Flying Hero Class (32 page)

Yet the effect on McCloud wasn't sedative at all. He felt twice as alive. He felt astringent, ready for the deed.

But once more, what was the deed to be?

A voice joined the line of the
didj
's plaint. McCloud was sure that it was Cowboy Tom Gullagara's voice.

The ordained style of a Barramatjara singer lay somewhere far out beyond the normal strain of sounds people heard; far out beyond the lyric tenor, say, of Irish sentimental ballad or the piercing delivery of Chinese opera. It had more of a twang than either. It worked by longer intervals. It carried in it the pulse of a genuinely murderous sun. It shimmered with bemusing distance. As well as inviting the planeload to shut its eyes, it also lulled them to avert their faces from Cale's confused spirit and offered to Cale himself a seductive invitation to rise from the essences of his body staining the carpet downstairs and slip to earth along the filament of his own murder.

McCloud became convinced too that the song was meant to add muscle to Whitey's already uttered and sealed curse. It was a surprise to McCloud that Taliq could not
hear
that intention in it. If not in the training camps of Iraq, then surely around the refugee hearths of his childhood Taliq must have learned to read such clearly uttered tribal purposes.

Mungina's
didj
and Cowboy Tom's voice continued to wash into him. It struck him that, for no easily defined reason, they were singing him safe.

“God save our gracious Queen,

“Long live our noble Queen.

“God save our Queen …”

More astounding still, they may even have been singing him brave.

Stone was not aware of this shift, though. Cale's death had not slowed Stone's rate of reasoning. He leaned across the aisle and muttered, “I've been thinking about all this. It doesn't compute, McCloud. If the people on the ground meant to give this Mahoud back to Taliq and the boys, they would have shown definite signs back there. They wouldn't have told us to take off again and cruise along to some new rendezvous. They could have had Mahoud flown to us in a supersonic fighter, for Christ's sake, if that had been their wish.”

McCloud half smiled. He felt indulgent toward Stone. A doomsayer from the start. A man who'd needed software to discern his enemy.

“I'm afraid, my friend,” said Stone, beginning to sneeze and having to stifle the noise with the rim of his blanket, “that from the larger view, you and I account for very little to our masters.”

“But I don't have masters,” McCloud said.

“Well,” said Stone, “neither—in the strict sense—do I.”

The light beyond the shutters turned glacial blue: the coming of the high, icy night. Handsome Yusuf the tailor's son was suddenly among them, slinging cellophaned packets of water biscuits into McCloud's lap and Stone's. Even tearing open the package, McCloud found that he could not take his eyes from Hasni's little grenade of unknown manufacture. He imagined it stuck intimately and organically in the socket of his arm. Its bite would give him a slight, improper pleasure. It would be something Stone lacked. Stone had trained and tanned, played tennis, and kept two passports against this moment. He had won his argument with Cale. He had even made arrangements for his widow. He had done everything. He had nothing more to draw on.

So McCloud fished down the front of his singlet, extracted one of the heretical wads of paper, and—picking his moment—passed it across the aisle. Stone did not seem pleased to receive it but at last, under cover of the crinkling and wadding of cellophane, opened the message one-handed and read it.

Stone frowned.
How do you know?
he mouthed.

McCloud deliberately gestured, suggesting that proof existed in some palpable, legible form but could not in the circumstances be produced. He did not feel this was misleading. The evidence
did
exist, but only he, McCloud, understood its force. He felt exalted. The distribution of the message had commenced.

Stone put the paper in his mouth and swallowed it. It did not go down easily. Then he covered his eyes with his hand and considered the advantages and disadvantages of believing what McCloud had written. As McCloud himself had, Stone too had cherished, you could tell, his belief in the Plastique. There was the comfort of being powerless. As soon as Whitey had uttered the truth, McCloud had shrugged that comfort off without thinking. Stone, a more careful man, did not want to let go too easily of any of the condemned prisoner's standard mental props.

He closed his eyes for a time and then, swallowing once more, stared at McCloud and smiled marginally. The mystery of faith, unleashed in McCloud by Whitey, had now mysteriously crossed the aisle and worked, more modestly and without any supporting data, on Stone.

