“Mr. Connell, I... I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I wanted to make sure you’re all right. Those men last night...”
“Uh-huh. Muggers are a hazard in that district.”
She nodded. “I shouldn’t have run away as I did. But I was frightened. It all happened so quickly.”
“You did the right thing.”
She sat in the armchair again, began twisting her hands nervously in her lap.
“Okay,” I said. “Now you can tell me the real reason you’re here. As if I didn’t already know.”
Color came into her cheeks. “I... I went back to the consulate this morning. They still won’t help me. I have nowhere else to turn...” Abruptly she began to cry.
I stood there in the heat and watched her. Then, as the tears slowed and became a series of snuffles, I moved over to Harry’s desk and cocked a hip against it and lit a cigarette.
She looked up at me, her face wet, her eyes shining. “Please, Mr. Connell, please help me. I’ll pay or do anything you ask...”
“I told you last night, I don’t fly anymore. I don’t own a plane anymore, don’t have access to one because my license was revoked two years ago.”
“But... the man I talked with yesterday, the one who gave me your name, he said you keep a DC-3 hidden at an abandoned airstrip here on the island.” She snuffled, brushed at her eyes. “Isn’t it still there?”
I didn’t say anything for a time. The smoke from the cigarette burned my throat; I butted it in Harry’s overflowing ashtray. “Yes,” I said then. “It’s still there.”
“Then...”
“I’m treading on thin ice with the government,” I said. “One more mark against me, I’ll be declared persona non grata and deported. I don’t have any other home to go to.”
“No one will ever know,” she said. “You’ll be very careful, I know you will. And I’ll pay you whatever you ask, any amount, as soon as I can make arrangements with my father’s bank...”
I was silent again, thinking. Not liking what I was thinking, but there it was just the same.
“Mr. Connell?”
“All right,” I said.
“You’ll help me?”
“I’ll help you.”
She came up out of the chair, threw her arms around my neck. “Oh, thank you, thank you! You won’t regret this, I promise you.”
I pushed her away gently. “I sure as hell hope not.”
“When can we leave?”
“Tonight. It’ll have to be late, around eleven.”
“We couldn’t go sooner?”
“No. Do you know the Esplanade on Cecil Street?”
“Yes. Yes, I know it.”
“Meet me there at ten o’clock,” I said, and left her and Harry’s hot, cramped office and went back to work. Telling myself I was a damn fool and knowing I was going to go through with it anyway.
It rained the early part of the evening, a torrential tropical downpour that lasted for more than an hour and left the air, as the daily rains always did, smelling clean and sweet. But by then, when I left my flat, it had grown oppressively hot and humid again.
Tina Kellogg was waiting in the shadows near the Esplanade when I arrived at Cecil Street. Tonight she wore men’s khakis and a gray bush jacket — her traveling outfit.
“No luggage?” I asked her.
“No. I didn’t want to bother with it. I can send for it later.”
“All right. Let’s get started.”
I hailed one of the H.C.S. taxis that roam the streets of Singapore in droves. The driver, a bearded Sikh, did not ask any questions when I told him where we wanted to go, even though he wouldn’t get many fares to the remote Jurong section of the island that I named. There was nothing much out there but mangrove swamps and a few native fishing kampongs.
It was nearly eleven when he turned onto Kelang Bahru Road, leading toward the abandoned airstrip, Mikko Field. The moon was up and nearly full, lighting the road brightly enough so that you could have driven it without headlights.
When we neared the access road to the strip, the Sikh slowed and asked, “Do you wish me to drive to the field, sahib? The road is very bad.”
“Go in as far as you can,” I told him. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”
He made the turn onto the access road. It was chuck-holed and choked with tall grass and tangled vegetation. We crawled along for about a quarter mile. Finally, in the bright moonshine, I could see the long, rough runway, raised some ten feet on steep earth mounds from the mangrove jungle on both sides. At its upper end, to our left, were the decaying wooden outbuildings, and farther behind them, the broken-domed hangar. The airstrip had been deserted since the end of the Second World War. Few people remembered, or cared, that it hadn’t yet rotted into extinction.
The Sikh brought the taxi to a stop. The road was mostly impassable from this point; the marsh grass was tall and thick, and parasitic vines and creepers and thorn bushes had encroached thickly in places.
I paid the Sikh, and Tina Kellogg and I stepped out. The night was alive with the buzzing hum of mosquitoes, midges, the big Malaysian cicadas. There was the heavy smell of decaying vegetation, of dampness from the rain.
The taxi backed around a jog in the road, its lights making filtered splashes through the mangroves. I stood looking toward the airstrip, listening to the throb of the engine as the Sikh got turned around and headed away.
Tina Kellogg had not spoken during the ride out. Now she said, “The runway doesn’t seem very well maintained. Are you sure it’ll be safe to take off?”
“You let me worry about that.”
I took her arm and pushed ahead through the grass. We hadn’t gone far when I heard the engine sound. Not the taxi’s; that one had faded to silence. This was a new, different sound — the unmistakable whine of a four-cylinder engine held in low gear — and it was coming this way. Coming fast and without headlights; when I turned to look back, all I could see was moonlight and thick shadow.
“That’s not the taxi,” Tina Kellogg said. Her fingers bit urgently into my arm. “Who—?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve got a good idea.”
We both started to run. We had to stay on what was left of the road; the mangroves were a dense snarl of roots and underbrush, home of a hundred dangers including poisonous snakes. The oncoming car was very close now, and even though the grass was thick here, it wasn’t tall enough to hide us. We were clearly visible in the bright moonglow.
Headlights stabbed on behind us; I heard the familiar pig squeal of brakes. A vine or creeper caught Tina’s leg and she stumbled and fell. I hauled her up again, pulled her along to the left where the grass was thinner and there were more bushes to cast shadow. A hoarse shout cut through the insect hum. I half-expected a gun to start popping, too, but that didn’t happen yet.
Ahead the road curled to the left, paralleling the airstrip and leading to the hangar and outbuildings. Vines and wildly tangled shrubs clogged it completely after forty or fifty yards. If we couldn’t get through, we wouldn’t stand a chance. And even if we could, needle-sharp thorns would shred clothing and skin, slow us down.
The only other way to the buildings was the runway. We’d be exposed up there, but no more than down here. And it was a straight line to the buildings, no more than seventy-five yards to the first of them. Find a hiding place over there and we’d have a better chance than floundering around in the jungle.
I plowed through underbrush and ground cover, half-dragging Tina along with me. Something ripped at my bare arms; something else brushed my face, whispering, cold. Then we were out of the bushes and at the base of the embankment. The mounded earth was a quagmire from the evening rain, but we managed to fight our way up onto the strip without losing balance. A gun cracked somewhere close behind us, but neither of us was hit.