By the Rivers of Babylon (14 page)

Hausner walked out of the cockpit. He began the long walk down the aisle. No one spoke to him. Little Yaakov Leiber stared at him through tear-filled eyes. The men who had been at the security meeting turned away from him.

Miriam Bernstein touched his arm as he went by, but he ignored it. He tapped two of his men on the shoulder as he walked by, and they got up and followed him.

Hausner entered the rear galley and walked through it into the small baggage compartment where the crew and flight attendants kept their luggage. There were also passengers’ jackets and coats on hangers along the wall. He flung aside the clothing and stared at the pressure bulkhead.

Talman listened as each of his ten squadrons over the Sinai reported in to the Operations Room. No visual sighting. No radar sightings. Laskov reported last. “I’m coming into Eilat to refuel. I want fuelers waiting for us on the strip. When I get up again, I’m not coming back down until I find them. I want you to get American tankers on station to refuel us in mid-air next time. I’m going to fly over every inch of this area until I find them. The pilots and flight officers will take turns sleeping and flying.”

Talman shook his head. “Wait one, Gabriel.” He looked at his illuminated situation map. With every minute that passed, the extent of the air space in which the Concorde could conceivably be increased geometrically. He looked at the concentric circles on his map that encompassed the last spot where they were sighted, over the coast. They had been flying for a half an hour since they were last seen, at a speed of about 500 kilometers per hour. They could have headed off in any direction after that. The radius of the last concentric circle was 250 kilometers, if he assumed that last speed. He punched the information into a computer and read the digital display. The air
space to be searched was already 196,350 square kilometers, without taking into account altitudes from 150 meters up to 8 kilometers. Every minute of flight time would increase the number of square kilometers and cubic kilometers. He pushed his radio button. “Gabriel, they could be heading for Lod, for all we know. Come home. We’ll know where they are soon enough. We’ve violated enough foreign air space for one day. So far, the Egyptians have been very patient. But now they want us out. They promised to send aircraft up to look. Don’t push, Gabriel. That’s what the hijackers want and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. Come back to the barn, old man.” He paused. “That’s an order.”

Laskov gave a crisp acknowledgment.

Talman sighed and called in the rest of his squadrons. What he didn’t say over the unsecured air waves was that American satellites were already trying to spot the Concorde. Also, American Lockheed SR-71 reconnaissance craft, successors to the U-2, were already in the troposphere, flying at Mach 3, photographing the entire Sinai Peninsula. The satellite and SR-71 information would take days to he interpreted. It was a long shot, but it was better than doing nothing. Talman suspected, also, that Russian satellites and Mandrakes were doing the same thing. He wondered if the Russians would give Tel Aviv a call if they had any luck. His last ace in the hole was electronic eavesdropping. The powerful electronic ears of both the American National Security Agency and Israeli Intelligence might eventually vector in on the sound of the broad bank jamming device. In almost every country of the world, men and women, paid agents, sat in the upper levels of their houses and took shifts listening and recording every radio transmission that was broadcast in their vicinity. Eventually, one of these people might pick up the sound of the airborne broad band transmitter that they were instructed to listen for. But Talman knew that the Lear, so close to the Concorde, would be transmitting a very weak signal. The chances of picking it up were small, though not impossible.

Talman was satisfied that he had done everything that could be done, for the moment. He picked up the telephone and called the Prime Minister. He gave a situation report, then turned in his resignation. He hung up before he received a reply. He got up from his chair, walked over to his Deputy Chief of Operations, General Hur, and spoke to him for a moment. Then he took his
hat and walked out of the Operations Room. Everyone watched quietly as the door shut behind him.

The Concorde climbed in slow stages over the mountains of the Sinai. Becker could see that the Lear wanted to keep within 150 meters of the ground, but the sudden rises and falls in the land made for a sickening roller coaster ride. Several of the passengers were already ill.

