We levelled out at 5,000 feet – I'd elected to fly beneath the airways so that I didn't need to keep applying for changes ofcourse whenever I wanted to dodge a bit of the cumulus cloud Iexpected ahead – and Ken steadied her on 155 knots indicated,then trimmed her to fly hands-off.
'She feels like a real aeroplane,' he said grudgingly. He didn't like the controls of most private aircraft and particularly not American ones. 'Bloody heavy on ailerons, though.'
I was sorting through the Aeradguide for the Beirut approach charts. "They've got servo tabs working in the oppositedirection.'
He stared. 'You mean they deliberately make her feel like a DC-3? Why?'
'Ask Beech; I only work here.'
He made a growly noise and went back to frowning at the instruments. I found the Beirut pages and set 351 kilocycles on thesecond Automatic Direction Finder compass, although wouldn't pick up any signals just yet. The first ADF was already tuned to the Dhekelia beacon on Cyprus's south coast, a moment later we went slap over the middle of it. You could tell by the way the needle shivered, uncertain which waytoturn, before spinning round to face backwards… 'Neat. He'd worked out our exact amount of drift and compensated for it in about two minutes, not having touched anaeroplane in two years and this one never before. The coastline, and its fringe of vivid pale green water crawled away behind; I switched from Nicosia approach to the Flight Information Region and said hello, and that was about as much as I needed do for the next hundred miles.
Ken seemed happy enough without any chatter, so I unstrapped and went back to the girls. 'All okay?'
Mitzi nodded, Eleanor grinned – a quick expression that showed a lot of white teeth. 'Fine, fine. Is that our in-flight refreshment?' And she nodded at the boxes stacked a few inches ahead of her knees.
'Sorry, no.' The Queen Air isn't pressurised (which was why I was going around rather than over the weather) but we could talk by using stage voices. 'I'm just carting it around for a bloke until he decides what to do with it.'
Mitzi asked: 'The plane is for the hotel, then? ' She'd seen the Castle insignia on the tail.
'The hotel group, yes. But they don't mind.'
Eleanor said: 'Something I wondered about: we've neither of us got visas for Lebanon. Does it matter?'
'Not a bit. You can buy 'em before you reach the immigration desk. Costs a few dollars, that's all.' But that reminded me -of something. I looked at my watch. 'We'll be starting our approach on Beirut in about half an hour. Anything you want, just stick your head through and shout. Not that we've got anything.'
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.'
13
As airports go, Nicosia is just a country way-station where you can usually get permission to back-track down the runway after landing., But Beirut's something else. Not just the gateway to the East – or the West – but the main junction of the whole area. Where the north-bound routes from the Gulf and East Africa join the east-west traffic for Europe and the States and you may as well stop off for a few beers and a couple of barmaids between flights. Like what Cairo used to be and Damascus pretends it is.
So you slot yourself into a queue of big jets whose approach speeds are higher than your flat-out maximum and go hammering down the glidepath feeling their big snouts snuffling up your tail and praying the flaps won't tear off. In over the permanent bonfire behind the docks where they burn the old crankcase oil from the taxis (at least that's the story and I'll believe anything about Beirut taxis); slicing across the width of the city towards the sea again, parallel to the sudden suburban hills like Beit Mery that the locals insist are mountains – and finally you float half the length of runway 21 waiting for the speed to unwind before you drop her on. I did the landing; Ken would have done it better.