Flying Hero Class (6 page)

So the word had been uttered at last, by that naive cosmopolitan Bluey Kannata. McCloud felt a surge of gratitude toward him.

“You will get to know us more in hours to come,” said the
English
English voice from the flight deck. “But for the moment, you may understand that my name if Taliq. My brother Yusuf has control of the front cabin. Razir, an old comrade of mine, will manage the middle section, while my brother Hasni controls the rear of the plane. The section upstairs is managed by my brother Musa. These are chosen revolutionary names, and though they might be unfamiliar to some of you, everyone should try to remember them for any conversations between passengers and the revolutionary brothers.”

“Pig's arse,” declared Cale across the aisle.

This boy up here, Yusuf, with his deadly Polish implement, seemed very tolerant of whispering in the classroom, McCloud thought. He hoped that Pauline's Hasni, in the rear, would be equally lenient, though—from appearances—he might turn out to be more strait-laced.

The intercom remained on, still wheezing of the safe night and all the safe planes beyond this particular tube of aluminum. Then, with a profound breath, a new phase of Taliq's message began. “While we are flying, or even on the ground, one of us will be in the cockpit here holding a grenade from which the pin has been withdrawn. Our men are equipped also with appropriate radio devices on which there are letter and numeral keys. Each of my brothers knows a short code word which, if punched out on our radio receivers, will ignite a wad of Plastique secreted in a suitcase in the baggage area. If any of us are attacked, I—or whoever stands in my place on the flight desk—will punch the code into our radios.

“We are not supermen. But we are trained and of one mind and ready to die! Are you ready to die? Even if your section is left for a time without one of my brothers, do not doubt for a second that any wild gesture will cause the destruction of the plane and of all your individual hopes.”

At this, McCloud heard a long release of breath from Daisy Nakamura across the aisle. But Tom Gullagara, at his side, seemed to listen to the voice from the flight deck as if it were some routine though complicated message about luggage collection.

The voice said, “Stewards will now take trays and collect everyone's passport. I must thank you on behalf of our revolution. Thank you. You will hear further from me. But later.”

The intercom noise ceased. Yusuf—full-mustached and with a more sensual and less scholarly face than Hasni's, the not unpleasant face of a Levantine coffee drinker and doer of fast business—pointed to the two stewards, a middle-aged man and a girl with a stricken face, who now began to work the compartment, each of them with a silver tray.

McCloud murmured, in the hope it could be heard by the dancers, “Passports, that's all. They just want our passports.”

Yusuf did not make any objection to this noise. He glanced briefly and placidly at the stewards with the trays and made little gestures of the head to show they should start at the front.

“I'm sorry, sir,” you could hear the stewards tell passengers. “Our chief purser refused to cooperate at first but was threatened.…”

Bluey Kannata was a world traveler and did not need McCloud's extra advice on what was required. The others had not traveled much outside the continent at whose core lay their millennial home, the Barramatjara country and the settlement called Baruda. They were not as accustomed as Bluey to the European rituals and meanings of the passport.

For that very reason, perhaps, because they couldn't see passports as having any intimate connection with themselves, all the members of the dance troupe gave them up without wavering, without feeling as orphaned and naked in the world as McCloud did when he let his drop on the anodized silver of the tray.

One of the American businessmen on the other side of the cabin, a well-ordered and athletic-looking man, threw
his
American passport down on the tray and then covered his eyes with his hand, as if he had suddenly been deprived of the power to see. But no one argued with the stewards. Everyone, McCloud was sure, had in his head an image of the suitcase down in the hold, which, if caressed with the right word, would blow this little planet, the Frankfurt flight, to pieces, scattering passengers out into the untold darkness.

Across the aisle, Daisy Nakamura was yielding up her U.S. passport by its patent-leather cover, the kind of thing friends give to those who are making the first big journey of their lives. A bald eagle was embossed upon Daisy's leather. McCloud wondered did she know that that emphatic eagle might be enough to stamp her as guilty in the present company? He looked at her, but she merely seemed engrossed in the procedure, as the dance troupe were. As if she too were studying an alien ceremony.

