‘All right, then the message is this,’ said Hanna. ‘This is a game you can’t win. But you can lose hard or you can lose easy. It’s up to you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time’s wasting. We’d better get back.’

Frank was suddenly holding a gun. ‘Maybe we’d better keep a few more hostages.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ said Philips. ‘You heard what he said about the soldiers.’

‘I don’t believe him.’

Hanna shrugged. ‘You’ll find out pretty soon.’

‘Okay,’ said Frank. ‘Then you go back.’ He waved the gun towards Leotta and me. ‘But they stay.’

‘All right,’ said Hanna, and turned to face the two of us squarely. There was a steely look in his eye. ‘I’m sorry, but you wanted to come.’ To Frank he said, ‘I’ll lay on a demonstration to prove that the army is here. Keep your eye on the lagoon.’

He said no more but turned on his heel and walked down the road. Frank said, ‘What did he mean by that?’ He prodded me with the gun. ‘I’m talking to you.’

‘I don’t know what he meant. I suggest you do as he says. Watch the lagoon.’

‘Not from here,’ said Philips. ‘Let’s get back. We could be jumped here.’

Frank prodded me with the pistol again and I felt like taking it from him and cramming it down his throat. But to try anything would have been stupid so Leotta and I meekly followed Philips up the road, with Frank guarding us from behind. At the top, where we came in sight of the airstrip, two men were waiting: the young man I had previously seen with Frank, and Haslam. He looked as if he was about to burst a vein in his neck.

He said, ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘I thought I told you to keep on loading,’ said Frank. There was a sharp edge to his voice.

‘The hell with that,’ said Haslam. ‘What’s happening down there?’ He looked at his two new hostages but said nothing.

‘Just a lot of big talk,’ said Frank.

There was a chattering noise from below and a stream of bright sparks arced over the lagoon as someone let rip with a machine-gun and fired a magazine load of tracer bullets. Then there was a thump in triplicate and three fountains appeared in the lagoon, red fire at their hearts.

‘A machine-gun and a mortar,’ I said. ‘That’s more than talk. That’s the army.’

‘I want to know what was said,’ Haslam insisted. He jabbed his finger at Leotta. ‘And who the hell is she?’

‘Frank wanted a souvenir,’ said Philips tiredly. ‘This whole thing’s a bust. It’s gone sour.’

‘The hell it has,’ said Frank. ‘They won’t dare use those weapons up here. We can still make it out. Let’s get back to the hangar and finish the loading.’