The Night Manager

TWENTY-FOUR

"Faberge," Roper said, when Jonathan asked him where they were going.

"Faberge," Langbourne replied out of the corner of his mouth.

"Faberge, Thomas," Frisky said, with not a very nice smile, as they buckled themselves into their seats. "You've heard of Faberge the famous jeweller, haven't you? Weil, then, that's where we're going, isn't it, for a nice bit of R and R."

So Jonathan had retreated into his own thoughts. He had long been aware that he was one of those people who are condemned to think concurrently rather than consecutively. For instance, he was comparing the greens of the jungle with the greens of Ireland and reckoning that the jungle beat Ireland into a cocked hat. He was remembering how in army helicopters the ethic had been to sit on your steel helmet in case the bad guys on the ground decided they would shoot your balls off. And how this time he had no helmet ― just jeans and sneakers and very unprotected balls. And how as soon as he had entered a helicopter in those days, he had felt the prickle of combat start to work in him as he sent a last goodbye to Isabelle and hugged his rifle to his cheek. And how helicopters, because they scared him, had always been places of philosophical reflection of the corniest kind for him, such as: I am on my life's journey, I am in the womb but heading for the grave.

Such as: God, if you get me out of this alive, I'm yours for ― well, life. Such as: Peace is bondage, war is freedom, which was a notion that shamed him every time it took him over, and had him casting round for somebody to punish ― such as Dicky Roper, his tempter. And he was thinking that whatever he had come for, he was now approaching it, and Jed would not be earned, or worth earning, and Sophie would not be appeased, till he had found it, because his search was for-and-on-behalf-of both of them.

He stole a look at Roper, sitting across the aisle with his head back and his sleep mask on, and it occurred to him that until recently their relationship had been of a rather formal kind ― health, passports, company structures, menus, Dan and so on ― and that if they had been German they would still be calling one another Sie. But that now, with action in the air and the same women in common. Jed and Sophie, a bond of mutual dependence was forming between them. And that Roper was aware of this also ― even if he didn't know the full reason ― hence the little extra confidences, glances and asides.

And that he had never seen anybody riding into a battle zone in a sleep mask.

He stole a look at Langbourne, seated behind Roper reading his way through a lengthy contract, and he was impressed, as he had been in Curaçao. by the way Langbourne sprang to life as soon as he caught the whiff of cordite. He would not say he liked Langbourne the better for it, but he was gratified to discover that there was something on earth apart from women that was capable of rousing him from his supine state ― even if it was only the advanced techniques of human butchery.

"Now, Thomas, don't you let Mr. Roper fall into any bad company," Meg had warned from the steps of her plane as the men humped their luggage to the waiting helicopter. "You know what they say about Panama: it's Casablanca without the heroes, isn't that so, Mr. Roper? So don't you-all go being heroes, now. Nobody appreciates it. Enjoy your day, Lord Langbourne. Thomas, it's been a pleasure having you aboard. Mr. Roper, that was not a seemly embrace."

They were climbing. As they climbed, the sierra climbed with them until they entered bumpy cloud. The helicopter didn't like cloud, and it didn't like the altitude, and its engine was wheezing and braying like a bad-tempered old horse. Jonathan put on his plastic earmuffs and was rewarded with the howl of a dentist's drill instead. The air in the cabin turned from ice-cold to intolerable. They lurched over a coxcomb of snowcaps and flipped downward like a sycamore seed until they were flying over a pattern of small islands, each with its half-dozen shanties and red tracks. Then sea again. Then another island, coming at them so fast and low that Jonathan was convinced that the clustered masts of the fishing boats were about to smash the helicopter to pieces or send it cartwheeling down the beach on its rotaries.

Now they are splitting the earth in two, sea one side, jungle the other. Above the jungle, the blue hills. Above the hills, white puffs of gun smoke. And underneath them roll the ordered ranks of slow white waves between tongues of dazzling green land. The helicopter banks tightly as if dodging unfriendly fire. Square banana groves like paddy fields merge with the sodden moorland of Armagh. The pilot is following a sanded yellow road leading to the broken-down farmhouse where the close observer blew two men's faces off and made himself the toast of his regiment. They enter a jungle valley; green walls envelop them as Jonathan is overcome by a dreadful need of sleep. They are climbing up the hillside, shelf by shelf, over farms, horses, villages, living people. Turn back; this is high enough. But they don't. They continue until zero is upon them and life below untraceable. To crash here, even in a big plane, is to have the jungle close over you before you hit the ground.

