Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  McCloud was angry for a second. “Come on. Leave me some pride. Whitey and I are fine.”

  “Whitey,” she said, “is very polite. And very forgiving.”

  He poured himself more water. He was ready to undertake the water therapy. He hated the idea that at some time in the future his name might be mentioned to Whitey by some official of Australian Aboriginal or Foreign Affairs, and Whitey’s eyes might politely waver.

  “I understand,” McCloud admitted to Pauline. He drained the cup. It disappeared into the ill ease, the hollow dryness. “I admit I’ve learned bad habits. But please don’t go home from Frankfurt, Pauline. I’ll behave differently in Frankfurt. And we’ll have fun.…”

  Perhaps, it occurred to him, they’d have it when he broke the news that $12,000 seemed to be the best he could get. She might even be happy at that. It would either put him back under her high-earning patronage or send him back to regular hours of work. And in some nice little Gasthaus in Frankfurt the disarming Pauline, so rigorous on herself and others, so strenuous on manners, who had seen in her father—“The Dentist,” as everyone still called him—the berserk shifts which can derive from a lack of rigor, might admit to him her ultimate contentment. Or else her easy forgiveness for his literary failure. And they would make love then and be reconciled.

  He went on talking about Frankfurt and how they would hire a van and all ride together into Italy. And he would keep Bluey Kannata out of bars, and she could keep him, McCloud, out of bars, too.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m not a mother superior. You’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Of course, he said. Of course. He understood that. It would be wonderful, though, he said, because in Milan they were really waiting for the dance troupe! No one took this sort of event more seriously than the northern Italian press. They wrote as if every day’s paper were an installment in an encyclopedia. Beside them, The New York Times was a callow rag.

  During this council with Pauline he had been able to see, around a corner of the partition which screened them, the stewards and—as the airline industry still chose to call them, long after poetesses had become poets—the stewardesses begin to move forward up the length of the plane. They wore no more than their usual pained frown at the mass of passengers who had to be fed and watered.

  The captain’s voice was heard. It seemed to rise up from some blithe rural place far back behind the American coast the aircraft was still skirting, a voice unmarred by ambiguous America, by the Village up against Alphabet City, by Georgetown up against Washington, by all America’s cheek-by-jowl glories and threats. The voice mentioned some improbable altitude they were supposed to have reached. It nominated another even less credible number as their aimed-for cruising altitude. It made the darkness—taller than Everest beyond this little flask of human light—sound homely and convivial.

  “That weather front which caused such havoc in the Midwest earlier today has moderated and should be of positive assistance to us,” the captain advised the passengers in his country accent. “Given that we arrive in Europe in the morning and have to put in a full day, I suggest you get as much rest as you can catch.”

  To McCloud, the idea of catching sleep as from a well of blackness seemed appealing.

  The polite young Pakistani/Arab, Pauline’s traveling companion, appeared in the gap between the bank of lavatories and the partition. He held something which looked as if it had been made of fiberglass. McCloud woodenly remembered that the thing he held was called a machine pistol. Pauline, with her back to the boy, had not yet seen this shocking, rarely glimpsed, yet somehow familiar possession in his hands.

  “Is that an Uzi?” McCloud asked the boy. It was a name he’d read in the New York papers. Adolescent drug dealers were said to tote them in the Bronx. This boy seemed hardly more than adolescent.

  Pauline turned and took one step backward then, until she was exactly and tightly slotted against the dip of McCloud’s shoulder.

  The polite Pakistani, who was possibly an Arab after all, said, “It’s a Polish WZ-63. Would you return to your seats?”

  “Why?” asked McCloud. “You aren’t going to tell me this is—”

  “Be calm about it, sir,” said the boy. His voice had an overlaying American accent, as if he were a foreign student at some American campus. And he had that appeasing tone which foreigners who get their English in America pick up from the natives. “My brothers and I have taken the plane over. Back to your seats, please.”

  “Your brothers?” asked McCloud. The boy had been seated on his own beside Pauline. McCloud had not noticed any potential brothers of this boy’s during his journey down from first class.

  The boy did not answer. He’d noticed the locked toilet door which the German woman had entered. He began knocking on it. He was insistent, but he didn’t pound away. The woman emerged, bleared and shocked, as if she’d been asleep in there. He ordered her to her seat.

