‘Vous parlez français?’
‘Yes, but I also speak English!’
A lilting, corrective tone. Jerry guessed he was a Dane.
‘I’m press. What’s the fuss?’ He was shouting at the top of his voice.
‘Phnom Penh is closed,’ the missionary bellowed in reply. ‘No planes may leave or land.’
‘Why?’
‘Khmer Rouge have hit the ammunition dump in the airport. The town is closed till morning at the least.’
The loudspeaker began chattering again. The two priests listened. The missionary stooped nearly double to catch their murmured translation.
‘They have made a great damage and devastated half a dozen planes already. Oh yes! They have laid them waste entirely. The authority is also suspecting sabotage. Maybe she also takes some prisoners. Listen, why are they putting an ammunition house inside the airport in the first case? That was most dangerous. What is the reason here?’
‘Good question,’ Jerry agreed.
He ploughed across the hall. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. The ‘crew only’ door was guarded by a pair of very serious crushers and in the tension he saw no chance of brazening his way through. The thrust of the crowd was toward the passenger exit, where harassed ground staff were refusing to accept boarding tickets, and harassed police were being besieged with letters of laissez passer designed to put the prominent outside their reach. He let it carry him. At the edges, a team of French traders was screaming for a refund, and the elderly were preparing to settle for the night. But the centre pushed and peered and exchanged fresh rumours, and the momentum carried him steadily to the front. Reaching it, Jerry discreetly took out his cable card and climbed over the improvised barrier. The senior policeman was sleek and well-covered and he watched Jerry disdainfully while his subordinates toiled. Jerry strode straight up to him, his shoulder bag dangling from his hand, and pressed the cable card under his nose.
‘Securité américaine,’ he roared in awful French, and with a snarl at the two men on the swing doors, barged his way on to the tarmac and kept going, while his back waited all the time for a challenge or a warning shot or, in the trigger-happy atmosphere, a shot that was not even a warning. He walked angrily, with rough authority, swinging his shoulder bag, Sarratt-style, to distract. Ahead of him - sixty yards, soon fifty - stood a row of single-engined military trainers without insignia. Beyond lay the caged enclosure, and the freight huts, numbered nine to eighteen, and beyond the freight huts Jerry saw a cluster of hangars and park bays, marked prohibited in just about every language except Chinese. Reaching the trainers, Jerry strode imperiously along the line of them as if he were carrying out an inspection. They were anchored with bricks on wires. Pausing but not stopping, he stabbed irritably at a brick with his buckskin boot, yanked at an aileron and shook his head. From their sandbagged emplacement, to his left, an anti-aircraft guncrew watched him indolently.
‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites?’
Half turning, Jerry cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Watch the damn sky for Christ’s sakes,’ he yelled in good American; pointing angrily to heaven, and kept going till he reached the high cage. It was open and the huts lay ahead of him. Once past them he would be out of sight of both the terminal and the control tower. He was walking on smashed concrete with couch-grass in the cracks. There was nobody in sight. The huts were weather-board, thirty feet long, ten high, with palm roofs. He reached the first. The boarding on the windows read ‘Bomb Cluster Fragmentation Without Fuses’. A trodden dust-path led to the hangars on the other side. Through the gap Jerry glimpsed the parrot colours of parked cargo planes.
‘Got you,’ Jerry muttered aloud, as he emerged on the safe side of the huts, because there ahead of him, clear as day, like a first sight of the enemy after months of lonely marching, a battered blue-grey Dc4 Carvair, fat as a frog, squatted on the crumbling tarmac with her nose cone open. Diesel oil was dripping in a fast black rain from both her starboard engines and a spindly Chinese in a sailing cap laden with military insignia stood smoking under the loading bay while he marked an inventory. Two coolies scurried back and forth with sacks, and a third worked the ancient loading lift. At his feet, chickens scrabbled petulantly. And on the fuselage, in flaming crimson against Drake Ko’s faded racing colours, ran the letters OCHART. The others had been lost in a repair job.
Oh, Charlie’s indestructible, completely immortal! Charlie Marshall, Mr Tiu, a fantastic half Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot…
He’d bloody well better be, sport, thought Jerry with a shudder, as the coolies loaded sack after sack through the open nose and into the battered belly of the plane.
