Flying Hero Class (35 page)

Rumors about Mahoud would multiply in the press: he had been
turned
in captivity and had come to terms with the moderates. He had already suicided or been shot. His helicopter had crashed on the way to Taliq's plane, leaving the authorities no choice but the military one.

The popular media concentrated on personalities. Mrs. Cale appeared on television as an elegant widow to explain what a character Cale was and how she would miss his humor. The British tabloids, however, concentrated on her “close friend,” a morning television anchorman. The claim was that even as that British bulldog Cale was bravely baiting the terrorists, she and the anchorman had been tenanting the one flat.

Stone became everyone's favorite item in support of the ironies of hijack. While he knelt under the gun muzzles of the terrorists, people on the ground had used his own software to devise a plan of action! He appeared on television, too, and always ended with a plea for the unconditional release of the Japanese-American Mrs. Nakamura, who was still being questioned as a suspected accomplice. His gratitude to Daisy became him, since others were so avid to condemn her.

Reflecting publicly on what had befallen them, most passengers saw the revolt against Taliq as a spontaneous uprising, and McCloud was given little credit for it, except by his fellow-condemned Stone.

His agent would, however, call him in Frankfurt and report ecstatically that she'd got the imprint's offer up to $20,000. At Pauline's proud insistence, he accepted.

Bluey was hospitalized. The other members of the dance troupe were at first rushed by the media but after proving almost willfully monosyllabic were given up as unsatisfactory.

But the account gets ahead of itself.

On that famous African night, McCloud and Pauline, having found each other after the melee, were among the last of the passengers to disembark. McCloud looked in her face for an after-image of her earlier, remarkable, and paramount smile, and not finding it there yet hopeful it might recur, he took off his placard, which had somehow stayed in place, a tribute to Razir's handicraft through all the turmoil.

When at last then the McClouds made their tremulous descent, by way of steps which had been rolled to the door where Cale had perished, and began testing the earth to see in what sense it might still be habitable for them, Gullagara the cowboy, Mungina with his
didj
, Whitey Wappitji, and Philip the Christian were still lingering companionably on the runway.

Two of them, Whitey and Paul Mungina, began the walk across the airstrip with McCloud and Pauline. The other two waited behind, probably for their fellow dancer and initiate, Bluey, to be carried out of the plane. Indeed, paramedics in jungle green had already fought their way up the stairs through a tide of descending soldiers and passengers to bring Bluey and other damaged victims of Taliq's enterprise out.

Whitey and the
didj
player said nothing to the McClouds now. They
accompanied
. It was clear they saw that as their function. Only when he would see in so many newspapers a photograph of himself, a man in underwear, Pauline in an overcoat, and Whitey and Paul in what would have passed in New York as “cowboy chic,” would he understand that they were indeed an odd company.

Traversing the runway, McCloud began to feel usurped. The commandos had cut him off in midstrategy. He had been succeeding and could have fulfilled without any help other than that of the passengers the sweet rebellion instigated by Pauline's smile. It was not that in any sense the commandos had stolen glory—he had not thought of presentations and reverent interviews on television. What he regretted was that the flow of conspiracy between himself and Pauline had been aborted.

He became aware that his shoulder was being dragged from behind. The captain faced him. The captain's shirt was soiled with blood—Taliq's or Yusuf's—and his genial features seemed engorged with rage. “You nearly screwed it, you son-of-a-bitch!” he roared at McCloud.

He began, the father of them all, to land blows on McCloud's face and shoulders, blows which brought no secretions of anger to the surface of McCloud's own skin, hooks and straight rights which merely made him step back and feel ashamed. Whitey and the
didj
player, and the plane's other two officers, strangers to McCloud, restrained and wrestled with the captain.

“How did you know?” the pinioned captain asked. “How did you know you weren't going to blow us all to fucking pieces?”

“
I
knew,” said McCloud. He was blushing. The captain's anger was so grievous. “There wasn't any Plastique.”

Yet that conviction was entirely unrecallable to him now. The certainty had left him.

“Look,” continued McCloud, “at the time—”

“I'll have you arrested, you stupid asshole!” said the captain as his discomfited officers tried to bear him away toward the terminal.

The stretcher on which Bluey lay, carried by two commandos and accompanied by Phil the Christian and Cowboy Tom, drew level with the imbroglio between the captain and McCloud, and then passed on.

The captain kept talking, but McCloud did not find what he said very pressing. McCloud turned to Whitey.

“You saved my bacon,” he said. “Didn't you?”

He was further arrested by the way Whitey turned to him.

“It's okay, Frank,” said Whitey, his eyes full of all the lenient and disappointed love of the missionary he was.

“Oh God, I'm sorry, Whitey. Look after Bluey, eh?”

“If he can be looked after, Frank.”

“One thing's certain,” said McCloud. “You're the only ones who can.”

Stalked still by the enraged captain, bemused McCloud and Pauline and the two dancers continued their progress. Far ahead, beyond a garden of palms at the terminal door, they saw a melee of weeping and arguing passengers. A ring of hostile people had formed around Daisy Nakamura, who had merely wanted to visit her sister in Frankfurt and had inherited something more complicated. The attackers included the man who had an age ago assaulted the brave German cripple.

