'I know. I'm a free man.'
'Keith, you could get killed.'
'Not me. I told you: I was good. The type that waits until he's got the height and he's up-sun and can get the other fighter in the back. We don't take risks. We don't gamble. We cheat.'
'Korea was a long time ago,' she said doubtfully. 'You could have forgotten-'
I stretched my hands and laid them on her shoulders. 'Like I had over Santo Bartolomeo that day?'
And suddenlyshe was holding me, her strong body straining against me, her hair flooding my eyes. And whispering: 'Keith – don't get yourself killed, justdon't…'
Then the dusty starlight and the lamp glittering at the end of the strip and the north wind itself, if it were there, were something in another country, beyond another hill Much later, and much sleepier, she said: 'Youare slipping, you know… you forgot to ask me what the J.B. is for.'
'Yes. You must tell me sometime, when we've got nothing better to talk about.'
'I will. I absolutely insist on you knowing. Besides, you might lose your British citizenship if they found out you didn't even know my name.' Then her voice changed. 'What about that man – Colonel Rafter?'
'What about him?'
'If you raid him tomorrow – won't he have to come after you?'
'I don't think so. Ned's a commercial pilot. He flies ground-attack, but just the way Pan Am flies passengers. He won't like it – but he won't come chasing me unless he's got a nice watertight contract saying he'll make a profit out of it.'
She was quiet for a while. I gave up groping around theengine covers for the cigarettes and just lay, watching the dim square of light that was a gun window.
Her voice was sleepy again when she said: 'You know, I've never been seduced in an aeroplane before. I wonder, if it was flying…'
'Greedy.'
She chuckled softly. 'Maybe sometime then. Keith – do I get to go with you?'
'Where?'
'Wherever you go – when you get run out of the Caribbean on a rail.'
'Hmm. It may not be exactly a Man and a Home and a Back Yard and… I don't know what it'll be.'
'I think I'd like that.'
I frowned. 'What about Whitmore?'
'You're going to need a hot lawyer a lot more than he will, after tomorrow. And I don't think you could afford my fees.'
'Why d'you think I seduced you?'
She laughed sleepily and put her arms around me again.
I was woken by a banging on the fuselage side. The morning sun was streaming dustily through the gun windows; the fuselage was stuffy – and empty, apart from the rumpled engine covers.
One of the spray pilots shoved his head up through the aft hatch. 'God, but you charter pilots really believe in your sleep. It's nine o'clock.'
I stared athim blearily. 'What's the weather?'
He grinned. 'No hurricane. She recurved; turned north-west four-five hours ago. So no trip to Caracas.' He looked around the fuselage. 'Well, at least you had a quiet night.'
I nodded. 'Yes. A quiet night.'
TWENTY-FOUR
I staggered down to the Golden Head for a wash and several cups of coffee. I'd finally found J.B.'s pack of cigarettes; I lit one and just sat, brooding.
A quiet night. And suddenly, something in your Ufethat you may never say goodbye to. Something fixed; a commitment. Funny how it changes a man. And funny how it doesn't. I was still Keith Carr, still unbeatable, still going on a visit to Ned Rafter in… about seventeen hours' time.
I was back with the Mitchell by ten.
Until the nets and bricks arrived, I couldn't do much practical work, so I sat down in the shade of a wing to work out me theory. I'd said a fighter pilot could do any low-level attack -but perhaps mostly because, like most fighter pilots, I'd never had a high opinion of bomber pilots. In fact, like most fighter pilots, I'd never had a very high opinion of any other pilot.
Now, it began to look a little complicated.
Say I was going in at 150 mph at 100 feet. In falling a mere 100 feet, a brick would hardly lose any of its forward speed -it would hit the ground when I was still dead overhead. I suddenly became glad I wasn't using bombs.
Working backwards from that, I had to drop the first bricks as many seconds before I passed over the first Vampire as it took a brick to fall 100 feet. Let that be known as Carr's First Law. On to number Two.
A brick accelerates downwards at 32 feet per second per second – ignoring air resistance. So it falls 16 feet in the first second, 48 in the second, 80 in the third – say two-and-a-half seconds for 100 feet. Bung in air resistance and call it three: I dropped three seconds early. Carr's Second Law.
Number Three was easy: at 150 mph. I was doing just over 200 feet a second, so I dropped a bit more than 600 feet early… It seemed a hell of a long way. But it was right.
That left me with just the problems of holding precise speed, height, and course and judging exactly 600 and a fewfeet. Possibly bomber pilots did need a trace of intelligence. The few that ever hit anything, that is.
Whitmore's white station-wagon swung in through the gates and trundled slowly up the runway. I watched it quietly, almost apprehensively. It stopped; Luiz got out. Only Luiz.
I went over to help him unload. He took die bundle of nets, I picked up the small drum of cable.
'From Montego Bay,' he said, carrying the bundle. 'Officially, we are supposed to be having a fishing scene but -such scenes often get cut.'
'All deductible, anyway.'
He dumped the bundle and gave me a look. I avoided it, put down the drum, and started unpicking the nets. 'Whitmore or J.B. coining down?' I asked, casually.
'Perhaps when they have the church sequence finished. I spoke to J.B. on the phone. She seemed… tired.' Again he tried to catch my eye, but I went on sorting the nets.
They turned out to be about a three-quarter-inch mesh, roughly circular, perhaps ten feet in diameter. I didn't know anything about fishing, but I guessed these had been the type diey used for casting into the surf – before the snorkel-fisher tourists had chased every fish outside the reef.
Luiz was fingering the end of the cable. 'Why do you need this, my friend?'
"Thread it around the edge of the nets to take the weight.' I held up the net itself: the edging was thick, rough string, stiff with creosote or something. 'Each net's to hold about five hundred pounds, remember.'
He looked at the cable doubtfully. 'Five hundred pounds…'
'Not so much. Just imagine four girls hanging on one end.'
'What a remarkable imagination you have, my friend. But I shall try.' He closed his eyes and smiled dreamily.
I said: 'Oh God.'
He opened his eyes. 'What is it?'
I'd just realised it might be more than 500 pounds – and also why bombers flew so sedately to the target, as if they were afraid of waking the air gunners. You've got a hook diat'll take a 500-pounder – but then you do just a one-g turn and the pull on that hook doubles. In fighters, I'd done more than 6-gturns. If I'd been carrying a 500-pounder then, the pull on thehook would have topped 3,000 pounds…
'I think it'll work,' I said. 'But it'll be a damn gentle ride.'
'I am happy to hear it,' he said. 'Because I am comingalso.'
I glared. 'Like hell you are.'
'You recall I was once a gunner?' He beckoned me over to the station-wagon and pointed in through the back window. On the floor lay a fat, heavy-looking rifle. After a moment, I remembered it as something the Americans had used in Korea: the BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle.
After a few more moments I said: 'So you were an air gunner – and you want to bringthat on an air attack?'
He shrugged, nodded.
I said: 'What is it – -30 calibre? And a cyclic rate of about five hundred rounds a minute?'
He nodded again.
'I see. In Korea we were using Sabres armed with six -50 calibre guns firing 1,200 round a minute each. Thirty or forty times the punch of just that thing. And even then we'd have done better with twenty-millimetre cannons. Christ,you know all this, Luiz.'