He makes marks, like Robinson Crusoe, on a blank white page in his mind.
Day 1. Takeoff. Almost immediate announcement from the pilot that due to expected turbulence, passengers are to remain in their seats until given permission to move.
Interesting, that, Tristan thinks in retrospect. The pilot must be part of it, unless a gun was already being held to his head. But how could machine guns have been brought on board? How could all that have been spirited past security if flight and loading crews were not involved?
We are expecting extreme turbulence … All passengers are to remain in their seats …
But there is no turbulence.
An hour passes. The meal is served; the flight attendants seem nervous and pale; the passengers are forbidden to move about. And then, at last, breaking the rules, Tristan makes his way down to Row 11, but Génie’s seat is empty and so is 11B. “Excuse me,” he says to the man across the aisle, “do you know where—?” and at that precise moment the hullabaloo breaks out. From the first-class cabin, figures with machine guns appear, Pigmen in gas masks, three in each side aisle, six in all, and Tristan has a gun barrel in his chest and he is being forced back back back down the plane.
On the PA system, in broken English, a voice keeps saying: This is the Black Death. If you obey exactly, you will not be hurt. This is the Black Death avenging many century of wrong. Obey or you will be shot. Everybody is prisoner of Black Death. Obey or you will be shot. This is return of the plague. Obey or you will be shot. This is Black Death.
The first shot comes then. The first killing. It is a random one, for show, and the hijackers wave their guns above their heads, triumphant as schoolyard bullies. Look, Pa! We scared the shit out of them.
And then time becomes hazy. A landing. Hours in stifling heat. The stewardesses, at gunpoint, distribute water. Babies and children cry incessantly. Someone goes crazy—with thirst? from the hallucination-inducing heat?—and runs down the aisle and is shot. The body is thrown from the plane.
Negotiations are going on. Sometimes shouting can be heard from the cockpit: radio voices coming in, shouted messages going out.
Night falls. Apparently the plane is being refueled. There is a takeoff. There are more flying hours, perhaps three, perhaps four, but no one is allowed to leave his or her seat, not for any reason whatsoever. The plane begins to stink. People pass out. There is another landing. There are more hours that seem to float in heat. Food and water are distributed. Bodies have slumped into aisles and on to the floor. The Pigmen pass through the plane and collect these bodies like garbage. They drag them down the aisles and toss them from the forward door.
There is another takeoff.
Somewhere here, Day 2 has begun. Tristan marks that on the blank page in his mind, but how is he to keep track of time when the plane is in the air? Two hours? he wonders. Three? He might as well be suspended in thick black ink. Then there is another landing: Tristan’s body can sense the loss of altitude. He feels the thump when the wheels hit the ground, then bounce, and then hit again. An amateur landing. He wonders what they did to the pilot. He wonders if the pilot, seriously inexpert, is one of the hijacking team.
This is Black Death, the PA system announces. The plague falls upon the infidel, but Allah, the All-Merciful, spares the children. Obey or you will be shot.
The children are herded up and off-loaded; mothers with babies in arms are permitted to leave, though not if the babies are dead. Two mothers are sent back to their seats, the bundles in their arms quite still. Many children do not wish to leave their parents, but the men with pig heads and guns pull them roughly from their seats. Passengers reach out to touch and caress as the little ones are pushed down the aisles. When the last of the screams and the sobbing—Mommy! I want my mommy!—have been pushed out of the escape hatch, a terrible silence prevails inside the plane.
All that, Tristan thinks, must have happened on Day 2.
Then night falls. A refueling, another takeoff. How many hours of flying? Another landing. They must have landed into Day 3.
The plane stinks. People have vomited. People have wet and fouled themselves. Trips to the bathrooms are permitted now, but are monitored, row by row, and a turn comes around again only three times a day. Bathrooms are blocked up and the stench is so terrible that people back away from their turn. Each time he is escorted from his seat, Tristan tries to insist on the bathrooms forward but is always forced back. He has not caught so much as a glimpse of Génie.
