Kingfisher

by Gerald Seymour

  'What do you mean?' the Assistant Chief Constable spun towards him, pirouetting in his polished shoes, smarting that no one had informed him of the Israeli's arrival and his role.

  ' I mean, why don't you go and finish the thing?'

  "And have half the passengers shot up, have a bloodbath on our hands?'

  ' If that one is anything to go by it would be over in ten seconds, and you have solved your problem.'

  'You can't attack in daylight...'

  'Rubbish. We had daylight in Tel Aviv when we freed the passengers of the Sabena jet. Even the Egyptians can do it- Luxor two years ago when they took out the Libyans. At Tel Aviv we had four to cope with, grown-ups compared with these children, and the hard one by your own admission is sleeping. Of course it can be done.'

  The Assistant Chief Constable fastened on the luckless lieutenant who was Arie Benitz's escort. Fighting for self- control, Charlie saw, hating the eyes that were on him. ' I think we should see if Colonel Benitz has been allocated a room in the building. Certainly he would not want to impede our work in this already crowded space.' Embarrassment, and plenty to spare, hands masking faces, discreet coughs as the Israeli left. Smiling, wasn't he? And a half wink at Charlie.

  'What does he think we are, a load of butchers, that we get kicks out of turning machine-guns on people?' The policeman had waited till the door was closed tight against further intervention.

  'Shortens the agony if all we're going to do is to send them back where they came from at the end of it,' Clitheroe said, playing the marionette, exasperating, and knowing it 'If all we're here for is to talk them into facing a Russian firing squad...'

  ' It's a politician's decision, not ours, what happens to them.' The Assistant Chief Constable cut short the argument, preventing further contagious growth.

  Charlie slid back into his seat. Nothing moving out at the plane. Not a vestige of life, the sun climbing and the plane shadow diminishing, and soon the tarmac would shiver and glaze in the heat.

  Then from behind, and a sure sign they didn't take to the waiting. ' Is there any way we can start talking to them on the radio again?'

  Charlie shook his head. 'No way at all. It's their privilege, and we have to be patient.'

  From his room in the Moscow Hotel Freddie Smyth was

  shouting at the full range of his voice into the telephone that was connected with the office of the commercial attache of the British Embassy.

  Four days he'd been hanging around to sign that contract, worth three and a half million quid, didn't they know? Jobs of five hundred men depending on it. He'd a bloody good expert record behind him, and a CBE medal to prove it. So what happens this morning, when he's all dressed up and ready to head to the Ministry with Sales and Technical? Had the phone call, hadn't he?

  All off, wasn't it? Not using those words, 'course not, 'need for further analysis of the project'.

  Could cut through that lot, couldn't he? Being fucked about, and they'd gone as far as telling him why. Because of some plane load of bloody hi-jackers. The attache should get off his arse and get on to the Ambassador and tell him to get talking with whoever was responsible in London.

  Tell him that Freddie Smyth, Managing Director, Coventry Cables, stood to have wasted four bloody days in Moscow, and if the factory went broke with half a thousand guys on the dole then Freddie Smyth would make sure every bloody newspaper in Britain knew the reason why.

  The commercial attache avoided the Ambassador's office, but went instead to the room on the same floor of the First Secretary. Freddie Smyth's outburst that morning was not unique, only the most vivid. Three other relatively prominent British businessmen had telephoned to report cancellation of morning meetings with Russian officials.

  'Just the start of it,' said the First Secretary, flashing the sad smile of a diplomat who has already served two long years in the Russian capital and knew its ways, and had another twelve months of his sentence to run in which to learn them better. 'There'll be a few more of them too.

  Broad enough hints dropped by their people at the Cuban reception last night, found us out and bashed our ears, and played it coy about the Chancellor's visit - and that doesn't even have a firm date on it. But the factory ought to know about it, and we'll sling them a cable.'

