'Not unless you would, sir.'
He turned to Hickson. 'I think we might send another one up.'
There was something very attractive about the Slingshot -the size of the thing, only five feet long, and its devastating potential – and I had the impression that Kityakara and his army chiefs here were as pleased as Hickson with it. They had fifty of them, stored under the heaviest security I'd ever seen.
One of the aides switched on his radio and asked for another drone.
It would only have worried Pepperidge if I'd told him. There are phases in every mission where you decide to push things right to the brink, not because of the exciting way it tickles but because you've weighed the odds and calculated the risk and looked at all the data again and then gone for it, shit or bust, and that's what I'd done when I'd decided to go to Lafarge's funeral. I'd known that Mariko Shoda might be there but it wasn't certain, and that had given me enough margin of safety to make the decision. After that point I'd relied on what Johnny Chen had said.
She's very spiritual. She prays before she kills.
But she hadn't been able to kill on sacred ground.
' – Mr Jordan?'
'I'm sorry?'
He whipped the little inhaler across his mouth. 'You haven't seen the Slingshot in action before, in England?"
'No, sir.'
'Are you impressed?'
'Very.'
We began walking about to relieve the tension. You had to stand perfectly still when that thing was being fired; it was like watching those people at St Andrews.
She'd wanted to scare me, of course. Maybe not scare, but get the message across: she'd one day be my death. That was why she'd let them get their knives out before she'd called them off. Then all I'd heard in the shadows of the cypresses was her quiet voice, 'Dio Korn! Plot man wai Karri? It could only have meant No, not now, or Leave him, something like that. Not a pardon, though. Just a reprieve.
'It's mounted with these control surfaces in the nose,' Hickson said. 'They produce roll and lateral shift.' He was holding the thing like a baby, cradling it. Pepperidge had told me that Hickson had been in on the actual design.
I could hear the aircraft climbing again.
'Fire-and-forget,' Kityakara said. He was looking at the specifications. 'What does that mean, Mr Hickson?'
'Pretty well what it says, sir. Once she's fired and on her way, the soldier can move off to a new position if he wants to, or get under cover if there's the need. The Slingshot's computerised, fully automatic. She thinks for you.' A definite note of pride.
It had been nerves, that was all. I'd been in the wrong mood for pushing myself into hazard. I was already morbid after the long night in the jungle, picking over those tortured bodies, and the ritual in the temple had made things worse, and what the boy had said, that it wasn't true, his papa couldn't be dead. And finally, of course, there'd been Shoda, and the almost mystic power coming from her, and her eyes when she'd looked into mine, with the need for my death in them.
I can put a car through a checkpoint and take the barrier with me and I can undo a bomb in a barn and take the fuse out and I can go through implemented interrogation inside Lubyanka and come out sane, but Shoda was different, operating on a psychically different wavelength, with a force in her that chilled you to the bone when she came near.
I didn't just walk away two nights ago, don't think that; I didn't just walk out of the cypresses and get into the car and drive off. I'd come away shivering, with my feet unsteady and my eyes flickering, close to what I've read about shell-shock. And I knew this feeling wouldn't leave me, not entirely. If I could get through this mission it was going to be with the constant fear of death inside me, like a haunting.
'Stand away, please,' Hickson said.
The Thai soldier plugged in the cable from the battery strapped to his waist and got the pistol grip into his right hand and heaved the canister onto his shoulder and took a sighting; then he flicked some switches and swung the missile to the right, angling it to something like 50 degrees; then he began tracking as the military jet trailing the drone began its pass across the airfield. Kityakara was using his inhaler every half-minute or so now, becoming very tense; the others weren't moving or saying anything – three full generals and a small crowd of colonels and lower brass, all immaculate, strictly on parade, and not only because Kityakara was here but because of the Slingshot. With its sinister potency it outranked them all.
'When you're ready,' Hickson said.
The soldier nodded and went on tracking the drone.
'Watch out for the gas cloud, gentlemen. Don't breathe any in.'
Tracking.
The man squeezed the trigger and there was something like a second's delay while the pressure from the initial charge built up in the tube and then the missile was forced out and began climbing, twisting to the left and correcting its course before the main booster came on and kicked the thing higher, leaving a plume of white smoke that drifted on the breeze. I was counting, and got to ten seconds before the Slingshot nosed into the drone and made the hit and left an orange fireball hanging in the sky.
Silence on the ground; then the sound-wave reached us, nothing more than a soft 'woof because of the distance and the fact that the drone carried no fuel.
When I looked down, the soldier had moved almost fifty yards away, demonstrating the Slingshot's 'fire-and-forget' capability.
'Of course,' Hickson said – and I thought his tone was deliberately conversational for the sake of effect – 'with a rocket-powered drone you can shoot at thirty thousand feet. They're on their way.'
Prince Kityakara gave a brief nod. 'Thank you, Mr Hickson. An impressive demonstration. Are there any questions, gentlemen?'
It took half an hour, with two interpreters picking up when the non-English-speaking people wanted to know things; then Kityakara took me across to his staff-car and we got in.
'I'm sure I don't need to emphasise, Mr Jordan, the devastation that weapon could cause, in the wrong hands.'
'Or the right.'
He tilted his head. 'I am not talking of war, but of full-scale revolution, initiated by someone like Mariko Shoda and her organisation. It's not just the technical capability of the Slingshot that makes it so deadly. In jungle terrain, one man could use it at five-minute intervals and continue to move around so that he could never be flushed out. One man could bring down half a squadron of bombers, and, of course, any given number of helicopters moving in at low level.' Inhaler. 'It means that any armed revolution could proceed with its enterprise in the certainty that it was completely safe from the air.' He laid a hand on my knee, became suddenly aware of protocol and removed it at once. 'It means, Mr Jordan, that if the Shoda organisation acquired this weapon, it could set Indo-China aflame within a week. And that, of course, is its intention.'
'Noted.'
'I'm kept fully informed of your reports. Can you give me any hope that you can move into Mariko Shoda's operation before too long?'
'I met her yesterday.'
'Shoda?'
'Yes.'
His head was turned to watch me from behind his tinted glasses. 'I don't understand. She lets no one near her.'
'I didn't talk to her.'
'But how – ?' He left it hanging.
'I took a chance, in the hope of getting some information. It didn't come off. Or maybe it did. I know more about her now, what kind of adversary she is. It's not always,' I told him, 'the angle of the shot, or the distance from the target, or the timing. Sometimes you just need to know how to get under their skin, and work from there.'
'I see.' His voice was hushed. 'I shall pray for you, Mr Jordan.'
Rattakul flew me in a Thai military staff aircraft to Singapore and their embassy had a rented plain van waiting for us on the tarmac and I climbed into the rear, which was facing away from the terminal buildings.