had to get past the ganga pilot. 'They said there was trouble?' Alex asked the question casually as he opened the cabin door, stepped on the wing into the rain, and jumped to the wet ground.
'Gawddamn! The way they tell it, they got stole blind by a bunch of fuckin' bucks out here. Resold a bundle after takin' their cash. Let me tell you, those niggers are loaded with hardware!'
'That's a mistake,' said McAuliff with conviction. 'Jesus... goddamned idiots!'
'They're lookin' for black blood, man! Those niggers gonna' lay out a lotta brothers! Eeeaww!'
'They do and New Orleans will go up in smoke!... Christ!' Alexander knew the Louisiana city was the major port of entry for narcotics throughout the Southern and Southwestern states. This particular ganga pilot would know that. 'Did they head down the slope?' McAuliff purposely gestured a hundred yards to the right, away from the vicinity of the path he remembered.
'Damned if they was too fuckin' sure man! They got one of them Geigers like an air-radar hone, but not so good. They took off more like down there.' The pilot pointed to the left of the hidden jungle path.
Alex calculated rapidly. The scanner used by the Dunstone men was definitive only in terms of a thousand-yard radius. The signals would register, but there were no hot or cold levels that would be more specific. It was the weakness of miniaturized long-distance radio arcs, operating on vertical principles.
One thousand yards was three thousand feet - over a half a mile within the dense, almost impenetrable jungle of the Cock Pit. If the Dunstone team had a ten-minute advantage, it was not necessarily fatal. They did not know the path - he didn't know it either, but he had travelled it. Twice. Their advantage had to be reduced. And if their angle of entry was indirect - according to the ganga pilot, it was - and presuming they kept to a relatively straight line, anticipating a sweep... the advantage conceivably might be removed.
If... if he could find the path and keep to it.
He pulled up the lapels of his field jacket to ward off the rain and turned towards the cabin door above the wing of the plane. He opened it, raised himself with one knee to the right of the strut, and reached into the small luggage compartment behind the seat. He pulled out a short-barrelled, high-powered automatic rifle - one of the two that had been strapped below the front seat of the Halidon car. The clip was inserted, the safety on. In his pockets were four additional clips; each clip held twenty cartridges.
One hundred shells.
His arsenal.
'I've got to reach them,' he yelled through the downpour at the ganga pilot. 'I sure as hell don't want to answer to New Orleans!'
'Them New Orleens boys is a tense bunch. I don't fly for 'em if I got other work. They don' lak nobody!'
Without replying, McAuliff raced towards the edge of the grassland slope. The path was to the right of a huge cluster of nettled fern - he remembered that; his face had been scratched because his hand had not been quick enough when he had entered the area with the Halidon runner.
Goddamn it! Where was it?
He began feeling the soaked foliage, gripping every leaf, every branch, hoping to find his hand scratched, scraped by nettles. He had to find it; he had to start his entry at precisely the right point. The wrong spot would be fatal. Dunstone's advantage would be too great; he could not overcome it.
'What are you lookin' for?'
'What! Alex whipped around into the harsh glare of light. His concentration was such that he found himself unlatching the safety on the rifle. He had been about to fire in shock.
The ganga pilot had walked over. 'Gawddamn. Ain't you got a flashlight, man? You expect to find your way in that mess without no flashlight?'
Jesus! He had left the flashlight in the Halidon plane. Daniel had said something about being careful... with the flashlight. So he had left it behind! 'I forgot. There's one in the plane.'
'I hope to fuck there is,' said the pilot.
'You take mine. Let me use yours, okay?'
'You promise to shoot me a couple o' niggers, you got it, man.' The pilot handed him the light. 'This rain's too fuckin' wet, I'm going back inside. Good huntin', hear!' McAuliff watched the pilot run towards his aircraft and then quickly turned back to the jungle's edge. He was no more than