Blood Rules
Page 43
He’d put his trust in Sharett.
“You lied,” he said.
He could have said no, when Sharett proposed trailing a hijack in front of Leila Hanif. What if he’d had the strength to throw himself between Robbie and the one with the gun, as he’d done before, on the plane, so that the bullets took his life, not Robbie’s? What if he’d been his father’s son, the son he’d always yearned to be?
He could have changed everything. Yes. He could.
He looked down to see Leila’s gun still in his hands. He raised it.
Colonel Shlomo Stern’s mind was on his wife’s cancer, his body geared up for combat, still set to automatic. When he caught the flash of moving metal in someone’s torch beam he fired instinctively, almost absentmindedly. Colin never even heard the shots.
24 JULY: 2000: BAHRAIN
Departure was infinitely better than arrival, Andrew Nunn thought, as the big white Cadillac swung off the hotel’s forecourt and headed for the Corniche. Sound drums and trumpets. Et cetera. The car was splendid, if you had a thing about sheepskin and Arab music, and as for motorcycle outriders—well, just what he’d always wanted. One regret haunted him, only one: he still hadn’t managed to prize a smile out of Selman Shehabi, and after all they’d gone though together these past few days that irked, it really did.
He was halfway to the airport when the phone buzzed. He picked it up and, to his astonishment, heard the voice of Britain’s Prime Minister.
“Well, yes,” he said, after a while. “Thank you for those kind words. … I can honestly say it was nothing, Prime Minister.” And he laughed in that knowing way people do when they’re being modest, whereas in fact it was the truth: they’d brought him here for their own purposes, he’d buggered about on the phone till the skin of his ear had started to peel, they’d finished with him and dispatched him to the airport, and here he was, having done nothing, on the blower to the PM, being told how the sun shone out of his arse.
“Your Parliamentary Private Secretary? Of course I’ll
have a word, delightedHello, Richard.”
Another distant voice. “Andrew … my dear boy, how are you? Covered in sand, what?”
Haw. Haw. Haw.
“Look, Andrew, bit of a bruiser, this one. We’re doing the thing tailormade, our end, and it would be frightfully helpful if you could just lend a wee hand.”
“My dear chap—”
“News blackout about the lady,” the PPS said blandly. “Whole thing planned, orchestrated, led by well-known Palestinian johnny called Fouad Nusseibeh, killed by storm troopers. Rule Britannia, massed bands, and chorus of the Irish Guards, got it?”
“No Leila Hanif?”
“No who?”
“Haw!” said Andrew. Haw. Haw.
“No hunt-the-kiddie, no emotional angle for the Sundays to sink their teeth into, just good old-fashioned Middle East political butchery.”
“Mixture as before?” Andrew Nunn inquired.
“Abso-bloody-lutely, old man.”
“Understood. By the way, were the SAS upset?”
“SAS?” A long silence from London. “Oooh … oh, yes, I know what you’re referring to. Most awful confusion, I’m afraid—somehow they never got off the ground our end. Never left Hereford. Total balls-up.”
Now it was Andrew’s turn to be at a loss for words. His brain struggled to make connections, found them coming all too easily. A deal, cobbled together between Jerusalem and London, mutual satisfaction guaranteed....
“Andrew? I say, are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Any problems?”
“None whatsoever,” Andrew Nunn said wearily.
“Spoken like a scholar and a gent. PM’s frightfully pleased, actually.”
“Jolly good.” Andrew cleared his throat. “Any news of what’s happening upcountry? The Israeli storm squad in Yemen?”
“Mm? Sorry?” But suddenly the line, until now clear as a bell, developed a fault so serious that after a while Andrew Nunn replaced the receiver, and it was a funny thing but somehow he knew the PPS wouldn’t be calling back. So. There was to be no sympathy for Leila Hanif, the woman who’d hijacked a plane because she wanted her son. Not at all the sort of show the PM would like to see. Not cricket.
Major Trewin was waiting at the terminal entrance, his beautifully tailored tropicals fitting every bit as well as the cabinet’s story concerning the hijack; there were salutes and much snappy hefting of luggage by soldiers and some handshaking with chaps he wouldn’t be seeing again. And ah, yes! There was Jack Leroy Francis Consett, the company pilot, “L.F.” as he was jocularly known, or “Lucky Fucker” Consett, on account of all the near misses he was rumored to have not quite almost had.