"They seem to prefer the Pacific side," Rooke had explained in Curaçao, eight hours and a lifetime ago, speaking over the house telephone from room 22. "Caribbean side's too easy for the radar boys to track. But once you're in the jungle it makes no difference anyway, because you won't exist. The head trainer calls himself Emmanuel."

"It isn't even a letter on the map," Rooke had said. "The place is called Cerro Fabrega, but Roper prefers to call it Faberge."

Roper had taken off his sleep mask and was looking at his watch as if checking the airline's punctuality. They were in free-fall over zero. The red-and-white posts of a helicopter pad were sucking them downward into the well of a dark forest. Armed men in battle gear were staring up at them.

If they take you with them it will be because they daren't trust you out of their sight, Rooke had said prophetically.

And so indeed had Roper explained before going aboard the Lombardy. He won't trust me in an empty henhouse until my signing hand has signed me off.

The pilot cut his engines. A squat Hispanic man in jungle uniform trotted forward to receive them. Beyond him, Jonathan saw six well-camouflaged bunkers, guarded by men in pairs who must have had orders not to leave the shadow of the trees.

"Hullo, Manny," Roper shouted as he hopped cheerfully onto the tarmac. "Starving. You remember Sandy? What's for lunch?"

* * *

They processed cautiously down the jungle path, Roper leading and the stubby colonel chattering to him as they went, turning to him with all his thick body at once, lifting his cupped hands to grapple him each time he made a point. Close behind them walked Langbourne, who had slipped into a low-kneed jungle march; then came the training staff. Jonathan recognised the two loose-limbed Englishmen who had appeared at Meister's calling themselves Forbes and Lubbock and known to Roper as the Brussels boys. Then came two look-alike Americans with gingery hair, deep in converse with a flaxen man called Olaf. After them came Frisky and two Frenchmen he evidently knew from other lives. And behind Frisky came Jonathan and Tabby and a boy called Fernandez, with a scarred face and only two fingers on one hand. If we were in Ireland, I'd reckon you were bomb disposal, thought Jonathan. The scream of birds was deafening. The heat scalded them each time they entered sunlight.

"We are in most steep country of Panama, please," said Fernandez in a soft enthusiastic voice. "Nobody can walk this place. We have three-thousand-meter-high, very steep hill, all jungle, no road, no path. Terebeno farmers come, they burn tree, grow plantain one time, go away. No terror."

"Great," said Jonathan politely.

A moment's confusion, which Tabby was for once quicker than Jonathan to solve. "Soil, Ferdie," he corrected him kindly. "Not terra. Soil. The soil is too thin."

"Terebeno farmers very sad people, Mr. Thomas. Once they fight everybody. Now they must marry to tribe they do not like."

Jonathan made sympathetic noises.

"We say we are prospector, Mr. Thomas, sir. We say we look oil. We say we look gold. We say we look huaca, gold frog, gold eagle, gold tiger. We are peaceful people here, Mr. Thomas." Great laughter, in which Jonathan obligingly took part.

From beyond the jungle wall Jonathan heard a burst of machine gun fire, followed by the dry smack of a grenade. Then a moment's silence before the babel of the jungle returned. That's how it used to be in Ireland, he remembered: after a bang, the old noises held their breath until it was safe to speak again. The vegetation closed over them, and he was in the tunnel at Crystal. Trumpet-shaped white flowers, dragonflies and yellow butterflies brushed against him. He remembered a morning when Jed wore a yellow blouse and touched him with her eyes.

He was returned to time present by a detachment of troops jogging past him down the hill at light-infantry speed, sweating under the weight of shoulder-held rocket launchers, rockets and machetes. Their leader was a boy with dead blue eyes and a bushwhacker's hat. But the eyes of his Spanish Indian troops were fixed in angry pain on the way ahead, so that all Jonathan knew of them as they scurried past was the praying exhaustion of their camouflage-dappled faces and the crosses round their necks and the smell of sweat and mud-soaked uniforms.