On the Day 3 landing (the fourth landing, unless he has lost count), supplies of food and water are brought on board, the bathrooms are cleaned; more refueling, another takeoff, a much longer flight, another landing. Somewhere in here, he thinks, Day 4 begins.
On Day 4, more food and water are brought on board. The plane is fumigated, the bathrooms are cleaned again. Supplies of a different kind are brought on: the gas masks arrive at this point, hundreds of them, one for every passenger. So this must be home territory for the terrorists, Tristan decides. Libya? Iraq? Morocco? Or maybe farther south, closer to the equator, because the heat is extreme. Sudan or Uganda? The masks are distributed, and the passengers are ordered to put them on. The effect is grotesque. A number of people vomit into their gas masks and promptly suffocate. Their bodies are removed.
The leader, the one who speaks BBC English, makes an announcement.
“The world has its eyes on this plane,” he says. “The world is listening to me as I speak.”
Tristan tries to imagine himself into his apartment in Paris, watching himself on TV. There is the long doomed silver Air France cocoon on the screen, indistinct at its edges. He imagines himself reading the message streaming across the base of his set: Hijacked plane on airstrip in Uganda. (Or in Egypt, perhaps? Or in Iraq?) Tristan squints. In peripheral vision, he can see the volumes of Proust and Stendhal on his shelves. If he could just see his television set more clearly, he could find out where he is.
“Toxic gas has now been released into the cabin,” the leader of the hijackers says to the passengers and to the television audience of the world. “Your masks will protect you. If you remove your mask, you will die very quickly, in great agony.
“We are returning to Paris,” the leader explains. “Before landing, canisters of highly volatile, highly flammable gas will be released inside the plane, so that any misguided attempt at sharpshooting, either by airport security or by American special troops, will result in a firestorm. If our demands are met, if the ten prisoners whose names will be given to Le Monde are released from French jails, and if these Muslim freedom fighters are permitted to board the aircraft, then all passengers will also be released. We are asking a small thing: ten Muslim freedom fighters for more than four hundred civilians.”
There is another takeoff and a long flight.
Tristan tries to measure the hours.
“We are beginning our descent into Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris,” the leader announces, and the words boom like thunder, but the plane circles, and banks, and levels out, and circles again. The voice of the leader over the PA system is sharp with fury. “We are refused permission to land,” he announces. “Idiots. Imbeciles. Cretinaceous-moronic-NATO-American snobs!” His words trip over themselves. “You are dogs!” he tells the passengers icily. “Your lives are nothing to your governments. You are dogs, and you will die like dogs.”
We are beyond fear, Tristan thinks. We are far beyond fear. Dying like dogs, when we have been living like dogs for days: it barely even touches us.
When the moment comes, he thinks, when the moment presents itself, he will leap snarling at that fake-BBC throat, though for the time being he seems to have misplaced his own ignition key, and the PA system by which his brain gets messages to his body seems to be on the blink. He tells his hand to make a fist and it drifts like seaweed.
This is a very strange dream, he thinks. When I wake, he thinks, what a story this will be.
He thinks the plane is still circling
Paris because he believes he can see the loops of the Seine and the towers of Notre Dame, but he knows this might be part of the dream. He feels sleepy. He dreams that oxygen, like a knight in armor, is battering at the walls of his mask. He sees Génie on a cloud at his window. Have you left us, then? he asks her, and he feels the plane plummeting in grief, but he cannot remember what grief feels like, and the plane levels out and flies south. Tristan knows they are flying south because the sun that he thinks he sees spells Africa. Génie raps on his window. Prepare for landing, she says.
“We have been permitted landing rights for refueling,” the leader announces, and they are on the ground in Toulouse, Tristan thinks. Or perhaps they are in Marseilles? He knows he is watching French on the lips of the men at the gasoline pumps. They handle the rubber hoses as snake charmers might, and the sucked-in hollows in their cheeks are making French. Tristan draws a question mark with one finger on his window and one of the refuelers looks back at him directly and says: Toulouse.
