Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

Warmth from outside was just the same sublime. It made its false promises as it entered and brushed McCloud’s cheek.

  Behind McCloud, Taliq spoke to Hasni and Musa in an even, unemphatic voice. “They are temporizing, they are making logistical excuses, they say Mahoud is not here yet, and they blame logistics and transportation failures. It is all the normal lies.”

  You could in a sense hear the three of them, Taliq and the two boys, reabsorbing and sucking on that datum—the turpitude of the powers, of the Palestinian traducers. “We must convince them about getting Mahoud aboard,” Taliq calmly announced. “We must shoot one of these three.” It was as shocking as hearing such an idea from a familiar—a doctor, a teacher, an editor, a lover—and it sounded just as unlikely.

  McCloud’s brain abandoned the threatened remnant in its underwear and nudged the ceiling, now and then—dependent on how it bucked among the lights and lockers—observing the breathless and negligible McCloud-flesh below and the posture of servitude and submission it maintained.

  McCloud remembered in the electronics pit how both Cale and Stone, experts, had surmised that the reason Taliq had taken the plane was because someone wanted a level of hate restored. But that there would be specific demands as well (the demand for Mahoud, as it turned out). These specific requests, said Cale and Stone in rare agreement, were a flag of convenience and not the real point.

  Yet Taliq now wanted someone shot for the sake of the side issue. Taliq seemed locked in and could not relent on this.

  It seemed an important question, though: How much did Taliq love his brother Mahoud? At the heart of things, how desperately did he desire Mahoud’s freedom?

  “Which one first, then?” Musa could be heard asking in the same voice which had dismissed the T-55 tank.

  McCloud believed Taliq would have an exact instruction. He would have memorized a proper order of dispatch, inexplicable to an outsider but cogent to him.

  Yet he did not answer Musa. There was a silence. It was exactly as if—like an embarrassed student—Taliq could not remember. The hand wound, pain, sleeplessness, desire, the curse, had borne away the recollection of things anyone could tell Taliq must have planned.

  The boys waited. McCloud was overcome by an almost pictorial image of doubt invading their blood, too, like ink spreading in some simple and immutable element.

  Taliq remembered himself then and said at last, “The one in the middle or at either end, it doesn’t matter.”

  But Hasni and Musa were not restored by that.

  “But which one of us?” asked Hasni.

  “Does it matter?” Taliq sounded brisk now, if not testy. “With all the lies, I fear a number will need to perish. So what does it matter?”

  But though it mightn’t have mattered to Musa or Hasni five minutes past, now it did.

  “All right, then,” said Taliq, apparently to Hasni. “You go first.”

  Hasni now seemed liberated by this nomination. He appeared from behind them and briefly weighed them with his eyes. There was no element of doubt in Hasni’s assessment of the three of them. It didn’t seem at all likely now that he might be overcome by hesitancy in the next minute or so. When McCloud had imagined execution, it had carried the blemished face of the old soldier Razir or even the confident, lady-killer visage of Yusuf the tailor’s son. He had never really believed in Hasni as the liquidator.

  “This one has a wife on board,” McCloud—agog for every nuance of Hasni’s words—heard the boy say. The barrel moved from McCloud’s face to Stone’s to Cale’s. Soon it would stop this. It would alight and discharge itself.

  Where was Whitey Wappitji now? McCloud, looking down from above upon the three condemned, wanted to know. In the face of Hasni’s certainty, where was the benefit of Wappitji’s wonderful power to curse? For the boy was studiously asking himself the question: Was it more correct to shoot a man with a wife aboard, in spite of the noise the wife would make? Or was it permitted to shoot one of the other two, who had no kindred aboard to wail for them? Was the easy option justified? Was the hard option to be commended?

  At least, thought McCloud with a kind of irrelevance he did not believe himself given to, at least none of us are pleading. Stone began to utter Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, in Hebrew. It was all unfamiliar to McCloud except the word Elohim. The Absolute. The Source and the Darkness.

  It made McCloud cry out, a group plea. “We’re innocent. The three of us. None of us have hurt you.”

  This proposition was a revelation to McCloud himself, who had until now believed he was more innocent than the other two.

  “Shut up!” said Taliq casually.

  “Even if the story in the magazine is true,” cried McCloud, “it’s not my doing! The other two …” He thought of Cale’s poignant underwear and of Stone’s Hassidic father who would not sue the Germans. “The other two are not guilty also.”

  “Shut up!” said Taliq. There was a distress and tiredness in his voice now. “This has already been discussed.”

  And as had been happening lately at the apex of all McCloud’s severest perplexities, Cale began to talk.

  “Come on, boy,” he said to Hasni. “Let’s have it, then! Make yourself a hero. Stop my education dead, sonny Jim, and pay for yours!”

  There was a flutter in Hasni’s eyes, a minor wavering. McCloud didn’t believe, though, that it grew from Cale’s line of provocation.

  “Go to it, son!” Cale continued, in some ways a genuine bore even now. “Satisfy the Israelis, you dumb little Hamitic bastard. You think you’ve got a license for it? No. You’re giving them one.”

  Cale gestured out the door, to the subtle world out there; to the army whose loyalties were a mystery and whose hardware followed the latest Chadian fashion.

  “Didn’t your political science professor fill you in,” asked Cale, “at Tulane or whatever cow college you were at? Come on, you little camel fucker, do what the Mossad wants. Strike a blow for craziness, sonny. Come on, come on!”

  McCloud’s engorged, levitating brain wondered what Cale’s harangue of the boy meant. Was it suicide or brotherly love? Was he taking the heat for McCloud and Stone? And why would he? Or was he somehow diverting heat from himself?

  Hasni stood back still, merely afflicted by the politeness he’d shown early in the journey. He seemed to be allowing the journalist room to conclude his statement.

  Then it became clearer to McCloud: what Cale was working toward. From a lifetime of archness, of journalistic ruses, the Englishman knew that there was a point at which impudence cried out to be punished—and a point beyond that, given a few seconds’ hesitation, when punishment cannot clear-headedly be inflicted. Cale, helped by Taliq’s earlier uncertainty, seemed now to have led Hasni to that point. McCloud’s primal belief in the curse revived. For Hasni seemed now—in strictest terms—spellbound.

  “Hasni,” Taliq called in warning. “Hasni!”

  McCloud closed his eyes on all the intimations of bright day from beyond the plane. But Cale had not shut his eyes or stopped working away on his stratagem.

  “Yes, Hasni. You do it. Just a question, though, sonny. Who are you doing it for? Who put up the money, eh? The Iraqis? The Libyans? Because some of them are just as passionate to see havoc set free as Taliq is. So who is it, lad? All of the above? Or are you going to kill me without inquiry? And can Taliq tell you, anyhow? Or doesn’t he have a fucking clue, either? Better ask, son, better ask. Who’s the paymaster? And if Taliq won’t tell you, why should you hang yourself for him?”

  Opening his eyes again, driven to it by the awful expectancy of the air around him, McCloud rejoiced to see that Hasni had raised his own eyes in appeal. McCloud was convinced then that the person most likely to be shot was Hasni himself. Cale had brought it about by clever talk.

  Taliq cried, “Do it! Do it!”

  Hasni did not do it. McCloud began to itch with admiration of Cale and gratitude to the word Elohim. Everything Cale had ever learned had been applied here
, in the waist of the plane, to talk his way out of execution! That was the glory of his line of argument. It not only liberated Cale. It liberated Stone and McCloud as well. It not only disarmed Hasni, but it might well disable Musa, Razir, Yusuf. Leaving only Taliq, whom Whitey Wappitji had cursed and Daisy Nakamura might be willing to confuse and seduce.

  But then the car fancier Musa appeared, stepping from the direction of Taliq’s voice. McCloud did not like the look of genial contempt he threw in Hasni’s direction. It caused McCloud to shut his eyes again. In darkness, he heard Taliq’s voice once more. “For the present purpose, I don’t care who does it.”

  There were two connected and astounding noises, like physical blows not only against the ears, but also at the base of the brain. McCloud’s eyes were jolted open twice for an instant, but each time he was quick and determined to jam them shut again. At least I have not urinated, he assured himself. For that reason it was allowed now for him to resume his observations.

  He did not at the moment know what the noises had been. He knew he had once—very recently—anticipated them and had at that stage, he remembered, known what their significance would be when they came. But now that he had heard them, the memory of that meaning had been erased.

  Musa had enlisted the balding steward to help him drag Cale to the door. The steward sobbed but seemed efficient. Cale traveled forward on his bloodied placard, facedown, slack-muscled, surely alive yet certainly gone. He left an astounding trail of matter behind him.

  McCloud looked at the soles of Cale’s large feet. They jolted away up what McCloud took to be Cale’s life now converted to a river. It could be seen that he had been shot twice through the neck. And this by Musa. Not by act of God. By Musa.

  McCloud was aware of the whimpering of other passengers, as Musa and the steward handled Cale forward over the rim of the door. Here a terrible deadweight fall began, but merciful people throughout the plane screamed to cover the sound of it.

  Stone turned to McCloud. “See?” he said, swallowing. “See?”

  Musa returned from the door. He was exactly the same boy who had been contemptuous about the electronics of Japanese cars. He punched the bewildered Hasni’s arm. “Next one,” he murmured in reassurance.

  Stone had been reduced to a purely private anguish. McCloud admired him for being capable of it. He had put his face in his hands.

  “Damn you,” he said softly. “God damn you.”

  Hasni kicked him. But it was a fairly gentle and uncertain kick.

  McCloud became aware of what he was sure was Pauline’s cry from the back of the aircraft, a scream of indefinite grief. Yes, a scream of inquiry. He felt astoundingly honored by it.

  “I’m here,” he yelled. “I’m here!”

  He heard the sound diminish.

  Taliq had taken Hasni away, his arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  Had the Barramatjara Dance Troupe heard? Where was Daisy Nakamura? How had she absorbed this savagery?

  His breath restoring itself, his brain returning from above to the socket behind his eyes, McCloud found it a relief to know now: the boys—whatever flickers there may have been in Hasni’s eyes, whatever wavering—meant what they had threatened. From Taliq’s nirvana on the upper deck to the battery of toilets at the rear, all the plane understood. Pauline herself would now be living by that certainty. Whitey Wappitji would have no doubts.

  Some passengers wept still, and most were stark-eyed.

  The stain of Cale’s recent life darkened to a memorial on the carpet. Hurled from the plane, he was lovable in retrospect. His antibureaucratic demand for whiskey before takeoff, his gritty rundown on where Taliq’s boys might have sprung from, and what the balance of their souls might be, seemed like gifts now. But his strategy—daring them like normal children are dared, facing them out—had failed him.

  For a time McCloud and Stone seemed to be left alone, kneeling, looking aft at passengers who largely did not want to recognize them. It surprised him that many faces were uptilted now in shocked sleep. Barely a staring eye met McCloud’s. They have written us off, he assured himself analytically and without bitterness. They don’t want to catch our disease.

  “McCloud,” he heard Stone call. Stone seemed very clear-eyed and apparently casual; his arm muscles were flexed, though. “Listen … looks to me I’ll be the next. These guys don’t really believe you’re guilty like they believe I’m guilty. And then statistics will be on your side. Hijacks generally only run to two point three seven fatalities. That’s in the program.…”

  McCloud, of course, found himself driven by an obscene sort of politeness. “No, I’m just as likely to be next,” he insisted. “My friend actually called out he wanted me to be the first.”

  “Well,” Stone said softly, conceding the needless debate, “he’s not exactly conscious. You can’t tell, anyhow. We don’t have a computer, and we don’t have the right software.” He grinned at that—the irony running against himself. “Just this, though. Remind my attorney, whose name is Max Freilich, that he’s holding special instructions for my wife and stepson—something quite apart from the normal documentation, you understand. Something for her future. Remind Freilich of it. Because he’s getting old. He was my parents’ lawyer. F-r-e-i-l-i-c-h. Max. On Forty-second Street, just near the Century Club. Got that? It’s easy. F-r-e-i-l-i-c-h. Do it for me.”

