“Thank you.” It was all McAuliff could say, but he meant it profoundly.
“I’m afraid that is not possible, Commander,” said Daniel. “You and I … we have matters between us. If McAuliff goes, he goes alone.”
“You’re a barbarian.” Hammond spoke sharply.
“I am the Halidon. And we do have priorities. Both of us.”
33
McAuliff nosed the small plane above cloud cover. He loosened the field jacket provided him by the driver of the car. It was warm in the tiny cabin. The Halidon aircraft was different from the plane he and Malcolm had flown from the field west of Accompong. It was similar to the two-seater Comanche in size and appearance, but its weight and maneuverability were heavier and greater.
McAuliff was not a good pilot. Flying was a skill he had half mastered through necessity, not from any devotion. Ten years ago, when he had made the decision to go field-commercial, he had felt the ability to fly would come in handy, and so he had taken the prescribed lessons that eventually led to a very limited license.
It had proved worthwhile. On dozens of trips over most continents. In small, limited aircraft.
He hoped to Christ it would prove worthwhile now. If it did not, nothing mattered anymore.
On the seat beside him was a small blackboard, a slate common to grammar school, bordered by wood. On it was chalked his primitive flight plan in white lettering that stood out in the dim light of the instrument panel.
Desired air speed, compass points, altitude requirements, and sightings that, with luck and decent moonlight, he could distinguish.
From the strip outside Drax Hall he was to reach a height of one thousand feet, circling the field until he had done so. Leaving the strip perimeter, he was to head southeast at 115 degrees, air speed 90. In a few minutes he would be over Mount Carey—two brush fires would be burning in a field; he would spot them.
He did.
From Mount Carey, maintaining air speed and dropping to 700 feet, he was to swing east-northeast at 84 degrees and proceed to Kempshot Hill. An automobile with a spotlight would be on a road below; the spotlight would flicker its beam into the sky.
He saw it and followed the next line on the chalkboard. His course change was minor—8 degrees to 92 on the compass, maintaining air speed and altitude. Three minutes and thirty seconds later, he was over Amity Hall. Again brush fires, again a fresh instruction; this, to, was minimal.
East at 87 degrees into Weston Favel.
Drop altitude to 500 feet, maintain air speed, look for two automobiles facing each other with blinking headlights at the south section of the town. Correct course to exactly 90 degrees and reduce air speed to 75.
The instant he reached Martha Brae River, he was to alter course 35 degrees southeast, to precisely 122 on the compass.
At this point he was on his own. There would be no more signals from the ground, and, of course, no radio contact whatsoever.
The coordination of air speed, direction, and timing was all he had … everything he had. Altitude was by pilotage—as low as possible, cognizant of the gradual ascent of the jungle hills. He might spot campfires, but he was not to assume any to be necessarily those of the survey. There were roving hill people, often on all-night hunts. He was to proceed on course for exactly four minutes and fifteen seconds.
If he had followed everything precisely and if there were no variants of magnitude such as sudden wind currents or rainfall, he would be in the vicinity of the grasslands. Again, if the night was clear and if the light of the noon was sufficient, he would see them.
And—most important—if he spotted other aircraft, he was to dip his right wing twice. This would indicate to any other plane that he was a ganja runner. It was the current courtesy-of-recognition among such gentlemen of the air.
The hills rose suddenly, far more rapidly than McAuliff had expected. He pulled back the half wheel and felt the updrafts carry him into a one-o’clock soar. He reduced the throttle and countered the high bank with pressure on the left pedal; the turbulence continued, the winds grew.
Then he realized the cause of the sudden shifts and crosscurrents. He had entered a corridor of harsh jungle showers. Rain splattered against the glass and pelted the fuselage; wipers were inadequate. In front of him was a mass of streaked, opaque gray. He slammed down the left window panel, pulled out the throttle, went into a swift ten-o’clock bank, and peered down. His altimeter inched toward 650; the ground below was dense and black … nothing but jungle forest, no breaks in the darkness. He retraced the leg from the Martha Brae in his mind. Furiously, insecurely. His speed had been maintained, so too his compass. But there had been slippage; not much but recognizable. He was not that good a pilot—only twice before had he flown at night; his lapsed license forbade it—and slippage, or drift, was an instrument or pilotage problem corrected by dials, sightings, or radio.