They entered alpine cool, and Jonathan was transferred to the forests above Miirren, headed for the foot of the Lobhorn for a one-day climb. He felt intensely happy. The jungle is another homecoming. The path led beside steaming rapids; the sky was overcast. As they crossed a dried riverbed, the veteran of many assault courses glimpsed ropes, trip wires, shell cases and netting, blackened pampas and blast marks on the tree trunks. They scrambled up a slope between grass and rock, reached a brow and looked down. The camp that lay below them was at first glance deserted. Fire smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney, to the sound of plaintive Spanish singing. All able-bodied men are in the jungle. Only the cooks, cadre and men on the sick list have leave to stay behind.

"Under Noriega, many paramilitary was being trained here," Fernandez was saying in his methodical way, when Jonathan tuned back to him. "Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Americano, Colombia. Spanish people, Indian people, all was trained here very good. To fight Ortega. To fight Castro. To fight many bad people."

It was not till they walked down the slope and entered the camp that Jonathan realised that Fabergé was a madhouse.

* * *

A commanding officer's lookout point dominated the camp, and it was backed by a triangular white wall daubed with slogans. Below it stood a ring of cinder-block houses, each with its function painted in obscene figures on the door: the cookhouse with a topless female cook, the bathhouse with its naked bathers, the clinic with its bloody bodies, the schoolhouse for technical instruction and political enlightenment, the tiger house, the snake house, the monkey house, the aviary and, on a small rise, the chapel house, its walls illuminated with a bulbous Virgin and Child watched over by jungle fighters with Kalashnikovs. Painted effigies stood waist-high among the houses, staring with truculent eyes down the concrete paths: a fat-bellied merchant in tricorn hat, blue tailcoat and ruff; a rouged fine lady of Madrid in her mantilla; an Indian peasant girl with bare breasts, her head turned in fear, eyes and mouth open, as she frantically works the handle of a mystic well. And protruding from the windows and fake chimneys of the houses, flesh-pink plaster arms, feet and frenzied faces, blood-spattered like the severed limbs of victims cut down while trying to escape.

But the maddest part of Fabergé was not the wall daubings or the voodoo statues, not the magic words of Indian dialect sprinkled between Spanish slogans or the rush-roofed Crazy Horse Saloon with its barstools and jukebox, and naked girls cavorting on the walls. It was the living zoo. It was the demented mountain tiger crammed beside a chunk of rotting meat in a cage barely his own size. It was the tethered bucks and crated jungle cats. It was the parakeets, eagles, cranes, kites and vultures in their filthy aviary, beating their clipped wings and raging at the dying of the light. It was the despairing monkeys mute in their cages and the rows of green ammunition boxes covered with wire mesh, each box containing a separate species of snake so that jungle fighters could learn the difference between friend and foe.

"Colonel Emmanuel love very much animal," Fernandez explained as he showed his guests to their quarters. "To fight we must be children of the jungle, Mr. Thomas."

The windows of their hut were also barred.

* * *

It is mess night at Fabergé, miniatures to be worn. The regimental guest of honour is Mr. Richard Onslow Roper, our patron, colonel in chief, comrade in arms and love. All heads are turned to him, and to the no-longer-languid lordling seated at his side.

They are thirty strong, they are eating chicken and rice and drinking Coca-Cola. Candles in jars, not Paul de Lamarie candlesticks, light their faces down the table. It is as if the twentieth century has emptied its garbage truck of leftover warriors and vanished causes into a camp called Faberge: American veterans sickened first by war and then by peace; Russian Spetsnaz, trained to guard a country that disappeared while their backs were turned; Frenchmen who still hated de Gaulle for giving away North Africa; the Israeli boy who had known nothing but war, and the Swiss boy who had known nothing but peace; the Englishmen in search of military nobility because their generation somehow missed the fun (if only we could have had a British Vietnam!); the huddle of introspective Germans torn between the guilt of war and its allure. And Colonel Emmanuel, who according to Tabby had fought every dirty war from Cuba to Salvador to Guatemala to Nicaragua and points between in order to please the hated Yanqui: well, now Emmanuel would balance the score a little!

