -50's and a few hundred rounds, I'll take them along.'

'Pretty big order.' He frowned. 'I can geta couplatommy-guns or automatic rifles, but…'

'Skip it, then. They'd be just a dead weight. I wasn't counting on anything, anyhow.'

J.B. said: 'You're going to do it unarmed?'

'A Vampire carries four twenty-millimetre cannon. If they get one of them up, a tommy gun won't make any odds. You don't shoot down aeroplanes widi tommy-guns.' Then I remembered Whitmore planned to do just diat – in the film. 'Begging Mr Whitmore's pardon, of course.'

Luiz smiled and said: 'In the air you need firepower. An aerial machine gun fires at about twice the normal rate of a ground gun.' Then, seeing my expression, he explained: 'I was a gunner in the Air Corps during the war.'

Miss Jiminez jerked around to stare at him: this was something he hadn't told her, eidier. She'd been thinking of him as an actor and -abracadabra – he was suddenly a warrior. A toad turned into a prince.

I asked: 'What'd you fly in?'

'Some B-20s – once or twice even the Mitchell.'

'Where'd you get to?'

He gave Miss Jiminez the sad apologetic smile of a prince about to turn back into a toad and said, to me: 'Texas. They made me an instructor. Possibly they decided actors were too valuable to risk in combat. Or just possibly they were keeping back the best men to defend Texas. After all – Texas neverdid get invaded. Can I be sure that was not my doing?'

I grinned sympathetically. Like most fighter pilots, I had a low opinion of air gunners' usefulness – and a high regard for their problems. A fighter pilot just has to point his aeroplane and press the trigger – and damn few are even much good at that. An air gunner is shooting sideways, upwards, and downwards from a moving platform at a moving target – and with usually only a quarter of the firepower of the fighter he's shooting at.

But Miss Jiminez had missed one point: Luiz must have been good. They might have kept him off operations because he was Hollywood, but that wasn't why they'd made him an instructor: they didn't want the gunners whowere going operational trained half-heartedly.

Under his Beverly Hills-Spanish manners, I was beginning to see Luiz as a tough, competent character.

The director called: 'Walt – we're ready.'

An elderly actor whom I hadn't met but recognised from several other Whitmore films was standing by the church doorway, dressed in a dusty set of priest's robes. Whitmore walked over and stood near him; somebody put a part-smoked cigarette in his hand; the director moved him a couple of inches and then scurried back behind the camera and started the scene going.

The priest said politely: 'You are looking for someone, Señor?'

Whitmore: 'Just a guy, Father.'

'On business, Señor?'

'He ordered some… merchandise. I just hauled it in over thehüls.'

The priest nodded. "That is your hoss in the – goddamn it, I meanjeep?

The director howled: 'Cut!'

The priest shook his head and spat sadly. 'Hell, Boss, Iknew I'd forget this one ain't a Western.'

Behind me, J.B. said softly: 'Don't we ah1?'

I got to Boscobel soon after eleven, and for once the joint was jumping. Mechanics and pilots were shoving the crop-spray planes into the single hangar; other pilots and a couple of local farmers who owned light planes were crowding the counter of the terminal hut, studying a weather chart, listening to a transistor radio, yelling at the clerk to ring Palisadoes met office yet again.

I asked the latest news and five people told me. Clara wasstillmoving along roughly in our direction – slightly south of westwards, and had last been seen about two hundred and fifty miles north-east of the República.

'She's big,' a spray pilot added. 'Fifty-knot gusts reported 300 miles ahead of the eye.'

'But what d'you bet we learn from the Repúblicaand Haiti and Cuba?' the man at the radio asked sourly.

That was a snag – three snags. Clara would be affecting the Repúblicanow, probably Haiti and Cuba by midnight. But all three were notoriously bad at broadcasting useful weather reports. Cuba and the Repúblicabecause they were just naturally secretive, Haiti because it's just Haití.

And while American weather flights would track the eye of the hurricane well enough they wouldn't necessarily check all its edges – and it was the edges, particularly the leading edge, that interested me.

The spray pilot said cheerfully: 'Sorry there's no room in the hangar, Keith.'

Til send you a postcard from Caracas,' I said. 'Sun shining, light sea breeze, wish you were here.'

The man with the radio chuckled. 'Just after he'd got the girl from Caracas installed at Shaw Park. Man, have youseen her?' He took his hands off the radio long enough to make Miss Jiminez-shaped gestures in the air.

Tveseen her,' the spray pilot said. 'You know, Keith – I'd say God was watching you. You bring in a girl and He sends a hurricane to test you: if it's really love you wouldn't let a little wind stop you.'

'As the actress said to the bishop,' the radio man added.

I stepped to the door and looked up at the sky. So, super-stitiously, did every other pilot in the group. But it was still clear and blue except for the fluffy white cumulus building up on the Blue Mountains; the wind was the normal gentle easterly. Nothing to see – yet.

But the eye of a hurricane isn't big; the hard core, the 150-mph winds spinning around the calm centre, isn't usually more than forty miles across. And that's the part that does the real damage: guts houses, throws steamers halfway up Main Street, flips heavy aircraft on their backs. But it's still only theyolk of a broken egg; the white spreads far and wide. Clara could be changing clouds 1,000 miles from her eye, dragging winds into an anti-clockwise spiral 500 miles ahead.

And there was our trouble: coming as she was, the first hint we'd get of Clara would be a shift of wind so it came from the north. And with only an east-west runway – like every runway in Jamaica -a north wind would be a crosswind. It might be too much crosswind to risk a take-off. So I could find myself pinned down with the eye still nearly five hundred miles off -and even if it didn't arrive for another twenty-four hours, me and die Mitchell would still be here when it did.

The spray pilot asked: 'Going this afternoon?'

It would make sense. Yet the first wind-shift could hardly come before three o'clock in the morning. And it might not come at all. Sooner or later Clara wouldhave to recurve – turn north and east. And Caracas, or anyornersafe airport south of here, was a lot of petrol away…

'I'll wait,' I decided.

'It must be love,' the radio man said.

The spray pilot snorted. 'If he's got any sense he'll be sleeping with the plane tonight.'

I nodded. It would be nice to trust die met office to ring me at the hotel if the wind shifted northerly and reached more than, say fifteen knots, but… I'd be sleeping widi die plane. I was the aircraft captain.

I walked up the runway to see how die electricians were getting on and warn diem not to leave any loose ends diis evening. But diey were just about finished. A new set of clean, bright plastic-covered wires direaded along the dowdy soundproofing behind the cockpit; a neat little panel of one master switch and four press-buttons on the instrument panel.

'Works okay,' the chief assured me. 'And when they've finished the scene, we'll strip it out. Can use them coils and magnets again. Unless you was thinking of setting up professionally as a bomber?'

Big joke. Everybody laughed brightly.

I had a quick drink at the Golden Head, dienback to diehotel to stockpile a little sleep, stopping on the way to buy an oil lamp.

At seven I woke up and rang the Palisadoes met office – and Clara was still coming. Reports were also in about what she'd done to Puerto Rico during the early morning: trees and telephone lines down, flooding, landslips in the interior – the usual catalogue. But all at a range of three hundred miles at least. The Repúblicamust have got the same treatment during the day. Well, I just hoped General Boscogot caught out of doors without a raincoat.

But not me. I wanted no part at all of sister Clara. She sounded a very big girl by now.

I washed, had a solitary drink at the bar, a leisurely dinner, and finally forced myself to head for Boscobel at half-past nine.