Whose “Just Cause?” when he stood alone on his balcony in the darkness, which was what he liked to do each evening after work, maybe with one of Uncle Benny's small cigars, and scented the night smells of luscious flowers on the damp air and watched the lights swimming in the rainy mist and glimpsed through fitful clouds the queue of boats at anchor in the mouth of the Canal, the abundance of his good luck instilled in him a keen awareness of its fragility: You know this can't last, Harry boy, you know the world can blow up in your face, you've watched it happen from this very spot, and what it's done once it can do again whenever it feels like it, so look out. Then he would stare into the too peaceful city, and very soon the flares and the red and green tracer and the hoarse tattoo of machine guns and the jackhammer rattle of cannons would start to create their own mad daytime in the theatre of his memory, just as they had on that December night in 1989 when the hills blinked and shuddered as huge Spectre helicopters flew in unopposed from the sea to punish the mostly wooden slums of El Chorillo — as usual it was the poor who were to blame for everything — bludgeoning the burning hovels at their leisure, then going off to replenish themselves and coming back to bludgeon them again. And probably the attackers never meant it to be that way. Probably they were fine sons and fathers, and all they meant to do was take out Noriega's comandancia until a couple of shells strayed off course, and a couple more followed. But good intentions in wartime do not easily communicate themselves to the subjects of them, self-restraint passes unnoticed, and the presence of a few fugitive enemy snipers in a poor suburb does not explain its wholesale incineration. It's not much help saying "We used the minimum force" to terrified people running barefoot for their lives over blood and smashed glass, dragging suitcases and children with them on their way to nowhere. It's not much help to maintain that the fires were started by vindictive members of Noriega's Dignity Battalions. If they were, why should anyone believe you? So the screams were soon coming up the hill, and Pendel, who had heard screams in his time and uttered a few, would never have supposed that one human scream would be able to assert itself above the sickening drone of armoured vehicles or the hump-thump of state-of-the-art ordnance, but it really could, particularly when there were a lot of screams together, and they were delivered by the lusty throats of children in terror and accompanied by the porky stink of burning human flesh.