In fact, her expression, McCloud noticed with some fascination, resembled that of Gullagara at his side. Tall Tom Gullagara was sitting up straight now, peering over the tops of the seats. He observed the collection for its educative value.

McCloud remembered the night—it could only have been a few nights past, in fact—when Gullagara stood outside an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village watching him stuff coins into a parking meter. The van Pauline had organized for transporting the troupe on their little jaunts around the city stood by the curb. As he assessed McCloud's actions an amusement had entered Gullagara's face. He never looked like that, squinting over a tolerant smile, unless he'd had a few evening drinks. And similarly, he rarely asked questions during the day; he had an easy air of omniscience and might have been loath to risk losing it. Anyhow, he was at his ease that night in the Village—or rather at a different sort of ease than he seemed to be at during the day.

“Why do you blokes do that?” he'd asked McCloud.

“Pay for parking?”

“Yeah. Where do those coins go?”

“Into the parking meter,” said McCloud.

“I know that. A man's not a fool, Frank. Just the same, where do those bloody coins go in the end?”

McCloud could tell he must try hard to pick up the tenor of the question, for Gullagara was aware of exactly the distance he was exposing himself by asking this question. He was beginning to frown too and to adjust the great leather belt around his slight beer gut. He seemed to be aware he was risking his dignity, asking for information that every five-year-old city child might have knowledge of. Here, outside the Italian place, he wondered had he done the right thing to ask an intimate, cultural question like this; just as a European might wonder after asking a question about something so basic to the Barramatjara cosmos that no one ever thought of explaining it.

In the deserts of Australia, men of influence like Gullagara and Whitey Wappitji were sometimes engaged in rituals involving the stroking and advising of certain rocks, stones associated with this animal or that. They spoke to, charmed, persuaded the stone. And the species was increased in number, or at least maintained in its levels.

In the street in New York, it had been McCloud's guess that Gullagara saw the parking meter as a white model of this rite of rock persuasion. Pour coins into the meter's narrow little mouth, and the metropolis with all its strange and ambiguous species was sustained! So the ceremony of parking brought a sort of immunity, Tom Gullagara might have thought, and an indefinable richness.

What Tom did not know was how thoroughly the city had expunged all myth.

So McCloud rushed to reassure him. There were no serious rites here. The meter had a little gut in which the money sat, and men with meter keys came round and took the money to cover the city's expenses. It was not the physics of magic. It was the physics of urban economics.

So Gullagara, like Daisy Nakamura, was staring at the hijacker in the cabin and at the backs of the two stewards collecting the passports as if he were trying to work out whether this too was just business or a powerful ceremony.

McCloud chose a light tone. “They want to look at people's passports so they can see whether any of their enemies are on board,” he whispered. “I don't think you're likely to be one of their enemies, Tom.”

He was not as successful a whisperer as Cale, however. Yusuf the hijacker called, “That gentleman down there should shut up.” His voice, like Hasni's, was quaintly accented with American. Or perhaps Canadian or some other brand of English which spelled opportunity to a young Palestinian.

As if to prove the normality of whatever demands they might make, of whatever acts they might perform, Taliq and his men permitted a meal to be served. McCloud had no appetite. He felt that he was tasting ashes. Yusuf watched the serving and eating but made no ideological comment on the food that was presented up here. Even the Sevruga caviar and the Stolichnaya vodka were permitted to be offered. The only requirement was that the diners should not speak to each other, nor listen in on headphones to the plane's broadcast system.

Occasionally McCloud would raise his glass to Tom Gullagara, who would in return toss his head in a way that said,
The things that can happen to a man when he goes on a dance tour!

Palpable fragments of hijacking accounts McCloud had read in newspapers recurred to him. The half-remembered details stifled him. Wasn't there one hijack where Egyptian commandos were ordered to liberate the plane yet destroyed in their efforts ten times as many hostages as hijackers? Was there another where the cabin blew up? And others where some mistake or wayward surge of electricity set off the Plastique in the hold and carried all the exalted ambitions of the hijackers, all the pedestrian hopes of travelers, screaming together down to earth?