And Roper himself ― who had summoned this ghostly legion to the feast ― floated over it like some presiding genius, now commandant, now impresario, now sceptic, now fairy godfather.

"The Mooj?" Roper repeats amid laughter, picking up on something Langbourne has said about the success of American Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. "The Mujahedin? Brave as lions, mad as hatters!" When Roper talks about war, his voice is at its calmest and the pronouns reappear. "They'd pop out of the ground in front of Sov tanks, bang away with ten-year-old Armalites and watch their bullets bounce off 'em like hailstones. Peashooters against lasers, they didn't care. Americans took one look at 'em and said: Mooj need Stingers. So Washington finagles Stingers to 'em. And the Mooj go crazy. Take out the Sovs' tanks, shoot down their combat helicopters. Now what? I'II tell you what! The Sovs have pulled out, no more Sovs, and the Mooj have got Stingers and are rarin' to go. So everyone else wants Stingers because the Mooj have got 'em. When we had bows and arrows we were apes with bows and arrows. Now we're apes with multiple warheads. Know why Bush went to war against Saddam?"

The question is directed at his friend Manny, but an American veteran replies.

"The oil, for Chrissakes."

Roper is not satisfied. A Frenchman has a second try.

"For the money! For the sovereignty of Kuwaiti gold!"

"For the experience," says Roper. "Bush wanted the experience."

He pointed a finger at the Russians. "In Afghanistan, you boys had eighty thousand battle-hardened officers fighting a flexible modern war. Pilots who'd bombed real targets. Troops who'd come under real fire. What had Bush got? Warhorse generals from Vietnam and boy heroes from the triumphant campaign against Grenada, population three men and a goat. So Bush went to war. Got his knees brown. Tried out his chaps against the toys he'd flogged to Saddam, back in the days when the Iranians were the bad guys. Big handclap from the electorate. Right, Sandy?"

"Right, Chief."

"Governments? Worse than we are. They do the deals, we take the fall. Seen it again and again." He pauses, and perhaps he thinks he has spoken enough. But nobody else does.

"Tell them about Uganda, Chief! You were tops in Uganda. Nobody could touch you. Idi Amin used to eat out of your hand." It is Frisky, calling from the far end of the table, where he sits among old friends.

Like a musician doubtful whether to give an encore, Roper hesitates, then decides to oblige.

"Well, Idi was a wild boy, no question. But he liked a steadying hand. Anyone but me would have led Idi astray, flogged him everything he dreamed of and a bit more. Not me. I fit the shoe to the foot. Idi would have gone nuclear to shoot his peasants if he could have done. You were there too, McPherson."

"Idi was a one-off, Chief," says a nearly wordless Scot at Frisky's other side. "We'd have been goners without you."

"Tricky spot, Uganda ― right, Sandy?"

"Only place I ever saw a fellow eating a sandwich under a hanged man," Lord Langbourne replies, to popular amusement.

Roper does a Darkest Africa voice. " 'Cummon, Dicky, let's watch dem guns o' yours doin' their job.' Wouldn't go. Refused. 'Not me, Mr. President, thank you. You may do with me what you will. Good men like me are scarce.' If I'd been one of his own chaps he'd have wasted me on the spot. Goes all bubble-eyed. Screams at me. 'It's your duty to come with me!' he says. 'No, it's not,' I say. 'If I was selling you cigarettes instead of toys, you wouldn't be taking me down to the hospital to sit at the bedsides of chaps dying of lung cancer, would you?' Laughed like a drain, old Idi did. Not that I ever trusted his laughter. Laughter's lying, a lot of it. Deflection of the truth. I never trust a chap who makes a lot of jokes. I laugh, but I don't trust him. Mickey used to make jokes. Remember Mickey, Sands?"

"Oh, too bloody well, thank you," Langbourne drawls, and once more earns the merriment of the house: these English lords, you've got to hand it to them, they're something else!

Roper waits until the laughter fades: "All those war jokes Mickey used to tell, had 'em all in stitches? Mercenaries wearing strings of chaps' ears round their necks and stuff? Remember?"

"Didn't do him a lot of good, though, did it?" says the lord, further delighting his admirers.

