Kingfisher

by Gerald Seymour

  ' I say "dangerous" because they will have believed that they would be permitted to put down anywhere in the West. They've tried twice now, and as you explained this is their last chance.

  They'll know that if they are still to get to Israel then they've a fair amount of shouting to get through first. You have to be prepared for them to shift from break-out to leverage, if and when they discover that the fuel wagons aren't going to be beside the plane and filling her up.'

  There is no possibility that the plane will be permitted to fly to Israel. Both from the diplomatic side and the question of principle involved that eventuality has not been considered. The basic approach had been agreed long before Charlie had arrived, relayed to the Prime Minister at his holiday retreat in the South of England, sanctioned by him without dispute. So that's the policy, Charlie, taking a hard line. Easy to be tough with this one, he thought; one-off job.

  ' I cannot be definite,' Charlie said, 'but I would expect these people to go hard once they find that things aren't that rosy. They'll know the case histories of previous hi-jacks, they can take in BBC, VOA, plenty of radio sets that can pick that kind of thing up in the Ukraine, no problem of jamming now, reception's not difficult. I wouldn't think they'll have a stamina fallback, they won't be able to keep the pressure up for long, forty-eight hours or so, but in the meantime expect them to play it rough.'

  'Will they be intelligent?' The Under-Secretary with responsibility for co-ordinating and implementing the decisions of the Emergency Committee. The high pitch of the public school and private means that Charlie detested, but it was a good and important question.

  'Academically they'll be bright. They'll have an ideology at any rate that won't be political, but will stem from their breeding, their position in Soviet society. Committed people. Probably they'll believe they are prepared to die for it all, providing the moment isn't too close at hand.

  They'll be similar enough to all the other groups. When you get down to it - start trading, that is -

  you'll find them the same breed as all the other groups, same breed as the Palestinians, Baader Meinhof, Tupamaros, Monteneros, Provies. They'll be speaking a different language, that's all you'll notice.'

  'Do you call the Provos intellectuals, Mr Webster?' queried the Under-Secretary.

  'You asked me a different question. You asked me whether these people were intelligent. You don't need a university degree to be good at this game, but you have to be sharp, know your way round and keep your thinking cap on. I say again, these people have done bloody well to get this far; it takes a bit more than luck, you know.'

  ' Is there anything you'd like to say in conclusion, Charlie?' Parker Smith was filling his briefcase with assorted papers, cigarettes stubbed out, pens removed to inside pockets, ties straightened.

  'Only this. They've come a long way, these three. But they think they've a fair old mileage still to come. Don't underestimate them. Take them very carefully to start with.'

  Charlie sat back in his seat, felt tired, hadn't the old resilience. The man next to him - there had been no introductions and Charlie didn't know his name - pushed three photographs across the table to where Charlie could see them. Snapshots, and they hadn't travelled well on the photofax machine from Moscow to the Foreign Office. Blurred and creased from the printing apparatus but still the recognizable features. Names printed in Russian and English across the bottom of each picture. Straight out of the bloody bible.

  'Mr Webster, I'm going to Stansted now by car. I'd like you to accompany me.'

  The Home Secretary had risen, gestured to Charlie to lead through the door, followed him out to the corridor and the rear staircase that led to the car park. The Minister's black Humber waited there, with a chauffeur and his personal detective, and with its engine idling was a three-litre Rover that would drive behind them. Three in the back they managed, Minister, Under-Secretary and Charlie.

