by Adam Hall
The whole of the Kobra cell is now on board,' I said, 'and they've got Pat Burdick with them. The police have got the aircraft cordoned off but they can't actually do anything useful. That's all I've got for you. Sorry there's no jam on it,'
In a couple of seconds he asked:
'Do you think they're going to take off?'
'Yes.'
'When?'
'Soon.'
He paused again.
'All right. Details.'
'TWA Flight 378 normally scheduled Belem to Miami. Boeing 707. Normal departure was 08:45 and the ETA is 11:15 Belem time, 09:15 Miami time.'
Ferris answered a little more quickly now. 'The aircraft is fuelled up and ready to leave, then?'
'Oh yes.'
'They didn't flush you, of course.'
'No.'
He paused again.
The siren was loud now and I saw the patrol car swing across the tarmac and pull up near the television unit. The man with the camera swung the thing half-circle to cover the people getting out of the patrol car in case they were official negotiators.
'What do you intend doing?' Ferris asked me.
I suppose it was a compliment, really, for him to assume I had any kind of answer to this one. There was of course an answer but it wasn't very subtle, and I didn't feel like spelling it out for him because he might order me not to do it, 'I think I'll have to go aboard,' I said.
From this distance I could see three people standing at the top of the flight steps but couldn't identify them for certain: the two outer figures were holding what looked like submachine-guns and the one in the middle would be Patricia Burdick. I didn't think they could have got any weapons that size through Manaus Airport: they must have a contact in Belem and they'd phoned him before they left. These people were internationals and if they'd decided to move to the United States they wouldn't have left anything to chance.
Ferris had been thinking it over. Now he said:.
'All right. I'll keep track of the plane.'
'Do that.'
He asked if there were anything else and I said no and we hung up and I stood there for a minute wiping die sweat off my face and feeling a bit queasy because this could get me killed.
Then I took off the overalls and put them on a bench with the ear-mufflers and walked across the tarmac till I reached the police cordon. I now recognized Satynovich Zade and Carlos Ramirez at the top of the steps with the girl between them. Ramirez was shouting to the group of police negotiators in Portuguese, asking again for a doctor to go aboard and look after the hostage. He promised repeatedly that the doctor would be regarded as a "brave humanitarian" and would come to no harm whatever happened.
I saw a small man pushing his way through the crowd with a bag on his hand, and decided I ought to start parleying.
I cupped my hands.
'Satynovich!'
I didn't want to talk to Ramirez because he might be limited to Spanish and Portuguese and if the police understood what I was saying they might take me for a friend of the terrorists and arrest me and that'd be strictly no go.
'Voce e medico?'
He was a captain of police and his hand had gone to his gun.
That's right, I told him, I was a doctor.
I cupped my hands again.
'Satynovich! I want to talk to you!
I used Polish and hoped none of the police understood.
Zade had turned his head and was looking straight at me.
He wouldn't expect anyone to speak to him in Belem in his own language: their contact would be Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking and Ramirez would be the go-between. Zade was turning to him and Ramirez now looked across at me.
In a moment he began calling to the police in Portuguese, ordering them to let me pass through the cordon.
They didn't want to. On principle they didn't want to do anything the terrorists told them, which was natural enough. A lot of shouting went on and I looked around for the nearest press group. A European was hanging from the side of a television van, trying to angle up a shot with the police captain in the foreground and the group on the flight steps beyond. I called out to him.
'Vous etes Francais ou quoi? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?'
He looked across at me.
'Bit of both, actually.'
'Listen, do you know who that girl is? The hostage?'
'American, isn't she?'
'She's the daughter of the US Secretary of Defence.'
'Jesus Christ! So that's — '
'Listen, get on a phone to Washington and tell him where she is and never mind about the bloody pictures.'
He was coming down from the side of the van.
'You're so right,' he said and got a quick shot of one in case he could use it later. 'Which side are you on?'
'Go and find a phone — you've got it exclusive.'
I wanted James Burdick to know the score because if that Boeing came down anywhere in the United States he'd want to be there. Forty-five minutes ago the Kobra operation had been running as a fully secret hostage-and-demand action and Pat Burdick had been insect-hunting along the Amazon with a group of friends but the situation had now changed radically: the girl's fever and Burdick's reaction to the news of it had either driven or panicked Kobra into the open and in seizing the Boeing they'd gone public and from this point onwards they'd be making their stand against the combined strength of the FBI, the CIA and whatever law-enforcement, counter-espionage and anti-terrorist organizations could be brought into the field.
That wouldn't make it more difficult for Kobra, as long as they held Pat Burdick. But it would infinitely increase her danger.
Ramirez was shouting again.
In thirty seconds, he announced in Portuguese, he and his companion would open fire on the crowd unless that man there were allowed through the cordon.
The police captain had been holding my arm. Now he released it.
He didn't believe I was a doctor.
'Urn dia,' he said, 'voce pagavr, voce e seus amigos? '
Then he gave an order and the cordon let me through and I walked across the tarmac under the hot sun,
my right foot trying to buckle over because the heel of the shoe had been worn away by the tyre of the DC-6.
