Quiller's Run

'Then they ship the pure heroin out in kilo bags to Bangkok, where it'll retail at around fourteen thousand, maybe around that figure, then it'll go direct by air to the States or through the Mafia labs in Sicily and it'll wholesale in the Big Apple and LA at around eighteen thousand, maybe twenty thousand before it's cut with lactose, quinine, baby powder, strychnine, brickdust, you name it, going through a whole chain of dealers before it hits the street, where that original two thousand bucks' worth of opium brings in around two million bucks as street scag.' He turned as a man went past him. 'Hey, where's Pakdee, for Christ's sake? I'm due out in three hours, goddam it, and I need some sleep.'

He turned back. 'Course in Laos they have their local trade going too. They run a cigarette factory lab, turns out No.4 heroin and sells under the brand name Double U-O Globe, hundred per cent pure, guaranteed, and you know what the logo is? Couple of fucking lions roaring at each other over a globe, kind of appropriate considering the competition around here. You wanna smoke, Marty? These are straight Camels.'

'Not just now. Is that why the village is blacked out? The competition?'

Tardy that, partly the way things are run. Sure, you could have some competitor — Vang Heng or Tricky Lee or Mariko Shoda, people like that – you could have them send a couple of dive-bombers in here and wipe everything out, so they just don't make things easy for them. Then there's the official side, see, the Laotian army general running this operation for Kuhn greases the narcs division in the government to let the place alone, but just for the look of things they pretend it isn't here, then the government can say they never knew what was going on. It's big money, okay? Maybe three or four million bucks runs through this place every day, and that's hey, Pakdee, for Christ's sake! Take a minute, Marty, I'll be right back.'

He was fifteen minutes and brought his attache case back but didn't bother to chain it to his wrist again. 'Okay, they'll be loading the stuff on right away.'

At the hotel he signed his name in the register, all his movements quick in spite of his fatigue. I had the feeling his time was short and he knew it.

The Asian at the desk spun the book around. 'You wanna girl, Tex?'

'You bet, make it a couple, is Kim here?'

'I'll have to see.'

'Tell 'em to hurry, I gotta get some sleep too. Okay, Marty, can you be down here again at three? That's in' – he checked his heavy gold watch – 'two and a half hours, can you make it?'

Said I could.

We sat at the end of the strip and waited, nothing but moonlight.

'So you ain't in the trade, Marty?'

'No.'

'So what're you doing in a place like this?'

'I'm an agent.'

'Shipping?'

'Narcotics.'

If he'd been drinking he'd have choked.

'You gotta be kidding.' But he was close to reaching for his gun.

'Just joking, yes.'

'Well Jesus Kee-rist, that isn't the kinda joke you make around here, you know that?'

'British sense of humour.'

'No wonder you lost the fuckin' empire.'

A green light flashed a couple of times and the strip lamps came on and he gunned up and got the brakes off and the pressure came against the spine and we were airborne and the lamps went out below us.

'Sorry, Tex.'

'Huh? Oh. That's okay. You just don't understand the situation. You comfortable? Be there in a couple hours.'

'Nah Trang.'

'Right. In South 'Nam.'

We went into a tight bank and the compass settled at 67 degrees. 'What were those burnt-out planes doing down there, Tex?'

'It's a tricky strip, and some fliers are better than others. It doesn't take much to burn us out if we get the touch-down wrong – if the trip needs extra fuel we shove a water-bed on board full of gasoline.'

'That's what this thing is?'

'Right. You wanna smoke, you better go out there on the wing and do it.'

'American sense of humour.'

'Too-shay.'

'I heard some shots down there, earlier. What was happening?'

'Well, sometimes one o' the coolies or the freight-handlers or the mule-drivers gets on a bummer – you know, has a bad trip? – and they can just take off and go crazy all over everybody, so the troops or the cops shoot 'em down, because we can't have that kinda thing around a place like that, you know, everyone's so nervous and it could start something. Or I guess it could've been some dealer on the cheat and the supplier wouldn't stand for it or the buyer got pissed off, you know – it isn't too different from the Wild West with the gold rush on, except the money that changes hands in the Triangle is about a thousand – make that a million – times as much on any given day. It's a jungle, see. You think that's a jungle down there? It's just a daisyfield.'

We levelled off at ten thousand feet with the heading southeast.

'How long do you plan to stay in the trade?'

I was talking partly to keep him awake. He'd looked dog-tired when he'd brought this plane in three hours ago and he couldn't have had more than two hours' sleep, given thirty minutes to bring the wall down, three in a bed. We were flying a petrol tank and the fumes were no help.

'How long do I what?'

'Plan to keep working?'

'Give it another couple o years, maybe around that. By then I'll have stacked up three or four million bucks an' I guess I'll be ready for Acapulco or Monte-Carlo for a while, ease off a little.'

'Is there much rivalry between you actual pilots?'

'Not usually. Get personal feuds, sometimes, but we don't often try and cheat each other out of trips.'

'You wouldn't bug each other, say.'

'How's that again?'

'You wouldn't slip a bug into a rival's communications.'

'Guess not. We all kinda know who's goin' where, an' we keep our asses clean. Bugs? Nope, I never heard o that.'

Noted.

We came down from our ceiling at 05:14 over South Vietnam and called up the tower in Nah Trang. There was cloud cover across the coast, topped with a gilding of light from the east, and we dropped through it into the dark again.

'Johnny said you'd get me through the barriers, is that right?'

'Sure. Don't show your Thai papers, okay? Gets too political.'

He left me on the terminal side of the tarmac at 05:52 with a wind rattling the shutters on the cafeteria and the heads of the palm trees rustling, shining under the floodlights.

'You want another ride, Marty, check with Chen. I'm always around.'

'I'm much obliged. And I hope you make it.'

'Make what?'

'Two more years.'

He gave a shrug and a wave and left me, a cloud of smoke across his shoulder as he walked away.

I'd need some secure transport when I landed in Singapore so I went to the line of telephones and called the British High Commission but she wasn't there, Katie. Then I gave I the operator the routing code for Cheltenham but the phone went on ringing and I hung up at twenty.

If it's any help, old boy, I'm marking hard at this end and I'm in constant signals with people in London and the field.

All right, but who the hell were the 'people in London' and who were his contacts in the field and why couldn't he get that bloody phone manned near the mast in Cheltenham, for God's sake, because I needed direction and I needed it now – as well as a safe-house in Singapore because there was nowhere else I could use as a base that'd let me keep the mission running, and the police could have identified Veneker by this time and if it went into the news media the Shoda team would be on the watch for me again and Kishnar would close in. Chen's place was hazardous now because we weren't certain that Sayako had bugged it and if it were someone else they could have mounted surveillance on it as soon as they'd found out the bug had died.