  Out into the traffic, swinging east from Whitehall towards the City. End of a routine commercial day, and the pavements thronged with the last shifts of commuters, only hesitating for their evening papers, succumbing to the propaganda of the billboards - OUR HI-JACK ALERT -

  BRITAIN PREPARES FOR RED HI-JACK CRISIS. The Ilyushin would be at Stansted when they arrived, and Charlie pictured again the three faces that they'd shown him. Stupid little bastards, and don't know what they've bitten off, and who'll wish when this is over they'd stayed at home and played kid's games. And now you're deep down in the pit, Charlie, and after you'd said you didn't want to see the ladder any more and wanted a desk job. Should have been franker months ago, told them that you were sick of the killing, of being a guardian of the right of the middle-aged, middle classes, middle-brows to sleep in their beds at night. Should have spoken then and you didn't. Kept your speech till tonight, till you impressed the big men, and they wanted you as part of the team, want you to help screw these three, help con them - help kill them. Stupid little bastards.

  Too slow! Too slow! What do you think they'll be doing, sitting around chewing beetle? They'll be ready for you. They know what time we come, can set their watches by it. Always we come at dawn. They know and they are ready for you, and you've got to be quicker than them. If not then it is you that are dead, not them.'

  He stood watching the soldiers as they trooped sheepishly back to their starting line, the top of the cement staircase. Eight soldiers, all of them deflated by his criticisms, and the air was heavy with the reek of fumes from the flash grenades they had thrown and the blank cartridges they had fired.

  'You must remember this for us is a rehearsed drill, simple and straightforward. You will have experienced it many times so that it has no strangeness to you. But for them it will be the first time. However much they are ready if you are fast enough you will have the time. When you hear the machine- gun fire outside then you must explode. You have to be faster, or you are worm-food. We shall now do it again.'

  Thirty-one years old, Arie Benitz, and wearing on his denimed shoulder, black against the olive green, the insignia of lieutenant-colonel. He commanded the most specialized force in the Israeli armed services, the anti-terrorist storm squad. Akin with both his predecessors, who had died leading their men on operations, he was a draftee from the Parachute Brigade. One who had held the rank had died in the assault on the beach-front Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv after Palestinians had sprinted with their hostages to the top-floor rooms, the other from a random sniper during the mopping up stages of the Entebbe rescue mission. Any new commander will insist that the training of his men bears his own hallmark, his own stamp, especially when the expertise called for is the ability to prise out dedicated and determined fighters from the cramped rooms where they had chosen to die, and die if possible in the company of their hostages.

  The building that Benitz and his front-line section used for training was a three-floor block of disused sleeping quarters in the big army barracks on the Beersheba road out of Ashdod. They were working on the top floor, because that was where the enemy usually sheltered with their prey of terrified and hushed civilians, where the space for movement of the attack force was limited, the opportunity for varying the direction of assault minimal.

  Hand on his stop watch, he gave a blast on the whistle cramped between his teeth. The long hammering chant of the outside machine-guns that would be aimed for the windows of the last bunker the Palestinians would creep to. High fire aimed to pass into the rooms and then impact against the ceilings, fire to make a man hesitate in his desire to win courage, to force him to the floor where he would cringe, to gain the precious seconds that the attackers must Save.

  At the first echo of the firing he screamed at the pitch of Ms voice. 'Go, you bastards, go!' First man raking the door, flattening himself against the wall adjacent to its hinges. Number Two crashing into it with his weight, a second's fraction after the firing stopped, Number Three with the grenade pins already pulled and hurling them into the opened space. Fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh and ei
ghth, bullocking through the smoke in the moments after the explosions and firing for the corners as they entered each room, where the man who already knows that he is doomed will hide for an illusion of protection. When the next group came from Fatahland Arie Benitz would be fourth in line, fourth man, but the first through the door. It was traditional that the commander led from the front, not in practice when the men worked on the drills, but when it was for real.

  'Better,' he said, as they emerged. Smiles now from proud men who valued his accolade.

  'Better. Three and a half seconds from the machine-gun fire to the grenade explosions. Seven seconds till the last of you was inside. At that speed you have a chance, perhaps only two hairy arses shot off.' Low murmur of laughter from the squad. Hard, battle-tested young men all of them, born and raised inside the State of Israel. Helmets covered in camouflage cloth and netting, denims that were not encumbered with any webbing that might encumber the rash forward, and on their backs a weird and incomprehensible series of fluorescent strips, all in varying patterns, the one different to the other, but which told the trained soldier which man was in front of him, what was his job, essential in the demi-light in which they would fight

  'We do it once more.'

