A flash lit the cockpit again and then the din of the rain on the windscreen stopped abruptly as we ran into clear weather. The pale blue ring of Saint Elmo's fire vanished from the propellers and the full moon drifted above the skyline.
'Easy come,' said Chuck, 'easy go!'
He got out another cigar and lit up.
'Was that a bad one?'
'They're all bad, if you wanna worry. Me, I shut my eyes till I'm out the other side.' He laughed noisily and blew out a cloud of smoke.
The second report in the newspaper had been a syndicated piece on the Defense Secretary's brief speech at the Quaker House Hotel in Washington on the increasing need for sophisticated armaments. In the last few lines of the report it was stated that 'Mr Burdick was seen to be suffering from the strain of his many recent engagements.'
Ferris hadn't picked this up because he'd been working the clock round. I didn't know if Zade had noticed it. By itself, it wasn't significant.
'I been runnin' the night-mails a couple of years now, you know that? Start at nine at night, finish around four in the mornin', maybe five.'
'You must know Manaus pretty well.'
'Sure do.' He cranked his seat up an inch and adjusted the soiled belt. 'Like I say, that place is goin' to get eaten up by the jungle one day. Industry's dying, 'cause they won't take the export tax off of electrical goods, an' what else've you got? Bit of rubber, maybe some gold in the mines, animal trapping. Listen-' he took the cigar out of his mouth and jabbed it in the air- 'that place is a thousand miles from the nearest city an' there's no roads in or out, y'imagine that? Okay when the rubber boom was on, but now there's no real money around any more.'
'No tourists?'
He jerked his red crew-cut head to look at me. 'You kiddin'? You know what the Brazilians call this jungle? The Green Hill — I guess you must've heard that.' He pointed with his cigar again, downwards. 'We run outa gas or blow an engine or what the devil an' we go down there an' can't get up again, that's it — you know what I mean? The trees'd just close over this crate like we'd never existed.'
He went on for a while and I thought about Burdick.
In Washington Ferris had told me that Robert Finberg was the only man in the United States who knew about Kobra and knew about our counter-operation but we now assumed Burdick himself had also known and was using Finberg as his representative. We also assumed that at this moment Burdick alone knew, and that with half a dozen major agencies including the FBI and the CIA at his disposal he was keeping strict hush.
Ferris had told me nothing beyond that. London may have told him nothing beyond that, or he might know some of me background but felt it wouldn't concern the executive. Fair enough, but a ferret can think.
Theory: somewhere among the networks of international intelligence an agent had run slap into some highly explosive information — someone like the late Milos Zarkovic — or they'd asked Zarkovic to bring it across to the West. It had been for the eyes of the Bureau only and it had personally concerned the US Secretary of Defence. He could have called in the CIA and he hadn't: he had asked the Bureau to handle it for him with no one else involved and to handle it with the highest possible discretion.
Facts: I'd discovered a tag on Burdick in Washington. He had used his rank to bring me out of Cambodia. His daughter was on an insect-hunting expedition along the Amazon but not on account of a 'family rift'. He himself was seen to be suffering the strain of his 'many recent engagements'.
These facts taken separately were not significant. Put them together and it didn't seem terribly illogical that Satynovich Zade was now on his way to the Kobra rendezvous somewhere along the Amazon.
Question: how much were they asking of James Burdick?
It wouldn't be money.
'Oh holy cow, we got some more shit comin' at us!'
Chuck adjusted the mixture handles and I saw the flame from the port exhaust change to a bluish pink. Ahead of us the broken stratus deck was beginning to pile up into thunder-heads.
'How far are we out, Chuck?'
'Huh? Twenty minutes, I guess. Take thirty, through that stuff.' A distant streak zig-zagged across the mountainous dark of the clouds. 'Don't mind flyin' through it but I don: like landin' in it, know what I mean?'
I said I did.
We began going down and I watched the altimeter, already feeling the warmth of the lower air. Manaus was three degree? below the Equator and the humidity was in the eighties at this time of the year and the man in the outfitter's in Belem had suggested light-weave tropical kit and I'd dumped the New York suit into a rubbish bin together with the rain-cape There'd been time to book out on the same Panair with Zade but we'd have risked blowing the mission and losing the executive because this was the penetration phase and I had to go in very close to the target and the target was Kobra and the Kobra people were now ultra-sensitive about surveillance: their operation was almost certainly centred on the entomological study group along the Amazon and they would be wary of strangers, so I had to jump in ahead of Zade and establish myself as a new image instead of a passenger who'd followed him in from Belem.
'Jesus, look at this!'
Rain hit the windscreens with a white explosion.
Chuck adjusted the set and I heard Manaus Approach Control come in, clearing him down to two thousand feet.
I sat back and went over the mass of data Ferris had given me to study in Belem: the layout of Manaus, location of consulate, airport, police headquarters, so forth. I'd dumped the set of maps when I'd got the essential topography into my head because I was going to present the image of somebody who knew the place welclass="underline" somebody in other words who hadn't followed any of the Kobra cell to Brazil.
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.