Mount Sinai rose up in front of them and the Lear skipped over the top with barely fifty meters to spare. Becker pushed forward on the throttles and cleared the peak. His ground altimeter bounced wildly between fifty and a hundred meters as the huge delta wings were buffeted by updrafts. He’d had enough. He pushed the throttles forward again and began to climb over the Lear. The Lear suddenly accelerated and rose up directly in front of him. Becker chopped back on the throttles and the Concorde shuddered as it approached a stall. He quickly moved the throttles forward once more until he got well above stall speed, then held it steady.

“That was too close,” commented Hess. His voice was a little shaky. “I guess he means for us to follow, no matter how hard we have to work at it. He must know what a terrific pilot you are, Dave.”

Becker wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. The Lear descended to its previous altitude and reduced its speed again, and again Becker fell in behind him. He felt like an obedient child following a truant officer to some undisclosed place of punishment, and the feeling was humiliating. He knew that Rish was prepared to cause a mid-air collision if things didn’t go exactly his way. Becker’s hands shook from rage more than from fear.

Hausner’s men were stripping away the plastic laminate from the steel bulkhead with their commando knives. Hausner watched as the steel wall was revealed, piece by piece. There was no possible way to get through it. “Any good ideas?”

One of his men, Nathan Brin, steadied himself on the bouncing floor and looked up. “How about a desperate idea?”

“Let’s hear it.”

The young man rose and spoke quickly. “We can take the powder from our rounds and a container from the galley and make a shapecharge, put an electric wire to it, and blow a hole in
the bulkhead. With a few coat hangers and a flashlight we can snag the wire that leads to the bomb and pull it off.”

Hausner turned to the other man, Moshe Kaplan. “Kaplan, is this the kind of man I’m hiring these days?”

Brin turned red. “What’s wrong with that idea?” he demanded.

“It’s dangerous. And what makes you think there is a wire instead of a battery?”

Brin thought. “There must be an aircraft power source to the radio receiver and to the detonator.
Something
detonated the bomb on 01 and it wasn’t a battery planted over a year ago.”

Hausner nodded. “All right, if it is a wire, then it must be connected to something with a constant and stable voltage. Something like the tail navigation light.” He thought a moment, then rushed out of the baggage room and back up the aisle toward the flight deck.

Becker turned around as he heard Hausner enter the cockpit. “Any luck?”

“Listen, the power source for this radio and detonator might be the tail navigation light. Turn it off.”

Becker considered. He remembered that Rish had made a point of telling them to leave their navigation lights on. All aircraft always flew with them on, anyway. Why emphasize it? “There are other power sources back there. All the hydraulics in the tail are also electrically activated and monitored, including my tail bumper wheel and the rudder. I can certainly shut off the tail navigation light and I can even cut off the power to my tail bumper wheel, but I can’t shut off the rudder. I need it to fly.”

Kahn spoke up from the flight engineer console. “I thought of all that, too. There’s a good chance that the power source
is
the tail navigation light. But any radio-controlled bomb would have a battery back-up, and the battery would get a steady trickle charge from one of those sources in the tail. Even if it’s been in place for years, the radio battery is fully charged every time we start our engines. But I may be wrong. I can shut off the tail navigation light and bumper wheel assembly, and we can fly away from here. Maybe we’ll be blown up. Maybe we won’t. Anybody want to try it?”

Nobody did.

Hausner sat in the jump seat and lit a cigarette. The momentary elation was gone. “Maybe we could lift a section of the cabin floor and then we could also lift the armor mesh and
insulation and stamp through the aluminum roof of the baggage compartment. In the baggage compartment it might be easier to get through the bulkhead into the tail.”

Becker shook his head again. He didn’t like people making holes in his plane and burrowing around in it. “You know the baggage compartment is pressurized. The bulkhead down there is just as thick as the one in the cabin. Even if you could get through—I don’t want any holes. No going through floors. I can’t risk it. Too many wires.”

Hausner stood up and forced a smile. “Then I don’t suppose you’d like the idea of using cartridge powder to blow a hole in the pressure bulkhead?”

