Flying Hero Class (14 page)

She began to beat the tanned arm of the businessman, her punches fading against his shoulders as he drew away from her. She turned to deal with Cale, but her aggression had exhausted her, and she was panting. “Son-of-a-bitch!” she told Cale, and to McCloud as he drew by her, she cried, “Jewish son-of-a-bitch! What's it like now? The boot's on the other foot? Eh? The other foot?”

“Madam,” said Cale, “will you please stop hitting me?”

A young man in a button-down shirt had stood to take her place and now spat fair in the journalist's face. It was apparent that Cale was the favored and obvious target. A string of spittle hung from his nose.

Hasni had turned around and made gentling motions toward the young man. These movements seemed to say, “I approve of your enthusiasm. But there will be plenty of time for punishment.”

The speed with which this miscreant hatred had developed among a section of the passengers astonished McCloud.

The first row of the compartment had been cleared of travelers. Taliq instructed the three prisoners to step up onto these seats and face the rear of the plane. So they did, McCloud finding it hard to keep his balance on the spongy upholstery. Three culprits on a shaky scaffold, he thought. The melodrama of it should have made the passengers laugh, but there was no sound. Taliq and the boys controlled the tone of this street—or aisle—theater. They had made everything serious, even the risible placards.

Standing on the seat allotted to him, McCloud could see the look of neutral inquiry and assessment on many blanched faces, a sort of amateur-dramatic scowl of hate on a few, and on others still the same unforced but authentic contempt which had produced assaults on the circuit around the rear of the plane.

Taliq, however, was not there to be influenced by this feigned or real revulsion. He was still at the curtain space by one of the doors, ready to broadcast again.

“Later in the flight,” he promised, “when we have communicated adequately with the ground, these criminals will be tried and punished.”

This pledge seemed to produce an almost inaudible sigh of edification from the passengers. Surely they can't all want to see us punished? McCloud wondered.

“But first there are things to attend to,” Taliq continued. “Your breakfast, the breakfast of the innocents. And we must land somewhere. The prisoners will be confined. Thank you, my friends, for your attention.”

As, on order, McCloud dismounted from the seat he had been standing on, he placed his finger to his lips for Pauline's sake. He knew Whitey Wappitji and the others would speak for him. They would laugh at the idea that he was some sort of felon.

Back in the first-class section, Yusuf was tearing up the carpet on the cabin floor. Standing by him was a middle-aged man in a uniform with bands of gold braid on its shoulders. He was a little overweight, but his face was humane. McCloud felt a sort of ecstasy at seeing him. This was an apparition. An intimation that a kindly order might be possible.

McCloud fixed his gaze on the soap-white scalp beneath the captain's sparse hair. A suggestion of everyday deliverance seemed to gleam in that fatherly tone of skin.

Yusuf now lifted a metal hatch which had lain embedded in the floor. McCloud began to shiver, not knowing whether it was the idea of being put down with the luggage or locked in some hole, or whether the atmosphere of the plane had altered.

The captain regarded them. There was at least an unfeigned compassion in his eyes.

“Sorry, boys,” he said in his Appalachian accent. “It's just that down there you'll be getting a little cold air from the engines.” He lowered his voice. “Listen, I flew B-52s in Vietnam in the 1960s. Notice they don't judge me for my so-called crimes? I have to go on flying
their
goddamn plane. And it is their goddamn plane, make no mistake!” He looked closely at all three of them, one after another. “I've thought of this situation for two decades, and this is the first time it's happened to me. I believe that means I'm better prepared than worse for what will happen. So trust me! Don't pull any fuses down there. It might put the aircraft in peril.”

“There it is,” said Yusuf to the American businessman Stone. Yusuf had heard what the captain had to say but tolerated it easily in view of the leverage he and his brothers had over everyone's life. “Climb down, my friends.”

He pointed to a ladder which ran down from the lip of this under-floor compartment into a dim, barely lit cavern.

