When the Hastings was clear of British airspace Vanderbilt vented a long, deeply sincere sigh of relief. And immediately began to feel badly about the whole messy operation.
If he was honest with himself, which was something Vanderbilt tried to be, it was not any of the specific actions which had been required of him that was causing this bad taste in his mouth. There was none he had not done before, without compunction or regret. He wished he had a rand for every time he had used his strength against people who were not his physical equal: women, men, kids, the hurt, the bound, the frightened. None of it was novel, and while he derived no great pleasure from it he accepted the need for it to be done and the desirability of it being done efficiently. Nor was it the first time his success had been crowned by another man’s death.
If he was honest, what rankled most was the trail of disorder he had left behind him. Good operations were swift and smooth, and after the mechanic had gone home all that was left to show he had been was the body of his mark, or the burning building, or the empty file where important papers used to be. A good mechanic did not attract attention to himself. Vanderbilt was troubled, and indeed ashamed, that he had left a trail Shola could follow, and deeply bothered that he would not even have won the success that confounds criticism but for the intervention of some smooth-faced ruthless little commando from Carver’s army who, except for a fluke of politics, would have been against him rather than with him. Yet when he reviewed the thing objectively he could not see where or how he should have acted differently.
He shrugged off his seat-belt and edged out into the aisle. There were only a few rows of seats immediately behind the bulkhead; all the space in the central fuselage was filled with crates. They were stamped for Egypt and for Zaire, but one of them was going further. Vanderbilt slouched down the aisle, the seats on either side brushing his thighs, to where they had parked the smallish crate loaded at the last minute from the van.
The flight engineer had noticed and asked what it was; the pilot had told him spare parts. The engineer had gone up to the flight-deck without comment, but he had not appeared greatly surprised by either the last-minute crate or the unexpected supercargo in overalls. If he did not know Kane was working something on the side he guessed; either he was paid off or he genuinely did not care. Vanderbilt made no enquiries: the crew was Kane’s responsibility, if he wanted to go on flying he had presumably safeguarded himself as far as they were concerned.
They had left the last crate accessible, abutting the aisle and with nothing on top of it. Vanderbilt stood for a while looking down at it, his hands in his pockets. Then he looked round for something to use as a crowbar and prised the lid off.
Grant lay on his side, curled round, with his knees drawn up. He made no response to the sudden light. He was deeply unconscious. Vanderbilt, wondering leaned closer. Grant’s breathing was deep and even, and under his jaw the pulse was firm and steady. He was sleeping, not dying. Pretoria had been right and Grant wrong. And Vanderbilt had been wrong not to use the hypodermic back at the cottage. He would have been home by now if he had, and Piet the helicopter pilot would have gone home to his wife.
Vanderbilt went on gazing at the man in the crate, thinking about what the man with the broken arm had said. That was the reason for that sudden, extraordinary flash of recognition he had experienced: something of the expression, something of the personality of the big old man floating like a mirage in the thin pale face of his sleeping child.
And if that much was true, the rest probably was too. It explained what he had been unable to understand before, how a defunct terrorist could be of sufficient value after two years out in the cold to be worth risking an international furore over. It also explained that odd emphasis Botha had placed on his captive’s health. Looking down at Grant’s passive, ambiguous face he wondered what terrible divisions in a family could result in a man and his son taking up arms against each other; and worse than arms. Vanderbilt knew what had been done to Joel Grant in his father’s house, and he believed Will Hamlin’s murmured, fainting accusation. The man had been too tired and confused to lie, his allegation too terrible to be other than true.
He waited for some feeling about that to come and none did. Feelings were not really his line of business. All that he could get his mind round was that Joachim De Witte was his chief, for whom he had untold respect and no small affection, and that Joel Grant was not. He realized that made him an emotional bankrupt, and found he had no strong feelings about that either.
He wandered over to a window. The Hastings was at height and over sea. He wandered up to the flight-deck. The engineer looked at him incuriously, the copilot did not even turn round. When Kane saw him he waved him brusquely back. Vanderbilt shrugged and walked back down the plane. A couple of minutes later the pilot joined him.
“Listen, you’d better stay away from those two. They’ve been paid off, but I’d just as soon they never knew what they’ve been paid off for.”
“All right,” Vanderbilt said mildly.
“I mean, Christ Almighty, it’s not like a box of rifles or illicit currency, is it?”
“No,” agreed Vanderbilt.
“Hell, we all got in the way of carrying extras when they started that sanctions nonsense over Rhodesia, but washing machines and televisions is one thing and people is another, and people being taken somewhere they don’t want to go is a different thing again, right?”
