The wrong side of the sk.., p.8
The Wrong Side of the Sky, page 8
‘Did you see the oil?’ Rogers asked me.
I told him what Herter had found, then what we’d found on Kira. He listened quietly. Then he said:
‘So it really happened? The jewels, I mean.’
‘Looks like it,’ I said.
‘Could he have flown all the way from India?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. No, he couldn’t. He’d have done it in two jumps, about 1,500 miles each. Landed in Arabia somewhere to refuel. The next 1,500 miles would bring him just about to here. He cut it very fine, too fine. My guess is that he hit Kira on his last drop of fuel.’
He was quiet for a while. I didn’t think we’d have His Excellency up in the cockpit this trip, and I was right.
Then Rogers said: ‘And Ken Kitson did the same thing, same place. Only he didn’t reach an island.’
‘Looks like it,’ I said. I left it at that, and, for once, so did he.
The jittery, bad-taste feeling was with me again. I wanted to bust something or barrel-roll the plane or get drunk or just get to hell out. A Dakota cockpit was a bad place right then. I’d spent too much of my life in Daks and flown them with too many men who were dead now, and until I got away from Dakotas I’d still be flying with them.
But I wasn’t going to get away from Dakotas. We were growing old and obsolete together and when they brought in a Dakota replacement they’d bring in a Jack Clay replacement, too. And I could go and spend the rest of my life in a quiet place among the trees.
You were wrong, Miss Brown. Not hard — not me. Nothing as noble and resolute as that. Just old and obsolete and frayed at the edges. You should learn to tell the difference, Miss Brown. It could be important, some day.
Just bitter, Miss Brown, just bitter.
I called Athens tower and told them what we’d seen by way of oil and wreckage, positively identified as from the Piaggio, and recommended the search called off. They wanted to debate what I’d been doing in landing on Saxos and endangering what ever I had been endangering, but I told them my receiver was fading badly and they gave up. They’d get me in person later.
I was in a bad mood for a night landing, but it was easy enough. Everything seemed easy enough; the hard thing was finding a reason for going on doing it.
Shirley Burt vanished as soon as we got parked. I felt bad about her, but there didn’t seem anything I could do. The Nawab and Miss Brown climbed into the big Mercedes that materialized under the hangar lights when Herter willed it to. Then he turned to me.
‘I understand that you insulted His Excellency,’ he told me.
I shrugged. I thought ‘insult’ was pitching it a bit strong, but he could be right. My experience of how to speak to Nawabs is limited.
He frowned at me. ‘This,’ he said weightily, ‘will be taken account of in the payment.’
‘The cost is £400,’ I told him. ‘Cash — in any hard currency you like.’
‘His Excellency can be generous. Also he can show his dis pleasure.’
‘ I said. ‘Here and now.’
‘You do not tell me what to pay!’ he trumpeted. ‘For this I report you!’
I sneered at him. ‘Who to? International Air Transport Association? The Swiss Chamber of Trade? We don’t belong. We don’t belong to anything. Pay up and go to hell.’
He got six inches taller at a jerk. I’d dropped my sabre on parade.
I said: ‘If you don’t pay, I’ll put the story of that crashed aircraft on to every front page in Europe. In twenty-four hours you’ll be knee-deep in foreign correspondents, and they’ll be hot men who know how to ask questions and dig for information. In two days they’ll either have found the jewels or driven them so far underground that you won’t find them in another ten years. My co-pilot will give you a receipt.’
He was either going to burst or hit me. Either would have been fine with me; I was in just the mood to be picked up for brawling on the parking apron to the inconvenience of the law- abiding citizens. But he was going to pay, whatever else he did. And he knew it.
Very slowly, he reached inside his jacket and turned one of its bulges into a roll of currency that would have choked a jet engine. He peeled several off the top, counted them again and passed them over. He made it seem like handing over his sword.
They were U.S. dollars: ten hundreds, two fifties and two tens. Fair enough. I turned to Rogers.
‘Write a receipt,’ I said. ‘To His Excellency the Nawab of Tungabhadra. For 1,120 dollars. With thanks. Sign it and give it to Mr Herter.’
