Kingfisher

by Gerald Seymour

  It was Isaac who stayed close to the navigator watching the pencil lines that he drew across the green heavily overscored map surface on the small pull-out table that acted as his work bench.

  Slow and painstaking, the plotting of the course. A few more minutes and they would have crossed the dark and shaded line that marked the barricade between the cul-tares of East and West. Just a line on a map at that height, and hazed squares of toned brown and yellow beneath them. Nothing to demonstrate the wire, and the mines and the watch towers, and the fear and the clinging helplessness that the frontier meant twenty-seven thousand feet beneath. Soon the descent would start, and the ground shades would sharpen, and then it would be over, and they would have achieved the impossible. Escape, something that could not have been contemplated two short days before. And now it was achieved, bar a few miles, a few minutes' flying time.

  'We are nearly there,' he called softly to David. Why is the man still so tense, why is it necessary to hold the gun so close to the girl? The Migs have gone, been defeated, seen off. Tt is over now, friend. We have beaten the pigs, hammered them, destroyed them. Relax, David.' Still the stress etched across David's face, still the suspicion there, nothing to show that he was convinced of their victory. Impatience now from Isaac. 'Can't you see, David, we are there?' He pulled the map from the navigator's table and thrust it under David's face. 'It's over, we are there.

  What was it you called it? The Kingfisher flight? The Kingfisher flight is over. The break-out of the Kingfisher, and we have done it."

  David did not speak to him, but said quietly with strain eating at his voice to the pilot officer,

  'Which airport should we land at?'

  Disinterest on her face, not her concern, she jerked her head back in the direction of the navigator. 'You should ask him. He is the one who will tell you that.'

  'Which airport do we go to?' David asked his question of the navigator, and the man in the blue uniform with twin rings of gold braid on his wrists waved away the question. 'I am talking to the ground. They have contacted us. They say they have a message for us and are awaiting the responsible person Who will read it. The nearest airport should be Hanover, that is the civil airport, also in that area are many of the military bases of the NATO forces of the British . . . It's unlikely they would permit us to use an Air Force camp. There are many options that are open if they give us permission to land. But you must be quiet, because I do not have much English and that is the language they will use to me — the pilot officer has very little, insufficient to talk to the controllers. The man that you killed was the one who spoke English.'

  'How far are we from the border?'

  A momentary calculation by the navigator, a deviation from his main task of awaiting the message from the ground, pencil and ruler on the map. 'We are there.'

  Isaac turned away from the cockpit, walked past the

  forward exit door and the lavatories

  and the cupboard space for the winter coats, came to the

  entrance of the passenger cabin,

  machine-gun still at the ready, held low across his thighs.

  Looked at the faces, saw only the

  drained and exhausted stares that faltered back at him. He realized the ordeal to which they had subjected this passive, muted collection of strangers - only one thing in common, all of them, that they wanted to sleep tonight in Tashkent. Time to relieve their misery, and time too, to demonstrate the power of three young Jews, and what faith could win.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for you that I hope will prove welcome. We are now crossing the frontier between the two Germanys. We are awaiting the instructions of the government of the BDR as to which airport they wish us to use for landing. You should be aware of our descent very soon. It has not been our intention to cause you any hurt, but you must stay in your seats and observe our orders. That is all.' And as an afterthought - and he laughed like a child when he said it -'Perhaps some of you would care to leave the plane with us?' His humour was met by the sad, tired eyes that offered no flicker of response. Separated from him by the full length of the cabin, half-hidden by the drinks trolley that was her protection from the rear passengers, Rebecca, flagging in her strength and leaning on the trolley top for relief and showing the pistol; he smiled to her, saw her return the greeting. Funny girl, he thought, but she'd done them well. There hadn't been the time, not the opportunity to talk to her of Yevsei. The little bugger must have been on a hope and prayer to have put the guns aboard, but he couldn't have made it with her, could he? Not if David wasn't getting it ... No chance for Yevsei. If she wasn't round David so much, then there could have been the opportunity, roll of drums for Isaac. David just didn't understand - too busy with his war games to see what was there on a plate. But she couldn't have kept her legs crossed all night, must have let old Yevsei get his hand in somewhere

  - stands to reason, if he was going to take a risk like that. Take a girl to persuade a man to put guns on Aeroflot, only a girl...

  David was tugging at his shoulder, pulling at him, wrenching him backwards and off balance as he was swung towards the cockpit 'Shut up, you fool. Shut up and come in here.' A moment to see the relief sucked from the faces of those passengers closest to him, and David had dragged him too deep for them to follow his whispered words. The Germans say we cannot land. They forbid us to use their airfields.'

  'It's a bluff . . . like the Migs.' Even as Isaac spoke the cold sweat that comes from chronic uncertainty, comes when the mast is broken, when the ladder slips, was spearing its way across his stomach, into his groin, an awful chill. 'They don't mean it...'

  "How do you know they don't mean it? They say they will prevent us from landing.'

  'Perhaps it's just an airport official, someone who had not been notified about us. Do they know who we are? Do they know we are Jews?'