“Jakarta?” said L.F., and for an absurd moment Andrew Nunn, unqualified hero of the moment, was tempted to reply, No, she went of her own accord, but sanity prevailed and instead he said, “I don’t think so, old boy. Is that where you’re headed?”
“Yup. Thought you were too: I’ve been sent to fetch you. The oil-cargo contract’s all stitched up at last.”
Andrew nodded. “I heard. But I think I’ll cadge a lift from Cathay, if it’s all the same to you. Back to good old Blighty.”
“You’re serious?”
“Never more so.”
“But what am I going to tell—”
“Just say this: Life’s too short.”
And with that terse judgment he left them, going to Cathay Pacific’s desk to pick up his first class single to London; doing it, because the damn contract was still going to be there this time next week, because he hadn’t seen Anne-Marie in yonks and she was thoughtful and beautiful, and somewhere deep down inside himself, amid all the statistics and the mortality figures and the amortization percentages on a ten-year-old DC-10, there was a solid nugget of love, and he wanted to give it to her.
So he went through the gate and stood underneath the bright yellow lights that make Bahrain airport so stark, to watch L.F.'s Lear take off, sans passenger; and although he had a long wait until his flight to London, he did not go to the Dilmun lounge but instead stayed beside the window, looking out at the desert moon, a perfect crescent floating on its back, and he wondered if they too could see it, the mother who did not exist and the son she loved so much.
MOTHER LOVE
“Your mother,” Sharett said, “is one of the five most wanted terrorists in the world. She planned and led this hijack because she wanted one thing, and one thing only: you. That is why we are here. That is why Van Tonder had to die, and others will have to die. And that is why, as soon as there is light tomorrow, she will come. She is ready to pursue you unto death, if only she can get you back. So she will come. She will.”
Robbie’s face had become invisible in the gloom, but Colin knew, could feel, his son was smiling. “Yes,” he heard him say; and then, after a pause that seemed as long as life itself—"I know.”
ALSO BY JOHN TRENHAILE
KRYSALIS
ACTS OF BETRAYAL
AVAILABLE FROM HARPERPAPERBACKS
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A woman I know told me she
had married her husband because
what he said was always unexpected -
a good adventurous reason
for matrimony, I thought.
FREYA STARK
The Southern Gates of Arabia
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE of the most important characters in this novel is not a person but a TriStar jet: the aircraft that services flight number NQ 033. Without her, no story; and without my friend, Flight Engineer Bob Osborne, no NQ 033 either. So it gives me great pleas
ure to take this opportunity of thanking him for his expert advice, and when Bob chuckles over such technical errors as remain, I hope he will be good enough to remember that they are mine, not his.
The same applies to Dr. Hamish Aitken, who enthusiastically applied himself to the problems facing my diabetic passenger and provided me with the necessary solutions—I’m most grateful.
“Memuneh” is what Israelis call the head of the Mossad, their external espionage organization roughly corresponding to Britain’s MI6 or the American CIA. By convention, the Memuneh is also head of the entire intelligence hierarchy. He is responsible to the Prime Minister and can be dismissed by the Knesset.
The two Yemens, North and South, have now joined to become a single country. In 1984, however, they were separate.
Finally, I want to pay tribute to three people, each a special individual “character” (nonfiction!) in his or her own right, each a major contributor to the novel: Ed Breslin, whose masterly touch guided this from the first; Charlie McDade, whose perceptive comments and illuminating editorial aperçus went hand in hand with charm, good humor, and friendship; and Jessica Kovar, who mediated, commented, harmonized, and helped until the job was done. When in doubt, say the editors, keep it short. So I will: Thank you all, very, very much.
ENDNOTE
IN the early morning of 23 July 1954, some ninety miles south of Hainan Island, Chinese fighters shot down a DC-4 passenger aircraft owned by Cathay Pacific Airways while on its way to Hong Kong.
The story of this tragic but true incident has been graphically told by Gavin Young in his history of Cathay Pacific, Beyond Lion Rock (London: Hutchinson, 1988), to which I pay grateful tribute. There, Mr. Young records how one of the passengers, Leonard Parrish, threw himself across his son in a vain attempt to save him from the fighters’ bullets. I mentioned to my editor at HarperCollins that I had read this account and been much moved by it. Since both of us are fathers, we spent some time musing whether we would have the guts, should the need arise, to try to save our children’s lives at the expense of our own.
I brooded over that question for a long time.
This novel is the result.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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Copyright © 1992 by Dongfeng Enterprises Limited
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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-03002-3
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Cover illustration by Kirk Reinert
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