Judas Country

Eleanor grinned again and I wriggled back through the doorway and into my seat. 'How're we doing?'

'Just starting to get Beirut.' Ken pointed at the second ADF compass; its needle was slopping about just left of centre.

I put on the earphones and got a faint steady tone, with every now and then the identification letters in morse: B-O-D. 'That's it. But something I thought of: what about your passport problem?' Normally, each of us carried two passports so that we could keep the Israeli stamps on one, the Arab ones on the other. And the same sort of juggling with some African countries. But your second passport is only issued for a year, and Ken's would be way out of date by now.

He shook his head. 'No matter. My passport didn't ret stamped going into Israel and for some reason they didn't bother going out. I'm clean.'

Well, perhaps that figured. I put a match to my pipe and the cockpit swirled with smoke.

Ken sniffed. 'Now I know I'm really home. When's your uncle going to sell the pig farm?' He stretched and licked his lips. 'You know – suddenly I miss not smoking. In jail it didn't matter mueh. I'd never been in the coop before, so one more difference you didn't notice. But in a cockpit… Maybe I'll start again.'

'More pilots lose their licences for heart trouble than anything else.'

'Ahh, that's just BOAC types overeating and worrying about the stock market.' A tower of cumulus cloud stood straight ahead, its top well over 10,000. Ken turned us 30 degrees right and started the stopwatch hand of his watch. Then nodded over his shoulder. That champagne-'

I looked quickly back, but though the little sliding door wasn't shut, the girls obviously couldn't hear.

That champagne: was the paperwork good?'

'Very.' I took the sheaf from my inside pocket. 'Even this certificate of origin thing. God knows how they got that.'

'Did you have the papers with you, that night? – when you got mugged but nothing taken?'

'Yes.' I touched the corner of my jaw reflectively.

'Could it be they just wanted a look at the papers? To make sure you'd brought the cargo they were expecting?'

'It's possible.'

'I mean, somebodyis expecting that load, and they'll have paid some in advance, maybe all. Had you thought they might start wondering if you'd sold it all for yourself and gone whoring on the proceeds?'

'No, 1 hadn't really thought that.' Somehow, I just hadn't had time.

'Hadn't you better start thinking it?' he suggested gently. 'I mean, besides sleeping with your back to the wall and your eyes open.'

'It's an idea. Only – why should anybody in Cyprus know what I was really carrying? It wasn't for them and you wouldn't exactly sling this sort of information around.'

He checked his watch; we'd been on our new heading just 90 seconds and the cloud was now behind the port wing. He turned us back 60 degrees to port and started the watch again. Another 90 seconds and a 30-degree turn and we'd be right back on our original track.

'You got thumped around midnight, yes? But the news that Castle had gone bust and the aeroplane's stuck at Cyprus must have come through about nine hours before. Plenty of time to catch a flight from Beirut. And they'd know exactly which hotel you'd be in.'

There's that,' I admitted.

We made the last turn of the dogleg. After a while, he said: 'And you got hit on the chin. Couldn't you see who did it? You can hardly get bopped on the chin from behind.'

'You can if you try. He just spun me around and bomp. Anyway, it was dark. I just got the idea he was big and male.'

'I'm glad it wasn't small and female. But hell – nobody hits anybody on the chin except on TV.'

'So maybe he was trying to break into TV work. Damn it all, it just happened.'

'Well, next time try and remember to ask why.'