A pilot on a routine C130 flight would not even give a second glance to a crow in its path and carry on flying. A pilot flying Pak One would try to steer clear of it. When you are flying the President (and the US ambassador) you try to stay away from any hazards even when the risk ratio might be that of an ant and an elephant squaring up to each other. Sweating profusely, the pilot curses the inherent stupidity of the army generals and puts the aircraft into a shallow dive. He knows he has not avoided the bird hit, when the pressure needle monitoring his port engine suddenly dips and the air conditioning is switched on automatically. A refreshing puff of cold air send shivers through his sweat-soaked spine. A whiff of lavender makes him forget his orders to keep the air conditioning off.
General Zia feels the plane going into a dive, unhooks his safety belt and stands up. He is suddenly clear in his head that the time has come to show the buggers who is in charge around here. Eleven years, he thinks. Can you rule Allah’s people for eleven years if Allah is not on your side?
General Zia stands firm, hands on his hips, like a commander on a turbulent sea. His audience slide in their seats and find themselves pinned against each other like people in a nasty turn on a roller coaster.
General Zia flings his right arm backwards and then brings it up slowly, like a baseball pitcher explaining his action to a bunch of children. He raises a fist and out of this fist comes his index finger. ‘This plane, by the will of Allah, will go up.’ He brings his index finger up as if pulling the nose of the plane up with his fingertip. They all watch, first in relief and then in horror, as the plane actually starts to go up again. They slide backwards. Arnold Raphel’s head is on General Akhtar’s shoulder for a moment. He excuses himself and tightens his safety belt.
General Zia sits down, slaps his thighs with both his hands and looks around, expecting applause.
General Akhtar changes his mind and thinks maybe all his life without knowing it he has been serving a saint, a miracle maker. He looks at General Zia with reverence and thinks maybe he should confess to what he has done and General Zia will be able to undo it. Turn the VX gas in the air-freshener tube back into lavender vapours. Then he stops himself and thinks if General Zia really was a saint, he would know that the plane’s pilots are dead by now. VX gas takes two minutes to paralyse, another minute to kill. If you are flying Pak One you can’t really do much in that one minute. If General Zia is really a saint, maybe he can bring the pilots back from the dead.
The air-conditioning ducts hiss into life.
General Akhtar was hoping death to announce itself with a whiff of lavender but what he smells is a dead bird’s smell.
He is still thinking about how to articulate this problem when the plane’s nose dips and it goes down into another dive.
The back door of the VIP pod opens. Loadmaster Fayyaz asks, ‘Shall I serve the mangoes, sir?’
* * *
‘What a vulgar word? What the hell is phugoid?’ General Beg is suddenly very curious.
‘It’s just what an aeroplane does when its controls are neutral. The plane will start going down. But when it goes down beyond a certain angle, its internal axis will correct itself and the plane will start going up again. Then it will go down again. But before that it will go up. Until somebody takes the controls again.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I studied it in my Aerodynamics class.’
‘Why are the controls neutral? Why is nobody flying this bloody plane?’ he asks me.
Why?
‘Pak One. Come in, Pak One. Pak One.’ The air traffic controller’s voice is on the verge of tears.
Bannon’s voice comes over the headphones. ‘Jesus, fucking Christ. These zoomies are sleeping. No. They are dead. The pilots are dead. We are all fucking dead.’ He chokes on his last sentence and the only sound that comes over the headphones is electrical static.
General Zia’s eyes are ablaze at his own miraculous powers. ‘I’ll teach the buggers. Look, it will go up again. Look. Here it goes. Look.’ He raises his index finger in the air. The plane keeps going down.
Some of the passengers in the VIP pod are sprawled on the carpet now. General Akhtar keeps sitting in his seat. Keeps his safety belt on. Waiting for another miracle.
General Zia raises both his index fingers in the air like an amateur bhangra dancer and shouts: ‘Now tell me who is trying to kill me? You think you can kill me? Look who is dying now.’
Tapeworms are eating through General Zia’s heart now. The krait’s poison has dulled his pain but he can feel his innards being torn apart. He inhales the cold air-conditioned air in an attempt to hold on to life. He breathes in VX gas.
If they are all trying to kill General Zia, who is trying to kill them?
Before I turn to God, I scream at General Beg, ‘Sir, please do something. The plane is going down. The pilots are dead. Did you hear that?’
General Beg throws his hands in the air. ‘What can I do? Who is the aerodynamics expert around here?’
He removes his Ray-Bans and looks out of the window. He doesn’t seem very worried.
God, I don’t want to be one of those people who turn to You only when their ass is on the line. I don’t promise anything. It’s not the time to make rash commitments but if You can save one person on that plane let it be Obaid. Please God, let it be Obaid. If there is a parachute on that plane, give it to him. If there are any miracles left in Your power let them happen now. And then we’ll talk. I’ll always talk to You. I’ll always listen to You.
I open my eyes and see Pak’s One’s tail whiplashing out of a giant ball of orange fire.