  It was a long time since the Kremlin had publicly shown its displeasure with Britain, he reflected. Back to the Lyalin defection and the expulsion from Britain of all the KGB chaps, all the trade men and the chauffeurs, and that was a fair few years back. Taken their time about thawing that one out. Difficult enough to work here, even when relations were comparatively normal, but damned near impossible when you made them angry. He would put a 'priority' on the cable to Whitehall.

  C H A P T E R E L E V E N

  With a sharp, spruce step the Russian Ambassador emerged into the sunlight from the darkness of the Foreign Office corridors. His immense black limousine was at the pavement side, door held open by a uniformed chauffeur. A policeman and a detective from SB Protection Group stood in the background, watching, relaxed and comfortable in the gentle heat. Be a pig of a day later. The Ambassador looked about him and saw the television crew and the reporter struggling to get clear of the camera car in which they had awaited his exit. The cameraman and sound man jogged across the street, connecting the cables as they went, the reporter faster and more anxious lest the quarry should elude him and disappear into the fastnesses of the car. The Ambassador slowed, then stopped, and saw the gratitude on the reporter's face. Lens focused and the recordist asking for sound level, and the reporter explaining the need for it, as if the Ambassador had never seen a camera before, never previously been interviewed. The diplomat smiled, sensing his opportunity. The cameraman called, 'Running. Go in five."

  Q. How would you describe your meeting with the Foreign Secretary?

  A. Very fruitful, and I think we have a large measure of agreement on a mutual policy of what our reaction should be to these murderous criminals.

  Q. The Russian government has demanded that the hijackers should be returned to Russia if they are captured. What are the British saying?

  A. The British government and the Soviet government are

  both determined to put an end to the evil of aerial piracy. I have the impression that the British would wish to return these three to the courts of the Ukraine where they would stand trial for their crimes committed before and after they took over the Aeroflot flight.

  Q. If they were returned to Russia, would they face the death penalty?

  A. In your country there is no death penalty, and we are most sympathetic to the emotion that the subject arouses. In the Soviet Union we have the death penalty, but it is rarely applied and then only to hardened criminals. I was able to assure the Foreign Secretary that people as young as those concerned in the hi-jacking would be most unlikely to face the supreme penalty of the law.

  Q. Are you saying that you have given a guarantee that if these people were returned they would not be executed?

  A. We discussed this matter at some length. It was not a guarantee that I gave, because sentence is a matter for the courts. But I was able to indicate that my government would look with great sympathy at this matter. And now you will excuse me. Thank you.

  The reporter was astonished at his good fortune, and because of his inexperience unable to assess the extent to which his microphone had been used as a bludgeon upon the Foreign Secretary now sitting in his first-floor office and weighing the results of his most recent conversation beside the transcript of his talk with the American Secretary of State, and the latest digests of world opinion on the issue being fed to the Foreign Office from British Embassies abroad.

  Though the camera crew had what they regarded as a minor scoop they had no outlet to broadcast it before the mid-day news bulletin, but standing beside the interviewer had been a young journalist from the Press Association. Recently arrived in the capital from a Midlands evening paper he had felt too shy to intervene and ask hi
s own questions. He had contented himself instead with taking a verbatim note of questions and answers, and within minutes he had found an unvandalized telephone kiosk and had read his copy to his news editor in Fleet Street. The sub-editors quickly packed the story into shape and context and prepared it for the teleprinters. All the big selling newspapers in Britain, television and radio studios, the Foreign Agencies- Reuters, Associated Press, and United Press International - all had received it before the young man stepped from his taxi at the door of his offices. The quotes he had taken down were recorded as of major significance, an indication of the British policy.

  By telephone the contents of the interview were conveyed from the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem to the Prime Minister's office. And by messenger a photocopy of the nine-inch- long text was taken from News Department to the Foreign Secretary.

  It seemed to stun him, the flimsy sheet of paper, the crudity of a coiled fist. Those around him had to wait, unwilling to badger him for the contents. In his own good time he would tell them.

