Gavin Lyall - Shooting Script

'Hmm. It may not be exactly a Man and a Home and a Back Yard and… I don't know what it'll be.'

'I think I'd like that.'

I frowned. 'What about Whitmore?'

'You're going to need a hot lawyer a lot more than he will, after tomorrow. And I don't think you could afford my fees.'

'Why d'you think I seduced you?'

She laughed sleepily and put her arms around me again.

I was woken by a banging on the fuselage side. The morning sun was streaming dustily through the gun windows; the fuselage was stuffy – and empty, apart from the rumpled engine covers.

One of the spray pilots shoved his head up through the aft hatch. 'God, but you charter pilots really believe in your sleep. It's nine o'clock.'

I stared athim blearily. 'What's the weather?'

He grinned. 'No hurricane. She recurved; turned north-west four-five hours ago. So no trip to Caracas.' He looked around the fuselage. 'Well, at least you had a quiet night.'

I nodded. 'Yes. A quiet night.'

I staggered down to the Golden Head for a wash and several cups of coffee. I'd finally found J.B.'s pack of cigarettes; I lit one and just sat, brooding.

A quiet night. And suddenly, something in your Ufethat you may never say goodbye to. Something fixed; a commitment. Funny how it changes a man. And funny how it doesn't. I was still Keith Carr, still unbeatable, still going on a visit to Ned Rafter in… about seventeen hours' time.

I was back with the Mitchell by ten.

Until the nets and bricks arrived, I couldn't do much practical work, so I sat down in the shade of a wing to work out me theory. I'd said a fighter pilot could do any low-level attack -but perhaps mostly because, like most fighter pilots, I'd never had a high opinion of bomber pilots. In fact, like most fighter pilots, I'd never had a very high opinion of any other pilot.

Now, it began to look a little complicated.

Say I was going in at 150 mph at 100 feet. In falling a mere 100 feet, a brick would hardly lose any of its forward speed -it would hit the ground when I was still dead overhead. I suddenly became glad I wasn't using bombs.

Working backwards from that, I had to drop the first bricks as many seconds before I passed over the first Vampire as it took a brick to fall 100 feet. Let that be known as Carr's First Law. On to number Two.

A brick accelerates downwards at 32 feet per second per second – ignoring air resistance. So it falls 16 feet in the first second, 48 in the second, 80 in the third – say two-and-a-half seconds for 100 feet. Bung in air resistance and call it three: I dropped three seconds early. Carr's Second Law.

Number Three was easy: at 150 mph. I was doing just over 200 feet a second, so I dropped a bit more than 600 feet early… It seemed a hell of a long way. But it was right.

That left me with just the problems of holding precise speed, height, and course and judging exactly 600 and a fewfeet. Possibly bomber pilots did need a trace of intelligence. The few that ever hit anything, that is.

Whitmore's white station-wagon swung in through the gates and trundled slowly up the runway. I watched it quietly, almost apprehensively. It stopped; Luiz got out. Only Luiz.

I went over to help him unload. He took die bundle of nets, I picked up the small drum of cable.

'From Montego Bay,' he said, carrying the bundle. 'Officially, we are supposed to be having a fishing scene but -such scenes often get cut.'

'All deductible, anyway.'

He dumped the bundle and gave me a look. I avoided it, put down the drum, and started unpicking the nets. 'Whitmore or J.B. coining down?' I asked, casually.

'Perhaps when they have the church sequence finished. I spoke to J.B. on the phone. She seemed… tired.' Again he tried to catch my eye, but I went on sorting the nets.

They turned out to be about a three-quarter-inch mesh, roughly circular, perhaps ten feet in diameter. I didn't know anything about fishing, but I guessed these had been the type diey used for casting into the surf – before the snorkel-fisher tourists had chased every fish outside the reef.

Luiz was fingering the end of the cable. 'Why do you need this, my friend?'

"Thread it around the edge of the nets to take the weight.' I held up the net itself: the edging was thick, rough string, stiff with creosote or something. 'Each net's to hold about five hundred pounds, remember.'

He looked at the cable doubtfully. 'Five hundred pounds…'

'Not so much. Just imagine four girls hanging on one end.'

'What a remarkable imagination you have, my friend. But I shall try.' He closed his eyes and smiled dreamily.

I said: 'Oh God.'

He opened his eyes. 'What is it?'

I'd just realised it might be more than 500 pounds – and also why bombers flew so sedately to the target, as if they were afraid of waking the air gunners. You've got a hook diat'll take a 500-pounder – but then you do just a one-g turn and the pull on that hook doubles. In fighters, I'd done more than 6-gturns. If I'd been carrying a 500-pounder then, the pull on thehook would have topped 3,000 pounds…

'I think it'll work,' I said. 'But it'll be a damn gentle ride.'

'I am happy to hear it,' he said. 'Because I am comingalso.'

I glared. 'Like hell you are.'

'You recall I was once a gunner?' He beckoned me over to the station-wagon and pointed in through the back window. On the floor lay a fat, heavy-looking rifle. After a moment, I remembered it as something the Americans had used in Korea: the BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle.

After a few more moments I said: 'So you were an air gunner – and you want to bringthat on an air attack?'

He shrugged, nodded.

I said: 'What is it – -30 calibre? And a cyclic rate of about five hundred rounds a minute?'

He nodded again.

'I see. In Korea we were using Sabres armed with six -50 calibre guns firing 1,200 round a minute each. Thirty or forty times the punch of just that thing. And even then we'd have done better with twenty-millimetre cannons. Christ,you know all this, Luiz.'

He smiled deprecatingly. 'My friend – I was good. And I might be lucky.'

'You aren't asking because you're either good or lucky.'

He just said: 'You are worried about the extra weight?'

'Not so much…' Him and the gun would only add 200 pounds or less, and that could be balanced by using him as copilot, to yank up the undercart the instant we broke ground. I'd prefer an extra 200 pounds than the extra seconds of drag from leaving the wheels down if I couldn't spare a hand at the moment of take-off.

I shrugged. 'All right: you've re-enlisted.'

He nodded graciously – but still didn't tell me why he was coming. It might be because he didn't want just to stand by with Miss Jiminez looking on. Or perhaps as a political commissar, to make sure my resolution didn't get a little weary in the wee small hours.

He picked up one of the nets. 'Perhaps you will show me how I am to do this threading.'

It was a long, hard grind in the sun, and we had to invent the details by trial and error; there's no manual of how to load a bomber with nets full of bricks.

In the end we doubled over the nets – I didn't like cutting and weakening them – into palliasses the dimensions of the bay: about eight by three-and-a-bit. Then I started screwing big ringbolts in four layers, along the bomb rails and at each end of the bay. The cables would be threaded through them as well as the mesh, each end of each cable ending in a loop hooked into a shackle; it had suddenly become useful having two hooks on each shackle.

When I pressed the button, the cables would jump off the hooks, the weight of bricks would force down the net and pull the free cables back through the mesh and ringbolts, letting more and more of the net loose until the load spilled out. That was the theory, anyway.