Satynovich Zade hadn't yet recognized me: he had known only that someone in the crowd not only spoke his tongue but knew his name and he wanted to find out who it was. He was still standing at the top of the flight steps as I climbed them, and when I was halfway up he stopped me with a jerk of the machine-gun. I took off the sunglasses and looked up at him.
His own eyes were still concealed by the smoked lenses, so that I couldn't see their expression; but I noticed his mouth give a slight jerk as he recognized me.
'She didn't succeed,' I told him carefully in Polish.
Then I caught movement and looked higher, beyond him, and saw Shadia staring down at me with her face dead white.
Zade had been keeping the sub-machine-gun aimed steadily at my heart, and now I saw his finger go to the trigger.
'Don't do that,' I said.
The sun was reflected on his smoked glasses as he stood above me with his head perfectly still. It looked as if his eyes were blazing, but of course it was just the reflection.
This was why Ferris had taken his time thinking about what I'd said, when I'd told him I was going aboard: it wasn't a terribly good move and I'd probably get killed; but something had to be done and if I could do it and get it right it'd mean a lot to that bastard Egerton. There was of course the ghost of a chance that I'd get away with it, and that's all we ask, when despite all we've done there's nothing more we can do to save the mission, when the only choice is to abandon it and try to live with our pride or make the final throw and hope for the only thing that can get us through:, the ghost of a chance.
I watched his finger.
'Don't do that,' I told him again. 'I'm working for Burdick, didn't you know? That gets you another hostage for nothing, and you ca
n use me to negotiate the exchange. So don't throw away good material — you might be glad of it later,'
He didn't move.
Shadia had gone inside the aircraft.
Pat Burdick looked down at me but I don't think she was taking anything in: her skin was yellow and her eyes dull and I could see why they'd wanted a doctor on board.
Carlos Ramirez watched me with his gun steady, Zade watched me, his finger curled.
I heard the cry of sea birds in the distance.
Some kind of aircraft landed and reversed thrust, sending out a rush of sound that diminished slowly.
I watched his finger.
It'd be a quick pressure, then off again: with shells that size he only needed one shot to blow me right off the steps.
'Work it out for yourself,' I said. 'It makes sense.'
There wasn't anything else I could do now, because I didn't want to oversell the idea: it'd look as if I were worried. It was his decision to make, entirely his decision, with nothing on my side to help me. Except the ghost of a chance.
Chapter Sixteen: BOEING
'I told you,' I said. 'It makes sense.'
He didn't answer.
I watched the reflections in his sunglasses.
He kept very still.
Sunglasses are effective in two ways: they disguise the face and they conceal the thoughts in the eyes of the wearer, and in a poker-type situation that can offer a critical advantage.
I couldn't see what he was thinking.
'Find out,' he said at last, 'where we are now.'
He was talking to Shadia, not to me.
She turned away and I watched her reflected back view in his sunglasses as she went forward to the flight deck.
We were still over the ocean: the glare still lit the mouldings above the windows. I hadn't been told anything but I assumed Zade would try for Washington: Flight 378 was originally scheduled for Miami so it would carry enough excess fuel.
Shadia came back.
'We're a few minutes north-east of Miami.'
'All right,' Zade said.
She looked into my face for a moment before she turned away and went aft to where Pat Burdick was lying on a tilted seat. Sometimes during the flight from Belem I'd found Shadia staring at me from a little distance, as if she still wasn't sure what had happened. I think if I'd suddenly sprung up with a fiendish cry she would have passed straight out. I don't use a gun so my experience with them is academic but I suppose when you pump six killing shots into someone's body it must do something to you as well: there must be a kind of rapport between you, in the giving and receiving of so much hate. For several hours Shadia had believed she'd lulled me and when she'd seen me standing there on the flight steps a: Belem it must have been psychically traumatizing.
'Do you think he would take your advice?' Zade asked me.
He meant Burdick.
'Yes, he would.'
We spoke in Polish most of the time, but he tried out some weird English phrases now and then to impress me, though I hadn't actually heard them used before. We sat facing each other: he was on the inside seat of the front row in the first-class section and I was on the steward's jump-seat I'd been searched and everything and they'd calmed down during the flight, though Zade and Sassine were still rather nervy and I had to watch what I said or they'd begin firing questions at me and I didn't want to tell them some of the answers.
Kuznetski was the quietest: his dossier had mentioned something about scientific training in Prague University and he was probably some type of bent boffin. He'd only spoken twice during the flight out of Belem and now he was sitting alone, preoccupied.
Sassine was across the aisle from us, reeking the place out with pot Zade had told him to shut up a few minutes ago and Sassine had come off his high in a swallow dive. I'd noticed on other occasions that when Zade said anything, people really listened.
'Then you can advise him not to make any trouble for me,' he said, watching me with his sunglasses.
'I don't think he wants to do that' I leaned forward. 'He wants his daughter back with him, and I'm ready to advise him to do precisely what you say. From my personal observation that is the only way he can save her.'