McCloud's mouth dried from the terror of being locked up in narrow places. But the American nodded bravely and briefly and set an example by beginning a lithe and unprotesting descent. Cale, who had to swing round and face McCloud so that he in turn could work his bulk down the ladder, chose to look like a man forced to play some party trick by friends. Glancing back to his clothes roughly folded on his seat, to what he thought of as the skin of his innocence, his immunity, McCloud wanted to retrieve photographs of the two children. He had a hunger to see them. And perhaps their mute and normally charming faces could work a transformation in Taliq's intentions toward him.

On the other hand, the photographs of bourgeois children—McCloud's children
were
bourgeois because of Pauline's salary—would provoke in Taliq only tales of his own tribe's dispossession, of infants terrorized and harried out of their home villages.

There was a text McCloud remembered from the boarding school chapels of his childhood. “Look and see if there is any suffering like unto my suffering!” That was Taliq's position. So McCloud obeyed Yusuf and the captain and swung himself onto the ladder and descended.

He saw as he came down into it that the compartment seemed to be some sort of giant fusebox. Thick electrical leads ran insulated up and across its metal walls, and there were switches and levers. This was the true and unsuspected core of the plane, this little cave barely more spacious than a phone box. That it was here was itself a revelation to McCloud, who'd never suspected its existence.

The three of them stood close together on the floor of the cavern. It was as cold as the captain had promised. McCloud was grateful for the contact his upper arm had with the warmth of Cale's. Yusuf closed the hatch on them. Two small lights cast a greenish glare over their faces.

“No one suffers claustrophobia?” Cale asked with that manic merriment of his.

“I used to,” confessed the well-made businessman called Stone. “I was a screwed-up kid. My poor mother took me to a doctor for it when I was sixteen.” He laughed briefly. “Must have been successful.”

Stone could have confessed anything—acne, kleptomania—and made it seem part of the whole cloth of his urban perfection.

Now that the hatch above him was closed, McCloud could tell that the time here would be a trial for his bladder. But he resisted saying so. For he felt he needed to preserve all his slim resources of dignity.

“Is there room to sit?” asked the American.

He tried it, keeping his knees up under his chin and holding his placard clear of his body.

Cale did the same, but more lumpily. McCloud noticed that there was now gooseflesh on Cale's arms. The two of them, Cale and Stone, seemed so self-possessed, like veterans at incarceration. Between them they took up just about the whole floor space.

“Join us,” Cale urged McCloud. “While we consider which of these fucking leads and levers to pull.”

Stone and Cale laughed a little at this.

“They've shown a lot of trust in us,” said McCloud. “They must know we want to live.”

Stone explained, though, that with the duplicate system, hydraulic and manual and electronic, which prevailed in an aircraft, there was no permanent damage which could be done here. “Even if we wanted to,” he said.

McCloud lowered himself. He sought the warmth both of their bodies and of their authority. Frosty metal surfaces seemed to scrape his shoulders and back, however. He remained uncomfortably on his haunches.

Cale formally introduced himself to Stone. “Brother McCloud knows the whole story,” he said. “I am definitely a Cale, child of other Cales. I use the Bennett passport for traveling in Arab countries.”

“And I'm Daniel Stone,” said the American. “Though by the record of my birth, Irving Stone. But I hate that Irving. And of course, my people's name is really Steinberg, and my company does business in Israel—on the merits of our product, not on any sentimental
Yiddischer
basis, just let me make that clear. The goddamn Israelis had me set up with that second passport. I couldn't ever see any fantastic benefit to it. I still can't. All I sell them is computer programming. And software.”

This news seemed momentarily to fascinate Cale. “Programming? Really?”

“That's right. Psychological profiling software.”

“Easy for you to say,” breathed Cale. Then he winked at McCloud.

“Sure,” said Stone. “It's a program called Psychopar. Nearly all goverments use it as a tool. Not that we don't have competitors. I'm the programmer, and my partner Hirsch is the psychologist.”

“And how does this program of yours work?”

