by George Foy
‘You’re dangerous,’ she continued. ‘You’re all big talk, and no staying power. All breakthrough, and no building. Tons of moonlight walks, but no one to change diapers with. And no one to hold your hand twenty years down the road, when the stretchmarks have covered even your face and the kids are gone. All trips, and cops and robbers,’ she added; ‘but when the excitement’s over, you won’t be around to take care of the people who get hurt. There’s a level missing, somewhere.’ She coughed, winded by her speech.
The pilot looked at her. He looked at Rocketman. He looked back at Ela. He noticed her cheeks were very red. There were shiny highlights under her eyelids, a quick sniff in her nostrils. His throat grew tight in response.
‘Your cough’s back, Ela,’ he said gently. ‘I hope you’re not getting the flu.’
‘Don’t patronize me! Don’t you have anything else to say?’
‘Well, I think maybe—’
‘Do you know,’ she interrupted him, ‘the last time I saw my daddy? I was nine years old,’ she went on, ‘I was walkin’ home from school, and he pulls up in a dirty, beat-up ole car and calls to me. I knew it was him, ’cause he called me by – by a name he used to call me. Then he got out of the car. He was dressed in dark glasses, and a dirty raincoat, and a grimy porkpie hat; he even had Mars Bars in his pockets.’
She looked away.
‘I mean, he was, like, nice an’ everything. We talked. But years later, I understood. He had dressed up like a pervert! A dirty ole man! He could never do anything without making it a joke, or a game. Or some kind of weird adventure. And if the joke was on him, so much the better!’
She rocked back on her haunches. Her streaked hair looked sad against the shine of tears.
‘You know the worst of it?’ she added, very low. Still not looking directly at the pilot. ‘I never even made that marching squad—’ A hand touched her shoulder, and Ela swung around in surprise.
Abd el Haq had noticed her tears. He pulled his hand back from Ela’s shoulder like it had been burned. Digging into his shalwar, he fished out a square of brown handkerchief which Ela, after a second’s hesitation, accepted.
‘You know,’ Rocketman said to no one in particular, drawing on a Pakistani cigarette as if it were his last drag on earth, ‘I’m actually starting to miss Bellevue?’
*
When night fell – you could tell because the lines around the porthole screens went dark – the pilot returned to his cabin. He took a shower, stood in the steaming water for a long time, soaping himself luxuriously.
Afterward, wrapped in an Imperial Airways towel, he fed God bits of steak from dinner and let him hop around the sleeping quarters. Then he lay back on his mattress.
The pilot had done nothing all day, yet still he felt as if he’d been wrestling large Kodiak bears for hours on end.
Some of it was exhaustion, molecules screaming implosion from mule saddles, and drugs, and flu.
Most of it was structural breakdown. If he saw his mind as an internal moral framework, some micro-electric jungle gym that balanced losses on one side with positive gains on the other, then he was suffering stresses three times past shear point, alarm lights flashing, sirens whooping, collapse imminent.
Every time he looked at Ela he felt as if the framework gave another wounded shriek, and another stanchion broke, and the structure lurched another couple of feet off-balance, as in the final fifteen minutes of a disaster flick.
Even flying was no help. A month ago being in a plane, any kind of plane, even if he was not doing the flying, would have given his mood a positive spin.
Now, all of a sudden, the rumble of engines, the occasional bank or shudder as they flew through turbulence had no perceptible effect on his mood. Flying no longer could save him. The awareness of speed no longer had the power to heal.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he mumbled to his reflection, vague in the scratched aluminum of the bunk above. ‘I can’t believe it.’
The reflection mocked, threw his questions back at him.
She had called him dangerous.
Why ‘dangerous’?
It was the word Carmelita had used.
And yet he was sure it was the danger – by that he assumed Carmelita meant the drive in him, to fly at night, under radar and over borders – that had attracted her to him in the first place.
It was Carmelita who had phoned him, after all. Only two weeks after he sat at her table in the South Carolina bar.