I tried to sound like a smooth Civil Servant, using that bastard Loman for a model, because the showdown might involve a modicum of close combat and I didn't want these people to think I was any good at it. Similarly I was trying to persuade him that me Defence Secretary was also a pushover because a determining factor in any confrontation with an adversary is the degree by which you can get his guard down in the preliminary stages.
'You have had contact with Burdick?.'
'Yes,' I said.
I hadn't.
'So you know what we are demanding from him.'
'Yes.'
I didn't.
He looked away from my face at last, turning his dark head to the window. I could now see part of his left eye, but couldn't judge the expression at this angle: he was just staring into the distant sky.
'We know that Israel has the bomb, and we know that the United Arab Republic is building one. That is the key factor in the imminent Israel-Egypt accord, already outlined by Kissinger.'
I looked beyond him to the pallid face of the Burdick girl.
Dr Costa was sitting alongside her: he was the short man who'd been pushing his way through the crowd at Belem: the "brave humanitarian". I hadn't known, until now, how slight her chances were.
A group like Kobra wouldn't come together from the ends of the earth to acquire a single nuclear bomb. They'd want more than that: fifty or a hundred of them.
'Yasser Arafat published his manifesto in Al Thawra, two months ago, in Beirut.' His head swung back. 'Did you read it?'
'I read the Newsweek interview.'
'Good. That is his manifesto, and it is my manifesto. We may not be able to prevent the proposed Israel-Egypt accord, but we can prevent some of its consequences. Have you met Yasser Arafat?'
'No.'
'If you met him, you would follow him. I can do nothing for Poland, but I can do something for Palestine. You understand?'
'Of course.'
He was on a liberation kick and he was sincere about it and therefore dangerous: the political terrorist is the man who could create new and better worlds if he could express his dreams with intelligence; having none, he can only express his frustration.
I leaned forward again, wanting to know things.
'But you said that the bomb is the key factor. Do you mean — '
'The bomb is always the key factor. In the ultimate show of strength, that is the form of strength that is shown. Surely you know that.'
He looked up as someone came off the flight deck: I heard the sliding door hitting the stops. I turned my head and saw Ventura. They'd been taking it in shifts to mount guard on the flight deck and Ventura had been there for the last twenty minutes. He was a narrow-chested man with a bald head and slow wet eyes: he looked like a disinterested assistant in men's haberdashery but he had killed Hunter in Geneva and he would kill me when the showdown came unless I could preempt him.
'I need you up front,' he said.
Zade moved quickly and I felt the power in him as he swung past me. The sliding door banged shut behind them and I changed my seat so as to face forward. Sassine went nervously for his gun but I didn't take any notice because he was as high as a kite and his reactions were notably slow: I could 'have got his gun and shot Zade or Ventura or possibly both as they came back from the flight deck but Kuznetski and Ramirez were behind me now and so was Shadia.
Sassine seemed ashamed of his show of nerves and crossed his legs and pinched out his reefer and put it in a tin box marked «Aspirin» in Czechoslovakian and began talking rapidly about the paradoxes of political history and the undercurrents of popular thought and their influence on the world revolutionary scene in terms of pseudo-neo-Fascism and its abortive attempts to achieve liberation for the elite. One of the port engines cut out
and came back on power while he was talking but he didn't notice it.
Behind him, farther along the aisle, Ramirez was watching me with one hand on a sub-machine-gun, and I saw him glance to the window. Sassine went on talking and I assessed his potential for creating difficulties: I thought Zade would probably have trouble controlling him when it came to the crunch. He was a thin, hollow-eyed man in his twenties, haunted by things he had done or perhaps by things that had been done to him, and I believed he would put a bullet into Pat Burdick's head and my own as well if he thought it would be politically correct.
The engine cut twice more, coming back each time, and five minutes later Zade and Ventura came back from the flight deck and stood talking in urgent whispers in the catering area forward of the passenger section. I couldn't hear anything they said. Sassine was recommending the advantages of what he called 'socialistically-oriented referenda' as a means of 'reaching the proletariat' without disturbing the 'mass-media syndrome' when the port engine cut out and stayed out. The background noise was diminished by one quarter and was noticeable even to Sassine.
Zade and Ventura had stopped talking and were moving forward again when the flight deck door banged back and the pilot stood there, a tall mahogany-faced type with four gold rings on his sleeve and his cap on the back of his head. He spoke directly to Zade.
'Okay, you better get this. I'm the captain of this ship as long as she's in the air and I want to tell you something in case you didn't happen to think of it for yourself. We have one engine out and it can happen again so I'm going to take her into the first place that can give me clearance, and if you don't like it you can shoot me right between the eyes and you've got a hundred and thirty thousand pounds of junk going through the air at thirty thousand feet and it's doing five hundred knots and she's all your baby, know what I mean? You think that guy in there can take her down? He's not a pilot, he's a navigator and he couldn't land a goddam bicycle. I realize you've got the biggest ass in the ball-park so I thought I better just tell you the score.'
He turned and went back to the flight deck and slid the door shut with a bang.
The Boeing was in a wide turn and drifting lower.