  “And you,” he told the McClouds yet again. “Please. Quick. This is a serious matter. To your seats.”

  To McCloud he looked vaguely disappointed, as if he had expected a Polish WZ-63 to work better than this in exacting obedience from ordinary people.

  McCloud, Pauline, and the German woman turned into the aisle and saw something both as accustomed and as very strange as the firearm they’d already beheld in the boy’s hands. All the stewards and stewardesses had been mustered by an exit further forward. Here they were under guard by a man older than Pauline’s polite young reader of U.S. News and World Report.

  In one upraised hand so that everyone in the plane could see it, this man, short but broad-shouldered, displayed a grenade which he had taken from a collection he wore on his belt. None of this seemed aberrant to McCloud. Yet the temptation not to believe in these phenomena was strong. For the man with the grenade was always there, and not there at the same time, in any aircraft you boarded. He stood just beyond the precise reach of your imagination. Here, on this New York–Frankfurt flight, he had simply taken on a little more flesh.

  He kept a calm demeanor, too, this stocky operative by the door. He had an ordinary grizzled, balding look. He didn’t seem rabid or frantic like the fellow you’d projected to yourself. He possessed an air of easy practice and efficiency.

  McCloud felt the shock of having the unthinkable made flesh in front of his eyes. A mute alarm arose in him. Yet with it came the strange suspicion that to work up too much of a head of distress at the moment would be a waste, a gesture of disorder akin to other disorderly gestures he’d already made in New York. So he moved on, absorbing everything.

  The boy told Pauline, who had halted in the aisle, “Go to your seat, madam.”

  Pauline raised her eyebrows, let her hand have fleeting contact with McCloud’s forearm, and, before McCloud could gauge whether his kiss would be welcome, struggled in past the freckled girl with the baby. The young mother did not seem more wan than she had before. No one had stood up and protested. They had not achieved belief in these events yet. People frowned slightly, as if all this were a minor hold-up in cocktail service.

  “Where is your seat, sir?” the young man asked McCloud.

  “I am up the front. But I’d like to stay with my wife. If I can’t stay here, can’t she come up there with me?”

  Crazily, he suspected for a moment there might be a separate system of politics up there beyond the curtain, and he might talk the steward into admitting Pauline into it.

  But then of course he understood the madness of the idea. “I’ll stay here,” he announced. He knew he would be happier here anyhow. He did not want to deal with these people on his own, in a separate seat. At the moment he felt profoundly married in a way he rarely felt in daily life. Separation would require surgery or death. He had not felt like that when the intense Polish woman promised him a sight of the best Navajo acrylics on the second floor.

  “Go to your seat, sir,” said the boy, nudging him with the Polish weapon.

  Pauline, nodd
ing, consigning him forward, called from her place in the middle of the row, “You’d better go. The dancers mightn’t know what in the hell is happening.”

  It was for sentiments like that that Peter Drury thought her the best in her business.

  “Who are you people?” McCloud asked the young man.

  “An announcement will be made on the public address system,” the boy told him in the style of a sentence learned by rote.

  With the armed boy following, McCloud began to walk forward. He felt that people were watching him disapprovingly. Even then he thought that perhaps they’d transferred the blame for the inconvenience from the men with the machine pistols to him. Reaching the older and tougher man who faced the pale cabin crew, the young reader of U.S. News and World Report bent to a bag at the man’s feet. He took from it a grenade belt like the one the small man already wore and a little press-button radio of neatest design. The two of them didn’t look like brothers. And then it struck McCloud: the boy had been talking of brothers in the tribal sense; in the sense of ideology and mission!

  Through the first-class curtain, still drawn, the hijackers feeling bound for the moment to recognize the airline’s policy as regarded division of the classes, he found—forward by the book and magazine racks—a young man armed just like Pauline’s boy and hardly any older. Tom Gullagara had of course awoken or been awakened in his place by the window and contemplated the boy levelly.

  That loaded and perhaps ambiguous word terrorist had not yet entered the mental vocabulary McCloud was applying to this evening’s occurrences. But it struck him now. It came up from the back of his brain like unexpected data. Terrorist, he thought. These are what are known as terrorists. But it wasn’t a very useful thought. It gave him less purchase, not more. In the mouths of politicians and editors it meant something. By not being a useful tool for this hour, however, it disappointed him.

