Eleanor grinned again and I wriggled back through the doorway and into my seat. 'How're we doing?'

'Just starting to get Beirut.' Ken pointed at the second ADF compass; its needle was slopping about just left of centre.

I put on the earphones and got a faint steady tone, with every now and then the identification letters in morse: B-O-D. 'That's it. But something I thought of: what about your passport problem?' Normally, each of us carried two passports so that we could keep the Israeli stamps on one, the Arab ones on the other. And the same sort of juggling with some African countries. But your second passport is only issued for a year, and Ken's would be way out of date by now.

He shook his head. 'No matter. My passport didn't ret stamped going into Israel and for some reason they didn't bother going out. I'm clean.'

Well, perhaps that figured. I put a match to my pipe and the cockpit swirled with smoke.

Ken sniffed. 'Now I know I'm really home. When's your uncle going to sell the pig farm?' He stretched and licked his lips. 'You know – suddenly I miss not smoking. In jail it didn't matter mueh. I'd never been in the coop before, so one more difference you didn't notice. But in a cockpit… Maybe I'll start again.'

'More pilots lose their licences for heart trouble than anything else.'

'Ahh, that's just BOAC types overeating and worrying about the stock market.' A tower of cumulus cloud stood straight ahead, its top well over 10,000. Ken turned us 30 degrees right and started the stopwatch hand of his watch. Then nodded over his shoulder. That champagne-'

I looked quickly back, but though the little sliding door wasn't shut, the girls obviously couldn't hear.

That champagne: was the paperwork good?'

'Very.' I took the sheaf from my inside pocket. 'Even this certificate of origin thing. God knows how they got that.'

'Did you have the papers with you, that night? – when you got mugged but nothing taken?'

'Yes.' I touched the corner of my jaw reflectively.

'Could it be they just wanted a look at the papers? To make sure you'd brought the cargo they were expecting?'

'It's possible.'

'I mean, somebodyis expecting that load, and they'll have paid some in advance, maybe all. Had you thought they might start wondering if you'd sold it all for yourself and gone whoring on the proceeds?'

'No, 1 hadn't really thought that.' Somehow, I just hadn't had time.

'Hadn't you better start thinking it?' he suggested gently. 'I mean, besides sleeping with your back to the wall and your eyes open.'

'It's an idea. Only – why should anybody in Cyprus know what I was really carrying? It wasn't for them and you wouldn't exactly sling this sort of information around.'

He checked his watch; we'd been on our new heading just 90 seconds and the cloud was now behind the port wing. He turned us back 60 degrees to port and started the watch again. Another 90 seconds and a 30-degree turn and we'd be right back on our original track.

'You got thumped around midnight, yes? But the news that Castle had gone bust and the aeroplane's stuck at Cyprus must have come through about nine hours before. Plenty of time to catch a flight from Beirut. And they'd know exactly which hotel you'd be in.'

There's that,' I admitted.

We made the last turn of the dogleg. After a while, he said: 'And you got hit on the chin. Couldn't you see who did it? You can hardly get bopped on the chin from behind.'

'You can if you try. He just spun me around and bomp. Anyway, it was dark. I just got the idea he was big and male.'

'I'm glad it wasn't small and female. But hell – nobody hits anybody on the chin except on TV.'

'So maybe he was trying to break into TV work. Damn it all, it just happened.'

'Well, next time try and remember to ask why.'

13

As airports go, Nicosia is just a country way-station where you can usually get permission to back-track down the runway after landing., But Beirut's something else. Not just the gateway to the East – or the West – but the main junction of the whole area. Where the north-bound routes from the Gulf and East Africa join the east-west traffic for Europe and the States and you may as well stop off for a few beers and a couple of barmaids between flights. Like what Cairo used to be and Damascus pretends it is.

So you slot yourself into a queue of big jets whose approach speeds are higher than your flat-out maximum and go hammering down the glidepath feeling their big snouts snuffling up your tail and praying the flaps won't tear off. In over the permanent bonfire behind the docks where they burn the old crankcase oil from the taxis (at least that's the story and I'll believe anything about Beirut taxis); slicing across the width of the city towards the sea again, parallel to the sudden suburban hills like Beit Mery that the locals insist are mountains – and finally you float half the length of runway 21 waiting for the speed to unwind before you drop her on. I did the landing; Ken would have done it better.

The radio told us to park on a ramp way down by the eastern hangars, which left us a long way to walk but out of sight of the terminal building, which might just help.

We trudged across the warm concrete sniffing the sharp smell of burnt jet fuel that I still find vaguely. exciting because to me it ^till means fast fighters and not airliners. That dates me. Eleanor asked innocently: 'Is the champagne going to be all right in there?'

'Should be,' I said. 'The aeroplane's locked; anybody stealing stuff still has to get it through Customs… If we just forget about the problem, maybe it won't go away.'

Ken switched hands on two pieces of Mitzi's luggage – she bad as much as the rest of us together – and let the girls get a few paces ahead, then said quietly: 'Whensomebody finds out that aeroplane's in town they'll bust the course record for corrupting a Beirut Customs officer.'

'Impossible. Anyway, they must have corrupted one in advance, just for this cargo. Then the handling agent brings it through when he knows that one's on duty. I'm rather counting on that. The agent daren't do anything until he's got these papers, and even if the Customs bloke recognises the aircraft he won't blow the whistle if he's still hoping for a payoff. Given the usual foul-up in communications, I'd think we've got most of twenty-four hours.'

'I hope you're right. Incidentally, the copper in Nicosia's going to be spitting blood, ours for choice, if we don't turn up for the inquest.'

I shrugged as well as I could with two handfuls of luggage. 'He didn't subpoena us. Anyway, he's only interested in Mitzi and maybe you.'

"Turn off the extinguisher, Jack, I've stopped burning, huh?' he said dryly. 'Well, maybe we'll be back in time anyhow.'

Ken took the girls through immigration and Customs while I made my number with control, paid my landing fees and generally sniffed the official air. It smelt calm. By half past five we were in a Ford Galaxie taxi going sonic down Khalde Boulevard. Beirut driving is terrible, but that's all. It doesn't get really aggressive, such as you find in Israel.

'Where,' Mitzi asked, 'are we going to stay?'

I knew what Ken would say – and he did: The St George. Is there anywhere else?'

'For God's sake come down to our price bracket. We'll stay at some small place in the same area and do our drinking in the St George.'

But the girls decided they, at least, would go for the St George itself. I think they were both just a little apprehensive about Beirut and felt that in a big western hotel there'd be less chance of anybody throwing them across the crupper of his Cadillac and galloping them off across the burning sands.

Well, things do happen in Beirut, if not quite that.