By the time the P.68 had come to a halt it was surrounded by troops, and as Miller dropped to the ground a police captain flashed a light on him briefly and then asked for his papers. I waited for him in the half-dark, then stopped him as he came through the group.

'Jordan.'

'Who?' He peered at me. 'Oh. Yeah. C'm'on over here, okay?'

Metal attache case chained to his wrist, cold cash. He peered at me again as light from a window passed over us, and stopped suddenly. 'Jordan, okay. You got some ID?'

I showed him my Thai papers and he held them to the thin ray of light, squinting, a short man, pot-bellied, red-haired, a pilot's cap stuck on his head at an angle, a gun outlined under his bush shirt, his left hand loaded with rings: diamond, ruby, emerald, one with a snake sculpted from gold and topaz.

'Okay, yeah. Johnny briefed me.' He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep. 'Jesus, that's better, you can't smoke up there.' Gave me my papers back. 'Let's go in here, I got a little business to do first.'

Under the tube lights of the refinery he looked ready to drop, red-eyed, pouchy, his skin sallow, his hands shaky as he unlocked the wrist-chain and pushed it into his pocket.

'Pakdee here?' he called out.

'He's on his way, Tex.'

'Well, Christ, I hope so. I'm down on time.'

Stink of ammonia in here. It was a small hangar, tin-roofed, with twenty or thirty girls working at the lab benches, five or six supervisors walking constantly down the aisles, two offices at the end, their doors closed.

'You been in places like this?'

'No.'

'They stink, right?' Put a hand out. 'I'm Tex Miller, I guess you know that. What's your first name, Jordan?'

'Martin. It's good of you to offer to take me out.'

'My pleasure, I guess I owe Johnny the ride.' He was watching the girls. 'This is Kuhn's operation, the whole village, I mean it's just one of them. He'll pay around a couple of thousand bucks for a batch of raw opium out of the fields up there in the mountains and then they do the refining in this place and a good few others like it, spread around the Triangle. Jesus, look at those tits, big for a coolie girl.' He dragged on his cigarette. She looked about sixteen. They all did. Sixteen and dull-eyed and half dead.

'Then they ship the pure heroin out in kilo bags to Bangkok, where it'll retail at around fourteen thousand, maybe around that figure, then it'll go direct by air to the States or through the Mafia labs in Sicily and it'll wholesale in the Big Apple and LA at around eighteen thousand, maybe twenty thousand before it's cut with lactose, quinine, baby powder, strychnine, brickdust, you name it, going through a whole chain of dealers before it hits the street, where that original two thousand bucks' worth of opium brings in around two million bucks as street scag.' He turned as a man went past him. 'Hey, where's Pakdee, for Christ's sake? I'm due out in three hours, goddam it, and I need some sleep.'

He turned back. 'Course in Laos they have their local trade going too. They run a cigarette factory lab, turns out No.4 heroin and sells under the brand name Double U-O Globe, hundred per cent pure, guaranteed, and you know what the logo is? Couple of fucking lions roaring at each other over a globe, kind of appropriate considering the competition around here. You wanna smoke, Marty? These are straight Camels.'

'Not just now. Is that why the village is blacked out? The competition?'

Tardy that, partly the way things are run. Sure, you could have some competitor - Vang Heng or Tricky Lee or Mariko Shoda, people like that - you could have them send a couple of dive-bombers in here and wipe everything out, so they just don't make things easy for them. Then there's the official side, see, the Laotian army general running this operation for Kuhn greases the narcs division in the government to let the place alone, but just for the look of things they pretend it isn't here, then the government can say they never knew what was going on. It's big money, okay? Maybe three or four million bucks runs through this place every day, and that's hey, Pakdee, for Christ's sake! Take a minute, Marty, I'll be right back.'

He was fifteen minutes and brought his attache case back but didn't bother to chain it to his wrist again. 'Okay, they'll be loading the stuff on right away.'

At the hotel he signed his name in the register, all his movements quick in spite of his fatigue. I had the feeling his time was short and he knew it.

The Asian at the desk spun the book around. 'You wanna girl, Tex?'

'You bet, make it a couple, is Kim here?'

'I'll have to see.'

'Tell 'em to hurry, I gotta get some sleep too. Okay, Marty, can you be down here again at three? That's in' - he checked his heavy gold watch - 'two and a half hours, can you make it?'

Said I could.

We sat at the end of the strip and waited, nothing but moonlight.

'So you ain't in the trade, Marty?'

'No.'

'So what're you doing in a place like this?'

'I'm an agent.'

'Shipping?'

'Narcotics.'

If he'd been drinking he'd have choked.

'You gotta be kidding.' But he was close to reaching for his gun.

'Just joking, yes.'

'Well Jesus Kee-rist, that isn't the kinda joke you make around here, you know that?'

'British sense of humour.'

'No wonder you lost the fuckin' empire.'

A green light flashed a couple of times and the strip lamps came on and he gunned up and got the brakes off and the pressure came against the spine and we were airborne and the lamps went out below us.

'Sorry, Tex.'

'Huh? Oh. That's okay. You just don't understand the situation. You comfortable? Be there in a couple hours.'

'Nah Trang.'

'Right. In South 'Nam.'

We went into a tight bank and the compass settled at 67 degrees. 'What were those burnt-out planes doing down there, Tex?'

'It's a tricky strip, and some fliers are better than others. It doesn't take much to burn us out if we get the touch-down wrong - if the trip needs extra fuel we shove a water-bed on board full of gasoline.'

'That's what this thing is?'

'Right. You wanna smoke, you better go out there on the wing and do it.'

'American sense of humour.'