Kingfisher

by Gerald Seymour

  They took great note of what you told them. They remember your every word,' Clitheroe speaking now in a tired, half- amused drawl. 'As I told you, I have offered my advice and it was not accepted.'

  He passed Charlie a cigarette, expensive with a gold- papered covering for the filter. Charlie took it instinctively, leaned his head for the light, and blew the smoke into the murk of the room.

  Without giving any particular thought to it, Charlie said, 'So how do we save them?'

  ' It depends on who you want to save. If it's the children I suppose they stand an equal chance, and it's a good one, whether Major Davies leads a heroic charge or whether we sit it out and people like myself give advice on a long- drawn-out stand-off. The children will be safe. Or is it the others, my friend? If the soldiers assault the plane then we can guarantee - I use your word -

  that they are unlikely to take time off for the niceties of capturing able-bodied prisoners. Shoot first, questions later is the doctrine of this type of operation. Is that what concerns you? Perhaps it should concern all of us, three young people who through a chain of circumstances stand condemned to die if the army take the plane. Whether they are evil people, or misguided, or those that in another context we would regard as courageous, they will not survive the visit of Major Davies. And I wouldn't criticize that: his men have wives and children, they too want to survive, and they deserve to. If you wish these three to live then you must persuade them to surrender, and unconditionally because then they will go before the courts," perhaps here, probably in the Soviet Union, and you must believe the words of the Ambassador that were carried on the radio, that they will be unlikely to face the death penalty if indeed they are returned. There can be no happy outcome, yet there was no reason to expect anything else from the moment that the aircraft landed. You've been very patient with me, Mr Webster. I'm not used to such attention.'

  Charlie smiled, thanked him and moved without more comment back to the console.

  Waste of time trying the radio unless someone was sitting in the cockpit with the earphones on and waiting. Seemed to know that his place was far from here, far from the green- carpeted floor, and the hum of the air-conditioner and the polite laughter, and the deference to seniority. Knew he

  should be on the tarmac again, sitting on his backside in the sunshine, flicking the flies from his nose and wanting a drink, waiting for something to happen. The pictures were still in front of him, where he'd pinned them in the early morning when the issues had been sharper and the grey fog hadn't blurred the outlines of his faith. Three young faces, ordinary to the point of boredom, and now trapped and vicious and being broken on an anvil by a force they could not combat, only strike against, bloodily and irrelevantly.

  Too long on the outside, Charlie, too long living and winning without the back-up of name and rank and number,

  without legality and authority. As much a terrorist as these little bastards. Had a base camp, sure enough, to come to with the intelligence gained by deceit and stealth, but otherwise a man of his own whims, without a general to direct him and draw lines on his map. Easy for some to hate these three, right Charlie? Easy to label and catalogue them. Easier still if you had a chauffeur and a pennant and a chest of medal ribbons and a swagger stick. But harder if you knew the isolation, and the loneliness and the fear that makes the stomach coil, as you did, Charlie. Disowned if you're caught, that's what they said when he went to Dublin; don't expect the FO to bale you out if the Garda Siochana lifts you - and when you're caught don't cough, that way you'll keep the pension and well see your wife doesn't have to go out to work and the kids get new shoes when they need them. All for a job, all for a way to pay the mortgage. Less motivation than those three. 'Motivation', the fashionable word that meant damn-all, meant you were thick and hadn't thought it out, or too young to know what went on. 'Motivation', the great confidence trick, the public relations target, what they told all the men who formed the starched khaki ranks and lined up to have Herself pin a cross of dulled metal on their chests and went back to barracks to shiver in a corner and wonder how they'd been so bloody stupid.

  Years since Charlie had been in uniform, despised it, sneered at the sameness and the identity and the mob instinct of men who needed polished shoes and short haircuts. What did these people know of the three on the plane? How could they understand them? Called them terrorists, murderers, fanatics ... all the usual claptrap. But they don't care, not even Clitheroe.

