Not all are like the Germans. We too have friends, David.'
"Less than two hours now, that is the fuel position. After that it will be settled for us.'
As he went back into the cockpit David wondered at the new turn in their fortunes. He realized that he was bemused they should meet with opposition at this time, and after they had won so much. Like a betrayal, like a boy feels when he knows his father has told him a he. He had not known that Isaac possessed such inner reservoirs of stamina; they would come to lean on him, both of them, Rebecca as much as himself. He felt such a great tiredness now, just a longing to be shed of it, to walk again on the ground, to escape this box of confusions that he did not understand. The joy of walking again on grass, and of not running, and of not listening at night for the footsteps that might follow.
He repeated it over in his own mind. Lean on Isaac, lean on him till his own strength returned.
Could any of them understand the awful wearying, endless conflict in the cockpit? The pilot dead, the shape that would not respond, would not forgive. The fighters, modern, technological killing soldiers that he had stood his ground against and beaten. The cool proficiency of the girl pilot. He had stood against them, stood against them and seen them off. But it had sapped and weakened him and now he should rest on Isaac, let the boy carry the load till he was ready again.
And the boy was good, better than you expected, David, and there was comfort there. The only comfort he had.
'Give me a course for Holland,' David said. Again the Ilyushin banked and began to turn, roused by the new thrust of power, searching once more for the Kingfisher's landfall.
The airport at Hanover is categorized as 'international', but the trade that it handles is not considerable, and certainly minor in comparison with Frankfurt or Munich or Cologne,' Bonn. So the groups of delayed passengers and crew and idled airport staff were sparsely scattered on the concrete terminal roof. Clusters of multi-national businessmen, a party of British war veterans who had come again to relive the triumph and the misery of 1945, some Scandinavians in search of fresh hiking pastures, mingled amongst the Lufthansa men and girls.
All could see the Ilyushin, alone in the azure, late afternoon sky. They watched its flight around the far perimeter of the airfield, occasionally stealing their glance away to the rock -
steady armoured cars and tracks that were the runway obstructions. A transistor radio chattered a report from a local broadcaster who described the scene and could tell of no more than their own eyes could take in. It was the only sound to compete with the low-pitched, incessant drone of the engines set far forward on the wings from which the Aeroflot flight's markings could be read by those with clear eyesight.
And the watchers realized that the plane would not come, that the confrontation was not sought They saw the new course set, and watched the diminishing silhouette and were left with a feeling of emptiness and inadequacy, because they were part of something that would not be completed. Only when the plane was telescoped to their vision, small and hard to see, and its engine noise was faint, did a new sound spring forward, powerful and dominating, as the armoured cars and tankers revved their engines and started to move clear of the tarmac.
There was a woman from Stockholm who cried, and said again and again, 'I don't know why.
I don't know why.' And her husband was embarrassed and gave her his handkerchief and tried to shield her from view as she dabbed her eyes.
The tolerance of the men with dark suits and attache cases and schedules to maintain was waning. There was much checking of watches and loud discussion on how long it would take to get things moving again, to fly them on to their homes or belated meetings.
The ground staff were first to leave the roof, beckoned by the work and organization that now awaited them, the businessmen hard on their heels, the hikers needing to make up lost time if they were to reach their chalets by nightfall.
The old army men stayed on. They'd no hurry; it was known where they were, and they were confident of being called when their flight was ready. Men in their sixties and seventies, at the fade of their lives, who for a week had recalled 'machine-gun platoon', and 'mortar platoon', and
"Monty', and 'knocking the Hun for six'. A great deal of wine and beer and sausage and reminiscence they'd been through in the last few days, and they did not seek to end it by returning more quickly than necessary to the polished cleanliness of the departure hall.
"Should have come on in, shouldn't they?' Cyril from mechanized infantry.
Then there'd have been the risk of pranging her.' Bertie, HQ Staff.
