Shooting Script

'How frightfully unsporting of them.'

He didn't answer. My crack just hung there with the pipe smoke and turned sour and dwindled and died. The room had gone very quiet. Only the radio breathed softly to itself.

After a time I got up to pour myself another drink, and found I was moving on tiptoe, shutting the refrigerator door as gently as I could. I opened my mouth to say something, then didn't. I just listened.

You don't have to like the man in the other cockpit. You canwant to kill him – not angrily, but coldly and carefully enough to have trained yourself to wait until you're close enough to shoot at the cockpit, not just the plane. But you understand him; you can't help understanding him. Because the instruments he watches, the controls he handles, are the same as in your own cockpit. Because his problems of speed and height, range and fuel, sun and cloud, are your problems. You know him far better than you know a ground soldier on your own side, fighting for your own cause.

So you don't have to like him, or his cause either. But you do have to sit still and breathe quietly and listen when a man you know is going into action.

It took a long time. The air-conditioning built up a chill that made me shiver. Ned hunched on the far side of the table, just watching the radio.

Then suddenly it crackled fast Spanish. Ned grabbed the phone and yelled: 'Tell the stupid cows to speak English! Jiminez could be monitoring this channel! '

He slammed the phone down. 'Christ – nobody thinks a man who'll buy three-inch mortars might have the sense to buy a normal shortwave receiver as well.'

'And learn to speak English too, maybe.'

He shrugged. 'I'm trying to get 'em used to code, too. It takes time.'

The radio crackled faintly, but we weren't picking up the transmissions from the base: close as it was, there must have been a hill between it and the Americana.

Then, slowly and carefully, like a reciting schoolboy: 'Green leader calls "Goalpost". I have seen the smoke. It is a roadblock. With muchrebeldes.I am going to shoot it.' Pause. 'Green two -1 break left, break left,now! '

'Code,' I said softly. 'What does he say when he speaks in clear – tell you about his birthmarks?'

'He said "Goalpost", didn't he?'

'If you call that code for home base…' Neither of us were really listening – even to ourselves. We were both living the rolling turn, the long wriggling dive as you bring your guns to bear, and the last dangerous seconds as the ground rushescloseand you're forcing the nosedown because the range is shortening.

'Target hypnotism,' they call it – and, a couple of days later, a 'fighter pilot funeral' when they bury a box of sand with a few grain-sized pieces of you mixed in.

The radio gave a few distant crackles; now they were too low to reach over this range.

'They make two passes?' I asked.

'On a target like this, yeh.'

'Every man a hero.' The second pass is the worst. If there's anybody left alive on the ground (and if there isn't, why are you attacking again?) you've given him a dress rehearsaclass="underline" he's got his eye in to your speed and angle.

But why should I care? If Jiminez' boys managed to knock down a Vampire – and damn little chance they stood with rifles, even light machine-guns, against a Vamp's four twenty-millimetre cannon – that suited me fine.

I still understood the man in the cockpit far better than the poor bastard with a rifle down at the roadblock.

Then, distant but getting louder quickly: '… have shoot ourmunitio. Roadblock is destroyed. Manyrebeldesare dead-'

Ned growled: 'That means two men and a dog.'

'… Army advancing. I request instructions. Over.'

Ned looked at his watch and picked up the phone. 'Tell 'em to return Goalpost. And tell the army we're through for the day.'

He snapped off the radio. The room suddenly seemed much too cold, the whisky bitter on my tongue. Well, maybe the next one would taste better. I filled my glass, then opened a window to let in a little heat and the friendly, distant hum of traffic on the Avenida Independencia. I leant against the sill and sipped.

After a time, I said: 'And that concludes our Saturday afternoon programme of sport from the Free Republic.'

Ned looked at me, then shrugged and went to get himself another beer. 'You can't have all your battles big ones, Keith -not if you're a pro. It's the amateurs who feel brave just because it's D-Day; you know that.'

'I know pros aren't the answer in this place, either, Ned.'

'Yeh? You think Jiminez'd sell off the Vamps if he got in?'

'I'll tell you one thing he'd sell off: you – in small pieces.'

He stared at me, then nodded slowly. Nobody builds up hate so much as a ground-attack pilot; a strafing fighter is partly a terror weapon, swooping omnipotent out of the sky, soaring away back. If you get hit by ground fire, you do your damndest to land well away from the people you've been shooting up. Rules of war don't apply to a god who's fallen off his pedestal.

'Yeh, could happen,' he said finally. 'But – I wonder who'd get my job then. You? That what you pushing for?'

'I'm not pushing, Ned. I'm not a professional any more.'

He stared at me. Then he nodded and said slowly and perplexedly: 'Yeh, that's right, isn't it? If you were a pro, you'd have joined the firm when I offered the job. You worry me, Keith. I don't know if you're working for Jiminez or not -maybe not. But either way, the General made a mistake with you. You should've been in jail. Then we'd've known where you were and you'd have got your plane back at the end. Now – you're loose but you don't have a plane to fly. And that worries me. Because you're still a killer.'

The word had no sting; it was just a statement – a definition of a trade.

He ended up in front of me, stabbing a thick finger at my chest. 'I'll do what I can for you. Try to get your Dove back. I don't think I can do it, but I'll try. You need any money?'

'That could have been more tactfully put, Ned.'

He shook his head impatiently. 'You know I'm loaded right now – so d'you want any of it? Just to take yourself a quiet holiday somewhere for a couple of months?'

'What's all this to you, Ned?'

'If I can't have you in jail, maybe Miami Beach'll do. Just keeping out of the way. Otherwise' – he shrugged – 'I could end up having to kill you.'

'You could end up trying,' I snapped. 'And I mean end up.'

He grinned crookedly. 'You see?'

After a while I grinned back. 'This town ain't big enough for both of us – is that it?'

'It's a small town, all right – the whole damn Caribbean. Okay' – he rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully – 'we just have to wait and see. You want to go on talking politics, or just drink?'

I emptied my glass and handed it over. 'Let's just drink.'

Things got a little fuzzy after that. But somebody got me into a taxi around ten o'clock, and I came slightly awake at half-past eleven and found myself aviating towards San Juan aboard the World's Most Experienced Airline, eating a piece of the World's Most Experienced chicken and with a glass of beer in my other hand.

Luiz was sitting alongside me; J.B. and Whitmore just across the aisle, the two directors somewhere behind.

Luiz leant and dropped a pair of dice on my tray. 'A small souvenir of General Bosco.'

I blinked blearily at them, and the dots blinked blearily back. 'So?'

'My friend, they are loaded.'

I picked them up, dropped them into my glass of beer – the old test for loaded dice. They tumbled slowly and showed a 6 and a 2. I drank them out, dropped them in again. I got a 4 and a 1.

'They don't seem to be winning anything for me. The General ought to fire his dice loaders.'

'My friend – do you think these belonged to the General?'

'You mean the Americana was giving him loaded dice?'

He smiled sunnily. 'So what could they lose? – he does not play against the house, only among his good friends. So the house get his custom, they help him win a little, and his beautiful smile brightens their dark, drab lives. The stick-man was highly annoyed when I first grabbed them before they could be changed and then walked off with them.'