First, there is the thunder of seventy-eight tonnes of metal and fuel and cargo propelled by four 4300 horsepower engines colliding, skidding, against the hot desert sand, titanium joints pulling at each other, resisting and then letting go; fuel tanks, full to capacity, boil over at impact and then burst. The desert receives a shower of metal and flesh and sundry objects. It lasts no more than four minutes. Medals go flying like a handful of gold coins flung from the sky, military boots shining on the outside and blood dripping from severed feet, peaked caps hurled through the air like Frisbees. The plane coughs out its secrets: wallets with children’s smiling pictures, half-finished letters to mistresses, flight manuals with emergency procedures marked in red, golden uniform buttons with crossed swords insignias, a red sash with the army, navy and air force logos sails through the air, a hand clenched into a fist, bottles of mineral water still intact, fine china crockery with presidential crests, titanium plates still bubbling away at the edges, dead altimeters, gyroscopes still pointing towards Islamabad, a pair of Peshawari slippers, an oil-stained overall with its nameplate still intact; a part of the landing gear rolls and comes to halt against a headless torso in a navy-blue blazer.
Three minutes later the desert receives another shower: twenty thousand litres of A-grade aviation fuel splashes in the air, combusts itself and comes back to the desert. It’s a monsoon from hell.
And the flesh; all kinds of flesh: brown melting into white, ligaments, cartilages, flesh ripped from bones, parched flesh, charred flesh; body parts strewn around like discarded dishes at a cannibals’ feast.
The charred pages of a slim book, a hand gripping the spine, a thumb with a half-grown nail inserted firmly into the last page.
When Pakistan National Television abruptly interrupts an early-evening soap opera and starts to play a recitation from the Quran, the First Lady waits for a few minutes. This is usually a preamble to breaking news. But the mullah doing the recitation has chosen the longest surah from the Quran and the First Lady knows that he will go on for a couple of hours. The First Lady curses the Information Minister and decides to do some house chores. Her first stop is her husband’s bedroom. She picks up the glass of milk from the side table, then puts it back when she notices a black spot on the bed sheet. She looks at it closely and curls her nose at the spot of blood. ‘Poor man is sick.’ The First Lady f
eels a pang of guilt which turns into anger and then utter hopelessness. ‘He is getting old. He should retire on health grounds if nothing else.’ But she has known him for too long to harbour any hopes of a serene retirement life. The First Lady picks up the new issue of Reader’s Digest from the side table. There is a cover story about how to put your life back together after your husband has cheated on you. Marriage therapy? she wonders.
Not for me, she thinks, throwing the bloodstained sheet into the laundry basket.
* * *
Our Cessna circles the ball of orange fire. My eyes scan the horizon for a parachute, then the desert for a lonely figure walking away from the fire and smoke. The sky is clear blue and the desert around the ball of fire and flying debris is empty and indifferent; no one is walking out of this inferno. The pilot doesn’t have to wait long for his instructions. ‘It doesn’t look good. There is no point landing here.’ General Beg has made up his mind. ‘We need to get back to Islamabad.’
He ignores my head banging at the back of his seat. ‘No, we cannot keep going in circles and have one more look. No, young man, we are not dropping you off here. There is nothing to look for. Come on, chin up. Behave like a soldier. We have a country to run.’
The last phase of Code Red kicks into action and the desert is assaulted by emergency vehicles of every possible size and description. Trucks full of ordinary soldiers with mission unknown, armoured cars with machine guns cocked, ambulances with oxygen cylinders at the ready, commandos in open-topped jeeps, fire engines with red helmets hanging out the doors, buses full of aircraft technicians as if Pak One has suffered a minor mechanical failure. Barricades are set up, emergency communication systems start crackling with eager voices, miles of red tape are strung around the scene of the crash.
A catering van pulls up as if the dead might feel hungry and ask for an afternoon snack.
A soldier wearing a white mask walks through the rubble carefully, trying to avoid trampling the body parts, picking his way through the pieces of smouldering metal and documents stamped secret, his eyes searching for a sign that would confirm what people in Islamabad want him to confirm. He wonders why anyone would need a confirmation from a scene as hopeless as this. But Pakistan National Television will keep playing the recitation from Quran, the flag will stay at full mast, the rumours will spread across the country but not be confirmed until the evidence is found. The First Lady will not be informed until they have definite proof.
The soldier trips on a decapitated head with glistening hair parted in the middle and finds what he was looking for.
A strange way to get killed, he thinks. It seems like he died many times over. A face broken off just above the nose, moustache half burnt but still twirled, lips and chin melted away to reveal a set of shiny white teeth, frozen in an eternal mocking grin.
As he bends down to pick up his piece of evidence, he notices a copy of the Quran, open in the middle and intact. Not a scratch on it, not a lick of fire or smoke. Before he kisses the Quran and closes it carefully he reads the verse on the page that is open in front of him and tries to recall a half-remembered story about an ancient prophet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Books, people, places that have inspired and helped during the writing of this alleged novel. They are in no way responsible for the contents of this book, though.
Sargodha. Fateh. Patricia Duncker. Andrew Cowan. Patricia. Richard Holmes. Anne. Masood. Mirza. Sam. Abbas and Barry. Norwich. Gordon House. Michèle Roberts. Arif. Arif. Sara Wajid. Nick. Emily. Diana. Anu. Asad Mohammed Khan. The Bear Trap. Lyceum. Bajwa. Charlie Wilson’s War. Ghost Wars. Abdullah Hussain. Anne. Shafi. Raja. Elissa. Dr Manzur Ejaz. Aaj. Victoria Shepherd. The Feast of the Goat. Laura. Newsline. Minnie Singh. Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Ann Gagliardi and Clare Alexander, the best readers one could ask for.
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Copyright © Mohammed Hanif 2008
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. While most of the places mentioned in the book exist, some locations have been altered or renamed, and some small liberties taken with geography.
Mohammed Hanif has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape
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A Case of Exploding Mangoes Page 31