“Well,” said Stone, “say a government wants to find out certain things about this guy Taliq. For example, his percentage likelihood to take hostage lives. They feed the data in, and Psychopar gives them the indices, a sort of profile they can work on with something like mathematical certainty.…”

“
Mathematical
certainty?” Cale asked in doubt. He sounded solemn now, as if the idea his destiny would be settled by indices distressed him.

“It's a good system. Hirsch and I keep upgrading. And it's only a tool anyhow, not a weapon. It's not as if we made rocket guidance systems or something! But of course there's no way
that
gets me out of this hole. As soon as the takeover happened upstairs, I said to myself, Daniel, my boy, you might just be a target.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “But I didn't expect them to find out about the Steinberg passport. These gentlemen … they obviously have some sophisticated backup.”

From the quantity of Mr. Daniel Stone's confessions, it was apparent that he was a frank man, comfortable with his own history. Stone possessed, McCloud thought, an admirable American lack of pretension: the equivalent of the Cockney or the self-made Australian. All Stone's harmless enough vanity was in his clothing and his firm, well-tended body.

McCloud could in fact imagine him growing up in some cold-water tenement of the kind consecrated by the works of Bellow or Doctorow. He would have been the sharp practical brother, much more certain of the world and of women than the dreamy narrator was.

Cale was rubbing his shoulders. “Sophisticated backup,” he groaned. “I'll say they have. I wanted naturally enough to—shall we say?—mask the fact I write for a newspaper which gives those sorts of chaps a caning. Slice it any way you care to,
those
boys are totally ominous. Did you hear the man?” And he adopted Taliq's accent. “
We will have a summary trial and execution, but first we must have breakfast!
I mean, that's absolutely off the planet.
Totally
deranged. If you want to hijack a plane, you hijack a plane and be nasty to everyone. You don't try to be Father Christmas for the port side and Jack the Ripper for the starboard.”

He paused as if to allow McCloud and Stone smiling time. “But of course all the literature says they're like this. Their ambitions are of messianic proportions. They want to be at the same time the saviors and the executioners of their hostages.”

Dan Stone made a squeaking noise with his tongue.

“So you've written about terrorism?” asked McCloud.

“Oh yes,” Cale told him. “They've got me to rights on this one. I've even attended the occasional upmarket seminar run by West German and French security … the very people our friends upstairs abominate.
Guilty as charged, Your Worship!
And you, Mr. McCloud? What do they have on you?”

McCloud hesitated. The other two had both confessed to the possibility of being seen, in certain lights, as guilty. There had been consciousness in
their
acts—Cale had harbored intent in writing about Palestinian factions, and Stone also had in making a better cybernetic device to measure such enemies of state as Taliq was. But
he
, McCloud, had not known there was any hostile content in bringing the dance troupe to America. He had had no intent. Though he did not want Cale and Stone surmising that he
had
, there was a subtle shame in that. It meant that he was not a big boy like them; not a player in the larger game.

“Come on,” said Cale, winking at Stone. “You can tell us. We're your brothers in misfortune.”

This banal accusation that he was one with them struck McCloud as inaccurate and something to be fought. It was perhaps harmless to exaggerate your crimes or play with guilt when there was no risk of dying to prove the point. With Taliq in command, though, McCloud saw he did not have to seek condemnation in his own demoralized spirit. His temperamental tendency to blame himself as a means of forgiving himself needed to be combated now.

So he began to tell them how he had been unlucky with an article published only that day. He laid stress on the point that if it hadn't been published
that
day, he wouldn't be here. He would be one of the unlabeled innocents upstairs, still ignorant of the connection between Highland Pegasus and the Barramatjara land, still believing that the CIA were quite happy with the real estate they already owned in remote Australia.

“But you had to expect something like this,” Cale argued. “You were getting loads of press, and it was wonderful. Roses, roses all the way. And when that happens for a few weeks, one sweet article after another, a rush suddenly sets in to find a negative story, the worm in the apple. I mean, it's somewhat bad timing that the colored-person-in-woodpile story hit the newsstands today, but it was bound to appear sometime soon. Because that's the nature of the press.”