I didn't know if the Pat Burdick party were in Manaus itself or somewhere along the river so I'd gone over the out-lying terrain rather thoroughly. It consisted of two elements the river and the jungle.
Okay 9 Whisky, please turn left heading 200.
Water was trickling again down the side of the windscreen.
Three very bright flashes in quick succession.
'An' screw you too, baby!' Chuck shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and cranked his seat down an inch.
The starboard wing dipped suddenly as I looked past the pilot's head, and the moon lifted out of sight above us. The altimeter was down to a thousand as we intercepted the final approach course a mile out with the airspeed on 90.
The rain had eased and visibility looked workable but I stopped reviewing the local data and noted the angle of the door-lever and the disposition of the fire extinguishers and made a few mental practice runs with the seat-belt release because Chuck was a bit worried and not talking any more.
Bright flash.
The thunder was still rolling when we began going in with the first of the approach lights nicking out of sight below the fuselage.
Gear-down light on.
Flaps at full.
500.
'Whisky, you are cleared to land'
'Roger.'
200.
Another flash lit the cockpit.
I could feel the heat of the tropical night seeping into the cabin. A haze of lights drifted past 100.
One bounce.
The blades of the ceiling fan droned above my head.
I could smell creosote on the moist air, or something like creosote; maybe it was the stuff in the little bowls: they'd lifted the bed and stood its legs in the little bowls and then poured the stuff in, almost to the brim. The boy at the desk downstairs had said it was against the centipedes.
I opened the 8X50s a fraction on the fulcrum and re-focused. Chuck Lazenby had told me where to buy them after we'd got into Manaus. The trouble was they misted up every thirty seconds and I had to keep wiping them.
Chuck had said he'd earned a crate of beer for bringing the Beech in through that storm and I'd spent half an hour with him getting some more data on the environs while he got slowly drunk: the flight in had worried him more than he admitted.
In the circular field of vision I could see their heads, below in the courtyard. Sometimes they disappeared as they moved, then came back into view: the foreground images were complex and consisted of the Indian screen across the lower half of my window, the uprights of the veranda and the leaves of the fan-palms in the courtyard. With the lowering sun throwing oblique light across the hotel I needed this much cover to haze out any glint from the lenses.
There were five men down mere, and a woman.
The girl sat more or less in the middle of them.
Satynovich Zade had come through on the noon plane, still with no baggage.;I saw Ferris a few yards behind him but we made no contact at any time: he was booked in at the Hotel Amazonas. He stayed at the airport long enough to see me lock on to Zade and then got a taxi.
Zade was one of the faces I had in the 8X50s, blurred and merging with the leaves. He was sitting next to the woman, very relaxed, his dark glasses occasionally swinging upwards and turning slowly to scan the first-storey verandas At these times I kept the binoculars perfectly still.
We had come the four miles to Lagofondo in separate boats from Manaus harbour. I had told the Indian boy to keep half a mile distant because the risk of Zade's getting lost was now almost niclass="underline" the terrain on each side of the river was thick jungle where according to Chuck Lazenby only a lunatic would go on his own. On the river, nearly seven miles wide in this area, the small-boat traffic provided adequate cover.
Lagofondo was at me neck of a tributary: a cluster of water-front cane-and-thatch dwellings along the steep bank where the jute reeds had been hacked away to make room, with a banana grove and some farm buildings and a church. The hotel had been a German mission house during the rubber boom; it had started to rot when the slump came and had then been repaired and was starting to rot again.
A mosquito whined close and I waited for the silence, then hit the side of my head, bringing blood away on my fingers. I put the field glasses up again.
They were sitting in the shade of the palms: everyone here sat in the shade. The thermometer in the hall had been at 103° when I checked in, and the boy at the desk said it was cooler after the rain. An hour ago I had been sitting in the courtyard myself, talking to a Dutchman who was here collecting Indian artifacts for a mail order line he was running in Canada. I hadn't once looked at the group of people on the other side of the fountain: 1 didn't want to see them but I wanted them to see me, to establish the image. Zade and another man had been drinking pisco sours and the rest had asked for mineral water. They had talked now and then, but with an effort, and always led by Zade. They bad talked about the Amazon and its insects, mostly in English with strong accents.
Sometimes I had heard the soft frightened tones of the girl.
I watched her now. She was centred in the field of vision: pale, fair haired, sitting perfectly still and looking up at the others only when they spoke directly to her. The woman spoke to her more often than the others. Her name was Shadia.
I moved the glasses.
They had that vague familiarity of faces seen before only in photographs: I'd seen the photographs in London and Ferris had shown me some more on the plane between Los Angeles and Washington four days ago.
Sabri Sassine: undercover operator for the Turkish Dev-Genc, released from gaol in the Argentine. Carlos Ramirez: mercenary terrorist, explosives expert. Francisco Ventura: freelance saboteur and sometime Black September assassin, Ilyich Kuznetski: another freelance with the Simplon Tunnel bombing on his record and a gaol shoot-out in Rome. Satynovich Zade: currently wanted by the Dutch police for a political assassination reportedly undertaken for the PLA.
I didn't know who the woman was.
I knew who the college girl was.
She was sipping some water as I watched her.
The woman was talking to her now but I couldn't hear the words intelligibly. The accent was Polish. I moved the field glasses and studied her again, wiping the condensation off the lenses and steadying them with my elbows on my knees. I am a bad judge of people's age but she looked thirty-five. Sun-tan, auburn hair hanging loose, very pale blue eyes that hardly ever moved: when she wanted to look at something she turned her head, in the way of a cat Possibly she had been taken on as a chaperon for Pat Burdick but these men were terrorists and if they wanted to search the girl they would do that and if they wanted to rape her they would do that: I didn't think the woman was a chaperon. More probably she was the current partner of one of the men but in half an hour's constant surveillance I hadn't seen who he was: she hadn't touched any of them, or sat particularly close. Ten minutes ago Zade had said something to her in Polish and she had cut in quickly, turning away, and there'd been a short silence among the group.
I moved the field glasses again to watch Ramirez.
Above my head the fan droned rhythmically: the blades were out of balance and the electric motor was vibrating with each revolution. It produced a warm draught, but the sweat went on running down my face and steaming the lenses.
I wondered again what they were asking of the Defence Secretary.
He would know by now, They would have presented their terms.
The fact was that Burdick could have called in security or investigatory or counter-espionage agencies and he hadn't done that and I could see only one obvious reason: he'd been ordered not to. If this were the standard hostage-and-demands situation then the United States Secretary of Defence was at present under the orders of the five men down there in the courtyard, so long as his daughter was alive.