Shooting Script

'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.'

I remembered that fuss with the croupier. 'But I still don't see which sides are weighted.'

He winced. 'My friend, one does not load theside of a dicethese days – it is much too blatant. One loads acorner. Then, if all goes well, that corner must be on the table and one of only three faces will be at the top. I will show you.' He stretched his hand; I fished the dice out of my drink and passed them over. He turned them in his long brown fingers.

'Now these, although they are rather heavily loaded, so they almost always turn up "loaded" faces, are also rather subtle. Each is loaded at a different corner. One can show only a 1, 2, or 4; the other a 2, 4, or 6. Nice harmless numbers – but you can work out for yourself what they mean.'

The hell I could – in my state. I stared Wearily. He sighed and explained: 'Two normal dice can throw thirty-six combinations: One 2, two 3s – and so on up to six 7s, then down again to one 12. But these can throw only nine combinations, including only one 7, one 3 – but two 6s and two 8s. And no 2 or 11 or 12 and some others.

'So: in nine first throws the General will win once with a 7, lose once with a 3 – enough to allay suspicion. But mostly he will throw something else and have to throw it again. Then he has a fifty-fifty chance, and if it is a 6 or an 8, he has a two-to-one chance. Overall it means…' he scribbled a quick formula on his menu card, 'it means he will win thirty-one times out of fifty-four. Say a three-to-two advantage. Enough – but only enough that people will say the General is lucky. And it does a dictator no harm to be known as lucky.'

He handed the dice back. I turned them in my hand, looking for signs of the loading. A great hope; in my current condition I couldn't have seen signs of an elephant loaded into a telephone-box.

'How did you come to spot this?'

'I played with them on the table – and found I threw only those numbers. And also -1 was born in this part of the world. One comes to expect dictators to play with loaded dice.'

'I know just what you mean.'

THIRTEEN

We flew back to Kingston by a direct British West Indies flight the next afternoon. J.B. had rung ahead and there were a couple of film cars waiting at the airport to carry them back over to Ochoríos. I dropped off at the Myrtle Bank hotel.

Whitmore lifted a big hand and said: 'Don't fret too hard, fella. You're still on the payroll. We'll call you.'