  They know everything about us. They know we are Jews. They know our names. They know we have passengers on board. They say that they know we have fuel, and they say we must fly on.'

  'Which is the nearest airport to our present position?' Isaac snapped at the navigator, seeking to regain the initiative.

  •Still Hanover.'

  Tell them that we are going to Hanover. Tell them we are going to land at Hanover.' Isaac was shouting; they were coming to the West, they were coming to freedom, they were coming to the democracies. 'Tell them that, and hold the course for Hanover.'

  'Only one person that can give orders in the cockpit, Isaac, and that is me.' David, animated, creased in anger.

  'Well, give some orders then. Take the plane down to Hanover.'

  Take the plane to Hanover,' David told Anna Tashova. The transfusion of energy from his fury was short-lived, and he seemed to crumple again, the belief in the outcome slipping. The girl's hands moved to the instruments to make the changes and deviations that were called for by the navigator. Checking altitude, checking airspeed, asking him to seek a talk-down into the airspace, and with her face set tight as he shrugged and said they would give no co-operation, that they could only repeat the message already passed to the airliner, that they were sorry.

  'How long?' David asked the navigator.

  Ten minutes and we will see the airfield. I will tell them again that we are coming. But you should know that they were very definite. They said they would prevent us from landing.'

  Because he was a big man and sat high in his seat Edward R. Jones Jr had seen David pull Isaac back towards the entrance to the cockpit. All the passengers, adult and children, were susceptible to the changes of mood in their captors, studied and analysed them, because they had little else to do, and because these were the only clues they possessed as to the future of the flight. Every smile, every furrowed forehead was noticed and evaluated as the passengers sought for information. It was as if the act were mimed, because the voices of David and Isaac were far removed, and were lowered, and the yowling of that bloody baby Obliterated any possibility for even the keenest ears
to eavesdrop. But Edward R. Jones Jr was not totally disappointed by his inability to hear the words that were spoken; his eyes had not betrayed him. They reported a new mood, a new urgency, a new tension at the front of the aircraft. He and his wife were seated at the back of the plane, among the last rows of the cabin, while the mass had herded towards the front because they had not read, as the American had, that the only possibility of survival in an air disaster is to be sitting in the rear. He and Felicity Ann always sat at the back, and it was that which put him in easy conversational range of Rebecca, as she stood with the gun still unfamiliar in her hand watching her charges and as ill-informed about what was happening in the cockpit as they were.

  'Miss,' he said, hands still on his head, 'Miss, do you speak English?'

  'You have heard the orders, it is forbidden to speak.' Clipped, hostile, shunning the contact; but an answer in the language that he sought.

  'Forget that crap, Miss, if you'll excuse me. The question was, "do you speak English?" and the answer was that you do."

  It is not permitted for you to talk.' Halting and styled by school classrooms, but she could understand what he said, and reply in a fashion.

  "It strikes me, Miss, and I'm only a passenger here, but it strikes me your friends up the front have a problem. You get that impression?' She ignored him, wondered what else she could do.

  Couldn't hit him, not without coming from behind her barricade, and she couldn't call David or Isaac because they were at the cockpit, and she had seen what the American had, and the two men had looked anxious. 'Perhaps the problem is, Miss, that no one is that keen to have you. Thought of that one, have you? That there won't be a red carpet down there waiting for you.'

  'We are Jews, we are persecuted. We are fleeing from a system of intolerance, and so we go to Israel. In the West they are the enemy of the Soviets - you tell me they will not help us?'

  Edward R. Jones Jr turned full towards her, eye to eye, face to face. Quite a pretty girl really, if she did something about her hair, bit of make-up, little eye shadow - not a beauty but presentable, dreadful frock, but they all wore things like that over there.

  "Have you thought, Miss, that it could all be a bit harder than that, that people this side of the line might not be quite as cosy, quite as friendly as you thought they would?' A rhythm in his voice, monotonous like the drip of a tap that needs a new washer, hypnotizing in its way, and dulling and wasting. 'When the Palestinians fly the planes into Arab countries they get locked up now, you know. No more garlands and a big villa to lie around till the heat cools. They shove them in the cells. Times move on, Miss.'

  'We are not Palestinians, we are not terrorists. We are Jews and we have been oppressed, we have been persecuted, and now we have fought back . . .' She too had now raised her voice, the last of the group to do so, but responding in her own way to a strain that was becoming intolerable, crippled all the time by the isolation of her position, divorced from the others, wanting comfort, reassurance.

  They all say that, Miss. All reckon that their God is on their side, that he looks with a friendly eye on their cause.

  You're not the first to join this merry-go-round, Miss; there are plenty before you. Proper all-sorts they are-Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, Tupamaros, Zeepa, Provos, Baader- Meinhof, ETA 5, PFLP. They're all in your line of business. And one problem they all face - they need somewhere to go, somewhere to sleep, somewhere where they aren't going to be hunted. Rest* houses are short on the ground, Miss. If you can't put this bird down in Tel Aviv you're lost, you'll be like all the other lepers and pariahs. No one will want you.'

