'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.' 'Too- shay .' 'I heard some shots down there, earlier. What was happening?' 'Well, sometimes one o' the coolies or the freight-handlers or the mule-drivers gets on a bummer - you know, has a bad trip? - and they can just take off and go crazy all over everybody, so the troops or the cops shoot 'em down, because we can't have that kinda thing around a place like that, you know, everyone's so nervous and it could start something. Or I guess it could've been some dealer on the cheat and the supplier wouldn't stand for it or the buyer got pissed off, you know - it isn't too different from the Wild West with the gold rush on, except the money that changes hands in the Triangle is about a thousand - make that a million - times as much on any given day. It's a jungle, see. You think that's a jungle down there? It's just a daisyfield.' We levelled off at ten thousand feet with the heading southeast. 'How long do you plan to stay in the trade?' I was talking partly to keep him awake. He'd looked dog-tired when he'd brought this plane in three hours ago and he couldn't have had more than two hours' sleep, given thirty minutes to bring the wall down, three in a bed. We were flying a petrol tank and the fumes were no help. 'How long do I what?' 'Plan to keep working?' 'Give it another couple o years, maybe around that. By then I'll have stacked up three or four million bucks an' I guess I'll be ready for Acapulco or Monte-Carlo for a while, ease off a little.' 'Is there much rivalry between you actual pilots?' 'Not usually. Get personal feuds, sometimes, but we don't often try and cheat each other out of trips.' 'You wouldn't bug each other, say.' 'How's that again?' 'You wouldn't slip a bug into a rival's communications.' 'Guess not. We all kinda know who's goin' where, an' we keep our asses clean. Bugs? Nope, I never heard o that.' Noted. We came down from our ceiling at 05:14 over South Vietnam and called up the tower in Nah Trang. There was cloud cover across the coast, topped with a gilding of light from the east, and we dropped through it into the dark again. 'Johnny said you'd get me through the barriers, is that right?' 'Sure. Don't show your Thai papers, okay? Gets too political.'