  Stuff it, Charlie, you're a raving old bore. You're

  not paid to think, to be the referee. Go back to counting the fag ends. Do something useful.

  Charlie stood up to his chair and looked around him.

  He attracted no attention, his moment of glory was

  past. The Assistant Chief Constable

  was cat-napping. Clitheroe reading, Home Secretary

  gone below. Nothing changed on the

  screen - David out of sight, Isaac and Rebecca at the

  forward entrance to the passenger

  cabin. Could read the defiance still fashioned on Isaac's face.

  He walked out through the door and began to descend the stairs, slowly, carefully, aware of the fatigue he felt. He reckoned he would have about two hours at the plane before the military had satisfied themselves on the DC6. He realized his hand was out against the wall, steadying himself as he went down.

  Didn't recognize him at first, the man he saw through the open door of the second landing.

  Seemed shed of his earlier confidence and poise that had been on display in the control tower.

  Charlie stopped at the entrance, hesitating.

  ' It's the Israeli, isn't it? . . . Benitz, Colonel Benitz? The one who thought our friends were about to surrender.'

  'That was me. I remember you too. You were very kind...'

  'Did they dump you in here?' Charlie glanced round the room. 'Looks like you've a plague or something. Not exactly in the centre of things, is it?'

  'It is not the intention of people here that I should be in the centre...'

  'What were you sent for?' Charlie said, casting off the small talk.

  " I was sent to help you persuade these people to surrender.'

  'Why you?'

  'It was thought that an army man might appeal to them.'

  'And they just left you sitting here, kicking your heels, our crowd I mean? They haven't talked to you since you were up in the tower first thing? Incredible.'

  ' I sit here and I wait to be asked.'

  'Well, you won't be sitting here much longer. They've just dropped a hostage . . .' He heard the Hebrew obscenity, saw Benitz clench his fist. 'Didn't they tell you? Didn't anyone even tell you that? They dropped one this morning, and there'll be another this afternoon, and then they plan a shooting gallery, with one each hour. We're gearing the heavies up, to go and thump them.'

  'You should have gone this morning when the one you call Isaac was asleep."

  'Could have had them all then. Looking back on it, that is. With hindsight we could have wrapped it all up. And saved the hostage, and whoever else gets in the way when the military attack.' Charlie had exhausted his politeness, wanted to be on his way. As an afterthought, he added: 'You think you could still talk them down?'

  Benitz forward in his seat, tense and trying to hide his elation. Casual. ' I think it would be possible. If I were at the plane and could talk to them.'

  'And what would you be telling them?'

  'Surrender, unconditional surrender.'

  'Before the next deadline, before the military go in.'

  'Surrender, unconditional surrender,®

  'Could save a deal of mopping up.®

  'Could save lives, Charlie.'

  Charlie looked behind him, satisfied himself that the staircase was unused, thumb in his mouth, the nail chewed between his teeth. 'I am going to the plane now. Perhaps ... if you wanted, you could come with me ... The message from your government is that there should be immediate and unc
onditional surrender?'

  'Yes, that is the message,' said Benitz looking hard into Charlie's eyes.

  'But if they surrender, then perhaps they go back to Russia.'

  If they surrender there will be no more killing. No more of the passengers will be hurt, and they themselves will live. I understand that what happens to them later is not yet decided."

  No opportunity for Benitz to use the telephone, to give explanations to London, to ask for fresh guidance. He prided himself that he had covered well on the hammer - blow disappointment of the news that a hostage was already dead, that his last instructions were now invalid, inappropriate. Charlie had taken his arm and was hurrying him down the steps, and seemed to stagger and falter, the mark of a man, Benitz recognized, close to exhaustion.

  Too late now, too far gone the opportunity for the young people to barter their freedom with the lives of the passengers. Possible before the captain had died, possible before they had taken their hostage. But the moment now lost. Benitz searched in his mind, among the briefings and the messages he had received in Tel Aviv and from London, as to what solution he might fashion that would most please those that he served.