I turned around and walked away, towards the Mercedes.
The back window was rolled down and as I came up to it the Nawab stuck his sharp little face forward out of the shadows of the back seat.
I smiled at him and leant down with my hand on the window. Miss Brown was just a dim white blur on the far side — that and a tingle of scent in the quiet air.
‘I hope you enjoyed the flight, Your Excellency.’ I smiled some more. Me? Insult a Nawab?
He grunted.
‘And I hope you find the jewels,’ I added. I straightened up. ‘Wait.’ He frowned out at me. I waited. He asked: ‘Mr Kitson did tell you, then?’
‘Something.’
‘You haven’t heard of them?’
I shrugged. ‘Not so far. But I get around quite a bit. Of course’ — I leered at him — ‘I might not know whose they were even if I met them.’
‘There would be a reward,’ he said.
‘Really? How much?’ I sounded interested.
He looked me over carefully, then his mouth twisted. I was just another beggar with just another wooden bowl outstretched. He shrugged carelessly. ‘I might offer a small percentage. They are worth over a quarter of a million sterling.’
Herter came up behind me, gave me a raking glance and climbed into the driving seat. ‘I had heard,’ I said to the Nawab, ‘that they were a million and more.’
That shook him. But he recovered quickly. ‘Captain — do you know much about jewellery?’
‘I knew a girl with moonstone ear-rings, once.’
From the shadows in the back seat Miss Brown gave a little diamond-studded chuckle. The Nawab frowned at me, then leant back and said something to Herter.
The big car zipped away, nearly taking my arm with it. I stood and watched them wind past the refuelling bowsers and out of the apron lights and away. Rogers came up under my elbow.
‘You didn’t even kiss her goodbye,’ he pointed out.
‘Why should I say goodbye? How d’you know she isn’t expecting me to come climbing up to her window with a guitar between my teeth?’
‘Don’t stub your toe on the Nawab,’ he said nastily.
‘He can always play the guitar.’ I stared around the empty, lighted apron. ‘Get the tanks filled; we’re flying tomorrow. I’ll see you back at the hotel.’
I walked over to the tower ready to be pleasant to anybody — which was as well, when they started asking about the Saxos landing. I pleaded alternate excuses of Aircargo carburettors and Nawab’s orders and got away with a warning. I paid off for the maintenance we’d had that morning and the fuel we were getting now. Then I started telephoning.
I’d lost some of my spare good humour by the time I’d fought my way through the Athens exchange. But I was lucky: it was one of Mikklos’s rare evenings away from the nightspots, and an even rarer one away from climbing walls with roses in his teeth.
We said how nice it was to hear each other. Then I said:
‘Mikky, old friend. I’ve been thinking things over. Maybe I was a bit hasty yesterday. I’ll take that cargo to Tripoli.’
11
BY NINE O’CLOCK the next morning we were ready to take on cargo. On the phone, the night before, Mikklos hadn’t sounded at all happy. He was suspicious of my change of mind, and he didn’t trust me farther than he could see me — and in Tripoli I was going to be 650 miles out of sight. But he sounded in a state to mistrust his own signature. He was jumpy, badly jumpy.
Contraband cargo is bad stuff to have lying around for long. It starts whispering behind your back.
But he told me that the cargo would be there on the dot of nine. He himself wouldn’t be. I could come and collect the documents from him at ten, in his office. There was no more mention of 350 dollars.
Bang on nine the yellow Dodge coupé swept around the corner of the hangar, trailing the same old lorry. Driving the Dodge was a lithe Arab youth, about twenty years old, wearing a pair of fancy mirror-glass sun spectacles that looked like two fat pools of black oil. He also had on a pair of cream cotton slacks and a bright blue denim jacket.
He climbed out and showed me his big white teeth.
‘I am Yussuf. You are Captain Clay?’
‘I’m Clay.’
‘You ready for the cargo, okay? I come with you to Tripoli.’
‘Who says?’ I asked him.
‘Mikklos says. I fix it all at Tripoli.’
