I swung hard left, into and underneath him, forcing him to tighten and steepen his turn even more if he was going to bring his guns to bear. But coming down-hill in a jet, he was going too fast. His wings swung vertical for a moment as he tried to make it, then he levelled and soared away up to start again from scratch.
'Missed, you bastard.'
Whitmore twisted around, watching the Vampire over his shoulder. 'You figure he's going to shoot?'
'I figure on keeping out of his sights.'Was that all 1 figured?
We were below 1,500 feet now and still going down in wide spirals. But the Vampire had learned something. He'd positioned himself only about five hundred feet higher this time and – as far as I could judge – he'd slowed down a lot. He circled in a gentle turn outside our spiral, waiting his moment.
Keeping an eye on the Vampire, I put my right hand down on the flaps lever. 'Get your hand on this,' I told Whitmore. 'When I say "Flaps" I want it all the way down. But not before. Don't practise.' I felt his big paw push mine aside.
He said calmly: 'Got it.'
I waited until the sun was where it wouldn't blind the Vampire or me, turned extra steeply for a few seconds, then straightened out as if I'd spotted where I wanted to go and was heading there direct.
Come on, you bastard: try and bite me.
He bit. He flipped over and came down in the classic 'curve of pursuit', the long curling dive to end up sitting on my tail.
I turned into and under him again – but now he was expecting that. He was moving slow enough to follow me. He tightened his diving curve, holding me easily, swinging smoothly into firing range.
I levelled the Dove and pulled back the throttles. The Vampireslid behind my left shoulder, almost dead behind us. I yelled: 'Flaps down! '
The lever clicked in the silence. Then it was as if I'd stamped on the brakes: the Dove collided with a soft pillow of air and bounced soggily upwards, into the Vampire's path.
Suddenly he was on top of us.
He reared like a startled horse, jerking into a wildly tight turn. His wings blurred with mist condensing in the shattered airflow, then flicked level as he stalled out. He shuddered past a few yards to the left and I caught a glimpse of a helmeted, hunched figure in the cockpit, fighting controls that weren't controlling anything any more. His nose began to swing inexorably downwards.
A Vampire can lose over two thousand feet in a gentle stall. This one had only 1,200 feet to lose – and he was as totally stalled as I've seen an aeroplane. There was nothing to do now but watch him die.
To bale out of a Vampire 5 you dump the cockpit canopy, roll on your back and drop out – if you're still in control.
I put the Dove's nose down, pushed up the throttles: we were close to stalling ourselves. Below, the cockpit canopy flashed off the Vampire, so perhaps he tried at the last second to jump. Then he was a burst of flame and a swelling cloud of smoke on the harsh green countryside. From inside the Dove you couldn't even hear the bang.
TEN
We landed at Santo Bartolemeo five minutes later.
The control tower didn't throw a banquet in my honour, but hadn't got any orders to cut my throat, either. And they knew Whitmore's name when I dropped it on their toes a few times. They cleared me in with just a few nasty remarks about how to write a flight plan, but I swallowed that easily.
Nobody said anything about a crashed Vampire.
It was at least possible that nothingwould be said. If the pilot hadn'thad orders to intercept, he might not have radioed that he was doing something without orders. So he might just be written off as a training crash: Ned must be expecting crashes, even if he hadn't had them already. And I'd been investigating officer on too many RAF crashes to worry about eye-witnesses. All Ned would learn from them would be that five Boeing 707s had simultaneously burst into flames three feet above their rooftops.
Well, I'd find out. But it still wasn't the best start to what I'd hoped would be a good-will visit. I went back downstairs, got my passport stamped, and went through to join the others in the dingy-modern lobby.
They were standing round a smeared glass case showing a model of what the grand and glorious new airport terminal would look like – when the government stopped spending the taxes on American blondes and Swiss bank accounts. Even the model had several years' dust on it by now.
The director and art director gave me rather white, suspicious looks; Whitmore and Luiz just nodded. J.B. marched up and whispered fiercely: 'Just what really happened back there before we landed?'
'Man made a pass at us, missed, and crashed.'
'Is that all?'
I shrugged. 'I thought you'd be used to men doing that.'
Her eyes glittered. 'Whatmade him crash?'
'One of those rare non-habit-forming vices: stalling at twelve hundred feet.'
'And you think it's just a joke?'
'You'd have preferred a serious ending? Like him shooting us down?'
'You can't be sure-'
'This way, I can.'
She stared at me a few moments more, sizzling quietly, her face in hard still lines. Angry like that, she seemed oddly feminine and somehow defenceless. I started to grin, and she jammed on her sunglasses and turned away.
The lobby was beginning to fill with outbound passengers. Whitmore dropped a hand on my shoulder and said: 'Lot of artillery around, fella.'
There was. About half a dozen of the passengers – all of them a little fatter or better dressed than the average – were shoving through the crowd with revolvers jammed in their hip pockets or slung on wide, fancy cowboy belts.
I nodded. 'They're government employees. Above a certain rank in the civil service, you get the right to carry a gun. And as it's a status-symbol and a sex-symboland they think it makes them look like Walt Whitmore, they carry it. It's the same idea as the old British Army one of selling its commissions.'
He shook his head slowly. 'How's that again?'
'A hundred years ago and more, when you were getting army revolutions all over Europe. They reckoned if you sold commissions, you'd have the Army run by rich men – and rich men don't want to change a system that keeps them rich. Same here: with everything run by bribery, the civil service is one of the best-paid jobs. They don't want a change. So you arm them and you've got a standing counter-revolutionary force.'
'I get it.' He nodded thoughtfully, probably working out where the idea would fit into Bolivar Smith. Apparently it wouldn't, because then he swung round and made a sweeping git-along-little-dogies gesture. 'Come on, kids, let's roll.'
We rolled into two taxis: Whitmore, Luiz, and J.B. in one, me and the two directors behind. They were still suspicious of me and still shaken by the flight, so it was a quiet ride.
We went too fast down a narrow concrete highway between overgrown plantations and tin-shack farmhouses for fifteen minutes. After that we were weaving through the shanty-town on the edge of the city itself.
Santo Bartolomeo is an old city. It's supposed to be named after Columbus' brother, who certainly wasn't a saint except by Repúblicastandards. It's also supposed to be the gayest, wickedest city in the Caribbean. Maybe it was, in the sailing-ship days when you could get a bottle of rum, two women, and three knife-fights for a silver dollar. Not any more.
Now it's just old, tired, shabby, worn out by too much politicking. The steam-ships are bigger and fewer and turn round quicker than the clippers, and banks and warehouseshave replaced the brothels and inns of the waterfront. The rest of the town is a mess: 400-year-old Spanish cathedrals flanking Victorianorneeblocks flanking stucco split-level houses that look as new as tomorrow for three months and as old as Columbus after six. But maybe after centuries of fast-changing governments, even the buildings don't want to look as if they might be talking to their neighbours.