The Night Manager (52 page)

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."

"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 once they 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, dba 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.

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 scrutinise 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.