So, thought McCloud, heady with revolution, a network has been set up. This making of a cell, he saw, was the
action
he had been straining toward. Hasni's grenade meant nothing, was not the option. In its unfastened state, it was supporting evidence of an incompleteness in Taliq's plans. That was all.

McCloud's mouth was full of biscuit when Philip Puduma visited him. The Christian dancer arrived at his side, dropping to his knees in the aisle the better to confer. He touched McCloud's wrist.

“Frank,” he confided solemnly, “I wanted to tell you this, mate. In this mucked-up setup we got here, you've got to put your trust in the Lord as your Redeemer. I mean, this is serious business, Frank. They shot a man. You can't have any big faith in them old people, those ancestors. I say it though I love them and they're my people, mate. But Jesus is Lord, brother. Them others do what they do. But they couldn't handle that booze for me. And see, they won't handle Taliq for you.”

He coughed. He looked forward toward the cockpit and aft again. He wanted to be certain his complicated message would not be interrupted.

“I mean, you know me and Whitey, we respect each other. And Whitey has to do what Whitey does. He's angry with that Taliq, and he thinks he's fixed his wheel for him now. But only the Lord can fix wheels, mate.”

McCloud remembered how in the dance, according to the Barramatjara orthodoxy, the dancer became the hero. He was lost to himself and might remain awesomely lost forever unless he awoke. Paul Mungina would in fact leave his
didj
at the end of the evening's entertainment and tap the four dancers on the shoulder, returning them to their daily identities.

“That's a bit of bullshit for the tourists,” Mungina had explained once.

But there was a truth behind the levity and an awareness of a threat. That the ancestor could capture the soul.

Maybe now Phil could see a kind of soul capture in Frank McCloud and felt bound to warn against it.

Phil whispered, “Don't put your faith in any curses, brother Frank. Don't you swear by any name but Jesus's name. Okay? This is
really
serious business!”

He rose from the kneeling position, and his leg creaked. Once he had broken it, McCloud seemed to remember having been told, working with horses on Easter Creek cattle station.

“And listen, another thing. You know Bluey? We've got to get Bluey back to Baruda, working on the diesels. No more of them movies or discos or Jim Beam for Bluey. The truth is not in them, brother. We'll get Bluey home, eh? So … Jesus your redeemer, Frank.”

Since Phil was inviting him to take part in Bluey's rehabilitation, Phil thought he, McCloud, would last.

There was a wink from the Christian then, so innate with meaning that McCloud felt his ribs expand.

It seemed important, however, that Phil shouldn't be deceived. “Phil,” McCloud pleaded, “listen. The only hope I've had in this whole shitheap is from … from
signs
Whitey's given me. I'm ready to meet whatever comes. But don't confuse me now, Phil. For Christ's sake, don't!”

Phil sighed, shook his head, and looked away. What the Spanish Benedictines and the German Lutherans would make of this! What the drowsing Hasni at his side would think, for that matter. A Presbyterian pleading with a Barramatjara elder for the freedom to believe in Wappitji's visions and curses.

“You got the message, Frank, anyhow.”

But McCloud was as willing as any heretic to die clinging to the only beliefs which made the universe habitable.

In this case the belief in no Plastique and in a siege-by-curse of the blood of the chief hijacker. In the effect these two articles of faith had on his will and his intentions.

Credo, thought McCloud. Credo. And no recanting.

The theological argument with Phil the Christian was interrupted then by an event which had been long prefigured but took McCloud's breath. By a further clear slippage—that is—of Taliq's power. The chief hijacker edged past Phil and, looking unsteady in the legs, progressed down the aisle toward the cockpit. Beyond the curtain by the lavatory, lacking strength to drag the drape back into place, he knelt all at once. More accurately, he fell onto his kneecaps like someone struck, and on his knees he began to rock his body.

Stone could not see this, but it was visible to McCloud, who believed the image was designed anyhow for him, that he was
authorized
to behold it.

Was the codeine eating the lining of Taliq's stomach, as the German doctor had darkly suggested it might? In any case, its action was interrupted now by Daisy.