‘Got a visa?’
He swept off the sunglasses with a flourish and gave me a sideways grin that was supposed to tell me he knew the price of everything and where he could get it for half of that.
‘I’m Arab.’
‘That doesn’t mean a damn thing. Either you’ve got a visa, or you’re a Libyan, or you don’t come.’
He gave a quick, nasty look and admitted: ‘I’m Libyan Arab.’ He reached into his hip pocket and stuck a passport into my open hand. He was Libyan all right.
‘I tell you where to go, okay?’ he said briskly, trying for a come-back.
‘I know where to go,’ I said. ‘Tripoli.’
He gave me his I’ve-been-around look again.
‘After Tripoli,’ he said, grinning.
‘I’ll talk that over with Mikklos. Start getting the cargo on board.’
I wasn’t much surprised at the suggestion that we’d be going farther than Tripoli. Mikklos wouldn’t want his stuff to hang around in the city if he could send it on south, into the desert, while he still had an aircraft on charter. The oil-drilling equipment story was a good excuse for this; most of the drilling rigs have their own airstrips by now.
Yussuf stuck his glasses back on and shouted to the men on the lorry. They backed up and started unloading.
I let Rogers handle the arrangement of the boxes but I was keeping his signature off any of the documents for this flight. The night before, I’d suggested he develop a bilious attack and stay in Athens. He’d just looked at me and said: ‘I’m second pilot on this plane. I’ll fly if you’re flying.’
I left it at that. I could always off-load him somewhere if the going seemed likely to get rough.
It took us twenty-five minutes to get everything arranged on board and tied down, and then it was time for me to start into Athens to pick up the documents from Mikklos. I left Rogers sitting on the doorway steps keeping a sharp eye on Yussuf to see that he didn’t try to sell the propellers off the plane before we could get airborne.
I reached Mikklos’s office by ten, climbed the dim stone steps and beat on the outer office door and got no answer. Miss Fluff was having her daily hair-set. I shoved in, past the piles of dusty files and cluttered desk, and banged on the inner office. Still no answer.
I was getting jumpy myself by this time. The cargo was now on my plane and I’d have to answer any questions about it if they got asked. I wanted to be on my way. Things might be fixed but the fix can wear thin when a man has had time to spend the money. I opened the door.
Mikklos was behind the desk, flopped forward on to it, his head on his arms. I thought for a moment he’d been coshed, then I sniffed a new tang among the dust and cigarette smoke. The smell of wartime, and a few times since the war. The smell of gunfire.
Something crunched under my foot. I looked down and could count five bright little copper tubes: 22 cartridge cases. I went very carefully back to the outer door. I wanted to scream for the police, but I wanted to find that Customs document even more. I locked the door and went back and very gently lifted Mikklos off the desk.
There were five neat little holes punched in the chest of his shirt, spread no farther than I could cover with the palm of my hand. Some blood, just a little, had leaked from two of the holes and formed a cross pattern along the weave of the shirt. Still very gently, I let him lean forward again.
The top of his desk was a mess of papers, but no more messy than he could have got them by himself. The office bottle of ouzo was on display, along with two small glasses, each with a dreg at the bottom. The top right-hand drawer was a fraction open. I wrapped a handkerchief round my hand and pulled it right open. The Beretta was still there. I took it out and sniffed it for no reason at all. I knew it hadn’t been fired. Perhaps, at the last second, he had reached for the drawer, but it had been too late by then. Whoever it was had stood up from the chair in front of the desk and put five well-grouped, unhurried shots into his chest and Mikklos had shoved his nose down into his paperwork and died.
Some of the paper had spilled off on to the floor. I shuffled them with my foot, and picked out a long white envelope with what looked like a cargo manifest sticking out.
I opened it gingerly and took out a bunch of consignment notes, manifests and a Customs clearance document. I saw the word Tripoli and that was enough for me. I shoved the whole lot into the front of my shirt.
I had been there too long for an honest man. Miss Fluff was due back from the hairdresser. The coppers were due back from coffee break. I was due far, far away — and fast.