“Quite so,” Vanderbilt agreed smoothly, bridling his irritation but not so closely that Kane should not catch a dangerous glimpse of it. “Which is why you were not expected to help us out of the mere goodness of your heart.” As he said it he winced. There were a number of expressions he was going to have to foreswear after this, because of their loaded meanings.
Kane, who had not been close enough to hear what Hamlin said, did not notice. Nervousness was enough to make him argumentative. “Oh yes, I’m sure it seems a hell of a lot of money to you. But you take out of it the extra fuel, landing charges, sweeteners for those two up front, ditto for people on the ground, and it stops looking quite so generous. And then it may have to last me a very long time, if I can’t go home.…”
“Not go back? What are you talking about?”
“That fiasco in the garage! Bloody hell, if I’d known to expect that I’d have wanted a damn sight more.”
“All part of life’s rich pageant,” murmured Vanderbilt.
“Your life, maybe. I get all the excitement I need wondering how many of the warning lights on a dashboard are serious. My point is, we left witnesses back there. The black and the kid you were so careful to drive round, they asked for me at the airport by name. They don’t just know what I am, they know who I am. So one of them’s got a sore head and the other a broken arm: so what? If I take this crate back at the end of the week, I’m going to find policemen lining the runway like landing lights.”
Vanderbilt said patiently, “I think you missed the point. The third man, who dealt with the other two. He was from the British government.”
“So?”
“So Whitehall—or whoever—is not going to connive actively at our success and then tell the world about it at a trial. They’ve already made the bed they want to lie in. We were lucky—for their own reasons, they wanted us to succeed. The case was closed the moment we took off, and Jack Carver will make sure it stays closed. If anyone tries to lean on you, let him know—a message left with Special Branch will find him. I don’t know how he plans to muzzle Shola and his friend—some judicious blend of threats and blackmail, I would imagine—but that’s his problem and unless he’s gone off badly he’ll handle it. Until this is ancient history, they won’t even risk charging you with speeding. What you’re going back to is a charmed life.”
Kane, who had been studiously avoiding the small crate behind them with its lid off, finally let his gaze settle on it. “And what’s he going back to?”
Vanderbilt looked directly at him. “Do you really want to know?”
After a moment the pilot looked away. “No.”
“Then don’t ask.”
Turning back to the flight-deck, Kane glanced at his watch. “We’ll be into Cairo before eight. That’s where we’ll stop over. There’s a hotel quite handy but I imagine you’ll stay on board. Tomorrow it’s a nine-hour haul to Kinshasa and another six to Johannesburg.”
Vanderbilt did not require to be instructed in his work, but he was too appalled to resent it. “Two days?” He had flown up by jetliner in fourteen hours, Johannesburg to London.
“What do you think this is,” Kane asked blandly, “Concorde?”
Left alone, Vanderbilt fumed silently with disappointment and frustration. Another night—and by then Grant would be awake. He would have to be drugged again: there were risks in that but it was too dangerous to keep him awake. At Cairo and at Kinshasa there would be men on board who owed Vanderbilt nothing, whose sympathies for the most part would be firmly with his prisoner: if Grant was in a state to ask for help he might very well get it. Even in the air he could not afford a scene, if Kane’s crew were something of an unknown quantity. Men who would cheerfully turn a blind eye to smuggled goods for the right price might feel very differently about taking a condemned man to his death. It would be far better if they never suspected Grant’s presence, let alone his destiny. Still trying to be honest with himself, Vanderbilt admitted that at least part of his reluctance to let Grant wake was because, now he knew what it was all about, he did not want to have to talk to him again. Anyway, he was too tired.
Time and miles passed in the humming aircraft plugging down the sky. They ate a late lunch from a briefcase full of sandwiches and boiled a kettle for tea. The crew ate together and Vanderbilt ate alone, obscurely troubled by the fact that there were five men on board but only four mugs. It was as if Grant was already dead and they were taking his corpse home. For the very first time and only in passing, chasing the thought out of his mind before it could roost, Vanderbilt wondered if he could go through with this.
Over the Mediterranean Vanderbilt took the top off the crate again. Grant was still asleep, curled foetally in the bottom of the box, dried blood under his face from his cut cheek, but this time he reacted to the light, his eyelids flickering, twisting his head away with a little protesting groan. Vanderbilt watched him for some moments, head on one side. Then he grasped the far side of the crate, braced his foot on the rim nearest him and tipped the thing over, spilling its contents into the aisle.
Grant was aware in the dimmest way possible of stirring consciousness. He was aware of the splash of light on his shut lids, and the flaccid painless tumbling of his eviction. He felt the cold and wet as Vanderbilt bathed his face and throat with a soaked towel. He felt himself hoisted by strong hands and walked mechanically up and down. When a mug of water was pressed to his lips he drank. When a hypodermic needle was pressed into his vein he slept again.