But the slight drift had been there. And it had come from aft starboard. Jesus, he was better in a sailboat! He leveled the aircraft and gently banked to the right, back into the path of the rain squall. The windshield was useless now; he reached across the seat and pulled down the right window panel. The burst of noise from the cross-drafted openings crashed abruptly through the small cabin. The wind roared at high velocity; the rain swept in streaking sheets, covering the seats and the floor and the instrument panel. The blackboard was soaked, its surface glistening, the chalk marks seemingly magnified by the rushing water sloshing within the borders.
And then he saw it … them. The plateau of grassland. Through the starboard—goddammit, right window. A stretch of less-black in the middle of the total blackness. A dull gray relief in the center of the dark wood.
He had overshot the fields to the left, no more than a mile, perhaps two.
But he had reached them. Nothing else mattered at the moment. He descended rapidly, entering a left bank above the trees—the top of a figure eight for landing. He made a 280-degree approach and pushed the half wheel forward for touch down.
He was at the fifty-foot reading when behind him, in the west, was a flash of heat lightning. He was grateful for it; it was an additional, brief illumination in the night darkness. He trusted the instruments and could distinguish the approaching grass in the beam of the forelamps, but the dull, quick fullness of dim light gave him extra confidence.
And it gave him the visibility to detect the outlines of another plane. It was on the ground, stationary, parked on the north border of the field.
In the area of the slope that led to the campsite two miles away.
Oh, God! He had not made it at all. He was too late!
He touched earth, revved the engine, and taxied toward the immobile aircraft, removing his pistol from his belt as he manipulated the controls.
A man waved in the beam of the front lights. No weapon was drawn; there was no attempt to run or seek concealment. Alex was bewildered. It did not make sense; the Dunstone men were killers, he knew that. The man in the beam of light, however, gave no indication of hostility. Instead, he did a peculiar thing. He stretched out his arms at his sides, lowering the right and raising the left simultaneously. He repeated the gesture several times as McAuliff’s aircraft approached.
Alex remembered the instructions at the field at Drax Hall. If you sight other planes, dip your right wing. Lower your right wing … arm.
The man in the beam of light was a ganja pilot!
McAuliff pulled to a stop and switched off the ignition, his hand gripped firmly around the handle of his weapon, his finger poised in the trigger frame.
The man came up behind the wind and shouted through the rain to Alex in the open window. He was a white man, his face framed in the canvas of a poncho hood. His speech was American … Deep South. Delta origins.
“Gawddamn! This is one busy fuckin’ place! Good to see your white skin, man! I’ll fly ’em an’ I’ll fuk ’em, but I don’t lak ’em!” The pilot’s voice was high-pitched and strident, easily carried over the sound
of the rain. He was medium height, and, if his face was any indication, he was slender but flabby; a thin man unable to cope with the middle years. He was past forty.
“When did you get in?” asked Alex loudly, trying not to show his anxiety.
“Flew in these six blacks ’bout ten minutes ago. Mebbe a little more, not much. You with ’em, I sup’oze? You runnin’ things?”
“Yes.”
“They don’t get so uppity when there’s trouble, huh? Nothin’ but trouble in these mountain fields. They sure need whitey, then, you betcha balls!”
McAuliff put his pistol back in his belt beneath the panel. He had to move fast now. He had to get past the ganja pilot. “They said there was trouble?” Alex asked the question casually as he opened the cabin door, stepped on the wing into the rain, and jumped to the wet ground.
“Gawddomw! The way they tell it, they got stole blind by a bunch of fuckin’ bucks out there. Resold a bundle after takin’ their cash. Let me tell you, those niggers are loaded with hardware!”