'If you're to win in that sort of game you have to take a few chances, like it was when we crossed . . .' Jim, Pioneer Assault.
They won't have come this far if they haven't taken some risks. You don't knock an aircraft off and get this far without chancing your arm a bit. I wouldn't fancy doing what they've done.'
Herbie, Armoured Corps Maintenance.
'Cyril's right, though. Whatever they've done up to now, they chickened this time. Should have come on in, like Cyril said. The Hun always buckles. Pressure him enough and he buckles.'
Dave, General Staff, Batman.
'What do you bloody know about it, Dave? You were so far back, they never even bothered to give you a rifle. Never even saw a bloody Hun with a gun in his hand, you didn't.' Harry, Airborne machine-gunner.
And they all laughed, and Dave looked pained, and they slapped his back. 'Time for another beer,' someone said.
Harry Smith had been a sergeant when they'd all been in uniform a lifetime ago. Para too, and they admired that. Gave him a sort of leadership over the rest, that and his Military Medal, and the fact that he now had a sweet shop in Kilburn and was 'self-employed'. 'I heard a bit of what the chappie said on the radio, picked up a bit of the language when I was here. They're Jewish boys up there. I don't know whether that makes it all different. But it's not for us to call them cowards. We had a bloody great back-up scene behind us. Stores, supplies and orders, some other bugger to tell us what to do. So what have they got? Sweet Fanny Adams, not much else. If they're Jewish they'll have thought it was all over by the time they reached here. Thought they were home and dry. Think of it as they'll be seeing it now, think of it and you'll know why that bird over there was crying.'
'They're still bloody terrorists, Sarge,' said Dave.
'If you say so,' said Harry Smith. He stared hard into the lowering light, searching through his spectacles for the aircraft. But the haze and mist of distance had wrapped the Kingfisher flight, lifting it beyond his reach.
Had David but known it, the West German 'Crisis Committee' had anticipated that an attempt might be made to land the plane in spite of the precautions taken. The petrol tankers and the armoured cars all had members of the green-uniformed Bundesgrenzshutz at their controls. If the word had come from the tower that the Aeroflot plane was on irreversible landing approach then the order would have been transmitted to the cabs of the vehicles that they should drive on to the grass verges of the runway and allow the aircraft to land without further hindrance. In the first-floor offices of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn there was much congratulation and back-slapping among the team of politicians and civil servants who had directed the operation as the news was brought to them that the plane was climbing, and had taken a flight plan that ran to the south of Hamburg and to the north of Bonn, Cologne and Dusseldorf. A bottle of Scotch was broached. It was the opinion of the aviation experts that the course was for Schipol, Amsterdam.
' I had not thought,' said the Minister, 'that we would accomplish the plan so easily.'
' It was a new tactic for these people. Their protests have been verbal before; they have not attempted anything of this intensity. But it is surprising, as you say, that they could be so easily deflected. I think we will find when the business is completed that they were very young.' It was the contribution of the senior police officer present who had been on the ground in th
e chaos of the Munich police ambush of Black September at Furstenfeldbruck airbase, who had laid out the bodies of nine Israeli athletes and coaches, and who never wanted to be part of a similar confrontation again. 'But because they are young, and because we have turned them, that does not mean that the problem for someone else is in any way diminished. What we have done is temporarily to depress them. My forecast is that this set-back will, in the long term, serve only to harden their resolve.'
The policeman spoke with distaste, unimpressed at the enthusiasm with which the unresolved problem had been shuffled elsewhere.
Parker Smith had left in a hurry, his departure preceded, by a confusion of ringing telephones, summoned messengers with paperwork and shouting through opened office doors. He had just time to push his head round Charlie's door. He was excited, and did not care who saw it. Call from the Big Boys, from Whitehall, beckoned to the presence, to attend the Emergency Group meeting. He might send for Charlie later, and would he have his files at hand, and be ready to bring them if it was required that he should come? Charlie noticed he hadn't cared to comb his hair, a mess without the ruler- straight parting, and that was unusual for him; meant the flap was building.