The plane takes off from Toulouse and flies into the fifth night, Tristan thinks, though it could be the sixth. There is a long flight and another landing, perhaps—probably—a return to the point where the gas masks first came on board.
This is where they now are, several hours from Toulouse, very late on the fifth or sixth day, and the Indian woman who has turned out to be an American man has finished dying, and the ripples of panic throughout the plane have played themselves out.
Nothing moves. The passengers are bewitched.
Tristan is light-headed. He believes he can fly.
5. Triage
Genevieve floats through her fever. When she opens her eyes, the air is strangely cloudy and opaque, as though life must now be seen darkly and through a glass. She closes her eyes again. Her breath smells like the inside of a rubber tube. Her throat hurts, her head hurts, a high kind of pain is singing behind her eyes. When she touches her neck gingerly with the pads of her fingers, she feels a crust of dried blood, and something else, a collar, a cage, what the—? Panic chokes her, and she floats into blackness again.
“Move,” someone says, and she stumbles. Her head is inside a jar. “Move! Bouge! Bouge!” and other words too, foreign words, something strange is … sound is ballooning and sloooow, sound is clouding her, scarfs her. Surf is everything she hears, though she can see black flecks of words in front of her eyes and the words are long and then longer, like taffy, and they boom and they fade and reverberate, and they bunch up in her ears and inside her head. She is deep in a tunnel, she hears a train. It is night. Is it night? A hand pushes, brutally, and she pitches forward and rolls down stairs.
Blacktop. A parking lot? Where is she?
Why is there a helmet on her head?
A foot kicks her. “Get up.” That was the sense of it, but not the words. The words wrap themselves around her like thunder, but they are not in a language she understands. The foot kicks her again. She tries to stand, but her legs will not hold and she slips as softly as a scarf to the ground. She sees boots, soldiers, machine guns, monster men with grotesque masks on their heads. Someone lifts her as though she were a sack and throws her in the back of a jeep.
Horror. Other hands, other bodies. She floats into dark.
She is conscious, she faints, she is conscious again, they are being driven somewhere, she recognizes the hum of tire tread and engine, she feels the jarring bumps in the terrain. They are driving, at high speed, straight to hell.
Arms help her. Someone half lifts, she is propped against another body, an arm comforts. “You all right?” It is the tone she reads. The sound reverberates without shape from inside somebody’s head cage. Bodies moan and huddle against each other and hold clumsy hands. She begins to notice things. She is able to distinguish and catalogue the heat, the stink, the suffocation of the thing on her head. Night. Desert. She imagines millions of stars. Another jeep is following. She decides she is watching the movie of her own captivity on late-night TV. Another vehicle is in front, she thinks, because now she can hear the different pitch and high hum of the tire treads. She is conscious of groping and of being groped: there are three other sets of hands in the same stifling space, three other bodies, each with jars on their heads.
And then whiplash.
Screech of brakes.
The sound comes a split second later than the pain in her neck.
Soldiers, butts of machine guns, fragments … The passengers are shoved and herded from the cars and turned to the north and made to watch.
“Pay attention, dogs,” barks the leader with the BBC voice.
A hand rips the Velcro collar at Genevieve’s neck and her head is free. Air, blessed fresh air, and dear God, isn’t that Tristan she sees over there? But she is thumped with the butt of a gun, and to the north, at the edge of the desert sky, like Jupiter rising, a globe of incandescent brightness lifts itself and sends plumes like meteors up to the stars. Brighter and brighter, the ballooning planet turns orange, then blood red, and its effulgence lights up half the sky. There is a boom like the end of the world and the little cluster of people, newly unmasked and huddled beside three military jeeps, can feel wavelets of sound buffeting their feet. The shock waves set the soldiers to dancing. They raise their guns above their heads in salute. They fire into the night. The others—the little knot of ten former passengers—move together like filings to a magnet. They huddle, body against body, furtive hand in furtive hand, and telegraph intimations of dread.