  There was a hidden resource which would give Mrs. Stone a plush widowhood! McCloud had no such thing as that to leave for Pauline. Perhaps the temporary notoriety of his victimhood would make some publisher increase the advance on his book by a few thousand. Enough, as old-fashioned people liked to say, “to take care of the arrangements.”

  But largely, Pauline would provide. Her father decamping for the gold diggings, her novelist husband—between them they’d convinced her that she’d better; and she had by founding her business. So that was settled.

  Time skidded beneath him now. There was no mark of distinction to any of the minutes which shifted away beneath his knees, tearing him down this last little fall to the indefinable bottom.

  At Baruda, when four of them had spent all day making a painting for him to photograph, he’d said, “Thanks for taking so much time.”

  And Cowboy Tom had replied, “We don’t take time, mate. Time takes us.”

  Time was taking McCloud at a harsh pace now.

  Musa and Hasni were behind him and no longer in view. Hasni had returned from the little tutorial stroll Taliq had taken him on right after Cale’s murder. McCloud heard Taliq return again now, heard him whispering to the boys in Arabic—a report of transactions he had just been carrying out by radio from the flight deck. From all McCloud could tell, Hasni did not seem to have sacrificed his standing by the hesitation over Cale. He seemed equally informed with Musa, who had done the casual killing.

  For Taliq had been there, and gone again, and then returned, and all without an angry word to Hasni. Once he moved down the plane, taking his time, to talk with Razir, who—according to Taliq’s mysterious timetables—had turned up again in the rear section. It meant Yusuf was back on the flight deck. The choreography of these lads was ceaseless and almost to be admired.

  Taliq came back without a glance at McCloud or Stone but with what looked like a bitter plan written on his face.

  McCloud, breath gone again, soared above and outside the plane. He achieved a perimeter eye’s view of the bright white, liveried sheath of the aircraft, a black hole opened in its flank, a geometrically concise patch of darkness leveled at the day.

  Hasni stepped forward into McCloud’s view. The young man seemed revivified, his face a little florid. He believed he was proof against eloquence this time, even if McCloud and Stone should unexpectedly show any. The maw of his Polish weapon traversed an easy axis between Stone’s face and McCloud’s. McCloud listened for Taliq’s order from behind his head. He was taken by surprise instead to hear Taliq’s voice emerge from the intercom, from the flight deck upstairs.

&
nbsp; “My ladies and gentlemen passengers,” Taliq began. “I have further news on possible outcomes.”

  Not all the passengers, McCloud noticed, woke up or stopped talking for this. Had they lost faith, or did they choose to live normally under Taliq’s dominion? If there was a memory of Cale’s murder, it had been sucked deeply down and would be retrieved only by a painful effort.

  “The men with whom I have been speaking by radio,” said Taliq, “the agents of the amusingly named great powers, claim they cannot quickly present my brother Mahoud and his two associates. It seems a small request, but they cannot satisfy it. The Palestinian traitors have kept him hidden away as a prisoner in a remote place, and it has been difficult to find him and deliver him. They require that we be refueled and then fly to another destination, one much closer to Mahoud’s place of detention. There they swear—though we doubt the value of their oaths—that our brother will be delivered to us. They ask us that in view of the refueling, no other criminals should be punished at this time. They claim that they have been influenced greatly by receiving the body of the criminal Cale. I hope as keenly as you do, ladies and gentlemen, that that is exactly right.”

  There was silence from Taliq, but the intercom spat and crackled on. Was he reflecting, or had his breath failed?

  “And so we shall take to the air again, a short flight. You know the old saying, ‘Happy landings’? The happy landings depend on the great powers, who have not shown themselves to be great or good or reliable in any way. But we have our hopes, don’t we? I believe that what you could call moderate hope is justified.…”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  Heresy

  The end of Taliq’s communication brought a spatter of fairly casual applause from among the body of passengers. Hasni and Musa, nudging them gently with weaponry, got McCloud and Stone up on their unfamiliar, their forgotten legs. On the way back to Taliq’s ambiguous place at the peak of the plane, the party yet again went by the sedated Bluey Kannata. McCloud, confused by his own deliverance, studied the actor’s face, the point of the cheeks turquoise, the brow knotted studiously, the eyes shut up against all accusation.