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
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.