Hasni had risen beside McCloud and was ready to go and help. He was preempted by Daisy, though. Pushing palely past McCloud in her green dress, free of her blanket, she came rushing up from her seat toward Taliq. The sweet green garment, McCloud noticed, had declined further. Its mileage had always been a cocktail party of two hours or—at a stretch—a transatlantic novice flight of six. It was not designed to stand up against an all-night, all-day hijack, to carry a woman through a revolutionary education.

Where McCloud and Phil could still see her, she knelt as Taliq had and took his head onto her shoulder. The flesh Taliq leaned against was alabaster, and with his forehead he nuzzled the green fabric of her shoulder. Daisy looked aft across the crown of his dark hair. Her frank eyes met McCloud's. They were not easily convivial—as they would have been behind the bar of the Polka Barn in Budapest, Arizona.

“Yes,” McCloud believed they said. “Yes, don't worry. I'll take away what he has left.”

Her hand reached up, and she dragged the curtain across.

“Not right,” said Phil, departing for his seat as if for the moment his message was delivered. “Her going sweet on Taliq.”

But even Phil, McCloud thought, lacked conviction.

McCloud was aware that Hasni had witnessed Daisy's comforting of Taliq. The boy knew at the same time that McCloud had also seen everything. He glanced toward McCloud, but the eyes did not engage. He had not yet consulted with himself about this, had not developed a policy, had not reconciled himself. There was something undisguised and painful to watch, McCloud thought, in the young hijacker's vague pain at this business of Daisy and Taliq, at the struggle first to absorb the scandal into himself and then to decide what attitude to take toward the world.

Hasni decided on a policy, though, and turned bravely to McCloud. His lips had a scholar's, a seminarian's, delicacy as he framed the words.

“Taliq is a hero, a combat soldier,” he said. “He's been through things we cannot imagine. He has led battalions on the Euphrates. He's raided Iran's oil wells. Mossad have sent men to Baghdad to kill him. He dodges out of buildings a half second before the enemy blows them up. He has had to swallow his own fear, day by day. So now he is in pain. Did you expect me to condemn him, Mr. McCloud? Just because he's rightly chastised me?”

McCloud wondered what they thought of this Arab kid at Tulane or wherever his hall of residence was located. What did they think of him with his relentless convictions and his old-fashioned words like “chastise”? In America they said “bawled me out,” “busted my chops.” They wouldn't have heard of “chastise.”

While Taliq and Daisy remained beyond the curtain, the air the plane traversed scarcely nudged the wings. While Daisy distracted him with her mouth, the smooth African night cosseted and—McCloud felt sure about this—betrayed Taliq.

When Daisy reappeared at last she wore a worldly, twice shy face such as the truckers and drinking Mormons and Navajos of Budapest may never have seen. Otherwise she seemed the old immutable Daisy, the one McCloud felt he had known a lifetime. Holding her right shoulder with her left arm, as if to imply that blows had been traded in there, she readjusted the curtain behind her. Taliq was not with her. His pain arrested for the moment, he must have gone through into the flight deck to speak to the pilot or to deal with the negotiators on the other end of the radio. He must have seen himself as restored and fortified and made sharper.

Daisy and McCloud knew better. Did Hasni know better, too?

Hasni seemed to have lost interest now, though. He dozed again under his bruised brow. McCloud dredged from his singlet one of the seditious wads and handed it to Daisy as she passed. Frowning, she opened it, read it, and her eyes widened—in her case a wonder of anatomy, so broadly written were they on her face in any case.

She frowned down at McCloud. But, he felt sure, it was a frown of belief. He was certain to her too this was news which changed everything, which guaranteed or at least held out hope for a communal survival of the flight.

His missionary work, he thought in unalloyed delight, was doing better and working more instantly than Taliq's missionary work. Taliq, with the persuasion of his special if stilted oratory and with the backing of muzzles, had powerfully converted Bluey. But in minutes, with a scribbled message in dim blue fished out of his string vest, his sweaty singlet, he had converted the Jew and the Japanese. So broadly based was his mission and the catholicity and breadth of what he uttered!