  He went inside the rooms beyond the flapping and damaged door, rearranged the target dummies of beaten straw wound about with sacking and adorned with the grotesque masks that his men had fashioned, moved them from where they had been the last time - placed them under beds, behind chairs, deep in shadow - and lit a candle in the inner hallway that would serve as the only illumination for the soldiers. This was the way it was learned, the killing game. None of the long-range marksmen crap that the Germans had tried at Munich; but close-quarters work, body to body, point- blank range, near enough for the nose to find them, the eyes to see them, the ears to catch the sob for mercy as you fired.

  When he came back out of the flat and slammed the door shut behind him he saw the stranger among the troops. Not one of the unshaven, dirt-smeared soldiers gangling and lolling in apparent semi-sleep but a ranking officer in office uniform. Could have cursed the men, not one of them stiffened, not one of them erect, not a salute among them. No recognition of the deputy-commander of the barracks. Because they were paratroopers and had now been elevated to anti-terrorist standby, and the outsider was just an admin man.

  'Colonel, my apologies for the interruption. There are men from the Ministry of Defence, from Tel Aviv. They are in my office to see you.'

  'We have one more run, then we are completed. My respects and I will be with them in ten minutes.'

  ' I do not think, Colonel, they would appreciate such a delay.'

  Pleasure on his men's faces. Knowledge that the shouting and hectoring was over for another day. Time for a shower and something to eat, time to get out of the sweat-sodden fatigues they had worn through the day and half the night.

  'Don't look so bloody lively,' the Colonel snapped at them as he followed his escort to the stairs. 'Tomorrow we're back here, and all day, till we lose at least a second off the entry time.'

  But for the men of the storm squad stationed in the Central Military Zone of Israel there was waiting a long sleep, no early call in the morning, no immediate repetition of the assault techniques. From a briefing by two military intelligence officers and a senior official of the Foreign Ministry Colonel Arie Benitz was driven to an Israeli Air Force base. Under the mantle of darkness he was strapped into the navigator's seat of a Phantom fighter bomber and flown at many hundreds of miles an hour to the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus. At the airfield, denuded of activity by successive Defence White Papers, he was transferred without formality to a VC10 of Support Command. He was sat far to the rear of the aircraft and separated himself from the small groups of service personnel and their families. During the five and a half hour flight to Brize Norton, the transport base in Wiltshire, he would have a chance to mull over, to evaluate, the direction that had been given him, to concern himself with the role that the Prime Minister of his country had asked him to play. No passport, only his IDF identity card, and the uniform still splendid with the twin flashes of fluorescent fight on the back. At Akrotiri they'd assured him that he'd have five minutes in the wash-house at Brize Norton before the helicopter flight to Stansted, enough to change into borrowed and less conspicuous clothes.

  At the time that the Colonel was flying out of Israel Aeroflot flight 927 scheduled for Tashkent was beginning its final approach to the Essex airfield of Stansted.

  The original course plotted by her navigator had taken Pilot Officer Tashova towards Heathrow, London's principal airport and one of the busiest in the world. Paris, thankful that the ultimate responsibility was not hers, had guided the plane in accented English along Green One, leading her to the fan markers, the radio beacons that drove a high, shrill whistle into her earphones and flashed sharp lights at her control panel. Paris signed off, with gratitude, offering as final consolation the London airways frequency of 128.45. The Ilyushin should begin to call for further instructions. That the navigator had brought the plane south before beginning the short drop across the English Channel was not out of error but deliberate. There was a determination that whatever authorities now had jurisdiction over the plane should have no doubts from their calculations that the fuel tanks were drying out and parched, that the flight time was exhausted.

