John le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy

'I may conclude, monsieur, with a word of warning to your country. You are American?'

'English,'

'It is the same. Tell your government, sir. If you do not help us to continue the fight against the Communists, we shall go to the Russians and ask them to replace you in our struggle.'

Oh, mother, thought Jerry. Oh boy. Oh God.

'I will give them that message,' he promised, and made to go.

'Un instant. monsieur,' said the senior official sharply, and there was a stirring among his dozing courtiers. He opened a drawer and pulled out an imposing folder. Frost's will, Jerry thought. My death warrant. Stamps for Cat.

'You are a writer?'

'Yes.'

Ko's putting the arm on me. The pen tonight, and wake up with my throat cut tomorrow.

'You were at the Sorbonne, monsieur?' the official enquired.

'Oxford.'

'Oxford in London?'

'Yes.'

'Then you have read the great French poets, monsieur?'

'With intense pleasure,' Jerry replied fervently. The courtiers were looking extremely grave.

'Then perhaps monsieur will favour me with his opinion of the following few verses.' In his dignified French, the little official began to read aloud, slowly conducting with his palm.

'Deux amants assis sur la terre.

Regardaient la mer,'

he began, and continued for perhaps twenty excruciating lines while Jerry listened in mystification.

'Voilà,' said the official finally, and put the file aside. 'Vous l'aimez?' he enquired, severely fixing his eye upon a neutral part of the room.

'Superbe,' said Jerry with a gush of enthusiasm. 'Merveilleux. The sensitivity.'

'They are by whom would you think?'

Jerry grabbed a name at random. 'By Lamartine?'

The senior official shook his head. The courtiers were observing Jerry even more closely.

'Victor Hugo?' Jerry ventured.

'They are by me,' said the official and with a sigh returned his poems to the drawer. The courtiers relaxed. 'See that this literary person has every facility,' he ordered.

Jerry returned to the airport to find it a milling, dangerous chaos. Mercedes raced up and down the approach as if someone had invaded their nest, the forecourt was a turmoil of beacons, motorcycles and sirens; and the hall, when he argued his way through the cordon, was jammed with scared people fighting to read noticeboards, yell at each other and hear the blaring loudspeakers all at the same time. Forcing a path to the information desk, Jerry found it closed. He leapt on the counter and saw the airfield through a hole in the anti-blast board. A squad of armed soldiers was jog-trotting down the empty runway toward a group of white poles where the national flags drooped in the windless air. They lowered two of the flags to half mast, and inside the hall the loudspeakers interrupted themselves to blare a few bars of the national anthem. Over the seething heads, Jerry searched for someone he might talk to. He selected a lank missionary with cropped yellow hair and glasses and a six-inch silver cross pinned to the pocket of his brown shirt. A pair of Cambodians in dog-collars stood miserably beside him.

'Vous parlez français?'

'Yes, but I also speak English!'

A lilting, corrective tone. Jerry guessed he was a Dane.

'I'm press. What's the fuss?' He was shouting at the top of his voice.

'Phnom Penh is closed,' the missionary bellowed in reply. 'No planes may leave or land.'

'Why?'

'Khmer Rouge have hit the ammunition dump in the airport. The town is closed till morning at the least.'

The loudspeaker began chattering again. The two priests listened. The missionary stooped nearly double to catch their murmured translation.

'They have made a great damage and devastated half a dozen planes already. Oh yes! They have laid them waste entirely. The authority is also suspecting sabotage. Maybe she also takes some prisoners. Listen, why are they putting an ammunition house inside the airport in the first case? That was most dangerous. What is the reason here?'

'Good question,' Jerry agreed.

He ploughed across the hall. His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were. The 'crew only' door was guarded by a pair of very serious crushers and in the tension he saw no chance of brazening his way through. The thrust of the crowd was toward the passenger exit, where harassed ground staff were refusing to accept boarding tickets, and harassed police were being besieged with letters of laissez passer designed to put the prominent outside their reach. He let it carry him. At the edges, a team of French traders was screaming for a refund, and the elderly were preparing to settle for the night. But the centre pushed and peered and exchanged fresh rumours, and the momentum carried him steadily to the front. Reaching it, Jerry discreetly took out his cable card and climbed over the improvised barrier. The senior policeman was sleek and well-covered and he watched Jerry disdainfully while his subordinates toiled. Jerry strode straight up to him, his shoulder bag dangling from his hand, and pressed the cable card under his nose.

'Securité américaine,' he roared in awful French, and with a snarl at the two men on the swing doors, barged his way on to the tarmac and kept going, while his back waited all the time for a challenge or a warning shot or, in the triggerhappy atmosphere, a shot that was not even a warning. He walked angrily, with rough authority, swinging his shoulder bag, Sarrattstyle, to distract. Ahead of him — sixty yards, soon fifty — stood a row of single-engined military trainers without insignia. Beyond lay the caged enclosure, and the freight huts, numbered nine to eighteen, and beyond the freight huts Jerry saw a cluster of hangars and park bays, marked prohibited in just about every language except Chinese. Reaching the trainers, Jerry strode imperiously along the line of them as if he were carrying out an inspection. They were anchored with bricks on wires. Pausing but not stopping, he stabbed irritably at a brick with his buckskin boot, yanked at an aileron and shook his head. From their sandbagged emplacement, to his left, an anti-aircraft guncrew watched him indolently.

'Qu'est-ce que vous faites?'

Half turning, Jerry cupped his hands to his mouth. 'Watch the damn sky for Christ's sakes,' he yelled in good American; pointing angrily to heaven, and kept going till he reached the high cage. It was open and the huts lay ahead of him. Once past them he would be out of sight of both the terminal and the control tower. He was walking on smashed concrete with couch-grass in the cracks. There was nobody in sight. The huts were weather-board, thirty feet long, ten high, with palm roofs. He reached the first. The boarding on the windows read 'Bomb Cluster Fragmentation Without Fuses'. A trodden dust-path led to the hangars on the other side. Through the gap Jerry glimpsed the parrot colours of parked cargo planes.

'Got you,' Jerry muttered aloud, as he emerged on the safe side of the huts, because there ahead of him, clear as day, like a first sight of the enemy after months of lonely marching, a battered bluegrey Dc4 Carvair, fat as a frog, squatted on the crumbling tarmac with her nose cone open. Diesel oil was dripping in a fast black rain from both her starboard engines and a spindly Chinese in a sailing cap laden with military insignia stood smoking under the loading bay while he marked an inventory. Two coolies scurried back and forth with sacks, and a third worked the ancient loading lift. At his feet, chickens scrabbled petulantly. And on the fuselage, in flaming crimson against Drake Ko's faded racing colours, ran the letters OCHART. The others had been lost in a repair job.

Oh, Charlie's indestructible, completely immortal! Charlie Marshall, Mr Tiu, a fantastic half Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot...