Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  By “sing me” here, McCloud understood, Bluey did not mean the sort of singing of the stones which occupied him during sleep. He meant a curse.

  “Poor old feller knows he can’t hang on to his country anyhow,” said Bluey. “Even though they give it to him freehold. They don’t mean it. They don’t mean, ‘We won’t come round and talk about the queen and exports and being a patriot.’ Because they will come round. They come round all the time in Singapore suits. They get down out of classy bloody planes and talk bullshit about balance of payments and exports. And my uncle stares at them and tries to sort out how much of what they’re saying comes from the queen.”

  In the electronics pit on the hijacked aircraft, McCloud would remember with distress that he hadn’t even asked Bluey the name of the drilling company, the corporation behind the enterprise. It was likely Bluey didn’t know it anyhow, that it was some small drilling company which had since sold the rights to the megalith named in the magazine article. And it would be no use explaining to Taliq that Bluey’s tale had sounded generic, to him, that the names almost hadn’t mattered, that the story was an encapsulation of the Barramatjara tragedy and all the rest of the earth’s tribal tragedies.

  Useless to say to Taliq, “I have no interest in mining news.”

  Useless to say, “I own no diamond drilling stocks.”

  Anyhow, in O’Neal’s, McCloud hadn’t asked for the company’s name.

  Hadn’t he been a compassionate troupe manager, though? And hadn’t he swallowed down his own bewilderment at what the literary agent had by that stage already told him, and given himself over entirely, companionably, to treating Bluey’s bewilderment?

  But that counted for nothing in Taliq’s court. It did convince McCloud himself, as he shivered and exchanged conversation with Stone and the Englishman Cale, that he must always ask for names. That it was a guilty world, and names must be inquired after. That you needed to live in the whole world, the world of the miners as well as the world of the agents. If I get out of here, McCloud promised himself forlornly, I’ll make sure I inquire after names and match them against the souvenir programs of dance companies.

  In O’Neal’s that day, the cognac had leveled out Bluey’s woe but somehow given it more authority.

  “I was up there on that stage,” reported Bluey, “and my uncle came in front of me, and his face was painted white and he had that confused look, the look of dead people. And I said to him, Yes, you’re dead, old man. You got to go back to your country. His face had that bloody awful look. He didn’t believe me, or he didn’t want to go, but he knew I was on to something all right. I knew something he didn’t. For the first time in my bloody life, I had one up on him. And he wanted to do me a harm. Because he didn’t know where he was. Poor old bugger. He didn’t know whether to stay or start out, he didn’t know whether to look for his own blood or put a curse on mine.”

  More weeping. A trench-coated young man at the bar was watching them. When men wept in places like this, it was generally a lovers’ quarrel. McCloud, angry for Bluey’s bewilderment, stared the young man down. To hell with you, you catamite! was what he wanted to yell. He was offended that Bluey’s sorrows had such an authenticity, grew from a profound threat, and that this boy thought that what he was seeing was nothing but a shift in affection!

  Bluey did not even notice the young man. He raised his chin. “When I saw my uncle there, on the stage, I asked him, ‘Uncle, how’d they sing you?’ And he said to me, ‘They sung my book.’ And I remember he had this book—it was a book by Louis L’Amour, and the poor old bugger loved it. Under the Sweetwater Rim, that was its name. Louis L’Amour the cowboy writer. That was his one book. He read it fifteen years ago, and he’s been reading it ever bloody since, starting it again as soon as he finishes it. Everyone knew about Under the Sweetwater Rim and my uncle. He was always trying to make other blokes read it. He thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, you know. And now listen, Frank! The last bloke he gave it to—the last bloke I saw handling it when I went home, you know … after you were up there … when my last picture finished … the last bloke I seen with it … well, I know him. I know who it was. Jesus, mate, this cognac’s good. Could you shout me another one?”

  McCloud suspected that Bluey’s enthusiasm for a second drink was merely a ruse to distract him from asking for names.

  “Not a chance, Bluey,” said McCloud. “We still have to walk you through your cues.”

  “I don’t think so, Frank. Not today.” Again he frightened McCloud by conveying his utter conviction of bereavement. “You heard about the featherfoot blokes, Frank?”

  “Featherfoot?” asked McCloud. “I’ve heard something about them.”

  “They’re your sort of stuff, Frank,” Bluey observed. “Real exotic. White buggers like to say, I know So-and-so, and he’s a featherfoot. Yeah, real glamorous unless you run up against them. They’ve got these feather moccasins. They don’t have to wear them or anything, not in the flesh. They wear ’em in spirit, you know. And they meet a man who’s done wrong, and they daze him with a song he can’t even hear. Then they wake him and send him home, and all at once, two days later he falls down for good. Or else they creep up and sing a man’s book. You can tell the featherfoot because his little toe’s broken. It points up. The old men break it when they choose him, when he’s just a kid.” Bluey lowered his voice to a resonant, teary wisper. “My cousin Whitey’s got that little toe, for instance. So he can move and no one sees him. And he can sing too and no bugger hears. You check on Whitey’s foot. Don’t say I told you, Frank. But my cousin Whitey went and sang that book. I wish I didn’t know it, but I know it.”

  McCloud himself began to tremble. Yet it was easy to believe in Whitey, the calm, pontifical curser, singing a doom into the print of Under the Sweetwater Rim. Such was the Barramatjara dispensation! Behind the charming patterns of paint and dance lay the fiercer disciplines. Powerful men and women exercised them. Whitey was exactly the sort of powerful man who might utter a judgment which would chase you through every corner of the night, would viper its way at you up through the print of your familiar book or slide down your throat with the tea from your accustomed cup.

  McCloud’s nostalgia for Barramatjara life hadn’t included up to now any sense of the claustrophobia of tribal judgment. From that second on it would.

  There was also the aspect—which hadn’t escaped McCloud—that Bluey, being convinced about who had sung his uncle, would be bound by blood to inflict a reciprocal punishment on Whitey, his fellow performer in the Barramatjara Dance Troupe.

  This was a terrifying and inconvenient duty for a film star like Bluey to live under. It was also an arrangement which would evade and baffle the management skills of McCloud himself. Curses could whizz back and forth across the stage. Blood might be shed. Someone might be pushed off the edge of a subway station platform. McCloud was suddenly as anxious as Bluey Kannata himself was about the uncle who liked Louis L’Amour.

  “I’ll speak to the hotel management at once,” said McCloud. “But we won’t wait until it’s morning in Baruda. If it’s necessary to put you at your ease, we’ll wake them in the middle of the night.”

  Giving up all idea of subjecting Bluey to a technical rehearsal that day, he took him into a cab and returned with him some fifteen blocks to the hotel. The competent Pauline was not there, was away visiting some cousin of her mother’s in Connecticut. When McCloud asked him about arranging a line for Bluey to reach Baruda, it seemed to astound the manager that there was anywhere on earth which could not be reached at will by telephone. He was unfamiliar with the idea of the radio telephone by which Baruda had touch with the world. The telephone company supervisors McCloud spoke with seemed equally unfamiliar but connected him at last to some specialist in one of the company’s remoter offices who believed the contact could be made.

  It would mean, however, a journey to lower Manhattan and a wait of some hours in a communications room.

/>   And so, while the other members of the troupe were still rehearsing and as an early dusk sharpened the wind off the river, McCloud and Bluey traveled downtown by subway and found the address in an old building which once—as late as the 1930s—had been a great telephone exchange. On the fifth floor, they sat three hours in front of a radio telephone apparatus, sharing a pint of vodka Bluey had insisted on to ease his certainty and acuteness of loss.

  By the third hour, Bluey—so far from Baruda and with only the promise of a tenuous link—divulged sundry other items of Barramatjara intelligence. But never once did he mention Highland Pegasus, the diamond fanciers for whose sake, within three weeks, McCloud would be punished in the electronics pit of a hijacked aircraft.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Landing in the Morning

  At some time the three dazed and pallid men in the electronics pit were jolted out of freezing half slumber by alterations of noise, by greater vibration, and by an access of warmer air.

  “I do believe we’re coming down,” Cale announced to the other two. For even in this he was first with an interpretation. “Someone’s letting us back to earth! Someone is consenting to refuel us!”

  They continued to thud down amid the earth’s lumpy rising warmth. “The Mediterranean,” said McCloud.

  “I would call that likely,” said Cale.

  “Algeria, maybe,” athletic Daniel Stone guessed through his perfect teeth.

  “Perhaps,” said Cale. “Interesting to speculate.” And of course he began to. To Cale, you were forced to conclude, the world was a seminar. “We don’t know whether we have imposed ourselves on this airport we’re approaching—at least I hope we’re approaching an airport—or whether they’re welcoming us.” He pulled a face. “Jesus, I hope they let us out for a piss. I don’t want to short-circuit any of this stuff.”

  “Or smudge our cards,” said Stone dryly.

  McCloud felt his own bladder growing like a stone, brewing like a cloud, within him. He could not countenance the humiliation or the stench which might occur down here.

  “Okay, Cale,” said Stone, “you keep telling us you’re the expert. Tell us what you think is happening on the ground.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Cale, trying to pretend he would rather not be put to the mental effort. He crossed his arms reflectively, the hands tucked into each opposing armpit. “Forgive me, Mr. Stone. I don’t have a watch, I don’t have vision. And I still don’t know what Taliq and his lads mean.”

  For some reason, this amused and cheered McCloud. “But you told us upstairs you knew what they meant,” he said.

  “Oh, of course. That. Well, as I say, you can bet they’re part of some radical fragment, and they’re out to prove their prestige through their acts. But if they were a fragment, they would not be welcome, you see, in Algiers or Oran or Tunis, where the more orthodox and moderate Palestinian groups can be found … the ones who don’t sanction acts of terror.

  “However, if this aircraft were ready to fall out of the sky from lack of fuel, then it might grudgingly be permitted to touch down at one of a dozen places.” Cale closed one eye. “On the other hand, this could be Tripoli, Qaddafi’s Tripoli, which very likely approves of what Taliq is doing. See, my friends, we’re driven to think in circles.”

  “The sad truth is,” lamented Daniel Stone, “we have here an expert on terrorism—Cale—and a manufacturer of software to measure up their pathology—myself. But we know no more than the folk strapped in their seats upstairs.”

  Cale winked at McCloud then. “Well, it’s not quite as dismal as that. Though we have no eyes and we have no pants, within those limits surely—as I’ve said already—we can guess a certain amount about what you might call the profiles of the boys upstairs. These matters are well established, as you know as well as I, my dear Mr. Stone. I was simply opening up the subject, no more, when we were speaking briefly upstairs earlier, with the other passengers.

  “Wouldn’t you agree, for instance, it’s very likely that each of Taliq’s bright, brave, berserk young men has had his education paid for by whatever organization Taliq represents? Or else by money from some secret police somewhere which has Taliq’s group under contract? Because terror is a business, as we both know. Arab Youth Popular Socialist Front and such names are so much nomenclature and horseshit. A name made up specifically for this act. The taking of our plane.

  “So—as I intimated already—some government … or its secret police … sees the talents of the organization Taliq belongs to as bankable. Iraq or Syria might put up money—I mean big sums, free of taxes—to enable some act of this nature. Just like selling a house—some on contract, some on closing.”

  “Selling a house?” murmured McCloud in disbelief.

  “Yes. Say Syria wants to discredit the moderate Arabs! They don’t want Palestinians and Israelis talking gently to each other! A good, solid hijack, and the world barks like mad dogs again, and the normal hatreds everyone’s so happy with settle down in place once more. A job like that’s worth millions in anyone’s money!”

  The longer Cale spoke, the more his body spread in this cramped cell, forcing McCloud’s cold haunches together. Just the same, the Englishman’s utterances did sound quite sensible and magisterial to McCloud.

  “And Taliq?” Cale went on in a creaking voice. “The pattern of every hijack we know about tells us he isn’t exactly the leader of the organization itself … he’s more what you’d call middle management. Ambitious, I’d guess. And he doesn’t really want to die … he wants to live on and flourish.”

