Flying Hero Class (33 page)

Daisy handed the message back to him. It was not a rejection. It was that something so dangerous should only be handled by its creator.

He saved it for further use.

Air turbulence reasserted itself. Daisy was jolted on her way back to her seat.

In such a bountiful planet as the Frankfurt flight now seemed to be, there had been options to spare. The option of Hasni's grenade, for example. Except that he had not needed it. And as for Daisy, the workable universe which McCloud saw from his own seat had no need for her anymore. McCloud himself was surprised to feel no gratitude. The Jewel of Budapest had done her part, as he would do his. Gratitude would at the end be meaningless, though those who had acted would never cease—of course—to be bound to each other.

Musa, who had shot Cale, rose from his seat in front of McCloud now and went aft, and Hasni got up, stepped across the conspirator McCloud, and followed Musa. If you were my terrorist, I would discipline you for that loose stud, McCloud promised. It was the erosion of Taliq's powers of surveillance which made the loosened belt stud go unnoticed. It was a symbol of the woe Taliq was earning.

The changes of light outside the blinds, the deeper blue ascending now from earth, told McCloud that the negotiation he intended to have with Taliq, one not yet listed on Taliq's agenda, the coming crux and crunch and standoff, would take place in the meat of an African night.

And though the
didj
music had stopped, it still seemed to be there to McCloud, just beyond the angle of hearing like a familiar animal. Still there as the wheels ground down and locked in place; as from the intercom came one groaned, paternal sentence, a sentence of the captain's. “Folks, we're going in. Strap yourself down if they'll let you.”

McCloud listened for the yelp of wheels on runway and the panicked scream of air brakes. When they occurred, his breath fled him. Yet his imagination stayed resolute. He could still achieve a mental picture of what he meant himself to do.

Before the touchdown was fully accomplished, Taliq had moved warily into the cabin from the flight deck. He was beginning—it seemed to McCloud—to doubt whether Daisy had done him well, for he trod like someone facing the risk of ambush. Blue patches of bad blood stood beneath his eyes. He believed, however, McCloud could tell, that he had oxygen and peace enough to accomplish the result, and that then he could sleep.

“Very well,” he told Hasni and Musa.

The boys pulled Stone and McCloud upright, adjusting yet again their tattered placards, those stale inscriptions bullet-headed Razir had written an age ago and which the people downstairs must know by heart.

“It's over and settled,” McCloud, despite himself, found himself quaintly telling Hasni and Musa. “Taliq and Daisy are the one flesh. Daisy won't ever escape the weight of his husbandry.”

“Give it a rest, mate,” said Musa in his Midlands accent, not understanding a word.

He was very pleased that the boys ignored him and took his submission for granted. He decided that he had better stop himself from talking like a prophet. That he had better be on his watch against that.

Along with Daisy, the four dancers were also gathering themselves to go downstairs. Why this time and not last time? Was this Taliq's choice—to have the justified present to witness what he hoped were final transactions? Or had they asked to be counted in?

Whitey called ponderously to Taliq, “We think Frank isn't to blame. That doesn't mean the other ought to be shot.”

“What?” asked Taliq. “Don't presume on our friendship, Mr. Wappitji.”

Daisy also, however, wore a frown. “Nothing's going to happen to these two boys,” she stated as a fact, nodding toward Stone and McCloud.

“It is not up to me,” said Taliq.

Daisy became gloriously enraged. “That's not what you said,” she shouted. “That's
not
what you told me.”

Taliq shook his head as if to clear it. “Madam,” he said, “please don't misunderstand me. I said I would
try
to save them, and I will. But it is not up to me, and I also said that.”

“So, nothing's changed?” asked Daisy, agitated. “You know what? You
want
them dead. You want all of us dead. You love the dead, you son-of-a-bitch. Because their ideas are straightened out!”

It was hard to tell whether Taliq was more enraged than affronted. “Madam, that's not just or fair.” He kept putting his hand to his mouth, seemingly to check nausea or fatigue. “The saving of these men is out of my hands. I
put
it in the hands of others.” He took a profound breath. “I will not argue,” he said. “If you are going to shout and be unruly, you can stay here. If you come downstairs, you will be silent throughout.”

It was like a scene from a classroom, as bathetic and as farcical. Daisy and the Barramatjara said nothing.

“You are a serious disappointment,” said Taliq, waving a finger of his bandaged hand. But the authentic threat had returned to his manner, and he did not sound querulous. His oneness with them had its limits. Even in Daisy's case, he was willing to end intimacy with a bullet. “But you will have enlightenment,” he promised them. “You will have it.”

And so everyone began to leave the upper deck.

Downstairs, where Bluey Kannata, actor and dancer, was still resting, it was dark. As McCloud and Stone and their guards passed through, Bluey rose from the seats where he lay. Kneeling upright as the German doctor grabbed for him, Bluey was not to be denied.

“That one!” cried Bluey, pointing at McCloud. “He knew my face, that bastard! My face was in front of him. He still sold it off to people! That one! That one!”

The doctor and a steward wrestled Bluey back down but, “That one! That bastard!” Bluey kept yelling.

McCloud understood Bluey but felt unrepentant. He used the turmoil to pass one of his tracts, perhaps the one already handled by Daisy, to the doctor.

Glancing back, McCloud saw Whitey Wappitji, Phil Puduma, and Daisy Nakamura detach themselves from the rear of the procession from upstairs and stand by Bluey. Whitey and Phil said nothing, but Daisy spoke soothingly, according to the traditional pacifying tasks she had assumed to herself. Phil Puduma fetched drinking water, and the doctor produced two white pills and surreptitiously checked the strip of paper in his hands.

The door by which Cale had perished had already been swung back. Hasni, carrying the heroic bruise on his forehead, and Musa the home mechanic pushed McCloud and Stone downward, making them kneel there, on the rim of the stain. Again the soft air from beyond the plane warmed their exposed arms. This is the last time, McCloud was sure, we'll feel that mere exhalation of the outside, living world.

Stone shifted his limbs in small ways and made occasional sighs. McCloud felt a childlike anticipation of revealing himself, of startling the company, of turning events in his own direction. He knew that Whitey too was expecting something, a phenomenon. He and Whitey were one in expecting an end to Taliq, or at least an acceptable end to themselves.

Emanations of Cale from the bloodied carpet fortified him. Cale, who had approved of stirs as a means of managing people. Now—in Cale's absence—McCloud himself was the potential stirrer, the ordained arouser and confuser. Such were the febrile excitements, he understood, which would now keep him on his fixed, unlikely course.

“Is Mahoud here?” the kneeling Stone suddenly asked his captors, Musa and Hasni. They stood in full view of Stone and McCloud. They looked very calm, as if this time there would be no hesitations and no doubts. “Is there any word at all?”

Along with all the other questions of the day, there was this one: Why hadn't Taliq replaced the sensitive Hasni on this execution squad? Had Hasni pleaded for the chance? Or was this like the grenade-belt stud: another symbol of creeping inadvertence in the Taliq camp?

“Is Mahoud here?” Stone reiterated. Clearly he had given up all theorizing about whether Mahoud was the first or side purpose of this exercise of Taliq's. He seemed to believe he was finished if Mahoud did not appear.

But from the door could be seen only blue perimeter lights and some indefinite movement of trucks and men in quasi-military uniforms.

Hasni and Musa made a mouth at each other. Obviously neither of them knew, and Taliq was not there to ask, was away upstairs again with the captain's radio, wavering over it, no doubt, corroded with codeine and suspicion.

“Oh Jesus,” Stone said with level despair. “I knew there wouldn't be any Mahoud. They don't release these guys anymore. It just isn't policy.”

McCloud was struck by the polite regret in Stone's voice, as if he wished Mahoud al-Jiddah and his colleagues nothing but a felicitous escape and a bountiful future.

It made you worry if he had really absorbed the message about no Plastique.

This time McCloud could
hear
Taliq returning down the stairwell precisely because his tread was so light, unmilitant, irregular. His arrival sounded like that of a man with little strength left, yet when he appeared in front of McCloud and Stone his eyes retained a vigorous glimmer.

He spoke softly to Hasni.

“They are playing with us. Clearly. They are playing. They tell us now that Mahoud will arrive in thirty-five minutes by helicopter!”

Musa and Hasni shook their heads.

“
Thirty-five minutes!
It's a fiction. There have been too many improbabilities. We will need to feed them another one.”

Hasni, though ready in principle, seemed not to have quite gathered himself for the task, and McCloud was still collecting himself for his performance, when Stone began to speak in a direct and sensible voice. “If it
could
be the truth, why not wait the thirty-five minutes and see?”

“Oh, Mr. Stone,” said Taliq. He was not smoking anymore. Perhaps he was too ill. “You understand all this as well as anyone. ‘Tell them thirty-five minutes,' they say on the ground. ‘Buy time, buy time! And when the thirty-five minutes is up, buy another slab of time—tell them there are contrary winds, or a rotor has broken.'” He covered his mouth for a while. Settling his gorge, McCloud hoped, and not succeeding. “If I had one of your computers to play with, it would tell me to do this. Isn't that the case? So be brave, Mr. Stone. Man of two passports!”

“But after you've used McCloud and me? What then? No more class and race criminals left!”

Taliq pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed privately and with weary tolerance. “You don't believe that on a packed plane like this there won't be a second wave of criminals? And a third? There are always criminals, Mr. Stone.”

One look told McCloud that Stone's objections hadn't softened Hasni, who was still out to assert his revolutionary character. He spoke to Taliq through pursed lips. “Not the Jew. It's too easy. The other one first.”

“But,” argued Stone, who must have heard Hasni, “if you shoot us, where
is
your leverage? See, you
did
declare the rest of the plane innocent, for Christ's sake! And if you change your mind on that, why will they trust you further?”

But Taliq—with a nod—indicated the reason. Hasni's black and awful weapon.

“Hasni,” said Taliq simply to the boy.

McCloud did not look at Hasni but at Taliq. He could see the leader waver on his feet. Right on time, pain and nausea were bringing him unstrung.

Under cover of Taliq's duodenal crisis and of the minor debate Stone had begun, McCloud had shifted his kneeling angle. He rose toward Taliq's face. In the peripheral dimness where Bluey Kannata lay, the features of those exempted from sentence, of Daisy and the dance troupe, could be vaguely seen.

He was quickly shoulder to shoulder with Taliq.

He hunted down the front of his singlet for the handful of paper wads and threw them over the nearest seats of passengers.

“Read that!” he cried. “Read that! There's no Plastique in the hold …
none
!”

This must have taken many instants, and neither the resolute Hasni nor the confirmed killer Musa had done anything to prevent it. He felt sure that this was because they were accustomed to the idea of his powerlessness. If he rose up, they may have thought, it must be at Taliq's mandate. Even now—McCloud could see it—they believed that their power would easily be reasserted. They had not yet reached the assessment that everything was altogether changed.

In fact, McCloud watched Musa give a quite charming shrug, the shrug of a young man pretending still to be in the game, a shrug which carried with it at the same time an expectation of the bizarre; the gesture of a young man whom history has taught to expect erratic turns.

McCloud wrapped his right arm around Taliq's waist. It yielded. Taking further hold of Taliq, he felt the man stagger within his arms. Taliq, McCloud was astonished to find, had little strength; had postured, radioed, and threatened with no more than a minor sinew or two to drive him. And perhaps every movement had been for him a crisis of will, since—rather than move now, in this new and unscannable arrangement—he gave himself up to McCloud for the moment like a child.

“Pauline,” McCloud screamed at the height of certitude, “there's no Plastique!”

Under cover of this liberating cry, McCloud believed he saw his wads of paper being passed from seat to seat, the data about no Plastique, read by Whitey Wappitji from Taliq's blood, creating speculation, unleashing debate, falling like a unifying net over the cabin. Making everyone relatives, to use a Barramatjara phrase. Not everyone, of course—that was fanciful to expect. There would be unbelievers, he knew, and there would be mothers, like the one who had sat beside Pauline at the outset and who would have duties outside belief. But enough relatives. Enough.

Hasni and Musa were still scanning the tangle of movement, McCloud embracing Taliq, holding him as a buffer between the muzzles of their Polish automatics and himself. He was triumphantly convinced that now they thought he was armed and had some weapon stuck against Taliq, and that they held their hands at this early stage for love of Taliq. It just showed you.
Act
, and the world fell into place!