'Getting a bit nervy are they, Sir? Our masters?'
'Decidedly so, Charlie. You've seen the Russian note, and it's very tough. You've seen what the Hun's reaction is. Pass-the-parcel games, and it's with the Dutch next, and FO are trying to establish what position they will take. If they don't come down in Holland and they keep going we're next in line, and not much fuel to play with. If we send for you, look snappy.'
" I'm not a counter hi-jack expert, Sir. Home Office do that . . .' Caution from Charlie. Long time now since he'd been involved in anything fresher than stacking paper.
'Course you're not. But you're supposed to know these bastards, that is what we'll be requiring from you, every damned little thing about them. So don't shift off that telephone.'
Parker Smith was gone, not finding the time to close Charlie's door, lost in a welter of shouted farewells. And the word that the section was involved spread through the offices like a grass fire.
Huddles in the corridors, and voices raised in anticipation, and pleasure that the 'old man' had been sent for. Charlie went to his steel-grey cabinet, fished in his pocket for the keys, discarding those of his front door, his car, his office door, his garage. He unlocked the combination fastener and began to rifle through the buff-coloured folders. Kept a good system, did Charlie, something he'd learned in his old army days. Extracted seven-two of them marked with a red sticky-tape 'X'
diagonally across, denoting the classification 'Secret', five with blue-tape crosses that were simply denoted as 'Restricted'.
Time for some fast reading, Charlie.
The helicopter that carried the Israeli Prime Minister had left the Golan Heights in a swirl of choking, rasping dirt, saturating all those who had gathered at the stone-cleared landing-pad to see him off.
His tour of forward positions on the Syrian front that overlooked the ruined and war-broken city of Kuneitra had been scheduled to last for three more hours, but the radio transmission from Jerusalem had caused it to be cut short. And there was enough for him to be concerned about without the burden of new fashioned crises; in his mind he was attempting to obliterate the problems of perpetual argument between Defence, who sought more planes and more missiles and more anti-tank weapons and more cement for fortifications, and on the other side Finance, who bleated at every Cabinet meeting at the cost of it all and the effect on civilian morale of the creeping taxation that was the corollary of sophisticated and modern fire-power. Shut it out, block it, as the helicopter staggered off the ground and hovered before seeking its route. The Prime Minister had been a military man before entering politics, and prided himself that he had spanned the gulf, that he understood both points of view, but that in itself made it no simpler for him. Three devaluations, and that inside the last nine months, and no change in the precariousness of the national budget, and still the army demanding more hardware and showing no interest in where the money should come from. The visit to the Golan and its strongpoints was long-planned and was supposed to have been a sweetener to his generals. He was to have walked around behind the sandbags and the barbed wire and laugh and joke with them in the slang they had used when they were together as lieutenants and captains, and look serious and understanding when that was required of him, and sympathize with their complaints and shortages, and make promises that would be vague and that would not sustain analysis, but that would mollify and placate.
And now the effect of the day was wasted.
The summons had come from his offices on the hill in Jerusalem that he should return forthwith, and there had been no time for explanations and excuses, just the opportunity to shake the hands of men who showed their disappointment, and who had the look in their eyes of soldiers who do not trust the commitment of their political leaders.
An hour and twenty minutes he sat in the helicopter. They'd brought an Alouette in from Rosh Pinah to ferry him back, a maintenance problem, fractured oil-feed pipe, denying him the use of the faster, more comfortable Sikorski that had made the morning journey from the capital. Room for only three passengers once the army fliers had taken their seats- ADC and a bodyguard. No one to talk to, and he'd left the majority of his party on the bare, stripped ground of the Heights, to follow on by car. There was a radio in the helicopter but that must be kept clear for operational messages, so that effectively he would be out of contact for the duration of the flight. Little enough information to consider at this stage. Russian aircraft hi-jacked, internal flight, on its way to the West, that the involvement was Jewish, that the Soviets would take a hard line. Not much to chew on in that.
