Whip Hand Part 36

'How high are we now?' I said. He glanced at his instruments. 'Eleven thousand feet.'

'And still rising?' He nodded. The other balloons, far below and to the left, were a cl.u.s.ter of distant bright blobs against the green earth.

'All that lot,' he said, 'will stay down at five thousand feet, because of staying under the airways.' He gave me a sideways look. 'You'll see on the map. The airways that the airlines use are marked, and so are the heights at which one is not allowed to fly through them.'

'And one is not allowed to fly through an airway at eleven thousand feet in a balloon?'

'Sid,' he said, grinning. 'You're not bad.'

He flicked the lever, and the burner roared, cutting off chat. I checked the ground against the map and nearly lost our position entirely, because we seemed suddenly to have travelled much faster, and quite definitely to the south-east. The other balloons, when I next looked, were out of sight.

In the next silence John Viking told me that the helpers of the other balloons would follow them on the ground, in cars, ready to retrieve them when they came down.

'What about you?' I asked. 'Do we have someone following?'

Did we indeed have Peter Rammileese following, complete with thugs, ready to pounce again at the further end? We were even, I thought fleetingly, doing him a favour with the general direction, taking him south-eastwards, home to Kent.

John Viking gave his wolfish smile, and said, 'No car on earth could keep up with us today.'

'Do you mean it?' I exclaimed.

He looked at the altimeter. 'Fifteen thousand feet,' he said. 'We'll stay at that. I got a forecast from the air boys for this trip. Fifty knot wind from two nine zero at fifteen thousand feet, that's what they said. You hang on, Sid, pal, and we'll get to Brighton.'

I thought about the two of us standing in a waist-high four foot square wicker basket, supported by terylene and hot air, fifteen thousand feet above the solid ground, travelling without any feeling of speed at fifty-seven miles an hour. Quite mad, I thought.

From the ground, we would be a black speck. On the ground, no car could keep up. I grinned back at John Viking with a satisfaction as great as his own, and he laughed aloud.

'Would you believe it?' he said. 'At last I've got someone up here who's not puking with fright.'

He lit another cigarette, and then he changed the supply line to the burner from one cylinder to the next. This involved switching off the empty tank, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the connecting nut, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it into the next cylinder, and switching on the new supply. There were two lines to the double burner, one for each set of four cylinders. He held the cigarette in his mouth throughout, and squinted through the smoke.

I had seen from the map that we were flying straight towards the airway which led in and out of Gatwick, where large aeroplanes thundered up and down not expecting to meet squashy balloons illegally in their path.

His appet.i.te for taking risks was way out of my cla.s.s. He made sitting on a horse over fences on the ground seem rather tame. Except, I thought with a jerk, that I no longer did it, I fooled around instead with men who threatened to shoot hands off... and I was safer up here with John Viking the madman, propane and cigarettes, mid-air collisions and all.

'Right,' he said. 'We just stay as we are for an hour and a half and let the wind take us. If you feel odd, it's lack of oxygen.' He took a pair of wool gloves from his pocket and put them on. 'Are you cold?'

'Yes, a bit.'

He grinned. 'I've got long Johns under my jeans, and two sweaters under my anorak. You'll just have to freeze.'

'Thanks very much.' I stood on the map and put my real hand deep into the pocket of my cotton anorak and he said at least the false hand couldn't get frostbite.

He operated the burner and looked at his watch and the ground and the altimeter, and seemed pleased with the way things were. Then he looked at me in slight puzzlement and I knew he was wondering, now that there was time, how I happened to be where I was.

'I came to Highalane Park to see you,' I said. 'I mean, you, John Viking, particularly.'

He looked startled. 'Do you read minds?'

'All the time.' I pulled my hand out of one pocket and dipped into another, and brought out the paperback on navigation. 'I came to ask you about this. It's got your name on the flyleaf.'

He frowned at it, and opened the front cover. 'Good Lord. I wondered where this had got to. How did you have it?'

'Did you lend it to anyone?'

'I don't think so.'

'Um...' I said. 'If I describe someone to you, will you say if you know him?'

'Fire away.'

'A man of about twenty-eight,' I said. 'Dark hair, good looks, full of fun and jokes, easy-going, likes girls, great company, has a habit of carrying a knife strapped to his leg under his sock, and is very likely a crook.'

'Oh yes,' he said, nodding. 'He's my cousin.'

CHAPTER TWELVE.

His cousin, Norris Abbott. What had he done this time, he demanded, and I asked, what had he done before?

'A trail of bouncing cheques that his mother paid for.'

Where did he live, I asked. John Viking didn't know. He saw him only when Norris turned up occasionally on his doorstep, usually broke and looking for free meals.

'A laugh a minute for a day or two. Then he's gone.'

'Where does his mother live?'

'She's dead. He's alone now. No parents or brothers or sisters. No relatives except me.' He peered at me, frowning. 'Why do you ask all this?'

'A girl I know wants to find him.' I shrugged. 'It's nothing much.'

He lost interest at once and flicked the lever for another burn. 'We use twice the fuel up here as near the ground,' he said afterwards. 'That's why I brought so much. That's how some nosey parker told Popsy I was planning to go high, and through the airways.'

By my reckoning the airway was not that far off.

'Won't you get into trouble?' I said.

The wolf grin came and went. 'They've got to see us, first. We won't show up on radar. We're too small for the equipment they use. With a bit of luck, we'll sneak across and no one will be any the wiser.'

I picked up the map and studied it. At fifteen thousand feet we would be illegal from when we entered controlled airs.p.a.ce until we landed, all but the last two hundred feet. The airway over Brighton began at a thousand feet above sea level and the hills to the north were eight hundred feet high. Did John Viking know all that? Yes, he did.

When we had been flying for one hour and fifty minutes he made a fuel line change from cylinder to cylinder that resulted in a thin jet of liquid gas spurting out from the connection like water out of a badly joined hose. The jet shot across the corner of the basket and hit a patch of wickerwork about six inches below the top rail.

John Viking was smoking at the time.

Liquid propane began trickling down the inside of the basket in a stream. John Viking cursed and fiddled with the faulty connection, bending over it; and his glowing cigarette ignited the gas.

There was no ultimate and final explosion. The jet burnt as jets do, and directed its flame in an organised manner at the patch of basket it was. .h.i.tting. John Viking threw his cigarette over the side and s.n.a.t.c.hed off his denim cap, and beat at the burning basket with great flailing motions of his arm, while I managed to stifle the jet at source by turning off the main switch on the cylinder.