The Henchmen's Book Club Read Free Page B

two more minutes of aerial dodge ball, he flicked off the
seat-belt sign and announced that this afternoon’s in-flight movie would be The Time Bandits .

 
    Eighteen
of us survived Thalassocrat’s job. Nineteen if you want to count the lab
technician who’d got himself shot trying to sneak on board, but only eighteen
of us made it onto the plane, lived through the take off and managed to last an
hour of The Time Bandits before it was turned off by popular demand. It isn’t a
bad film, I’ve seen it before, but no one was in the mood to watch Snow White’s
mates running around history after we’d lost our wages – particularly the
two surviving lab technicians who were near inconsolable at the thought of
having to sell their houses, belongings and spare kidneys to pay for their
flights home.
    But you know what, eighteen wasn’t bad.
    I’ve been on jobs where hardly anyone
made it through to the other side. That Siberian job that Captain Takahashi had
picked me up from being a case in point. Only four of us had survived that one,
which was probably why Captain Takahashi remembered me. He came back to my seat
during the flight and talked to me some more about that day.
    “You worked with that fella with the
funny name, didn’t you? In Siberia? What was his name again?”
    “Polonius Crump.”
    “Yes, that it, Polonipus Crumb ,” the Captain laughed, shaking his head and urging
his girls to laugh along too. Some smiled politely, though the others just
regarded me with cautious indifference. “Funny name him. Funny.”
    And a funny end he met too, old Polonius.
He’d had some potty notion about knocking the Earth off its axis by a dozen
degrees to melt the polar ice caps and bring the Equator further north to
transform the frozen tundras into rich fertile land – while sinking every
other square inch of rich fertile land under a few billion gallons of freshly
unfrozen sea water, you understand. Of course he didn’t have a clue, he didn’t.
Even the lads on the job didn’t think he could do it, but he was a nice enough
bloke and paid well – in Russian gold no less. And if by some miracle he
did manage to pull it off… well, I’d rather be sunning myself with old Polonius
on the new Arctic Riviera than standing on my roof in Sussex wondering where
all this bloody water had come from.
    But no, I don’t need to tell that you he
didn’t manage it. Russian agents backed by Spetsnaz commandos brought the whole
place crashing down around our ears while we were testing his stupid
defridgerator (*patent pending). Polonius himself took a tumble into a
temporarily defrosted lake trying to flee on his snowmobile, so that when the
ice set again he was frozen inside a big block of it like something out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Apparently, I
didn’t see it myself, but the Russians cut him out and carted him off as a
souvenir.
    “Funny,” Captain Takahashi smiled again,
squeezing my shoulder and heading back to the front check if Mr Andreev wanted The Time Bandits back on.
    Yeah hilarious. I’d ended up with moths
fluttering out of my pockets on that job too.
    A little while later Mr Smith came over
and sat with me.
    “So Jones, what are you going to do when
you get back?” he asked.
    I rubbed my face and opened another
little bottle of Japanese whisky. “I don’t know,” I shrugged. I hadn’t met Mr
Smith before this job but we’d got on well and become firm friends. He was an
American while I’m British so it’s natural for people who shared a common
language to eat their sandwiches on the same table of any international
canteen, though it wasn’t just a language thing. Mr Chang for example, had been
a lovely bloke, as had been Mr Fedorov, while I could’ve happily watched Mr
Cooper getting blown up, and then revived, and blown up again all day long, so
it was more than just a language I shared with Mr Smith. We shared a sense of
humanity too. And in a profession predominated by killers and