At Cairo, after the cargo handlers had finished and the crew had retired to their hotel, Vanderbilt left Grant sleeping on the floor beside his crate, handcuffed to an anchorpoint though the chances of him taking advantage of the concession seemed minimal, and walked up to the flight-deck.
Kane had found a quiet spot to park the Hastings. The nearest lights were barely sufficient to show it was there, quite inadequate to pick up any movement on board, and Vanderbilt left the cabin lights off. He found the radio by touch and began searching through its bands for something useful. Mostly he would have liked to hear from Pretoria, but that was still most of a continent away and he could not pick up anything he recognized. At length he found an English language news programme and listened to that.
It was not that he expected to hear his exploit discussed. Indeed, with so many interests vested in keeping it quiet it would be an appalling blunder if it became public knowledge. But on a personal level Vanderbilt did not much care. If they would wait another day the world’s press could discuss it to their hearts’content, up to and including how he was beaten up by an unarmed, bound and barefoot boy, and he would not care at all. The radio was less for information than for company: for reassurance that a world beyond his trials with Grant continued to exist and was only waiting for him to get home and hand over his prisoner before welcoming him back into its bosom.
He listened for fifteen minutes to a woman discoursing knowledgeably on the Benin bronzes, interrupted at regular intervals by a reporter who clearly thought they had holes in them and sat in public parks between the war memorials and the swings, and then he switched off.
He switched on again an hour later to hear a man saying, “… fought in the Western Desert during the Second World War. He took part in many historic actions, and led the now famous raid. …”
Vanderbilt had been listening with half an ear for two or three minutes before he realized that what he was listening to was Joachim De Witte’s obituary.
It took him half an hour to find a telephone he could use, and longer to get the call placed. When he finally got through to his office Botha was not there. He had gone home. (De Witte had never left the office while there was anything resembling a crisis on. More than once the nights he had snatched sleep on the little folding cot by his desk had stretched into weeks.)
At least Botha did not have to be roused from his bed. He had taken the phone almost before Vanderbilt had finished giving his name.
“Vanderbilt, where in God’s name are you?”
Vanderbilt told him.
“You should have been here yesterday! What in hell went wrong?”
“Just about everything. It tends to, when you’re working on your own in somebody else’s country. You know?” Botha did not, of course, and Vanderbilt knew it, which is why he said it. “It’s all right now, though. Well be in tomorrow—no, today. This evening. That’s not why I called. De Witte: is it true he’s dead?”
“You’re damn right it’s true. The department’s a madhouse. I need you back here, Vanderbilt.” Botha sounded at once tired and fraught.
“What happened?”
There was the briefest of pauses. “He was shot. At the hospital.”
“By who?”
“We’re working on that.”
“You didn’t catch anyone? Surely to God he was guarded?”
Botha always responded to criticism with bluster. “When you show some signs of being able to carry out your own duties with efficiency and on schedule, I might be interested in your views on how I should perform mine. In the meantime the most useful thing you can do is get back here with that bloody boy. Though precisely what I’m meant to do—” He stopped abruptly.
Vanderbilt said deliberately, “You never did explain what we needed Grant for.”
Botha responded tartly. “I never considered it necessary to do so.”
“Consider it now,” suggested Vanderbilt quietly.
“When you get back,” Botha promised, “you and I are going to have a little chat.”
“I worked for the colonel for eight years and never questioned his judgement once. I’m sorry I have to question yours so soon, but I’m doing nothing more until I get an answer.”
Vanderbilt could picture his chief’s round, rather pasty face flooding with colour, but after another of those brief pauses he got his answer. “He’s a ter. He never retired from terrorist activity, he’s just been directing it from a safe distance. We think it was his people murdered De Witte. We think a period of interrogation will confirm this.”
Vanderbilt did not doubt it. Periods of interrogation in Pretoria had confirmed much stranger things.
After he had taken his leave of Botha he thought for several minutes. Then he rang his office back and spoke to the duty officer.
“I’ve just been talking to Botha. That’s bad news about the colonel. Hard to believe he’d take that way out.”
The voice at the other end of Africa was glum, depressed. “I know. But there’s no other way to read it, Danny. You’ve got to remember, he’s been a sick man. He wasn’t getting any better.”
Vanderbilt returned to the parked aircraft, taking pains to remain unseen more from habit than strict necessity. He checked with his torch but Grant had hardly stirred. Then he switched it off and sat in the dark, listening to the soft steady rain of pieces falling into place and forming a picture he did not want to look at.
The dawn came with its familiar celerity. One of the things which irritated Vanderbilt on his excursions into the temperate zones was the lethargy of daybreaks and nightfalls, as if the matter was subject to a twice-daily poll, with recounts. Equally irritating was the way the people of such regions insisted there was something pleasant and desirable in those murky joyless hours bracketing the day like dreary book-ends.