“She's a tart!” one of them was telling an armed African soldier. “She's the hijackers' moll. She worked with those bastards, and slept with them.”

Stone, disarmed and in his shirt and pants, joined this circle and put his arm around Daisy's shoulders, defending her. McCloud also meant to go to her aid, except that he could not shake himself free of the angry captain.

“There were passengers wounded, for God's sake,” the captain yelled. “Exactly what I was trying to prevent! And listen! The commander of the troops who came aboard tells me there's a wad of Plastique in the hold big enough to blow us up five times over! What do you damn well say to that?”

McCloud stared at Whitey, who, unblinking, looked back.

“There was no Plastique,” said McCloud.

He looked at Pauline, and he could see she did not believe him anymore, though she conveyed this with the sort of frank yet gentle wariness which normally characterized her dealings. She was no longer the daughter of the revolution. She was again a creature of light and shade and professional standards.

“There was no Plastique,” McCloud asserted again.

“You ask the fucking commandos,” said the captain. “You ask them!”

“Leave him alone!” called Pauline then. There were sudden tears on her lashes. “For Christ's sake, leave him alone! He fixed it. He liberated the plane! Listen, you were essential to those bastards. So they didn't harm you. But none of us counted. We had to make different kinds of decisions.”

What McCloud found a wonder was that she understood how to him all the captain's palaver seemed to be carping, seemed to be literalism gone crazy.

“Well,” McCloud challenged the captain on his own behalf, “we're all standing, aren't we?”

Though he knew Cale and Taliq and Yusuf were not, and that Razir and Hasni and Musa were concussed and had broken bones, and that two passengers had been shot, though not fatally.

“You'll do time, you bastard!” yelled the captain. But at last his lieutenants were able to drag him off and begin to soothe him.

McCloud and Pauline strode off again with Whitey and Paul, who had waited for the confrontation to end. The knot which had surrounded Daisy seemed to have vanished, as had Daisy herself.

Whitey, whose curse had finished Taliq, seemed to McCloud to deserve further thanks.

“So,” he said uncomfortably, imitating the apparent cowboy casualness of Barramatjara speech, “you even talked Paul into letting me off the hook. Even Paul, eh? You talked him round.”

McCloud punched Mungina's arm. It had held the
didj
which played the strangest monarchical anthem ever heard by human ear.

Whitey paused. “Yeah, well, Frank,” he said. “You know. You're not really the villain, eh?”

Of course he meant,
You don't know enough to be a villain
.

They walked more. Now they entered the garden of palms before the terminal building. There was silence from the two dancers, but obviously not an end to the topic.

Then Whitey spoke again. “Some of the blokes back at Baruda will want all those mineral royalties. The others won't.”

He let an anxious passenger, going through into the light, push him aside.

“So we're all still bloody hostages,” he said. He stopped and cocked his head. “Eh, mate?” he asked.

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally was born in 1935 and was educated in Sydney. He trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take Orders. His work includes THE PLACE AT WHITTON; THE FEAR; BRING LARKS AND HEROES, which won the Miles Franklin Award for the best Australian novel of 1967; THREE CHEERS FOR THE PARACLETE; THE SURVIVOR, which was the joint winner of the 1970 Captain Cook Literary Award; A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER; THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH (shortlisted for the Booker Prize); BLOOD RED, SISTER ROSE; GOSSIP FROM THE FOREST (runner-up for the 1975 Booker Prize); SEASON IN PURGATORY; VICTIM OF THE AURORA; PASSENGER; CONFEDERATES (short-listed for the 1979 Booker Prize), SCHINDLER'S LIST, winner of the 1982 Booker Prize; OUTBACK (a nonfiction book about Australia); A FAMILY MADNESS (1985); THE PLAYMAKER (1987); and TO ASMARA (1989).

THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH was made into a successful film and Thomas Keneally has written several plays.

Thomas Keneally has served on a number of Australian Government Councils and Commissions, including The Constitutional Commission, which is looking at a review of the Australian Constitution. He is President of the National Book Council of Australia, a member of the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council and is Chairman of the Australian Society of Authors. He received the Order of Australia in 1983 for his services to Literature.

He was visiting Professor, Department of English, Creative Writing School, for three months in 1985 at the University of California, Irvine, and has held the position of inaugural Berg Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, at the New York University for several terms since 1988.

Thomas Keneally is married with two daughters. He now divides his time between Sydney and New York.

Acknowledgments

In the making of this fiction went some experience and a certain diffuse reading. Four works in particular provided valuable intelligence, and the author would like to express his debt to them, and
their
authors:

Dreamings
by Dr. Peter Sutton;

The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade
by Robert Tonkinson;

Bible & Sword
by Barbara W. Tuchman;

Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians
by David Gilmour.

The last work provided the basis for the fictive backgrounds of Hasni and his colleagues, as relayed to McCloud.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1991 by Serpentine Publishing Company Propriertary, Ltd.

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3803-4

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