  C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

  David stayed in the dull-lit recess at the back of the aircraft, his body pressed hard against the fastened drinks trolley. Waiting for nothing, passing the minutes away. He had not moved since the Italian had been taken from his seat to the doorway. After the noise of the shot that had sent a shudder through him, involuntary and unsought, barely a muscle or a nerve had functioned. Just stood there, hearing the rhythmic sounds of his wrist watch, willing the progress of its hands. The gun was held loosely across his waist, apparently ready to be fired at a moment of crisis, quickly and expertly, and giving the impression of a man who had found confidence and was his master.

  David alone realized the deception.

  The exact moment when he knew that all was over, that the struggle was hopeless, was not clear even to him. Perhaps it had been on the pavement in Kiev as Moses had stumbled and shuffled through his pockets in search of the balaclava. Perhaps it had been in the woodman's hut when Isaac had first raised the plan for the break-out and in doing so had usurped his own place as innovator and initiator. Perhaps it had been with the words, flat and unemotional, of ground control over Hanover when they had been ordered to fly on. Perhaps it had been as the dawn had risen lighting the cabin and he had witnessed the fear and hatred that alternated on the faces of those who were guarded by the guns. Perhaps the moment had come, the journey been completed, when he had seen the surprise and terror and comprehension merge on the face of the harmless and inoffensive little Italian. Which moment he did not know, but at one of them had come the knowledge that the game was completed, that he was ready for what Isaac called

  'surrender and capitulation'.

  They were big and bold words and worthy of a greater occasion. Armies surrendered, governments capitulated. They signified momentous times, nothing as scabrous or as dirty as the collapse in morale of three young Jews far from home. Babi Yar . . . that had been a great wrong, thousands machine-gunned because they were Jewish, for no other reason. A hundred times a thousand people had died in the ravine of Babi Yar. Jews, and not remembered, and the cheap belated monument made no mention of them. And those who came with flowers on the anniversary, on the day in late September, they were stoned and scourged and imprisoned -or

  'detained', as the authorities called it. Babi Yar had been the flint that forged the four of them together, a desire to avenge, to tilt the balance of the wrong . . . and now the water had come in its torrent and destroyed the flickering of that small flame.

  He had liked Moses, known him better than Isaac, because he was younger and less able and more dependent, and because he laughed more. Remembered him now, untidy, confused, willing to try, willing to become a casualty, a statistic. And Moses was already taken, and had bought them time- at what cost David could not know. And for what?

  The Italian should not have died for Babi Yar, nor even the schoolmaster who had jumped. It was not their quarrel. They did not wear the uniform of the authorities, did not carry the badge of office presented by the bullies who would not permit prayers to be said by the ditch where the Jews had fallen, that had become a tip for rubbish. Nor was it they who sent the Jews to the camps, arrested those who sought passage to Israel. They had no guilt, yet one had died and it had been intended another should have fallen in his place.

  If that was the cost of avenging Babi Yar and all that it had accumulated in shame, then the price was too high, that was the feeling of David as he stood far from the others at the rear of the cabin aisle. How to surrender? How to conclude his part without destroying what Isaac sought, without betraying his friends? He had thought long and hard behind the unmoving eyes, struggling with his tiredness till the solution came reluctantly upon him. A brutal, desperate solution that brought a chill over his body. And then the decision was made and there followed a calm and a clarity of thought that had been denied him for many hours.

  Often the American had looked at him, peering and twisting round in his seat, inviting conversation, still crowned with the knotted handkerchief that he wore across his scalp. While David had wrestled with his problem the man had kept his silence, bided his time. Now Edward R. Jones Jr recognized the lightness in the face, appreciated that he could speak.

  'How long do you go on like this? You shoot one, you lose one, but the British aren't talking, they aren't moving, not an inch.' The same nagging, grating voice, primed with aggression. David understood not a word, knew only that behind the deference to the gun and his youth the older man sneered at him. He shrugged his shoulders, and looked on down the aisle.

