"The Mooj?" Roper repeats amid laughter, picking up on something Langbourne has said about the success of American Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. "The Mujahedin? Brave as lions, mad as hatters!" When Roper talks about war, his voice is at its calmest and the pronouns reappear. "They'd pop out of the ground in front of Sov tanks, bang away with ten-year-old Armalites and watch their bullets bounce off 'em like hailstones. Peashooters against lasers, they didn't care. Americans took one look at 'em and said: Mooj need Stingers. So Washington finagles Stingers to 'em. And the Mooj go crazy. Take out the Sovs' tanks, shoot down their combat helicopters. Now what? I'II tell you what! The Sovs have pulled out, no more Sovs, and the Mooj have got Stingers and are rarin' to go. So everyone else wants Stingers because the Mooj have got 'em. When we had bows and arrows we were apes with bows and arrows. Now we're apes with multiple warheads. Know why Bush went to war against Saddam?"
The question is directed at his friend Manny, but an American veteran replies.
"The oil, for Chrissakes."
Roper is not satisfied. A Frenchman has a second try.
"For the money! For the sovereignty of Kuwaiti gold!"
"For the experience," says Roper. "Bush wanted the experience."
He pointed a finger at the Russians. "In Afghanistan, you boys had eighty thousand battle-hardened officers fighting a flexible modern war. Pilots who'd bombed real targets. Troops who'd come under real fire. What had Bush got? Warhorse generals from Vietnam and boy heroes from the triumphant campaign against Grenada, population three men and a goat. So Bush went to war. Got his knees brown. Tried out his chaps against the toys he'd flogged to Saddam, back in the days when the Iranians were the bad guys. Big handclap from the electorate. Right, Sandy?"
"Right, Chief."
"Governments? Worse than we are. They do the deals, we take the fall. Seen it again and again." He pauses, and perhaps he thinks he has spoken enough. But nobody else does.
"Tell them about Uganda, Chief! You were tops in Uganda. Nobody could touch you. Idi Amin used to eat out of your hand." It is Frisky, calling from the far end of the table, where he sits among old friends.
Like a musician doubtful whether to give an encore, Roper hesitates, then decides to oblige.
"Well, Idi was a wild boy, no question. But he liked a steadying hand. Anyone but me would have led Idi astray, flogged him everything he dreamed of and a bit more. Not me. I fit the shoe to the foot. Idi would have gone nuclear to shoot his peasants if he could have done. You were there too, McPherson."
"Idi was a one-off, Chief," says a nearly wordless Scot at Frisky's other side. "We'd have been goners without you."
"Tricky spot, Uganda ― right, Sandy?"
"Only place I ever saw a fellow eating a sandwich under a hanged man," Lord Langbourne replies, to popular amusement.
Roper does a Darkest Africa voice. " 'Cummon, Dicky, let's watch dem guns o' yours doin' their job.' Wouldn't go. Refused. 'Not me, Mr. President, thank you. You may do with me what you will. Good men like me are scarce.' If I'd been one of his own chaps he'd have wasted me on the spot. Goes all bubble-eyed. Screams at me. 'It's your duty to come with me!' he says. 'No, it's not,' I say. 'If I was selling you cigarettes instead of toys, you wouldn't be taking me down to the hospital to sit at the bedsides of chaps dying of lung cancer, would you?' Laughed like a drain, old Idi did. Not that I ever trusted his laughter. Laughter's lying, a lot of it. Deflection of the truth. I never trust a chap who makes a lot of jokes. I laugh, but I don't trust him. Mickey used to make jokes. Remember Mickey, Sands?"
"Oh, too bloody well, thank you," Langbourne drawls, and once more earns the merriment of the house: these English lords, you've got to hand it to them, they're something else!
Roper waits until the laughter fades: "All those war jokes Mickey used to tell, had 'em all in stitches? Mercenaries wearing strings of chaps' ears round their necks and stuff? Remember?"
"Didn't do him a lot of good, though, did it?" says the lord, further delighting his admirers.
Roper turns back to Colonel Emmanuel. "I told him, 'Mickey,' I said, 'you're pushing your luck.' Last time I saw him was in Damascus. The Syrians loved him too much. Thought he was their medicine man, get 'em anything they needed. If they wanted to take out the moon, Mickey would get 'em the hardware to do it. They'd given him this great luxury apartment downtown, draped it with velvet curtains, no daylight anywhere ― remember, Sandy?"
"Looked like a laying-out parlour for Moroccan fags," says Langbourne, to the helpless mirth of all. And again Roper waits till all is quiet.
"You walked into that office from the sunny street, you were blind. Very serious heavies in the anteroom. Six or eight of them." He waves a hand round the table. "Worse-looking than some of these chaps, if you can believe it."
Emmanuel laughs heartily. Langbourne, playing the dude for them, lifts an eyebrow. Roper resumes:
"And Mickey at his desk, three telephones, dictating to a stupid secretary. 'Mickey, don't fool yourself,' I warned him. 'Today you're an honoured guest. Let 'em down, you're a dead honoured guest.' Golden rule, back in those days: Never have an office. Soon as you've got an office, you're a target. They bug you, read your papers, shake you out and if they stop loving you they know where to find you. Whole time we worked the markets, never had an office. Lived in lousy hotels ― remember, Sands? Prague, Beirut, Tripoli, Havana, Saigon, Taipei, bloody Mogadishu? Remember, Wally?"
"Certainly do, Chief," says a voice.
"Only time I could bear to read a book was when I was holed out in one of those places. Can't stand the passivity as a rule. Ten minutes of a book, I've got to be up and doing. But out there, killing time in rotten cities, waiting for a deal, nothing else to do but culture. Somebody asked me the other day how I earned my first million. You were there, Sands. You know who I mean. 'Sitting on my arse in Nowheresville,' I told him. 'You're not paid for the deal. You're paid for wasting your time.' "
"So what happened to Mickey?" Jonathan asks down the table.
Roper glances at the ceiling as if to say, "Up there."
It is left to Langbourne to supply the punch line. "Hell, I never saw a body like it," he says in a kind of innocent mystification. "They must have taken days over him. He'd been playing all ends against the middle, of course. Young lady in Tel Aviv he'd grown a bit too fond of. Some might say it served him right. Still, I thought they were a bit hard on him."
Roper is standing up, stretching. "Whole thing's a stag hunt," he announces contentedly. "You trek, you wear yourself out. Things pull you down, trip you up, you press on. And one day you get a glimpse of what you're after, and if you're bloody lucky you get a shot at it The right place. The right woman. The right company. Others chaps lie, dither, cheat, fiddle their expenses, crawl around. We do ― and to hell with it! Goodnight, gang. Thanks, cook. Where's cook? Gone to bed. Wise chap."
* * *
"Shall I tell you something really, really funny, Tommy?" Tabby enquired, as they bunked down for the night, "something you're going to really enjoy?"
"Go ahead," said Jonathan hospitably.
"Well, you know the Yanks have got these AWACS down at Howard Air Base outside Panama City, for catching the drugs boys? Well, what they do is, they go up very, very high, and watch all the little planes buzzing round the coca plantations over in Colombia. So what the Colombians do is, being crafty, they keep this permanent little bloke drinking coffee in a caff opposite the airfield. And every time a Yankee AWACS goes up, this bloke's on the blowe to Colombia tipping off the boys. I like that."