Roper turns back to Colonel Emmanuel. "I told him, 'Mickey,' I said, 'you're pushing your luck.' Last time I saw him was in Damascus. The Syrians loved him too much. Thought he was their medicine man, get 'em anything they needed. If they wanted to take out the moon, Mickey would get 'em the hardware to do it. They'd given him this great luxury apartment downtown, draped it with velvet curtains, no daylight anywhere ― remember, Sandy?"

"Looked like a laying-out parlour for Moroccan fags," says Langbourne, to the helpless mirth of all. And again Roper waits till all is quiet.

"You walked into that office from the sunny street, you were blind. Very serious heavies in the anteroom. Six or eight of them." He waves a hand round the table. "Worse-looking than some of these chaps, if you can believe it."

Emmanuel laughs heartily. Langbourne, playing the dude for them, lifts an eyebrow. Roper resumes:

"And Mickey at his desk, three telephones, dictating to a stupid secretary. 'Mickey, don't fool yourself,' I warned him. 'Today you're an honoured guest. Let 'em down, you're a dead honoured guest.' Golden rule, back in those days: Never have an office. Soon as you've got an office, you're a target. They bug you, read your papers, shake you out and if they stop loving you they know where to find you. Whole time we worked the markets, never had an office. Lived in lousy hotels ― remember, Sands? Prague, Beirut, Tripoli, Havana, Saigon, Taipei, bloody Mogadishu? Remember, Wally?"

"Certainly do, Chief," says a voice.

"Only time I could bear to read a book was when I was holed out in one of those places. Can't stand the passivity as a rule. Ten minutes of a book, I've got to be up and doing. But out there, killing time in rotten cities, waiting for a deal, nothing else to do but culture. Somebody asked me the other day how I earned my first million. You were there, Sands. You know who I mean. 'Sitting on my arse in Nowheresville,' I told him. 'You're not paid for the deal. You're paid for wasting your time.' "

"So what happened to Mickey?" Jonathan asks down the table.

Roper glances at the ceiling as if to say, "Up there."

It is left to Langbourne to supply the punch line. "Hell, I never saw a body like it," he says in a kind of innocent mystification. "They must have taken days over him. He'd been playing all ends against the middle, of course. Young lady in Tel Aviv he'd grown a bit too fond of. Some might say it served him right. Still, I thought they were a bit hard on him."

Roper is standing up, stretching. "Whole thing's a stag hunt," he announces contentedly. "You trek, you wear yourself out. Things pull you down, trip you up, you press on. And one day you get a glimpse of what you're after, and if you're bloody lucky you get a shot at it The right place. The right woman. The right company. Others chaps lie, dither, cheat, fiddle their expenses, crawl around. We do ― and to hell with it! Goodnight, gang. Thanks, cook. Where's cook? Gone to bed. Wise chap."

* * *

"Shall I tell you something really, really funny, Tommy?" Tabby enquired, as they bunked down for the night, "something you're going to really enjoy?"

"Go ahead," said Jonathan hospitably.

"Well, you know the Yanks have got these AWACS down at Howard Air Base outside Panama City, for catching the drugs boys? Well, what they do is, they go up very, very high, and watch all the little planes buzzing round the coca plantations over in Colombia. So what the Colombians do is, being crafty, they keep this permanent little bloke drinking coffee in a caff opposite the airfield. And every time a Yankee AWACS goes up, this bloke's on the blowe to Colombia tipping off the boys. I like that."

* * *

It was another part of the jungle. They landed and ground crew winched the helicopter into the trees, where a couple of old transport planes were parked under netting. The airstrip was cut alongside a stretch of river, so slender that until the last moment Jonathan was sure trey would belly-flop into the rapids, but the metalled runway was long enough to take a jet. An army personnel carrier collected them. They passed a checkpoint and a notice saying BLASTING in English, though who would ever read and understand it was a mystery. The early sunlight made a jevel of every leaf. They crossed a suppers' bridge and drove between boulders sixty feet high till they came to a natural amphitheater filled with jungle echoes and the sound of tumbling water. The curve of the hillside made a grandstand. From it you looked down into a bowl of grassland broken by patches of forest and a winding river, and embellished at the centre with a film-set of block-built houses and seemingly brand-new cars parked along the kerbside: a yellow Alfa, a green Mercedes, a white Cadillac. Flags flew from the flat rooftops, and as the breeze lifted them Jonathan saw that they were the were the flags of nations formally committed to the repression of the cocaine industry: the American Stars and Stripes, the British Union Jack, the black, red and gold of Germany and, rather quaintly, the white cross of Switzerland. Other flags had evidently been improvised for the occasion: DELTA, read one, DEA another, and, on a small white tower all its own, U.S. ARMY HQ.