In the wake of the quick North African dawn came Kane, striding hurriedly across the tarmac, agitation in every line of his long, angular body. He let himself into the aircraft, calling Vanderbilt’s name although Vanderbilt was only feet away, in the last row of seats where the leg-room was greater. Grant was back in the crate.
“What’s the matter with you?” Vanderbilt asked calmly.
Kane glanced at him with hunted eyes. “You know a man called Botha?”
Hairs pricked up along the back of Vanderbilt’s neck. “How do you know that name?”
“He phoned me this morning. Early, at the hotel. He said he was your boss. Is he?”
“Probably.” Vanderbilt’s tone contained some irony. His eyes remained wary.
“He wants us to scrub Kinshasa, to fly direct to Johannesburg.”
“Does he indeed?”
“There’s no problem as far as fuel goes, and I can drop the Zaire shipment off on my way home.”
“That’s all right, then.”
“You’re happy enough with that?” Kane sounded relieved, as if he had expected—had been led to expect—difficulties.
“Why shouldn’t I be happy? I’m getting home so much the sooner.”
“Right. Exactly.” The pilot essayed a game if overgenerous grin and went on up to the flight-deck, moving more easily as if the weight lifted from his mind had been a physical burden. Five minutes later the second officer and flight engineer came aboard too. They just about nodded at Vanderbilt, still sprawling in his seat, and he raised a languid hand by way of response. They too disappeared into the nose.
Behind the amiable bland face and the lazy wave Vanderbilt was thinking, with intensity and speed: not so much of the chain of events which had brought him here but of the people whose lives were joined by strange, enduring linkages into that chain.
Of Botha, devious and carping, a man of infinite guile and no greatness, whose rule would be un-tempered now by the prospect of De Witte returning to claim his desk and file his understudy away where he would be harmless.
Of the English girl, the naked girl he had seen only once, and her calm faith in Grant.
Of Grant himself, still an enigma, an eternal hung Christ pierced through at intervals by the sharpness of other people’s ambitions.
Of the black man who could have saved him except that the urbane, ubiquitous civilization of the corrupt old world into which he had come had slid into his soul unnoticed and stayed his hand when a moment of African strength would have ended the thing.
Of the white man, by no standards a warrior, who should have been finished four times over by a broken arm but fought back the pain long enough to deliver his piece of the picture that finally made sense of all the bits that would not fit.
Of the young man from Carver’s army and his unattractive proposition.
But mostly of De Witte. De Witte had always inspired a fierce loyalty and genuine affection in his officers, and in return had supported and protected them to the best of his considerable ability. He was one of the last—perhaps the last—of a dying race of giants. Behind the amiable bland face Vanderbilt was grieving for him.
He wondered how much he had known. That they wanted to give him a new heart, probably: he would have welcomed a new lease of life. But that that heart belonged to a living, viable man? Vanderbilt did not believe that De Witte would have sanctioned it. It had the particularly nose-curling stink of Botha’s brand of ruthlessness. De Witte was ruthless too but not like that, never like that. And when he found out, certainly about the heart and probably about the donor too, he stopped it. He stopped it dead.
One by one the four Bristol engines broke into life, the propellers turning at first as if hand-cranked, only afterwards dissolving into a blur of their own speed. The ageing aeroplane, like a dowager in a bathchair, trundled past the buildings towards the runway. This early in the morning there was no queue: the tower directed the Hastings to the top end of the runway. Like a dowager pushed by an athletic footman the plane taxied downwind and turned her face back briefly towards the Mediterranean. Kane put on his brakes, made his final checks and ran his engines up.
Under cover of the burgeoning sound and vibration, Vanderbilt threw open the passenger door in the big hatchway. He kicked the crate over, dragging Grant—somnolent, mumbling—out mostly by his hair. He cast sharp glances forward and aft, but no one was watching: the tower was half a mile ahead and on the blind side. Grant’s hands were finally free: Vanderbilt used one to haul him to the door and manhandle him through it, lowering his limp body some of the several feet to the tarmac. When he let go Grant dropped inert, a shapeless heap on the ground dressed in another man’s clothes stained with another man’s blood.
The engine noise dropped back to a lower, throatier rumble. The aeroplane strained for the sky. Either unaware of the open door or deliberately ignoring it, Kane snapped the brakes off.
As the aircraft took that first abrupt stride towards freedom, the dowager suddenly lifting her skirts and bounding from her chair like a sprinter, Vanderbilt finally cast his vote. He followed his prisoner out of the hatch, hit the ground face down and rolled over once, and the broad expanse of the tailplane rushed over his head.