Becker laughed in spite of the situation. “Sorry.” He knew that Hausner was a man who would rather die than face life after what had happened here, unless he could personally save the situation. He also knew that Hausner was a man under sentence of death, anyway. He couldn’t trust his judgment any longer. “Mr. Hausner, thank you for what you’re trying to do. But as Captain of this aircraft I have to veto any ideas that would endanger this craft or the people on it. As long as we’re airborne, I’m in command. Not you, not Burg, not the Foreign Minister. Me.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Look, Jacob, I know what you’re going through, but just take it easy. We have about two hours of flying time left. Let’s see what happens.”

Hausner nodded. “All right.” He left the flight deck.

The Concorde passed over the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and headed toward the Red Sea, following the Lear as it banked sharply left and headed toward Saudi Arabia. Becker was curious about where they were going, but their destination seemed less and less important.

With its nose dropped and its tail and flaps down, the Concorde looked more than ever like a big, forlorn seabird that wanted to land on the water below, but, for some reason, could not. Becker looked at the whitecaps on the Red Sea until he was mesmerized by them.

“Coast coming up, Dave.”

The Saudi Arabian shoreline slid by quickly. The ground was flat as far as he could see. He breathed a sigh of relief. “It won’t be so bad now.”

Hess glanced over at him. “That’s one way of looking at it. Want me to take the wheel for a while?”

Becker looked at him. He wondered if Hess could fly a formation with the Concorde under these conditions. He decided to be blunt. “Can you fly it?”

“I can fly the crate it came in.”

Becker smiled and let go of the controls. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He almost felt good. If ever a pilot had reason to lose his nerve, the flight over the Sinai was it. No matter what happened now, he was comforted by the thought that this, his last flight, had been his best.

The Lear picked up speed quickly and was doing about 800 kilometers per hour. Hess fought to keep the Concorde at 150 meters above the ground.

Ahead, Becker could see a few Bedouins on camels, staring at them. The sinking sun cast the huge delta shadow in front of the aircraft, over the Bedouins. The camels spooked and bolted clumsily as it passed. He drew on his cigarette. Now, over the flatlands, the flight looked safe enough, but Becker knew that, with the increased speed and the 150–meter altitude, any small dip in the nose would send them screaming into the ground before there was a chance to correct.

Peter Kahn looked up from his instruments. “One hour and fifty minutes fuel remaining, skipper.”

Dobkin came onto the flight deck. He put this hand on Becker’s shoulder. “How is it going?”

“All right. Any thoughts?”

Dobkin nodded. “We had a little meeting back there.”

“And?”

“Well . . . we have concluded that they are very clever fellows. First of all, they didn’t go into a long political harangue, like these chaps usually do, so we don’t even know who they are, except that they’re probably Palestinians. If Hausner hadn’t recognized Rish’s voice, we wouldn’t even know that. This all makes it very hard for our intelligence people to begin work on this.”

“Not good,” said Becker.

“Not good at all,” agreed Dobkin. “They further changed their
modus operandi
by jamming our radios. That can only mean that we’re going to a secret destination. This time, there won’t be a thousand newsmen at an international airport when we land. There will be no Entebbe rescue, either, because no one will know where we are. We’re going to be held incommunicado.”

Becker had come to similar conclusions. He had suspected he’d be putting the Concorde down in the desert, and now he was sure of it. He hoped, at least, it would be a hard-packed airstrip like Dawson’s Field.

Dobkin seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Can you put it down anywhere?”

“Anywhere but a swine yard. No problem. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll try not to.”

Hausner took a seat next to Miriam Bernstein. They spoke quietly for a while. They both shared a sense of guilt that they were trying to relieve by speaking to each other. A steward, Daniel Jacoby, had taken charge of the flight attendants and was giving instructions to serve a meal and drinks, whether anyone wanted them or not. Hausner ordered a double Scotch. He stirred his drink. “I can’t believe I could have overlooked that.”

Miriam Bernstein took a sip from his drink. “They would have found another way to do it.”

“Whatever way they found, I would have been responsible.”

“I keep thinking about Teddy . . . General Laskov. He fell into the same trap we all did. I know he would have reacted differently if I hadn’t . . .”