Half a mile from the centre of this mock town, set amid pampas grass and close to the river's path, lay a mock military airfield with a crude runway, yellow wind sock and dapple-green control tower made of plywood. Carcasses of mothballed aircraft littered the runway. Jonathan recognised DC-3s, F-85s and F-94s. And along the riverbank stood the airfield's protection: vintage tanks and ancient armoured personnel carriers painted olive drab and emblazoned with the American white star.

Shielding his eyes, Jonathan peered at the ridge overlooking the north side of the horseshoe. The control team was already assembling. Figures in white armbands and steel helmets were talking into handsets, peering through binoculars and studying maps. Among them, Jonathan made out Langbourne with his ponytail, wearing a flak jacket and jeans.

An incoming light aircraft skimmed low over the ridge on its way to land. No markings. The quality was beginning to arrive.

* * *

It's hand-over day, thought Jonathan.

It's the troops' graduation ceremony before Roper collects.

It's a turkey shoot, Tommy boy, Frisky had said, in the over-familiar manner that he had recently adopted.

It's a firepower demo, Tabby had said, to show the Colombian boys what they're getting for their you-know-what.

Even the handshakes had a finite quality. Standing at one end of the grandstand, Jonathan had a clear view of the ceremonials. A table of soft drinks had been set up, with ice in field containers, and as the VIPs arrived Roper himself led them to the table. Then Emmanuel and Roper between them presented their honoured guests to the senior trainers and, after more handshakes, escorted them to a row of folding khaki chairs set in the shade, where hosts and guests arranged themselves in a half-circle, talking self-consciously to each other in the way that statesmen exchange pleasantries at a photo-opportunity.

But it was the other men, the men who sat out of focus in the shadows, who commanded the close observer's attention. Their leader was a fat man with his knees apart and farmer's hands curled on his fat thighs. Beside him sat a wiry old bullfighter, as thin as his companion was fat, with one side of his face scarred white as if it had been gored. And in the second row sat the hungry boys, trying to look assured, in over-oiled hair and watered leather boots, and Gucci bomber jackets and silk shirts and too much gold, and too much bulk inside the bomber jackets, and too much killing in their fraught, half-Indian faces.

But Jonathan is allowed no more time to scrutinize them. A twin-engined transport aircraft has appeared over the northern ridge. It is marked with a black cross, and Jonathan knows at once that today black crosses are the good guys and white stars the bad guys. Its side door opens, a stick of parachutists blossoms against the pale sky, and Jonathan is rolling and spinning with them as his mind becomes a pageant of army memories from childhood till here. He is at parachute camp in Abingdon, making his first balloon jump and thinking that dying and getting divorced from Isabelle don't have to be the same thing. He is on his first field patrol, crossing open country in Armagh, clutching his gun across his flak jacket and believing he is finally his father's son.

Our paras land well. A second and a third stick join them. One team scurries from chute to chute, gathering up the equipment and supplies, while another team gives covering fire. For there is opposition. One of the tanks at the edge of the airfield is already shooting at the men ― which is to say its barrel is belching flame, and buried charges are exploding around the paras as they hasten into the pampas grass for cover.

Then suddenly the tank is firing no more and will never fire again. The paras have taken it out. Its turret is askew, black smoke oozes from its interior, one of its tracks has snapped like a watch strap. In quick succession the remaining tanks get the same treatment. And after the tanks the parked aircraft are sent skidding and reeling across the runway until, buckled and quite dead, they can move no more.

Light anti-tank weapons, Jonathan is thinking; two to three hundred meters effective range; the favoured weapon for killer patrols.