I went back around the desk to replace the Beretta, then didn’t. Instead, I took a box of 765 mm. cartridges out of the drawer, closed it and pocketed the gun. At the door I stopped and looked back. Mikklos looked uncomfortable, unsettled, as he had when I had last seen him alive. He looked like a small crook in a small office. Not one of nature’s gentlemen, but probably not deserving of five holes in the chest either. I nodded to him and tiptoed on my way, wiping doorknobs as I passed.
12
BACK AT the airport I presented the clearance, and took across the Customs man to check the cargo. He gave the seals the quick one-two and signed me out. Then I herded Rogers and Yussuf across to the Customs office and got the three of us cleared. Then I practically ran back to the plane.
Rogers was amused at my jitters. He’d had me marked down as a cool, shady gun-runner from long ago — but Rogers didn’t know what I knew now. And I didn’t tell him, either. He’d make a better job of looking innocent if he had no guilty knowledge.
I showed Yussuf a seat, told him to get in it and stay in it. He gave me a knowing leer and as he reached down for the seat-belt I got a glimpse of the gun-butt under his left arm. It didn’t surprise me. This season, everyone was wearing them. Even me, nearly. By now the Beretta was under a bunch of manuals in the locker behind the cockpit door.
We turned on to the runway at five to eleven. At eleven o’clock we were outside the three-mile limit and not at home to any radio calls. I plotted a course that took us south for about a hundred miles and then turned south-west between the Peloponnese and Crete. Knowing my feelings about flying over more sea than I had to, Rogers thought the termites had got at my head, but he also knew my feelings about being argued with. And I was sticking to the wide open spaces beyond the three-mile limit. Mikklos probably hadn’t been fool enough to have any documents mentioning me and the cargo lying around, but I wasn’t prepared to bet my liberty on it.
We turned after three-quarters of an hour and Rogers put in the autopilot and started collecting bearings off the radio-compass. After he had plotted what he could get and made the necessary alterations to course, he said:
‘You haven’t told me what made you take this cargo, Jack.’
‘Money.’
‘Did you get the dollars?’
‘No.’
He looked at me, then at the instruments, then at the wind screen.
‘Of course, it’s only a suggestion,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but you wouldn’t be going off your nut, would you?’
‘I’ll see a psychiatrist when we get back to Berne.’
He nodded. ‘What I was thinking was that you’d be seeing Hauser.’
‘I’ll convince Hauser.’
He may have believed that; I didn’t. The only thing that would convince Hauser would be Mikklos’s cheque, and I didn’t think Mikklos would have posted it. But Hauser was a long way off.
Time and the Mediterranean passed steadily by. The Med is a good sea to fly over — if any sea is good on Aircargo standards of maintenance. Most of the time the winds are fairly steady and fairly light. But it can also, blow up some vicious storms without too much warning.
Today the sea was calm and glossy 6,000 feet below and Miss Brown was calm and glossy half an inch below the surface of my conscious mind. Already the three of them, and Athens itself, were becoming unreal in my mind, glamorous, remote film-screen figures. It happens. To a professional pilot ‘up there’ can eventually become ‘up here’, and the world where he lands is episodic, fragmentary. It happens to some earlier than others. Then, perhaps, he does something damnfool in the half-real world down below and he finds that being able to fly doesn’t make him one of the gods.
It isn’t new. It’s been happening to birds ever since cats.
Getting on for one o’clock we met a couple of U.S. Sixth Fleet jets who came and sniffed us over in case we were Moscow’s latest secret weapon. When they decided we weren’t, and had shown us how well they could fly on their backs, and gone away when I didn’t waggle the wings to show how marvellous I thought that was, I announced lunch. Tinned stuffed vine leaves, bread, cheese and a thermos of coffee.
Yussuf hadn’t brought any lunch. After a while he came and stood behind our seats and looked at things, especially at the lunch. I didn’t offer any conversation or any food. As far as I was concerned he could eat his pistol, and if he tried to be a smart guy in my aircraft I’d help stuff it down his throat. He went back again.
