“You might not like it,” Barney Knox told him. “It has absolutely no connection with any department of the US government.”
“I see. Which particular department is it absolutely not connected with?”
“The CIA. No link whatsoever. The pay’s good.”
“Will I have to kill anyone?”
“Only if they insult the queen. Hell, what do I know? They’re paying top dollar, so it’s not going to be a milk run. You want out, I wouldn’t blame you.”
Silk wanted in. Air America suited him. It had a large stable of aircraft, from single-engined air taxis to four-engined airliners. Every task was different. He flew sacks of rice (or something labelled rice) into Burma, and he flew body bags (or bags of something) out of Nicaragua. The years passed; when he flicked through his logbook he was surprised how quickly they had passed, and how many types he had flown: Constellations, Globemasters, a Ford Trimotor, a Catalina, various Piper Cubs, Mustangs, freighters converted from Marylands, Baltimores and Bostons. And many more. Occasionally his flight plan sent him to a US Air Force base. He was always made welcome: Barney Knox’s influence. Sometimes they offered him a flight in a military aircraft, just for the experience. He flew as co-pilot in a Lockhead Hercules, a gentle giant of a plane. He flew in the two-seat trainer type of some astonishing jets: the Sabre fighter, the twin-engined Canberra bomber, the US Navy’s Phantom. He even flew an Air Force version of the Boeing 707. Once he got accustomed to their kick-in-the-back acceleration, he liked jets better than anything. After a jet, Air America’s freighters felt like wheelbarrows.
Silk always took his leave during the Parliamentary summer recess, when Zoë would be free. That arrangement failed in 1957.
She wasn’t at the apartment or the cottage. Her office said she was part of a Unesco team investigating illiteracy in the Third World. Where, exactly? Right now, in Singapore. “I’ve just come from bloody Singapore,” Silk said. The office was sympathetic. It had tried to contact him via Air America but apparently the airline’s number was unlisted. Very unusual.
1958 was worse. Zoë’s diary was so full that he gave up any hope of a normal reunion. Instead he found out where she was going and he tagged along. Big mistake.
He was sitting in a lecture theatre at Birmingham University, not listening to her speech about secondary education, when he knew they were in trouble. She wasn’t the woman he had married, she wasn’t skittish, slightly crackers, lithe as a kitten, totally unpredictable, huge fun. She was Zoë Silk, MP, in a tailored navy blue suit, the skirt two inches longer than he liked, and wearing the permanently interested expression of the politician. She’d changed in twelve years – well, of course she’d changed, everybody changes. That meant he’d changed too, and not for the better. Laura – growing up fast and usually away at boarding school – seemed to treat him like an uncle. A distant uncle.
He left the lecture theatre, went to the lavatory and stared in the mirror. He looked like his father. Especially the eyes. He was looking at his father looking back at him, a bit critical, a bit dissatisfied. The old man had been a pain in the ass. Christ Almighty. He washed his face. Made no difference. Same eyes.
On the train back to London, Zoë said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Silko darling, but would you mind awfully having the guest bedroom tonight? It’s just that I’ve got an early start tomorrow, and you can be so enormously restless when you sleep.”
“Can I?” he said. “Bloody hell.”
“And I suppose I’m accustomed to sleeping alone.”
He was glad when he could go back to Air America, but not for long. After a week or two he began resenting the work because it kept him away from Zoë. Yet he knew that if he went back to London he would be bored and boring, and she would be as remote when she was in the House of Commons as she was when he was flying to Chile or to Portuguese Angola.
He got to know Angola quite well. Portugal had clung onto its empire in Africa by never changing the simple formula of total white supremacy and brutal black repression. Then Lisbon had declared that its African colonies were now in fact overseas provinces of Portugal, so any prospect of freedom for the black population was stone dead. Action and reaction were equal and opposite: the first attacks came from the MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola. The Soviet Union sent aid and advisers to the MPLA. The Pentagon couldn’t be seen to support colonialism, but something had to be done, and Air America supplied much of it.
In the spring of 1961, Silk flew a Douglas DC-3 to Angola and landed at a military air base near Nova Lisboa. He was wearing what he always wore: leather flying jacket, cavalry twill slacks, calf-length boots: all stained and battered. He went up into the control tower and watched men unloading crates marked Refrigerator – Handle With Care. Heavy mortar shells began marching their explosions along the runway until they hit the aircraft. It blew up with a ferocity that no refrigerator could provide. That took care of his return trip. The next problem was how to get out of Angola.
It took him five days, travelling by taxi, bus and train all across Africa, to reach Tanganyika. He flew first class to London, a scruff surrounded by suits. At least he managed to shave on the plane. He used up the little bottle of aftershave by splashing it on the grimier, grubbier parts of his body. At Heathrow he phoned Zoë’s office. They said she was at her house in Scotland.
“You mean in Lincoln,” Silk said.
“No, in Scotland. She has a small hunting lodge, in the Trossachs.”
“Where, exactly? What’s the phone number?”
Short pause. “I’m afraid we can’t give out those details.”
“I’m her bloody husband, for Christ’s sake.”
“I see. Well, we could telephone Mrs Silk, and she could telephone you, if you’d like to give us your number.”
It was a public callbox. He was still staring at its number, arguing with himself whether he should do what they said, wait here for Zoë’s call and maybe fly to Scotland, or should he find a hotel, or go to the apartment, or buy a gun and shoot himself, when his call ran out of time and the line went dead. He had no more small change.
He came out of the callbox. A man was waiting to use it. He had a face like a rabbit with a tired, shaggy moustache. “Cheer up, chum,” the man said. “It might never happen.” Silk’s fist made the decision, not Silk, his fist tightened and it was very ready to smash the man’s teeth, when somebody gripped Silk’s arm. “You don’t want to do that, sir,” a policeman said.
They kept him in an interrogation room for half an hour. They looked at his passport, checked the dollars in his wallet, gave him cups of tea and listened to his weary account of his travels and his faraway wife. Then they let him go.
“Bloody lucky for me you were there,” he said to the policeman.
“We get all sorts arriving at Heathrow, sir. I could tell that you weren’t having a very happy day.”
Silk found a bar where they were willing to take his dollars and he got to work on a double Scotch.
“Just the chap I want to see,” said a confident, Home Counties voice. Silk looked up. Bowler hat, club tie, pigskin gloves, walking cane. Total stranger. Oh, fuck my old boots, he thought in despair. Then the stranger took the bowler off, and grinned, and it was Freddy Redman, his navigator, his partner in the Lanc on so many dicey ops. “You look like shit, Silko,” Freddy said, “but apart from that you haven’t changed. I expect you’d like another.”