The valley splits again as defensive machine gun fire pours out of the buildings in a belated counterstrike. Simultaneously the yellow Alfa Romeo lurches to life and, remotely guided, races down the road in a bid to escape. Cowards! Chicken! Bastards! Why don't you stay and fight? But the black crosses have their answer ready. From the pampas, firing on settings of ten and twenty bursts, the Vulcan machine guns drive streams of heavy tracer into the enemy positions, cutting through the concrete blocks, plugging them with so many holes that they resemble giant cheese graters. Simultaneously the Quads, in bursts of fifty, lift the Alfa clean off the road and hurl it into a coppice of dry trees, where it explodes and bursts into flames, setting light to the trees also.

But no sooner is this peril past than a new one besets our heroes. First the ground explodes, then the sky goes mad. But do not fear: once more our men are prepared! Drones ― aerial targets ― are the villains. The Vulcan's six barrels can achieve an elevation of eighty degrees. They achieve it now. The Vulcan's radar range finder is co-mounted, her ammunition load is two thousand shells, and she is firing them in bursts of a hundred at a time, so loudly that Jonathan has set his face in a grimace of pain as he presses his hands over his ears.

Belching smoke, the drones disintegrate and, like scraps of so much burning paper, tumble sedately into the jungle's depths. On the grandstand it is time for Beluga caviar served from iced tins, and chilled coconut juice, and Panamanian Reserva rum, and single malt Scotch on the rocks. But no shampoo ― not yet. The Chief plays long.

* * *

The truce is over. So is lunch. The town may finally be taken. From the pampas grass a brave platoon advances frontally on the hated colonialists' buildings, shooting and drawing fire. But elsewhere, covered by the distraction, less conspicuous assaults are being launched. Waterborne troops with blackened faces are advancing down the river on inflatable dinghies, barely visible among the reeds. Others, in special combat gear, are stealthily scaling the outside of the U. S. Army HQ. Suddenly, on a secret signal, both teams attack, tossing grenades through windows, leaping after them into the flames, emptying their automatic weapons. Seconds later, all remaining parked cars are immobilised or commandeered. On the rooftops, the hated flags of the oppressor are lowered and replaced by our own black cross. All is victory, all is triumph, our troops are supermen!

But wait! What is this? The battle is not yet won!

Attracted by the growl of a plane, Jonathan again glances up at the ridge, where the control team sits tensely over its maps and radios. A white jet aircraft ― civilian, sparkling new, unmarked, twin-engined, two men clearly visible in the cockpit ― skims over the hilltop, dives steeply and zooms low over the town. What is it doing here? Is it part of the show? Or is it the real Drug Enforcement Agency, come to watch the fun? Jonathan looks round for somebody to ask, but all eyes, like his, are fixed upon the plane, and everyone is as mystified as he is.

The jet departs, the town lies still, but on the ridge the controllers are still waiting. In the pampas grass also, Jonathan spots five men huddled in a fire group and recognises the two look-alike American trainers among them.

The white jet is returning. It sweeps over the ridge, but this time it ignores the town and begins instead a rather vague ascent.

Then from the pampas grass comes a furious, extended hiss, and the jet vanishes.

It does not break up, or shed a wing, or reel giddily into the jungle. There is the hiss, there is the explosion, there is the fireball that is so quickly over that Jonathan wonders whether he has seen it at all. And after that, there are the tiny sparkling embers of the aircraft's skin, like golden raindrops, disappearing as they fall. The Stinger has done its work.

For a dreadful moment Jonathan really does believe that the show has ended with a human sacrifice. In the grandstand Roper and the distinguished guests are hugging and congratulating each other. Roper is popping Dom. Colonel Emmanuel is assisting him. Swinging round to the ridge, Jonathan sees delighted members of the control team congratulating each other also, wrestling hands, ruffling each other's hair and slapping each other on the back, Langbourne among them. Only when he looks higher does he see two white puffs of parachute half a mile back in the jet's flight path.

"Likee?" Roper enquired in his ear.

Like a nervous impresario, Roper was moving among the other spectators collecting opinions and congratulations.

"But who on earth were they?" Jonathan demanded, still reluctant to be mollified. "Those crazy pilots? What about the plane? That was millions of dollars of stuff!"