  The Under-Secretary nearest heard him muttering as if on a loop of tape: 'The swine . . . the swine

  ... the swine ... the swine.' He threw the paper half-crumpled across his desk, available to whoever wished to straighten it out. 'They've taken us for a big ride, those damned people. You have a private conversation. Leave it at a delicate point, nuance and innuendo, nothing signed and sealed, and he walks out and tells the whole damned world about it. Read that and you'll think the British are hand in glove with them. It makes a nonsense of what I told the Secretary of State.'

  'Aren't we hand in glove with them, Minister?' queried the Under-Secretary currently in possession of the text.

  'Not till they were safely in the air. After that we could be hand in hand, arm in arm, whatever cliche you want, but not till then. That was the deal, and they've reneged . . .'

  'And reduced your freedom of action, Minister. Difficult now to change tack. Would seem very strange.'

  He realized he'd been outwitted, out-thought. And that all around him knew it.

  The 'freedom of action' so beloved by Foreign Secretary and Under-Secretary alike was to be further eroded in the following hour. Home Office press desk telephoning their opposite numbers in News Department: Thought you'd like to know, old boy, that we've had the press chaps on from the Street. Seems they have transcripts of tower to cockpit conversations, have translated the Russian, and are asking Us for reaction on a hi-jackers' ultimatum scheduled to expire at ten in the morning. Didn't take a brain to work that one out: threats meant government had to respond with, the hard line, hard line meant send them back, as the Soviets wanted. Cannot go soft on little blighters who're throwing their weight about.

  Can't you have them under Wireless Telegraphy, criminal offence tapping authorized radio channels? asked News Department. Tried it, old boy, responded Press Desk. Told us to get stuffed - more politely, of course, but that was the gist of it.

  Explicit instructions had been given: corral the journalists and photographers somewhere where they see nothing, hear nothing, give them a view of the plane and nothing else. The order had been carried out to the letter. A pen was provided, but in such a position that the Ilyushin blocked any view of the SAS command post, and there was an ill-briefed press officer who could in truth report nothing of substance to the hungry observers. But a farm backed on to that section of the perimeter where the press were held, and at dawn the owner's wife, out of a sense of charity and pity, had sent her eldest son with three full Thermos flasks of coffee and a plastic bag of sandwiches to the newsmen. The boy brought with him his radio set, an advanced Japanese model, on which he was in the habit of tuning to the conversations between the tower and incoming aircraft; a hobby that he shared with hundreds of other youths who lived close to the noise of the country's major airports.

  When the farmer's son returned home with the empty flasks and plastic bag, he was without the radio, but in his hip pocket were five newly-printed five-pound notes and a promise of the same for each day that the worn, sleep-short men borrowed the set. The family themselves had listened to the talk-down of the Ilyushin the previous night, and the tuning had not been altered. There was disappointment at first when it was realized the early morning exchange was to be conducted in Russian, but these were men paid their monthly salaries for their enterprise. The conversation was recorded on a cassette tape player, and the spool sent back to London by despatch rider to await translation.

  It was a sombre gathering in the Foreign Secretary's room. Some standing, some sitting, some watching the window and the crowded pavements, some waiting for the next intervention of the telephone. And the old man in their midst, paled face in his bone-ribbed hands. Poor devil, thought the PPS. Too old for learning new tricks. Should have been out to grass years ago and togged up in his waders and dumped in some river with a hat full of flies to keep him warm. Days that started badly didn't get better, and this was going to be a long and bitter one, and carefully compiled reputations could be demolished by the late summer dusk. And all because of three little bastards from the other side of Europe. Made him want to weep, but there'd be enough tears to be mopped up, enough without him adding to the flood.