There were more serious questions than these honestly horrifying ones. He was not American or Israeli. But how could he watch Americans and Israelis beaten and bloodied and remain silent? The experts said that for some people it became all too easy. He could not imagine it becoming all too easy for him, though, but everyone said you never knew these things ahead of time. Under terror, would he get into a frame of mind where he'd start believing that a single American carried a lethal portion of blame for American policy? And if—as he hoped—he refused to believe that, if he did not remain silent, how prepared was he for punishment?

The event was rumored to make the man. This event held no promise of making him. It was as if his lack of literary, managerial, and marital credit fitted him badly for this moment.

He wondered too would Pauline have any trouble from her seating neighbor Hasni? He suspected she might be safer relying on Hasni's apparent good manners than on any fighting return by him, by McCloud, to the rear of the plane—even if it were possible. For if he appeared, he thought, she might be unsettled into a sort of recklessness, the recklessness of a mother or spouse. Or else the recklessness—if any were left in her—of the lover.

Then the Barramatjara. Surely they were safe? Surely they were the oppressed of the earth, bearing no blame for anyone's policy? Victims of policy, in fact. And dispossessed of their land? Well, against the wishes of many whites, in recent years they'd been given it back freehold by an embarrassed government. But dispossessed in the past and potentially dispossessed in the present! And surely—according to these men with the Polish automatic weapons—daily and spiritually dispossessed by capitalism?

The first-class passengers had coffee in front of them: Cale and—McCloud suspected, though he couldn't see directly—Bluey Kannata a cognac apiece as well, and Daisy Nakamura a port. Cale was smoking, hungrily and with energy.

A beeper on Yusuf's belt began to bleat. Yusuf, his eyes darting around from the face of one of his well-fed passengers to that of another, pulled his small radio from his back pocket and spoke softly into it. He inclined his head then and listened to the words which emerged in return. He nodded and then seemed to prepare himself for a visit from someone.

Within seconds McCloud saw a tall, clean-shaven man, a solid being in his late thirties, wearing a close imitation of army fatigues, pass down the aisle and stand by Yusuf. He turned and faced the passengers. His features were large and not unpleasant. There was already a faint bluishness of fatigue or disenchantment under his eyes.

He pulled cigarettes from his breast pocket. “Since some of you are smoking,” he said, “I shall join you.” He lit the cigarette with one of those transparent lighters you can see the fluid in and looked reflectively at his prisoners.

“I suppose you think you know what to expect,” he said in a well-modulated Anglo-Arab voice, the same voice which earlier had come from the flight deck. “You have all seen this on the movies, haven't you? The chief hijacker standing before you? He is a fanatic, isn't he? He is rabid. He is not a man born of woman. He speaks in jargon. Oh yes, my friends and my enemies, we shall hear jargon. There
will
be what you might call
classes. This
will be for some of you a short, sharp seminar. Some things will seem familiar to you, some things beyond your imaginings.

“For the moment, I ask you to consider one idea—that the alienation, the—if you like—
trauma
you are suffering at the moment is but an echo of the trauma suffered by my people for the past fifty years. Imagine this, as an instance! A Sunni Muslim woman in the village of Saf in October 1948. An enemy soldier rapes and then executes her. Trauma, you see. My grandmother, as it happens. I know you have heard such stories before. Now you may listen to them with a little more immediacy of spirit.… For the moment, I wanted you to see me, and I wanted to see you.”

Examining them, he took one quick, energetic gulp from his cigarette.

“My name is Taliq. T-a-l-i-q. I hope you all ate well, since these matters are likely to become more erratic as we go.”

He nodded to Yusuf and walked down the aisle again. McCloud looked over his shoulder and saw him ascending the stairwell to the upper deck. Returning to the cockpit, the threatened core of this small, hostage planet.