  From

  the cockpit on the eastern approach to London they saw the distant hazed lights of the lit-up city that merged into the ink-dark horizon, and then the instruction had come for the diversion to Stansted, an airfield that neither Tashova nor her navigator had heard of. There was no reason why they should - it was not an international strip, but dealt with the trade of holiday charters and offered facilities to virgin British Airways pilots and crew on their take-offs and bumps.

  The instructions on flight level, squawk ident, course degree numerals, VOR locations were incomprehensible to David - a foreign tongue, a foreign science. It was not possible for him to know that Stansted had been chosen as the airfield in Britain most suitable to receive a hi-jacked airliner - that the studies had been made by Security and Board of Trade a full three years earlier.

  It was remote, could easily be sealed, and if it had to be shut down because of an alien presence on the runways then the disruption to the massive traffic using British airspace would be minimal.

  As the Ilyushin headed away from London, its red indicator lights flashing the message of its traverse over the Essex countryside, three companies of the Third Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were beating a path down the country lanes from Colchester, the barracks town to which they had returned thirty-six hours earlier from four months' duty in Londonderry. Leave abruptly cancelled, and orders to the commanding officer to provide a military cordon. The Fusiliers travelled in the high-powered whining Saracen armoured cars and in the clumsy three-ton Bedfords; men disappointed in the cancellation of the reunions with their families, but for all that thrusting the adrenalin through their bodies at the prospect of seeing for themselves, watching, guarding over the plane that had come from Russia, the plane that dominated the television...

  Further away, but closing with greater velocity on Stansted, were a formation of Puma troop-carrying helicopters, bringing a Special Air Service detachment from their distant camp on the Welsh borders. These were the men specifically trained in anti-hijack operations, and the lack of talk among the eighteen being ferried across Southern England reflected their frustration at being summoned late, due to arrive only minutes before the airliner, little time for reconnoitering, preparation, before they slipped to their planned and practised positions. I From divisional police stations in the county FN rifles and Smith and Wesson pistols were distributed to men of the Regional Crime Squad. Uniformed police were dispatched to set up road blocks on the approaches, on the roads from Saffron Walden and Thaxted and Great Dunmow and Bishop's Stortford. Keep the rubberneckers back, hasten the arrival of the various
agencies, civilian and military, now speeding towards Stansited to greet the arrival of the Ilyushin.

  David knew none of this, just watched the cold, unspeaking skills of Anna Tashova as she alternately cudgelled and caressed her controls, followed her instructions that came from over her shoulder. He knew nothing of the guns and the armour and the tensions that were amassing and that would await him.

  Flaps moving again, change in the engine pitch, deep-throat rumble of the undercarriage dropping, and the passengers were craning at the cabin, windows searching out the lights on the ground.

  Would take more than a blow from a gun barrel to depress the inherent cheerfulness of Edward R. Jones Jr, and besides his wife had managed a picture of his head and the bloodstained handkerchief, right after she'd attached it, when the blood was really red, before the wound dried out.

  'Hey, Miss,' he said, turning again in his seat, looking back to Rebecca, 'and you don't have to get that gorilla to belt me this time, but is this it? Are we really going in this time?'

  She did not understand the American with his bright plumage clothes and his bravado, could not come to terms with the man, and so said nothing.

  'Have it your way, Miss. But I hope you know where the ball game goes from here. It could be awfully disappointing, Miss, awfully messy.'

  Still no response, and he smiled at her, two-and-a-half thousand dollars of capped teeth, and turned back to the window.

  The Italians, talking fast and excitedly among themselves, tightening their seat belts, leaning sometimes forward, sometimes backwards to spread their conversation among the whole group.

  The children sat subdued in their seats. They were tired and hungry and had not been taught what their reaction should be to this situation. They had looked for a lead and received none, and were unable to digest the new noises of the engine and closing lights of the farmhouses and villages below.