  The light that poured into the cockpit left Isaac undisturbed. He had curled his sparse body into the seat that had been Anna Tashova's and settled his legs with care so that they would not brush against the floor pedals or the instrument switches of the flight deck. His sleep was dreamless, the exhaustion permitting neither the pleasure of fantasy nor the horror of nightmare. He had checked the safety catch of his gun, made sure that the weapon could not fire if he lurched or reached in a spasm of movement and now held it tight across his chest. The lines of tension round his mouth and on his forehead had softened, as if he had discovered a peace and understanding with himself. He had pulled his knees up to his stomach, and his breathing was calm and regular, marred only by the trace of catarrh from the passing summer cold that had dogged him his last week in Kiev. Not a dangerous-looking creature, not a psychopath or a manic depressive; just a youth who had become extremely tired, and who tried now to regain his strength, to recharge the batteries that powered him. Slight and ineffective he would have seemed if the fish-eye could have found him, far from worthy of all that his actions had brought to Stansted. His stomach rumbled in its desire for food, but even the aching far down behind the stomach wall was insufficient to break the hold of his sleep. The first traces of a beard were showing through, a shadowy mess on the whiteness of his skin. His shirt was dirty now and creased from his own sweat, sleeves carelessly rolled; hands dirty from the oil of the gun that had not left his grip, fingernails too short and clipped to retain the filth that otherwise would have been theirs.

  Difficult to see as a figure who had created fear, even terror, difficult to take seriously, this boy who had spat his threat into the microphone now idle and propped on the back of his seat. Two hours he'd promised himself, then David should wake him. He was terrified of not sleeping, of not resting and being found inadequate when he sought his best; right from the days of Secondary examinations, and of the tests and interviews for university places. Had to sleep that he would not go pallid and yawning before the tutors. David had promised to wake him. Would rouse him at eight, long before the deadline. He could rely on David,

  It was the stench that woke Rebecca.

  The heavy, all-invading stench of the forward toilet. The wall of the lavatory was behind the crew seats on which she had slept, small enough to make a bed of, an arm becoming a make-shift pillow. The toilet queue had formed again, but not like the one that Isaac had controlled: people standing up from their seats, and in a line in the centre of the cabin, something different and less fearful than it had been the night before. She lay still, her head motionless, one eye half open, acclimatizing. She had dreamed, she could remember that, images of her home and of her mother and family, nothing vicious in the images she had conjured, soft and warming. But then the
harshness of the smell had forced the sleep from her. It was difficult at first to realize where she was, and why, but then she recalled the plane, its traplike compactness, its arched prison walls.

  The passengers walked to the toilet, heads erect as if the tumbrils delivered them, and behind her came the constant routine sounds, punctuated by the flushing of the pan and the squirting of water into the basin. One after another they came, edging their way past David as he stood at the entrance of the cabin, some five feet in front of her, showing him deference. He held his gun lightly in his right hand, and that was the termination of her rest, that was reality, the gun and the asymmetry of its magazine from which the old paint had worn and which still showed the oil slicks of its preservation.

  David did not see that she was awake, concentrating on the passengers and every minute or so breaking away to move to the portholes and peer out, searching for a sign, like someone looking through the windows of his home when a guest is expected but is late.

  David, sustaining and comforting, giving strength and help, keeping the wolves clear from the encampment. Ever since she had known him, the bigger boy in the higher class, this had been their point of contact and togetherness. From when he was in short trousers and she in frocks with white ankle socks and they had gone to the Pioneer camps, and he had sought her out, he had been protective and all-knowing. With maturity had come the cementing of the friendship, brother and sister, colleague and comrade. Different to Moses and Isaac, outsiders who had joined: they were the nucleus, the kernel. Always a shoulder to lean on, a chest to rest against, an ear for confidences. Should have loved him, now that he was a man and she a Woman. No denial of opportunity, frequent occasions, didn't understand why it had never happened. Seemed to spill through her, the nausea of the awful primitive groping of the fool Yevsei. Thirty-six hours, just a day and a half, nothing in time, and on her back in the grass with that stupid, oafish idiot. Could have been David.