The Jupiter-sun is a fireball now and casts a shadowy light of almost-day where the jeeps are. One of the robot men takes the cage off his head, though in the twilight his face cannot be clearly seen.
“That is the end of Flight 64,” he says. “Welcome to Iraq. Welcome to Tikrit Airport.” His English is excellent, his accent is that of a British public school. Genevieve closes her eyes and hears the thin descant of the S on his wrist. Pieces of dream come back to her: Tristan, Sirocco, guns and gas masks, children crying, and then she is falling down a black hole.
Where did yesterday go? Where has Genevieve been? Where is Tristan? An ache more painful than the fire in her throat and her head sets in. A hand brushes hers, feels it, takes hold of it. Tristan’s hand. She leans against him and they cling to each other, weak with joy.
“Ten for ten,” Sirocco says. “That’s a fair exchange, and you fortunate few have been handpicked. You have been handpicked by me personally. Take this as a compliment. Whenever they release one of ours, we release one of you. It’s that simple and you’d better say your prayers.”
One of the hijackers fires a jubilant round at the sky and Sirocco barks at him, three unintelligible words, but the meaning is clear. There is another command, and each prisoner is roughly seized, and manhandled, and tossed about like spit. Someone splits Tristan and Genevieve apart as though prizing a mussel shell open. A gun butt meets the back of Tristan’s head, and Genevieve, punched in the stomach, buckles over. “Put on,” a soldier orders, but she is unable to stand and he is dressing her, roughly, brutally, pushing arms and legs into padded suit, fastening her in, putting another cage on her head. Canvas boots are Velcroed on her feet.
“You happy ten,” Sirocco says, “might stay alive. For the moment, the air you breathe is safe again, but not for long. You will be famous. Whatever happens, your names and your photographs will be in newspapers and on the covers of magazines around the world. We will transmit your passport photographs to CNN. You will achieve immortality.
“And you may yet be inscribed in the Book of Life. You may be saved. That depends on the decisions of your governments. Ten for ten. An eye for an eye, a life for a life.”
He speaks slowly and distinctly, but the sound blurs inside Genevieve’s cage, and the fire on the horizon flickers along the edges of his words. You have just been issued protective suits and mitts, she hears, and fresh gas masks with fresh filters. Sealed into protected space, after which … both sarin and mustard gas … if any part of your skin is exposed …
. He is gesturing now, speaking in mime, and the listeners huddle their padded bodies together and even in the heat, grief steams off them … in agony, as you already know. If you remove your gas masks, or any part of your protective clothing, you will die.
One of Sirocco’s men fires into the sky and chants something unintelligible. At the end, all join him in a brief incomprehensible refrain.
I will translate for you, Sirocco says to the prisoners. This is Operation Black Death, the revenge of Suleiman, praise be to Allah the All-Merciful.
Is it death that brings the sound into focus? Is it possible to believe, Genevieve finds herself thinking, that this is how we will die? Like extras on a movie set? The memory of Tristan’s hand in hers, of his body against hers, gives her a mad surge of hope. Which one is he? She looks from one to the other of the padded prisoners and is unable to tell, yet she feels strangely composed. Sirocco’s voice is suddenly so crisp and clear inside her head cage that she wonders if sensory deprivation has switched the channels. She believes she is on the telepathic track.
“If the demands of Operation Black Death are met, then the bunker will be unsealed and you will live.
“If our demands are not met, you will rot. Your equipment will protect you for twenty-four hours, and after that: seeping toxicity through the filters, and slow but agonizing death. You may prefer to remove your masks and take the fast exit: ten minutes, then violent vomiting and the shakes, then finis.”
Due Preparations for the Plague Page 16