The Reverend Ricardo’s lifelong Sancho Panza, your Grace, Craw had said, in extension of Lizzie’s description. Half Chow, as the good lady advised us, and the proud veteran of many futile wars.
Jerry remained standing, making no attempt to conceal himself, dangling the bag from his fist and wearing the apologetic grin of an English stray. Coolies now seemed to be converging on the plane from several points at once: there were many more than two. Turning his back on them, Jerry repeated his routine of strolling along the line of huts, much as he had walked along the line of trainers, or along the corridor toward Frost’s room, peering through cracks in the weatherboard and seeing nothing but the occasional broken packing case. The concession to operate out of Battambang costs half a million US renewable, Keller had said. At that price, who pays for redecoration? The line of huts broke and he came on four army lorries loaded high with fruit, vegetables and unmarked gunny bags. Their tailboards faced the plane and they sported artillery insignia. Two soldiers stood in each lorry handing the gunny bags down to the coolies. The sensible thing would have been to drive the lorries on to the tarmac, but a mood of discretion prevailed. The army likes to be in on things, Keller had said. The navy can make millions out of one convoy down the Mekong, the air force is sitting pretty: bombers fly fruit and the choppers can airlift the rich Chinese instead of the wounded out of the siege towns. Fighter boys go a little hungry because they have to land where they take off. But the army really has to scratch around to make a living.
Jerry was closer to the plane now and could hear the squawking as Charlie Marshall fired commands at the coolies.
The huts began again. Number eighteen had double doors and the name Indocharter daubed in green down the woodwork, so that from any distance the letters looked like Chinese characters. In the gloomy interior, a Chinese peasant couple squatted on the dust floor. A tethered pig lay with its head on the old man’s slippered foot. Their other possession was a long rush parcel meticulously bound with string. It could have been a corpse. A water jar stood in one corner with two rice bowls at its base. There was nothing else in the hut. ‘Welcome to the Indocharter transit lounge,’ Jerry thought. With the sweat running down his ribs, he tagged himself to the line of coolies till he drew alongside Charlie Marshall, who went on squawking in Khmer at the top of his voice while his shaking pen checked each load on the inventory.
He wore an oily white short-sleeved shirt with enough gold stripes on the epaulettes to make a full general in anybody’s air force. Two American combat patches were stitched to his shirt front, amid an amazing collection of medal ribbons and Communist red stars. One patch read ‘Kill a Commie for Christ’, and the other ‘Christ was a Capitalist at Heart’. His head was turned down and his face was in the shadow of his huge sailing cap, which slopped freely over his ears. Jerry waited for him to look up. The coolies were already yelling for Jerry to move on, but Charlie Marshall kept his head turned stubbornly down while he added and wrote on the inventory and squawked furiously back at them.
‘Captain Marshall, I’m doing a story on Ricardo for a London newspaper,’ said Jerry quietly. ‘I want to ride with you as far as Phnom Penh and ask you some questions.’
As he spoke, he gently laid the volume of Candide on top of the inventory, with three one-hundred dollar bills poking outward in a discreet fan. When you want a man to look one way, says the Sarratt school of illusionists, always point him in the other.
‘They tell me you like Voltaire,’ he said.
‘I don’t like anybody,’ Charlie Marshall retorted in a scratchy falsetto at the inventory, while the cap slipped still lower over his face. ‘I hate the whole human race, hear me?’ His vituperation, despite its Chinese cadence, was unmistakably French-American. ‘Jesus Christ, I hate mankind so damn much that if it don’t hurry and blow itself to pieces I’m personally going to buy some bombs and go out there myself!’
He had lost his audience. Jerry was halfway up the steel ladder before Charlie Marshall had completed his thesis.
‘Voltaire didn’t know a damn bloody thing!’ he screamed at the next coolie. ‘He fought the wrong damn war, hear me? Put it over there you lazy coon and grab another handful! Dépêche-toi, crétin, oui?’
But all the same he jammed Voltaire into the back pocket of his baggy trousers.