“That’s a mistake,” said McAuliff with conviction. “Jesus … goddamned idiots!”
“They’re lookin’ for black blood, man! Those brothers gonna lay out a lotta other brothers! Eeeaww!”
“They do and New Orleans will go up in smoke!… Christ!” Alexander knew the Louisiana city was the major port of entry for narcotics throughout the Southern and Southwestern states. This particular ganja pilot would know that. “Did they head down the slope?” McAuliff purposely gestured a hundred yards to the right, away from the vicinity of the path he remembered.
“Damned if they was too fuckin’ sure, man! They got one a them Geigers like an air-radar hone, but not so good. They took off more like down there.” The pilot pointed to the left of the hidden jungle path.
Alex calculated rapidly. The scanner used by the Dunstone men was definitive only in terms of a thousand-yard radius. The signals would register, but there were no hot or cold levels that would be more specific. It was the weakness of miniaturized long-distance radio arcs, operating on vertical principals.
One thousand yards was three thousand feet—over a half a mile within the dense, almost impenetrable jungle of the Cock Pit. If the Dunstone team had a ten-minute advantage, it was not necessarily fatal. They did not know the path—he didn’t know it either, but he had traveled it. Twice. Their advantage had to be reduced. And if their angle of entry was indirect—according to the ganja pilot, it was—and presuming they kept to a relatively straight line, anticipating a sweep … the advantage conceivably might be removed.
If … if he could find the path and keep to it.
He pulled up the lapels of his field jacket to ward off the rain and turned toward the cabin door above the wind of the plane. He opened it, raised himself with one knee to the right of the strut, and reached into the small luggage compartment behind the seat. He pulled out a short-barreled, high-powered automatic rifle—one of the two that had been strapped below the front seat of the Halidon car. The clip was inserted, the safety on. In his pockets were four additional clips; each clip held twenty cartridges.
One hundred shells.
His arsenal.
“I’ve got to reach them,” he yelled through the downpour at the ganja pilot. “I sure as hell don’t want to answer to New Orleans!”
“Them New Orleens boys is a tense bunch. I don’t fly for ’em if I got other work. They don’ lak nobody!”
Without replying, McAuliff raced toward the edge of the grassland slope. The path was to the right of a huge cluster of nettled fern—he remembered that; his face had been scratched because his hand had not been quick enough when he had entered the area with the Halidon runner.
Goddammit! Where was it?
He began feeling the soaked foliage, gripping every leaf, every branch, hoping to find his hand scratched, scraped by nettles. He had to find it; he had to start his entry at precisely the right point. The wrong spot would be fatal. Dunstone’s advantage would be too great; he could not overcome it.
“What are you lookin’ for?”
“What?” Alex whipped around into a harsh glare of light. His concentration was such that he found himself unlatching the safety on the rifle. He had been about to fire in shock.
The ganja pilot had walked over. “Gawddamn. Ain’t you got a flashlight, man? You expect to find your way in that mess without no flashlight?”
Jesus! He had left the flashlight in the Halidon plane. Daniel had said something about being careful … with the flashlight. So he had left it behind! “I forgot. There’s one in the plane.”
“I hope to fuck there is,” said the pilot.
“You take mine. Let me use yours, okay?”
“You promise to shoot me a couple a bucks, you got it man.” The pilot handed him the light. “This rain’s too fuckin’ wet, I’m going back inside. Good huntin’, hear!”
McAuliff watched the pilot run toward his aircraft and then quickly turned back to the jungle’s edge. He was no more than five feet from the cluster of fern; he could see the matted grass at the entry point of the concealed path.
He plunged in.
He ran as fast as he could, his feet ensnared by the underbrush, his face and body whipped by the unseen tentacles of overgrowth. The path twisted—right, left, right, right, right, Jesus! circles—and then became straight again for a short stretch at the bottom of the slope.
But it was still true. He was still on it. That was all that mattered.
Then he veered off. The path wasn’t there. It was gone!