  “Right,” agreed Stone. “Success here will help him get the leadership.”

  “Exactly. Of course the problem is he’s also quite willing to perish if necessary, more willing on balance than us. He’s willing to blow us up, him and his lads with us. He’s a soldier. But he also knows that if he lives, his act will attract more recruits to his flag, more foot soldiers for the next time some government wants foul play done. In return for which, as I say, the rewards are so great you can send those kids upstairs—Hasni, Yusuf, and the rest—to Harvard or Oxford.” With a conclusive swipe of the back of his hand across his nose, Cale came to his peroration. “So how do I think of those young men with their Polish automatics? They are paying off their educational loans. That’s how I think of them.”

  As the plane encountered lower air still, the American Stone, unanchored in his corner, was jolted forward toward McCloud. It seemed, however, not to be purely a matter of turbulence. He appeared to be in a state of forceful dissent from what Cale was arguing.

  “You can’t compare them to honest kids like you’re doing,” said Stone. “‘Paying off their educational loans’! That’s just not a feasible proposition. With these guys, you don’t begin by stating similarity with normal people. They’re essentially different from a kid, say, like my stepson.”

  He blinked at what must have been the inevitable inquiry in McCloud’s and Cale’s faces.

  “Sure. I have a stepson. I married late. A widow. But the fact is, you just can’t compare those bastards upstairs with my boy. They’re pathological to the core, and that’s it!”

  “If you’ll forgive me, Stone,” said Cale, unconcerned with whether he was forgiven or not, “I think the difference is only one of degree, not of kind.”

  “No way,” said Stone, shaking his head. “Different in kind, those sons-of-bitches. A different species!”

  McCloud tried to imagine his own son as a potential activist and arm of revolution. Could events make him Hasni?

  Meanwhile Cale was raising his eyebrows. “My dear old chap, does your computer program, this Psychopar or whatever … does it begin by saying your stepson and the boys upstairs are actually different animals?”

  “Look, Mr. Cale,” said Stone, “I might be a simple engineer and therefore easy to dismiss. But my partner Hirsch has often said to me that the usefulness of our program comes from the fact it works from substantive differences, based on verifiable dat
a. In talking about terrorists, Cale, it cuts through all that nature-versus-nurture bullshit. It doesn’t pretend that hijackers or bomb throwers are normal boys suffering from a little too much motivation, say, or a lack of vitamin C. If it did, what it told governments and police forces would be useless! No, it begins with crucial departures. It delivers the key because it works in essential differences. Like the ones between those sons-of-bitches upstairs and my stepson.”

  McCloud watched Cale consider the wisdom of such a method and seem to dismiss it. How wonderful that stripped, labeled, and imprisoned, he and Stone had space for such passion.

  “Oh God!” declared Cale now. “All I want to do is—I’m trying to project from normal people the sorts of people Taliq’s boys are. They’re tribal patriots, they remember history as any young man should, they’re compelled by history, in fact, and they want more of an education than they’ll get on the West Bank. A combination of motives. I recommend you listen to these kids, Stone. Their own words will tell you.”

  “Not so far they haven’t,” said Stone.

  With a meaty hand, the English journalist made a concession. “Oh sure. They are different from your lad in some respects. At least in the sense they’ve probably already been through some initiation he wouldn’t even think of. Even though he—like the rest of us males—has probably done crazy enough things in the holy name of initiation into whatever group he wants to be part of. Jesus Christ, I still think most boys are the same. Halfway between a rebel and a rapist. Now those boys upstairs may have placed an explosive device in a nightclub in West Berlin, or thrown a bomb into a swimming pool in Athens—you perhaps remember the Glyphada Hotel there, a delegation of handicapped Britons bobbing around in the pool. Two killed, nine wounded.” But at that, suddenly and as if in self-reproof for overstepping limits of taste, Cale shook his head. “Most likely, however, nothing dramatic like that. Probably a raid on a savings and loan in New Jersey or on a post office in Manchester. Funds for the cause, you see, and a rite of passage. And there’s excitement and brotherhood in all that!”