No contour flying, not with the Prime Minister on board. Up to three thousand feet where the sharp winds that gathered on the hills behind Tiberias buffeted and pitched at the helicopter, causing him to steady himself in his canvas seat and feel for the safety harness that he wore. Not a time for thinking, for weighing alternatives. Dead time, lost time, that would duly add up till inevitably the pressure on the decision-makers would increase. Not the way it should be, but the way it always was: the penalty of living in a country perpetually in a state of war.
Flying south of the hills and towns and villages where the Palestinians liked to work, the settlements close to the Lebanese border fence. The targets the Palestinians sought out Hard, fanatical killing teams who came to Israel to test their muscle against the might of a modern and sophisticated society, and who were broken on the anvil of gunfire and grenade explosions, and who kept coming. This was the ground they came to, bright in the harsh sunlight below him, to the little communities that nestled close to the cultivated fields and the orange groves that were burned and dry in the heat. Men who came in their groups of four, having let their blood run together in the symbolic farewells in the Fatahland of South Lebanon, and who died horribly and brutally at the hands of Squad 101, the elite of the Israeli army, the counter-terrorism storm squad. 'Terrorists' they called them in his country - could find no other title for them, shunning the acceptance of such words as 'guerrilla' and 'commando' because that would bestow a certain fractional legality on their actions. He was musing to himself, not thinking with the speed and clarity he was capable of, just wafting the ideas in his head as the helicopter powered its bumping way towards Jerusalem. And what was it Gadhafi had said? Moammar Gadhafi, President of Libya, paymaster of the assassins, organizer of their plans, harbourer of their escapes. Gadhafi said there were terrorist? and freedom fighters, that if the cause is right then so too the action is justified. Any action against the State of Israel is justified, any attack could be supported if it bore the name of Palestine, that was the message of the Libyan. And the response of the Prime Minister's government had been fierce and consistent; that the international community should succour no sympathy for the gangs and cells of armed men, that there should be no condoning
of the terrorist, that he should be fought and brought to justice. There must be no weakening.
-
The helicopter yawed its way down the scale of the altimeter, dropping sharply and without ceremony into the city, the sun's flat beams splintering light on to the silver dome of Al Aqsa.
Was a Jew with a gun held to a pilot's head a different flower, to be "watered and ' husbanded from the Palestinian weed that they chopped and hoed when he took his grenades and explosives to the cockpit of the El Al plane? Did the Jew fight for freedom or for terror? Principle or self-interest? There was ano precedent from which to take comfort. The decision of Entebbe had been easy by comparison, the decision to loose the killer squads in Europe to seek out their Palestinian ccounterparts had been simple. But this was fraught with dangers. Principle and expediency, principle and emotion; all cavorting inside him as the machine lurched the final feet to the ground.
He hurried to the grey-green Pontiac with its curtained rear windows and chassis that strained low under the weight of the armour-plated body. Men around him with unshielded Uzis, and walky-talky radios, and police who saluted him and who wore pistols at their belts in holsters of which the top restraining flap was unfastened. And why were they all there? One reason, one reason only: because of the threat of the small groups, the men who stood apart from the shouting, chanting abusive crowds of protest. Four hundred yards from the helicopter pad to his offices, and a lift to the third floor. More men in slacks and light summer shirts that they wore outside the waist of their trousers that their hand-guns should be concealed and not frighten the stream of foreign visitors who came to pay their respects and tell him how his government should conduct its affairs.
The Security Committee was waiting for him, gathered round the table by the window, opposite his wide-topped desk. Piled in front of the chair that he would use were the papers that would tell him the story of the hi-jacking so far, what was known of the participants, the statements of the Russians, and the decisions that had been made by the West European governments in whose territory the plane might attempt a landing. Sombre reading, no light in the darkness, no crack through which optimism might wear a path.
Kingfisher Page 13