The inside of the plane was dark and roomy and cool as a cathedral. The seats had been removed, and perforated green shelves like Meccano had been fitted to the walls. Carcasses of pig and guinea fowl hung from the roof. The rest of the cargo was stowed in the gangway, starting from the tail end, which gave Jerry no good feeling about taking off, and consisted of fruit and vegetables and the gunny bags which Jerry had spotted in the army trucks, marked ‘grain’, ‘rice’, ‘flour’, in letters large enough for the most illiterate narcotics agent to read. But the sticky smell of yeast and molasses which already filled the hold required no labels at all. Some of the bags had been arranged in a ring, to make a sitting area for Jerry’s fellow passengers. Chief of these were two austere Chinese men, dressed very poorly in grey, and from their sameness and their demure superiority Jerry at once inferred an expertise of some kind. He remembered explosives-wallahs and pianists he had occasionally ferried thanklessly in and out of badland. Next to them, but respectfully apart, four hills men armed to the teeth sat smoking, and cropping from their rice bowls. Jerry guessed Meo or one of the Shan tribes from the northern borders where Charlie Marshall’s father had his army, and he guessed from their ease that they were part of the permanent help. In a separate class altogether sat the quality: the colonel of artillery himself, who had thoughtfully supplied the transport and the troop escort, and his companion a senior officer of customs, without whom nothing could have been achieved. They reclined regally in the gangway, on chairs specially provided, watching proudly while the loading continued, and they wore their best uniforms as the ceremony demanded.
There was one other member of the party and he lurked alone on top of the cases in the tail, head almost against the roof, and it was not possible to make him out in any detail. He sat with a bottle of whisky to himself, and even a glass to himself. He wore a Fidel Castro hat and a full beard. Gold links glittered on his dark arms, known in those days (to all but those who wore them) as CIA bracelets, on the happy assumption that a man ditched in hostile country could buy his way to safety by doling out a link at a time. But his eyes, as they watched Jerry along the well-oiled barrel of an AK47 automatic rifle, had a fixed brightness. ‘He was covering me through the nose cone,, thought Jerry. ‘He had a bead on me from the moment I left the hut.’
The two Chinese were cooks, he decided in a moment of inspiration: cooks being the underworld nickname for chemists. Keller had said that the Air Opium lines had taken to bringing in the raw base and refining it in Phnom Penh, but were having hell’s own job persuading the cooks to come and work in siege conditions.
‘Hey you! Voltaire!’
Jerry hurried forward to the edge of the hold. Looking down he saw the old peasant couple standing at the bottom of the ladder and Charlie Marshall trying to wrench the pig from them while he shoved the old woman up the steel ladder.
‘When she come up you gotta reach out and grab her, hear me?’ he called, holding the pig in his arms. ‘She fall down and break her ass we gotta whole lot more trouble with the coons. You some crazy narcotics hero, Voltaire?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you grab hold of her completely, hear me?’
She started up the ladder. When she had gone a few rungs she began croaking and Charlie Marshall contrived to get the pig under his arm while he gave her a sharp crack on the rump and screamed at her in Chinese. The husband scurried up after her and Jerry hauled them both to safety. Finally Charlie Marshall’s own clown’s head appeared through the cone, and though it was swamped by the hat, Jerry had his first glimpse of the face beneath: skeletal and brown, with sleepy Chinese eyes and a big French mouth which twisted all ways when he squawked. He shoved the pig through, Jerry grabbed it and carted it, screaming and wriggling, to the old peasants. Then Charlie hauled his own fleshless frame aboard, like a spider climbing out of a drain. At once, the officer of customs and the colonel of artillery stood up, brushed the seats of their uniforms, and progressed swiftly along the gangway to the shadowed man in the Castro hat squatting on the packing cases. Reaching him, they waited respectfully, like sidesmen taking the offertory to the altar.
The linked bracelets flashed, an arm reached down, once, twice, and a devout silence descended while the two men carefully counted a lot of bank notes and everybody watched. In rough unison they returned to the top of the ladder where Charlie Marshall waited with the manifest. The officer of customs signed it, the colonel of artillery looked on approvingly, then they both saluted and disappeared down the ladder. The nose cone juddered to an almost-closed position, Charlie Marshall gave it a kick, flung some matting across the gap, and clambered quickly over the packing cases to an inside stairway leading to the cabin. Jerry clambered after him, and having settled himself into the co-pilot’s seat, he silently totted up his blessings.