There was an ear-shattering screech in the darkness, magnified by the jungle downpour. In the beam of his flashlight, deep within a palm-covered hole below him, was a wild pig suckling its blind young. The hairy, monstrous face snarled and screeched once more and started to rise, shaking its squealing offspring from its teats. McAuliff ran to his left, into the wall of the jungle. He stumbled on a rock. Two, three rocks. He fell to the wet earth, the flashlight rolling on the ground. The ground was flat, unobstructed.
He had found the path again!
He got to his feet, grabbed the light, shifted the rifle under his arm, and raced down the relatively clear jungle corridor.
Clear for no more than a hundred yards, where it was intersected by a stream, bordered by soft, foot-sucking mud. He remembered the stream. The runner who had used the name Marcus had turned left. Was it left? Or was it the from the opposite direction?… No, it was left. There had been palm trunks and rocks showing through the surface of the water, crossing the narrow stream. He ran to the left, his flashlight aimed at the midpoint of the water.
There were the logs! The rocks. A hastily constructed bridge to avoid the ankle-swallowing mud.
And on the right palm trunk were two snakes in lateral slow motion, curving their way toward him. Even the Jamaican mongoose did not have the stomach for Jamaica’s Cock Pit.
Alexander knew these snakes. He had seen them in Brazil. Anaconda strain. Blind, swift-striking, vicious. Not fatal, but capable of causing paralysis—for days. If flesh came within several feet of the flat heads, the strikes were inevitable.
He turned back to the overgrowth, the beam of light crisscrossing the immediate area. There was a dangling branch of a ceiba tree about six feet long. He ran to it, bending it back and forth until it broke off. He returned to the logs. The snakes had stopped, alarmed. Their oily, ugly bodies were entwined, the flat heads poised near each other, the blind, pinlike eyes staring fanatically in the direction of the scent. At him.
Alex shoved the ceiba limb out on the log with his left hand, the rifle and flashlight gripped awkwardly in his right.
Both snakes lunged simultaneously, leaping off the surface of the log, whipping their bodies violently around the branch, their heads zeroing toward McAuliff’s hand, soaring through the soft leaves.
Alex threw—dropped? he would never know—the limb into the water. The snakes thrashed; the branch reeled in furious circles and sank beneath the su
rface.
McAuliff ran across the logs and picked up the path.
He had gone perhaps three-quarters of a mile, certainly no more than that. The time elapsed was twelve minutes by his watch. As he remembered it, the path veered sharply to the right through a particularly dense section of fern and maidenhead to where there was a small clearing recently used by a band of hill-country hunters. Marcus—the man who used the name of Marcus—had remarked on it.
From the clearing it was less than a mile to the banks of the Martha Brae and the campsite. The Dunstone advantage had to be diminishing.
It had to be.
He reached the nearly impossible stretch of overgrowth, his flashlight close to the earth, inspecting the ground for signs of passage. If he stepped away from the path now—if he moved into the underbrush that had not seen human movement—it would take him hours to find it again. Probably not until daylight—or when the rains stopped.
It was painfully slow, agonizingly concentrated. Bent weeds, small broken branches, swollen borders of wet ground where once there had been the weight of recent human feet; these were signs, his codes. He could not allow the tolerance of a single error.
“Hey, mon!” came the muted words.
McAuliff threw himself to the ground and held his breath. Behind him, to his left, he could see the beam of another flashlight. Instantly he snapped off his own.
“Hey, mon, where are you? Contact, please. You went off your pattern. Or I did.”
Contact, please … Off your pattern. The terms of an agent, not the language of a carrier. The man was M.I.6.
Past tense. Was.
Now Dunstone, Limited.
The Dunstone team had separated, each man assigned an area … a pattern. That could only mean they were in radio contact.
Six men in radio contact.
Oh, Jesus!
The beam of light came nearer, dancing, flickering through the impossible foliage.
“Here, mon!” whispered Alex gutturally, hoping against reasonable hope that the rain and the whisper would not raise an alarm in the Dunstone ear.