  ' I said, how much longer do we have to sit on our backsides here, waiting for you to call it quits?' David turned with the tolerance of one who is irritated by a wasp but cannot gather the energy to swat it, a half smile on his mouth.

  'Don't you speak English? Don't you understand me? Was it only the girl that went to school?'

  David no longer cared to listen, shut himself apart again, sensing the subsidence of the American in the face of his inability to communicate. Heard him mutter to his wife with her loud clothes and rinsed hair and hands that sought to silence her man, prevent provocation. What did that fool know of Babi Yar, or the labour camps? What did he know of militia headquarters, of the interrogations, of the humiliations?

  His eyes roved over the heads of the passengers. Through the hours he had come to recognize some, to know which were eager for his approval and would cringe for him, which tried to hide their pent-up hatred. He had begun to acknowledge them as individuals, had carved faces and personalities from the initial mass that they had taken on the journey. The children were still quiet, he could not say how or why. The old man with the farm boots bristled with independence as best he could from the confines of his seat belt. The pilot, Tashova, with her neat and close-cut hair, who held herself above them, superior to their struggle. The navigator, cautiously interested in what happened close to him, but never speaking. The Italians who had screamed, some of whom still cried and held each other's arms. The woman halfway forward, in the widow's clothes, with the baby on her knee and a pitch of smell around her and the reddened weather-stained face of the country and who asked each time he passed for milk for the child. The man beside her, who seemed a stranger, and whispered that she should not speak lest she draw attention to herself.

  Those who were frightened, those who were bold, those who were indifferent, those who rested on their nerves and those whose eyes darted to accumulate each nuance of mood from their captors. He had begun to know them all. But the familiarity had won him no friendship. No warmth, no love, no affection, only the loathing of those who watched him now.

  Abruptly David started to move the length of the aisle. His hands had tightened on the gun barrel, fingers entwined around the trigger guard. In front of him, their faces masked in shadow
, were Isaac and Rebecca. Without a victory, he thought, not even there where it had lain waiting.

  Should have won her by conquest, should have taken her, hours, weeks, months ago. Isaac had struck her, out there in the full gaze of the passengers, and now she fawned at him and played to him, and was close so that their bodies touched and their voices would be soft with the intimacy of equal conversation. Perhaps that was the defeat that hurt him above all. One could be proud and surrender to an army, capitulate to a government, but when defeat came from the hands of your friend, when the prize at stake was not great but the way between the thighs of a girl, then there was the capacity for wounding. He had hit her and she had come back to him; the bitch that snivels at the ankle when it has been whipped. And Isaac no better, on no higher a pedestal. He had been betrayed by her, yet now he nestled his shoulder close and protectively by hers. But irrelevant now, decision taken. Just a child she had seemed to him, a follower, who was not worth the attention of affection or love, and now that she was taken by his friend regret dominated him, and he fought to hold back the tears that welled in his eyes.

  As he passed the woman with the baby arrested his arm.

  "Sir, there can be milk for the baby. That cannot hurt you.'

  He saw the pleading, and the screwed, torn face of the infant, and the nervousness of the man who counselled quiet.

  ' I don't know,' he said hollowly.

  'But you are the leader,' she persisted. 'If you tell the others to allow it then they will not prevent it. Milk can be sent to the plane.'

  " It is not easy .. .*

  ' It is just for a child. Many hours it has not fed. A child can do you no harm.'

  Angrily David wrenched himself clear from the clinging hand and continued down the aisle.

  If he had taken the girl then it would not have been as it was now. Could have been in the hut, on the dry and dusty planking, or on the sacking of the window cover if they had first shaken the spiders and cobwebs loose, or in the forest among the leaves and watched by the birds. He looked at her closely, eating into her clothes, his thoughts drifting to the whiteness of her skin, the softness that would be her breasts, the firmness of the hips on which he would have spent himself. Why had it not happened? Why had there never been the moment? And when he had gone would either understand that it was because he loved them, both of them as his sister and brother?