They had set up a date in Alphabet City, not far from her fifth floor walk-up, a part of town where people habitually wore mourning and made ‘art’ out of garbage and bought smack from holes in the walls of condemned buildings.
A dangerous place to live.
And it was truly the risk-taking in her that had excited him, the first defiant John-Paul-Jones flaunt of her hair, the privateer determination to be the best in the world at one thing. It all came out when she roller-danced. It was what drove the fat, beer-guzzling, sad-eyed men in the barroom wild; a sense that she herself had no borders, no restraints, in this one thing at least.
The men believed she lacked it in all respects.
He could not believe Carmelita did not see a mirror of herself in his compulsion to smuggle. And he was sure that side of him had sparked on some hint of flint in the puzzling conglomerate that was Eleuthera Hawkley Taylor.
His mind flew circles in its bewilderment. The circles grew tighter and more repetitious. Finally some damage-control mechanism in his brain shut down the major circuits, the circular pain. In the silence of switches thrown the small emergency power section of his mind took up a discipline to scale. He got out the butter knife and began unscrewing the screen covering the porthole beside his bunk.
It was tough work. The heads of the aluminum studs on the sliders kept stripping or breaking off; however he finally got a left-hand corner of the screen loose. He put his face to the resulting wedge.
The perfect night of high altitudes touched him as if it could pierce his skin like Van Allen radiation. A moon shining from behind the plane poured indigo over the world. Stars burned their distant fire through the blue. An even canopy of clouds stretched to the horizon. The cloud-scrim allowed occasional glimpses of a wrinkled darkness that looked like sea. Some deep spirit level inside the pilot shifted closer to even again.
He was still mostly naked in protest at not being told position or destination, but, now he could see horizon, his geographical anxiety was attenuated.
Now he felt almost peaceful not to know where they were. It reinforced the feeling that this Flying Boat was its own world, a microcosm of humans to whom origin was a fable and destination a myth; seven people lost between the stars and the earth with twenty hours of fuel endurance, telling each other stories to fight the unbearable and beautiful loneliness of belonging to something so cold and distant, so totally without beginning or end.
The pilot stared out the porthole for a long time. He picked out constellations and planets. By their position in the sky he figured they were heading roughly southeast. He spotted Venus, Regulus – Mars, blearily orange to the east.
In his mind’s eye he saw a ship with titanium castings on her ass end, jerking toward the red planet in fiery atomic bursts.
In the bunk above him Ela shifted and coughed. Through the worn foam he could trace the soft contours of her back and thighs. Something curved in the pilot’s gut, as if in symmetry. He went back to the porthole and measured Mars’ height over the horizon in finger-widths, and checked the time. Twenty-two hours, forty-two minutes, eighteen seconds; one day after they had slipped under the effects of that strange tea in the khor. If they were still in the same time zone, that made it 17:42:18 GMT. Useless info, for the cloud horizon was not the mathematical one, and you needed the mathematical horizon to find the true altitude of a star. You needed to compensate for the plane’s altitude, and you needed an Air Almanac to find the Greenwich Hour Angle, or GHA. This was the only way to establish you
r longitude and fix your position with certainty.
He wished he had the ECM-pak. It had a stellar navigation sub-program where you just plugged in the corrected observation and three seconds later out popped your Lat. and Long. He wondered what had happened to the ECM. Daud Khan’s men had conscientiously shipped their bags across the mountains, but it was too much to expect they would not steal something that valuable and useful.
He dug the Smuggler’s Bible out of his gear. As well as microcharts of the world’s major air routes, the Bible contained an index of GHAs, five-digit numbers that, once corrected for parallax, height-of-eye, and time, would give him an approximation of longitude.
GHAs.
Somebody had mentioned them, he thought, not long ago.
Now he thought of it, he’d seen five-digit numbers recently as well.
It all came together in completely-stretched-out fashion, the memories lighting off first, then sparking common denominators till the whole made a pattern that was too cohesive to ignore.
Alois van der Lubbe.
He’d mentioned something about ‘Gay Hatch-ahs,’ a nonsense word unless you looked at it as initials. ‘Gay,’ ‘hatch’ and ‘ah’ were the German pronunciation for the letters G, H and A. He knew this from his father, who had learned German during the war, and still used it for his trains.