"Couple of clever Russkies. Hell-bent. Slipped down to Cartageña airport, pinched a jet, put her on automatic pilot second time round and bailed out. Hope the poor owner doesn't want it back."

"That's outrageous!" Jonathan declared as his indignation gave way to laughter. "That's the most disgraceful thing I ever heard!"

He was still laughing when he found himself caught in the cross-gaze of the two American trainers, who had just arrived from the valley by jeep. Their similarity was eerie: the same freckled smile, the same gingery hair and the same way of resting their hands on their hips while they studied him.

"You British, sir?" asked one.

"Not particularly," said Jonathan pleasantly.

"You're Thomas, aren't you, sir?" said the second. "That Thomas Something or Something Thomas? Sir."

"Something like that," Jonathan agreed, more pleasantly still, but Tabby close beside him heard the undertow in his voice and placed a restraining hand discreetly on his arm.

Which was unwise of Tabby, because in doing so he enabled the close observer to relieve him of a wad of American dollars nestling in the side pocket of his bush jacket.

Yet even at this gratifying moment, Jonathan cast an uneasy glance after the two Americans in Roper's train. Disenchanted veterans? Settling a grudge with Uncle Sam? Then get yourselves a couple of disenchanted faces, he told them, and stop looking as if you ride first class and charge the company for your time.

* * *

Intercepted handwritten fax relayed to the Roper jet, marked MOST URGENT, from Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw in London, England, to Dicky Roper care of the SS Iron Pasha, Antigua, received 0920 hours and transmitted to the jet at 0928 hours by the Iron Pasha's skipper, with a covering note apologising if he had taken the wrong step. Sir Anthony's handwriting bulbous and illiterate, with misspellings, underlinings and the occasional eighteenth-century flourish. The style telegraphic.

Dear Dicky,

Re our conversation two days ago, have discussed matter with Thames Authority an hour ago and have assertained that offending information is documentary in your hand, and irrifutable. Am also led to beleive that the late Dr. Law was used by unfriendly elements to squeeze out previous signatory in favour present incumbant. Thames are taking evasive action, suggest you do same.

In view of this crucial assistance trust you will send another immediate ex gratia care of usual bank, to cover farther essential expenses your urgent interest.

Best, Tony.

This intercept, which had not been passed to Enforcement, was surreptitiously obtained by Rynn from a source in Pure Intelligence sympathetic to his cause. In his chagrin following the death of Apostoll, Rynn had difficulty overcoming his native mistrust of the English. But after a half-bottle of ten-year-old Bushmills single malt, he felt strong enough to slip the document into his pocket and, having driven pretty much by instinct to the operations centre, present it formally to Burr.

* * *

It was months since Jed had flown on a commercial flight, and at first she found the experience liberating, like riding on the top of a London bus after all those dreary taxi rides. I'm back in life, she thought; I've stepped out of the glass coach. But when she made a joke of this to Corkoran, who sat beside her as they headed for Miami, he sneered at her condescension. Which surprised as well as hurt her, because he had never been rude to her before.

And at Miami airport he was equally unpleasant, insisting that he pocket her passport while he went in search of a luggage trolley, then turning his back on her while he addressed two flaxen-haired men hanging around the departure desk for the onward flight to Antigua.

"Corky, who in heaven's name are they?" she asked him when he returned.

"Friends of friends, my dear. They will be joining us on the Pasha."

"Friends of whose friends?"

"Of the Chief's, actually."

"Corky, they can't possibly be! They're absolute bruisers!"

"They're additional protection, if you wish to know. The Chief has decided to raise the strength of the security to five."

"Corky, why on earth? He's always been perfectly content with three before."

Then she saw his eyes and was scared, because they were vindictive and triumphant. And she realised that this was a Corkoran she didn't know: a slighted courtier on his way back to favour, with long-held grievances to settle with interest.

And on the plane he didn't drink. The new protection were flying in the back, but Jed and Corkoran sat in first class, where he renounced all alcohol rather than drink himself into a stupor, which was what she expected him to do. Instead, he ordered himself mineral water with ice and a slice of lime, and slurped it while he admired his reflection in the window.