They came at me from high on the right, out of the afternoon sun. From just where they should have been. So perhaps I should have seen them coming.

Once, I would have done. But this time I was sitting half-asleep in the driving seat of a Dove trudging at 150 knots down Route Delta to Puerto Rico and not worrying about anything more than whether my cargo of seedlings would leave the cabin with a smell that I'd have to pay to get cleaned out.

The first I knew was when they flicked across less than a hundred yards ahead; two bright silver H-shapes in the sky, suddenly there, suddenly gone.

I came awake with a thump and a terrible sick feeling of being defeated. Beaten. Then it turned quickly to anger, and I swung the nose of the Dove around the sky, searching. But there are no guns in the nose of a Dove.

I'd recognised the shapes, of course: Vampire jets. And I knew where they must have come from – the República Libra. I was just south of the coastline, just past Santo Bartolomeo. But I hadn't known the Repúblicaowned any jet fighters, not even seventeen-year-old ones.

They reappeared ahead, nearly a mile away and climbing. I watched them, angrily. If they wanted to try the same joke twice, I was going to slap on full power and swing straight at them. And if they rammed each other trying to get out of my way, then hard luck and maybe somebody'll paint your names in gold on the Honour Board… And if I got rammed? Or shot out of the sky in this old unarmed crate?

This wasn't how I'd learned the game. I started looking for a cloud to hide in. Live through today – but tomorrow…

But they kept going in the fast shallow climb jets use until they were out of sight eastwards, the same direction I was going. I watched them go.

An hour and three-quarters later I touched down at San Juan airport. I parked among the usual clutter of freight and private aircraft just east of the airport building, found the man who was supposed to collect my cargo, and left him and a squad of officials arguing over whether the seedlings were suffering from the Colorado Beetle or just dialectical materialism. I went on up to the Meteorological Office.

The duty officer there recognised me as a regular even if he couldn't recall my name. We said 'Hi' to each other, and then I asked if he'd heard of any good hurricanes recently.

'Bit early in the season,' he commented.

I shrugged and said: 'July, stand by,' quoting die old Jamaican tag about hurricanes: 'June, too soon; July, stand by; August, you must; September, remember; October, all over.' In a Jamaican accent, it even rhymes.

He nodded and shoved across the weather chart he'd been working on. 'Got a small circular disturbance east of Barbados.'

'What's it going to do?'

He smiled. 'I'll tell you and you tell me what'll win the three o'clock at Hileah Park on Saturday.'

'Meteorology's marvellous except when it comes to predicting the weather.'

'We've got a Coastguard flight down there. Should be a report in an hour. Which company's looking after your plane while you're here?'

I grinned, perhaps a little sideways. 'And I have a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce meeting me outside.'

He smiled back and pulled a piece of paper out of a pile on his desk. 'Give me your name and hotel and I'll ring you if it gets within two hundred miles of here – okay?'

'Keith Carr. I'm booked in at the El Portale. Thanks.' For a meteorologist, he was almost human.

Then I noticeda Macdonald World Air Power Guideon the shelf behind him, and asked if I could take a look. I turned up the República- and there, shoved in among the usual Mustangs and Thunderbolts and their 'shortage of spares' was a neat handwritten note that read just '12 Vampire F.5'.

'When the hell did the Repúblicaget Vampires?'

He looked up. 'Couple of weeks or so. Have you been tangling with them?'

'Two of them made a dummy pass at me this afternoon.'

'Probably the two that came in here – just over an hour ago.' He nodded eastwards, towards the National Guard base at the far end of the mam runway. 'On a good-will visit. So maybe you'll meet them around town and congratulate them personally.'

'A good-will visit?'

'That's what it says here.' He stood up and walked to the door with me. 'Happen our circular disturbance grows up into a real hurricane, it'll be the first of the year. So we're set to call it Annette.'

'I knew a girl once-'

'Ahh.' He patted my shoulder and smiled a deep satisfied smile. 'I had a kind of bet with myself – that I'd get at least a dozen pilots each saying exactly that before five o'clock. You make eleven, and there's half an hour to go.' He sighed. 'Me, I've never met an Annette in my life.'

'They're all just crazy about pilots.'

He pushed me firmly out of the door.

I got my overnight case out of the Dove, rang the agency that sometimes finds me cargoes in Puerto Rico, then took a taxi into town.

San Juan has changed – grown up, perhaps – in the last few years. Mind, I never knew it when it was a quaint old Spanish-colonial town, and I haven't met anyone who did. Now it's a five-mile stretch of hotels, offices, and freeways strung along the shore from the airport to the Navy airbase, all as clean and crisp as an architect's model. It's a great place if you happen to be a building or a car, but dogs and human beings are frowned on. You could call it growing up.

The El Portaleis built in the same style, only smaller and stepped back a few hundred yards and dollars from the big hotels down on the beach. I checked in, drank a couple of cans of beer in the drugstore beside the lobby, and read a paper to see if it suggested why República jetsshould have taken to jumping innocent charter flights. It didn't, of course. So Iwent upstairs, took a shower, and then lay down on the bed to watch the sky darken and the line of big hotels over on the beach start lighting up like Christmas trees.

The phone woke me.

The room was flat dark by then. I groped around for the receiver and answered it with a prehistoric grunt.

A voice said: 'Mr Keith Carr of Kingston?'

You didn't have to have heard the voice before to recognise it. You hear it all over the world, and everywhere it sounds the same. As precise and impersonal as an income-tax form, and about as welcome. The voice of authority.

The voice said: 'Agent Ellis, Federal Bureau of Investigation.5 I grunted again.

'I believe you're leaving for Kingston again tomorrow, Mr Carr, so perhaps I could have a friendly talk with you sometime this evening.'

'D'you mean I have a choice?'

'You're not an American citizen, Mr Carr. Just a friendly talk.'

I didn't say anything. He went on: 'I could come to your hotel, or perhaps you're going out somewhere. I could meet you there.'

I chewed on this for a moment. Then I thought of something. 'There's a couple of República Libra pilots in town. Find out where they're staying and I'll meet you there.'

There was a long official silence at his end. Then: 'That isn't exactly my job, Mr Carr.'

'All right. Where I'll be this evening is walking round the big hotels looking for them. You can come along on that if you like.'

'Hold the line, please.' There was another silence. After a while he came back. 'I understand they're staying at the Sheraton. Why-'

'Then I'll see you in the roof bar there at nine – all right?'

'Why do you want to meet these pilots, Mr Carr?'

'Just a friendly talk, Mr Ellis.'