‘His GHAs are declining;’ he remembered van der Lubbe saying that.
The postcards from Hawkley. Always going east, Ela had said. East, in terms of stellar navigation, meant ‘declining’ GHAs.
And those nonsense classifieds he’d been noticing, even looking forward to, in the Gazette. He couldn’t remember if the numbers had been declining or not. He got his jeans out of the chartcase and checked his pockets on the off chance. Luck was with him; he’d automatically stowed the ripped section of the October edition in his back pocket when he woke up in the Buddha khor.
Sapphic historian seeks SDM Bantu-speaker (Non-smoker) with SS# ending 113.20 for comprehensive oral history on influence of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s ring finger on modem concept of time. Contact Box L.
Was this how van der Lubbe knew Hawkley’s GHAs?
For a GHA of 113.20 to mean anything, it had to have a time.
But the Gazette was the only newspaper in the world to print its precise time of publication.
The pilot sighed.
It was one hell of a complicated way to tell your cronies where you were, even if you were in hiding, even if you claimed to lead a ‘religion’ founded on arcana such as these.
The pilot checked his rough measurement of Mars with the almanac at the back of the Bible and crossed it with the course he’d figured, southeast from Nooristan.
By his calculations, they were somewhere in the middle of Cambodia.
He looked at the glimpses of sea below him in utter disgust.
He converted the numbers in the Gazette to longitude. It turned out to be 121 degrees, 13 minutes, 44 seconds east. If you took a chart and drew out the Flying Boat’s course, well ahead of his calculated position till it crossed longitude 121, you found yourself in Borneo.
The pilot threw away his pencil and closed the book. He was pissed off at the whole exercise. When you hit bottom, he thought a little melodramatically as he went to sleep, all directions were up, and all speeds too slow. They would find out where they were headed in due course.
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘People claimed to have seen the Cargo ships unloading. Planes were coming; the ancestors were returning; and docks were built for the Cargo vessels . . . The secret of the Cargo, so long hidden by the whites, was now revealed . . .
In the initial stages, rifles were included amongst the expected goods.’
Peter Worsley
The Trumpet Shall Sound
A change in the Flying Boat’s rhythm woke them at around 2:30 that morning by the pilot’s watch. The characteristic whine of Dornier-Akai hydraulics started, stopped. The engine’s r.p.m.’s diminished, the plane banked left, right, left again and began to tremble as flaps thickened the flow of air under the wings. The hull boomed, bounced, boomed as they left the air; the roar of engines was replaced by a rushing of water; within twenty seconds the Flying Boat had settled into the water and was taxiing, rocking a little in this more solid element.
The propellors changed pitch, got louder, died away to nothing.
The pilot peered out his wedge of porthole. He saw the greasy black teeth of low waves reflecting lights from the cockpit forward and above his head. A line of what looked like bonfires ringed the dark, and was answered beneath him by the portholes of the Flying Boat, mirrored in the black water.
A black craft slid silently through the splits and saucers of the plane’s reflection. It had a single narrow hull, a thin outrigger on the starboard side, and was powered by a claw-shaped sail, very tall. It disappeared like a prehistoric bird into the night behind the aircraft’s tail.
‘Door’s locked,’ Rocketman reported from the entrance to the sleeping quarters, and sat on the pilot’s bunk.
Waves tapped and played the S-26’s hull like an aluminum xylophone. The Flying Boat shifted around its bow. They had anchored, the pilot thought. In the distance he could hear shouts, and the bang of hatches.
The relative silence, after hours of engine noise, was awesome, huge; an indistinct monster of something-gone.
On the bunk above, Ela started to cough.
‘You OK?’ the pilot asked.
She ignored his question.
‘Where do you think we are?’ she said.
‘I thought it didn’t matter.’
‘Don’t get technical.’
‘I don’t know. I just saw a boat. It looked like a prau – Indonesian.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘South of China.’
‘Wow,’ Ela commented. Her voice was hoarse, and a little tense. ‘I didn’t know there was anything south of China.’
