The electricians were still working, so I just handed out a few 'Jolly good show – you chaps reallydo know your business, what?' remarks such as pilots use for ground crews who are doing something totally incomprehensible. And went away again.
I hoped they did know their business, though. After sixteen years flying, the most important thing I'd learned about electricity in aeroplanes is that it's the first thing to go wrong.
I checked the weather again with a phone call to Palisadoes met office – tomorrow's wind was forecast the same as today's, but the circular disturbance was getting a little more circular and disturbing. Still, it hadn't grown up enough to earn a name yet.
But that night, it did: Hurricane Clara.
TWENTY-ONE
She was the third ugly sister of the season – Annette and Belinda having come and gone in the usual way: a couple of days snarling around outside Barbados and Martinique, then crawling off north-east to die in some uninhabited corner of the Atlantic.
Clara had started the same way. But that night she came toa near-stop a couple of hundred miles north of Antigua, wound herself up into fury and headed westwards. By nine o'clock in the morning, when I first heard of her from die Palisadoes met office, she was already north of Puerto Rico and still coming.
I had another cup of coffee while I thought about it, diengot the desk to call me a taxi – the art director had confiscated my jeep the day before – and went up to the church location, where they were supposed to be starting filming. They were -or at least, everybody wasdiereand well into me day's snoozing and poker playing. It was as quiet as I'd learnt to expect it: the only sound was a monotonous drone that was half the generator truck, half the sound man swearing at his equipment.
Roddie's church was a pretty impressive affair: fifty feet tall, twin-towered, built of 400-hundred-year-old stone widi moss in die cracks. You had to get within a few feet to see the stone was rough-plastered boards, the moss plastic, and die whole thing justa façadepinned on scaffolding.
J.B., Luiz, Whitmore, and Miss Jiminez were sitting around my jeep under die shade of a palm at the edge of the plaza and drinking coffee out of paper cups. Whitmore seemed pleased to see me; Miss Jiminez looked as if she could have managed without.
'She all ready to go?' Whitmore asked.
'Getting on that way."
J.B. handed me a cup of coffee.
'Thanks. ' I thought of telling diem about Agent Ellis popping up over here, but decided not. If I rnought he represented an extra risk, it was up to me to say so – and cancel die raid. I was still a free man – as J.B. would have pointed out.
I said: 'I need to see the bombs before I do the final work. Heard any more about them?'
Whitmore grunted. 'Supposed to be sailing yesterday. We should get 'em maybe tomorrow.'
'All good modern stuff, non-corroded, guaranteed to explode in die right time and place and not before. Am I right?'
He shrugged. 'Fella, we just got to wait and see.'
I nodded, looked up at die church. 'How long were you planning on shooting here?'
'Today, maybea couplascenes tomorrow.'
'I should try and get it finished today; there may be a hurricane heading this way.'
The director called: 'Walt: we're ready to go.'
He said to me: 'Stick around,' then climbed into the jeep. Several people shouted 'Quiet', the camera crew laid down their cards, and Whitmore drove the jeep upin front of the church, stopped, got out, looked around, lit a cigarette.
The director shouted: 'Cut!' Then they did it three more times.
Luiz passed me a script so that I could see what was going on. Bolivar Smith comes into the plaza with his load of guns (the back of the jeep was stacked with empty rifle boxes) to meet the rebel chief but can't find anybody but a lovable old priest. However, the lovable old priest goes into a bit of useful dialogue which tells the audience that (a) Amazonia is a poor but lovable country run by a cruel dictator, and (b) Whitmore is a hard-hearted gun-runner who's ready to sell his goods to the dictator if the rebels can't find the pesos to pay for diem.
This, of course, is before the love of a peasant girl (the girl whose scenes Whitmore had shot in a hurry a month before because he couldn't stand her) converts him not only to handing over the guns for free but leading the rebellion for them as well.
And they live happily ever after in a real democracy with a stable economy.
He walked back, leaving the jeep in front of the church while the camera crew produced a burst of energy and shifted the camera a few yards forward.
'So what's about this hurricane?'
'The eye can't get here in less than two days even if it's coming and it probably isn't. But it sounds pretty wide, and you can get some rough stuff at the edges. You remember Hurricane Flora, a couple of years ago? It hit Cuba, two-three hundred miles north – but we got sixty-knot winds and several inches of rani down here. It washed out half the mountain roads, knocked out telephone Unes, and fouled the water supplies.' I nodded at the church. 'And I don't thinkthat'll take sixty knots.'
'You're damn right, fella.' He frowned thoughtfully.
'And I may want to get the Mitchell off the island. She won't take sixty-knot winds, either.'
'Yeah. Well – let us know if you're going. Now – Anything more you want for the plane? Howsabout armament?'
I shrugged. 'If you can find a couple of Browning -50's and a few hundred rounds, I'll take them along.'
'Pretty big order.' He frowned. 'I can geta couplatommy-guns or automatic rifles, but…'
'Skip it, then. They'd be just a dead weight. I wasn't counting on anything, anyhow.'
J.B. said: 'You're going to do it unarmed?'
'A Vampire carries four twenty-millimetre cannon. If they get one of them up, a tommy gun won't make any odds. You don't shoot down aeroplanes widi tommy-guns.' Then I remembered Whitmore planned to do just diat – in the film. 'Begging Mr Whitmore's pardon, of course.'
Luiz smiled and said: 'In the air you need firepower. An aerial machine gun fires at about twice the normal rate of a ground gun.' Then, seeing my expression, he explained: 'I was a gunner in the Air Corps during the war.'
Miss Jiminez jerked around to stare at him: this was something he hadn't told her, eidier. She'd been thinking of him as an actor and -abracadabra – he was suddenly a warrior. A toad turned into a prince.
I asked: 'What'd you fly in?'
'Some B-20s – once or twice even the Mitchell.'
'Where'd you get to?'
He gave Miss Jiminez the sad apologetic smile of a prince about to turn back into a toad and said, to me: 'Texas. They made me an instructor. Possibly they decided actors were too valuable to risk in combat. Or just possibly they were keeping back the best men to defend Texas. After all – Texas neverdid get invaded. Can I be sure that was not my doing?'
I grinned sympathetically. Like most fighter pilots, I had a low opinion of air gunners' usefulness – and a high regard for their problems. A fighter pilot just has to point his aeroplane and press the trigger – and damn few are even much good at that. An air gunner is shooting sideways, upwards, and downwards from a moving platform at a moving target – and with usually only a quarter of the firepower of the fighter he's shooting at.
But Miss Jiminez had missed one point: Luiz must have been good. They might have kept him off operations because he was Hollywood, but that wasn't why they'd made him an instructor: they didn't want the gunners whowere going operational trained half-heartedly.
Under his Beverly Hills-Spanish manners, I was beginning to see Luiz as a tough, competent character.
The director called: 'Walt – we're ready.'
An elderly actor whom I hadn't met but recognised from several other Whitmore films was standing by the church doorway, dressed in a dusty set of priest's robes. Whitmore walked over and stood near him; somebody put a part-smoked cigarette in his hand; the director moved him a couple of inches and then scurried back behind the camera and started the scene going.