'You'd screw yourself up all over the Caribbean. No place'd let you land there – not after playing games in the República.'

'I know. That's why I'm not working for Jiminez, either.'

'Of course.' He nodded wisely. 'Perhaps you have that lettered on a little sign on the dashboard of your plane? It'd screw me up all over the Caribbean.'

I said: 'No, I don't have.'

'I'll get you one made.' He smiled. 'It'd be silly to make a mistake that size just because you happened to forget.'

And he went away.

The next day I got a charter for a bunch of non-cost-conscious fishermen down to St Kitt's, and when I got back to San Juan Ned and the Vampires had gone. I flew out for Jamaica in the late afternoon, staying well south of the Repúblicacoastline and using the fair-weather cumulus that builds up after midday for cover.

I wasn't worried about radar. I didn't think they had any, and even if they had, I didn't believe they'd know how to use it properly yet. Ned had probably caught me the day before just by following the position reports I'd been dutifully radioing out. On this trip I kept shut up.

It was a long drag against some rare west winds and without the Repúblicaas a refuelling stop. In fact, things were getting pretty thin all round at this end of the Caribbean. Cuba was out; only Pan American could get any sense or fuel out of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and that only by damn near buying up the whole airport; now the Repúblicawas out. Apart from trips inside Jamaica, short hops to the Grand Cayman and an occasional long slog up to Nassau or out to Puerto Rico, it looked like being a long quiet summer. The next day proved it.

I was living in a two-room flat over a night club in Kingston's East Street, which made for free calypsos while I was trying to get to sleep. I staggered out of bed around eight, flying strictly blind, set the coffee going, and spent ten minutes searching every pocket and drawer I owned in case I'd left a cigarette around. I hadn't. So I lit the first pipe of the day, which tasted like a fire in an old clothes warehouse, and sat around gulping coffee and promising myself that next week I'd find a nice quiet place over in Port Royal, where the airline crews lived.

That made the day normal so far.

By nine I was more or less shaved and dressed in more or less clean khaki drill shirt and trousers and down getting pushed off the pavement by the Kingston crowd. I put the rotor arm back on the jeep, wondered for the several-hundredth time whether anything in such a state was really a good advertisement and if I shouldn't scrape the Keith Can, Charter Pilot for Hire, Twin-engined Plane off the side. I decided, as usual, to do it when I moved to Port Royal, and drove off to start getting pushed off the road by the Kingston traffic.

Palisadoes airport lies halfway around a curving spit of land enclosing Kingston harbour, with Port Royal on the far end, about five miles on. I reached the airport at nine-twenty and sat down in my daytime office – a canvas stool on the shade side of the Dove – and lit the second pipe of the day. That only tasted like a leaking exhaust, so things were improving.

Still a normal day.

I spent a little time wondering if I should be tracking down a leak in one of the air-pressure systems which was feeding out air at about the same rate that the engine compressor was feeding it in. The Dove lives on air pressure – for the undercarriage, flaps, brakes – so I'd have to do something about it eventually. But meanwhile I had a duplicate systemand an emergency undercarriage lowering bottle in working order, so I decided to let it wait until it got bad enough to spot more easily. Anyway, I had an appointment for ten o'clock and it's poor sales psychology to let the customer find the plane with its inspection panels off and wires dangling.

For once the customer was on time: the Canadian High Commissioner and a Canadian trade delegation wanting to take a fast look at a bauxite mine in the hills. The HC himself had obviously heard enough about me to have preferred doing the trip in his air-conditioned Buick, but he wasn't going to let down the morale of the party, so he just scratched his moustache and remarked that both engines still had propellers and off we went.

It was only a half-hour trip on to the mine's airstrip, and the delegation couldn't take more than an hour of breathing raw bauxite dust, so we were home again soon after midday.

I was drinking a beer in the Horizon Bar of the terminal building and thinking about going out on to the 'waving gallery' to buy a hamburger when I got customer number two, Mr Peterson, who was the managing something of an hotel chain on the north coast. Dressed in the local uniform of dark trousers, white short-sleeved shirt, he was big, enthusiastic, and Negro – which was a rare thing in the hotel trade; it isn't famous for promoting Jamaicans to responsible jobs.

And he had an idea. 'Mr Carr – you know we can't really buy good beef on the island. So we want you to fly it in, frozen, from South America for us.'

I frowned and said: 'Exactly where from?'

'Venezuela. We reckon it wouldn't melt in the time you took. It's been done before.' It had, too: somebody had started running beef up to Miami, with a refuelling stop here, in a converted bomber. But he'd had a bad brake fire, sold off the aircraft, and the idea seemed to have died away.

I asked: 'How much does a side of beef weigh?'

He waved a big pink hand. 'I'd say around three hundred pounds.'

'Caracas is 800 nautical miles. I could just about scrape out with 1,500 pounds of payload – say five sides. But-'

His face exploded into a grin. 'Man, that's wonderful. I'll just-'

'But,' I said firmly. I hated to kick that grin in the teeth. 'But Caracas means a ten-hour round trip. I'll shave my profit for a regular long job – but I can't shave my costs. I'd have to charge you about £235 per trip.'

The grin vanished, all right. 'But – but that's about – about nearly fifty pound a side on just transportation.'

I nodded.

He stared at me suspiciously, then shook his head. 'Man -1 thought the hotel trade had fierce costs, butflying…'

'You're playing my song.'

'You couldn't bring it down just a bit?'

'I know the words. I just can't remember the tune,'

He smiled briefly – on and off like a light switch. Then he said, sadly: 'You don't want our business, Mr Carr?'

'Your business is what any charter pilot dreams of: regular, dependable work. But it still costs me £22 4s. an hour to keep that Dove in the air. I'm charging you just over £1 an hour for myself. And a check four coming up.'

'A what?'

'Check four: happens every 1,800 flying hours. A bunch of engineers tear the whole plane apart, tell you it's in fine shape and stick it together again. Costs you up to £3,000. Then you're all licenced to fly again.'

He smiled again, this time a little more sincerely. 'Man, you reallyhave got costs. Well, I'll put it to my board, but… I suppose the trouble is we'd be paying you for going out there empty. Right?'

'Right. Just find me a regular cargo for Caracas and it'll half your cost.'

He nodded wearily. That's the real problem with the Caribbean: it's really just a string of suburbs. If you're travelling anywhere on business or pleasure, you don't go to another suburb, you go into town – Miami, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam. The islands just don't want to know about each other.

That's why the idea of federating Jamaica and Trinidad sprang a leak: Jamaicans and Trinidadians never met except in London and didn't much like each other there. Why not federate Malta and the Channel Isles? – they speak just as much English and they aren't any farther apart than Jamaica and Trinidad.