  'We are going to land, Isaac told you so. Isaac told you we were going to land. And the plane is now descending.'

  Close to shrieking, and the words carrying the length of the cabin, enough to rouse Isaac from far away so that he ran the distance of the aisle, and when she pointed to Edward R. Jones Jr she could not speak because the tears choked in her throat. He seemed to dare the boy, to taunt and anger him in the very defiance of his steadied, aged eyes. Not even the hands raised in self-defence across his face, nor his body turned away that a blow might be warded off. Isaac swung the barrel of his gun in a short, chopping arc on to the apex of the American's skull, one blow to submerge it under the protection of Felicity Ann's arms, and there was blood on heir dress and the sound of the distress of an old man for protest.

  'Rebecca, it will be over very soon. We are nearly there. We are losing height. Courage for a few more moments. Courage."

  Isaac's was the only voice in the great hushed cigar of the cabin. But he had not told her of the message from the ground, had not thought to. Flaps moving and arresting the progress of the plane, causing it to yaw from side to side, thrust sound changed to a higher pitch, and the rumbling of the extraction of the undercarriage.

  The movement of the plane made it difficult for David to stand in the cockpit, but there was nowhere else for him to go. The pilot officer in her seat, the navigator in his, and only the captain's place with the strapped-down body available to him. Couldn't bring himself to touch the man, different if they'd meant to kill him, if he had been an enemy and his death had been reached by decision. But it was just an accident, an empty and hollow accident to a man whose status represented no threat to them. Not like killing the policeman. And so the captain reserved his seat, his head rolling with the motion of the aircraft and the blood trail congealed and darkened.

  We are talking again with the tower at Hanover. They repeat that we are not permitted to land there. They call it a blanket order for the whole of the Federal Republic. They are emphatic that we will not be permitted to land there.' The navigator seemingly calm, unaffected by the bow-string tension around him, and repeated his messages as if uncaring as to who heard them, all the time interrupting his recital of instructions from the ground with the minutiae of course adjustments that the pilot officer required of him.

  'Another few seconds and we will be through the haze, then we will see the runway, then we will see if they mean to stop us, or whether as your friend says it is just a bluff.' Five years' flying she had had, three more before that at the training school, sufficient experience solo for her to be able to handle the Ilyushin on her own. Too senior really for her to be flying co-pilot, especially a creature like this, but the rosters were not logically drawn and did not always recognize her log book of flying hours. They taught you how to pilot an aircraft, and gave you lectures on emergencies -but those were concerning the technical problems that might be faced - fire in an engine, undercarriage that would not retract, fracture of pressurization, loss of flap control. They did not know how you would react if there was a submachine-gun at your ribs with a thirty-round magazine attached, and a class of school children that you must bring to safety. No way they could know that when they gave you command of an aircraft. Lectures and courses, but this . . .

  There is the runway,' she snapped, peering high over the bottom lip of her windscreen at the dun-coloured strip of concrete thousands of feet beneath her. The city was laid out like a toy town further away. Neat gardens, high chimneys of the factories, rising office blocks. But closer

  - and this held her attention - the shape of the airfield, runway placed straight ahead for her by the skill of the navigator.

  There are trucks across it. See them? Petrol lorries, armoured cars, suicide, suicide if we go down there.' Without the order from David that had preceded her every previous move she had pulled on the instrument column, and was scrambling to complete the job she would have shared with her captain, to reset the mass of dials and switches that were necessary if the plane were to climb again. David had seen it all, seen it as she had. And he too recognized the impossibility of a successful landing. Every three hundred metres the variation between the yellow and white petrol tankers and the green and olive armoured cars, clear and silhouetted against the background of the tarmac.

  'Do not answer any calls for us from the ground, and circle the airport, low enough
so that they can see us.' David moved out of the cockpit, the first time that he had left it in more than two hours, stepping into the corridor, the passageway between the flight deck and the passenger cabin. He reached forward to pull the curtain across that the watchers might not observe him as he spoke to Isaac. He spoke in a quiet and sombre voice, and with a resignation about him that unnerved Isaac, and with his shoulders seemingly shrunken by the enormity of the problem.

  'What do we do now? In God's name, Isaac, what do we do now?'

  'We can tell them we are coming in to land, and see what..'

  And if they do not move the trucks, and if we are committed to landing, and cannot climb again -

  then we are dead.'

  'Perhaps it is because they know we have fuel."

  'And how many countries will follow the lead of the Germans?'

  'If we crash the plane that is by our hand. They know the fuel that we have, they know when we can go no further. It will not be at our hand, David.' Isaac spoke feverishly and searching to build again the momentum that had taken them to the flight. 'When the fuel is expended what government will refuse us permission to land when they know we have children on our flight?

  This is not the crisis, not yet. Time for "Masada", the time for suicide is later. When we have landed, then it will be different' Again Isaac had his arm round him, the gesture of friendship and support. 'David, you are down, and that is how they would wish you. They want us to dispute with each other, they want your depression because that helps them. We always knew it would not be easy, that it would not be simple. There are other countries that we can reach, many others.