At a quarter to three the short headhunter came in with a wooden-stocked Chinese AK-47 in one arm. He pointed the machine-pistol in their direction and said, ‘We’re here, dudes. Get dressed. You can put your pants on,’ he added, pointing at the pilot. ‘Cap’n Hubbard says he gonna tell you where your ass is at.’
The headhunter led them through the deserted plane to the cargo area. He stopped at an open hatch under the huge wing, under the hot bulk of engines. Through the hatch they could see a large dugout catamaran, twice the size of the prau the pilot had spotted earlier, snubbed between the plane’s side and its left float.
Smells blew in the hatchway: salt, rotten vegetation, dead fish. The air was moist and very warm. A haze blocked the sea horizon, dimming an ambient moon. It reminded the pilot of the Rio Chingado.
He had sworn never to fly to places like this, and now here he was again.
Darkworld.
The dugout, like the prau, consisted of one long hull and an outrigger made of carved tree trunk. The outrigger was connected to the main hull by bamboo struts. Planks had been tied across the struts and a tiny palm-leafed cabin raised across the planks. A small fire glowed in a little clay hearth inside the cabin.
The prisoners were told to sit on the planks. A couple of men of the same ebony color as the headhunter unloaded crates from the Flying Boat and lashed them next to the cabin with sisal rope. Then they pushed off from the huge plane and hauled up a sail. The dugout picked up speed, heading for the distant line of lights. Salt spray tainted their lips. The mist covered them like a moist blanket.
Behind them, in the mist, the seaplane looked like a magic ship, with its three rows of portholes, and the meaty, endless wings with the great props frozen in four different directions, and its great silver tail rising like a mizzen from the sea. A name was painted on the tail, Silubloan, in black, old-fashioned letters.
Sleek glimmering shapes shot underwater across the catamaran’s path, leaving shadows of green light behind them. For an amazed instant the pilot thought they must
be torpedoes – then one of the shapes surfaced and he recognized the sloping back, the black, curved fin, and heard the dolphin’s explosive breath.
The ring of bonfires grew larger. Ten minutes after leaving the plane a huge structure rose from the black water. It looked like a bizarre and giant crab, or a wooden oil rig perched on scores of very long, spindly legs. They sailed into the shadow of pilings. The pilings were laced with bamboo cross beams, steps, ladders, catwalks. It did not look very strong. They could hear the structure groan in the minimal wind. The crew brought the dugout into the breeze and snugged the craft easily into a bamboo dock. A murmur of voices rose from above their heads.
The headhunter slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and pointed up a ladder leading from water level. As they climbed, carefully checking their purchase on the moist bamboo rungs, the bonfires resolved into torches of pitch and brush, stuck up and down a coral beach under a brow of tall and thick-leafed palms.
They reached a sort of wooden landing. The headhunter, who’d been following behind, led the way now, across a catwalk, up another ladder, and finally over a short deck into a long, wooden, palm-thatched house. The longhouse was set on stilts that blended into the deep structure of the wharf’s underpinnings.
Inside, the space was brightly lit with hurricane lamps. Their glow painted strong shadows on fifty or sixty men and women as black as the headhunter, or the prau’s crew. The men were dressed in cheap jeans; the women wore only plain cotton skirts, and their breasts were bare.
Most of the people were engaged in unpacking the goods that had come in on the Flying Boat.
A few sat, nervously active, at makeshift desks.
The place smelled of wood smoke and gum grease, of moldy leaves and roasted meat.
The headhunter pointed under a loft of palm fronds halfway up the length of the only room. The bald codger in the flying jacket was squatting on an empty crate by an open fire, drinking from a gourd.
Beside him sat a white man in a trim white beard. He wore John Lennon glasses, headphones, a denim jacket, and a faded Pan Am pilot’s cap. His cheeks were wrinkled with age, though his way of looking was interested and young. A portable sat-nav lay beside him, and a Walkman. The Walkman’s ‘play’ button was lit. He wore a paisley bandanna, knotted around his neck.