  From her seat Daisy Nakamura raised her eyebrows toward him. She could have been saying, “Nothing surprises me.” And indeed she seemed to shine with a sort of assertive air of unsurprise.

  His drink had arrived. The new masters of the aircraft had not interfered with that. A number of these people up here were sipping wine or spirits or mineral water. Across the aisle, Cale held an envelope briefly toward McCloud. Written on its back, the side the young man by the magazine racks could not see, were the words, “For Christ’s sake, I am not a journalist!” The message was aimed at McCloud for a second, before Cale crumpled and hid it in his pocket.

  The intercom came on. It whistled and thudded like the wake of some other, safer jet above tonight’s Atlantic.

  “My friends,” said the captain’s cozily breathy voice, “I recently introduced myself to you as your captain, but I have to tell you I’ve been deprived of control of this aircraft. There are folks here who want to speak to you, and I have no option but to permit them to. I recommend you do what they ask and remain calm, and we’ll all soon have an end to this thing.” But there was a sigh. He didn’t seem happy now with his own promises. “May God see us all through this night!”

  McCloud wondered with a kind of envy how the man could so naturally invoke God at this enormous and improper height. Miles of blackness below and above kept them packed tight in the hostage condition. How could you mention God when the distances, the height of intentions, defied Him?

  The male voice which then took up the message was no more manic and barely more stressed than the captain’s.

  It announced in slightly accented English English, rather than American English, that the plane had been seized by the Arab Youth Popular Socialist Front. Those who had not been guilty of war crimes against the Palestinian people, it said, would be very, very safe and should look to strict obedience as their hope. Everyone sitting by a window was to lean forward now and draw the shutters down and to keep them closed until ordered.

  “You must understand,” the voice explained, “that with the difficult negotiations still to come, my party of brothers may become exhausted, and we are therefore determined from the start to be consistently harsh on anyone who is disobedient.”

  There was a hiatus, though the choppy sound of the intercom, the static of a happy world parallel to this one, continued.

  McCloud heard Cale murmur arrantly across the aisle, “No one needs your fucking difficult negotiations. No one asked you to take the fucking jet!”

  Very amiable, leaning forward in his front seat, Bluey Kannata called to the young man with the Polish gun, “Hey, mate! Tell me. This some sort of hijack?”

  So the word had been uttered at last, by that naive cosmopolitan Bluey Kannata. McCloud felt a surge of gratitude toward him.

  “You will get to know us more in hours to come,” said the English English voice from the flight deck. “But for the moment, you may understand that my name if Taliq. My brother Yusuf has control of the front cabin. Razir, an old comrade of mine, will manage the middle section, while my brother Hasni controls the rear of the plane. The section upstairs is managed by my brother Musa. These are chosen revolutionary names, and though they might be unfamiliar to some of you, everyone should try to remember them for any conversations between passengers and the revolutionary brothers.”

  “Pig’s arse,” declared Cale across the aisle.

  This boy up here, Yusuf, with his deadly Polish implement, seemed very tolerant of whispering in the classroom, McCloud thought. He hoped that Pauline’s Hasni, in the rear, would be equally lenient, though—from appearances—he might turn out to be more strait-laced.

  The intercom remained on, still wheezing of the safe night and all the safe planes beyond this particular tube of aluminum. Then, with a profound breath, a new phase of Taliq’s message began. “While we are flying, or even on the ground, one of us will be in the cockpit here holding a grenade from which the pin has been withdrawn. Our men are equipped also with appropriate radio devices on which there are letter and numeral keys. Each of my brothers knows a short code word which, if punched out on our radio receivers, will ignite a wad of Plastique secreted in a suitcase in the baggage area. If any of us are attacked, I—or whoever stands in my place on the flight desk—will punch the code into our radios.

  “We are not supermen. But we are trained and of one mind and ready to die! Are you ready to die? Even if your section is left for a time without one of my brothers, do not doubt for a second that any wild gesture will cause the destruction of the plane and of all your individual hopes.”

  At this, McCloud heard a long release of breath from Daisy Nakamura across the aisle. But Tom Gullagara, at his side, seemed to listen to the voice from the flight deck as if it were some routine though complicated message about luggage collection.

  The voice said, “Stewards will now take trays and collect everyone’s passport. I must thank you on behalf of our revolution. Thank you. You will hear further from me. But later.”

  The intercom noise ceased. Yusuf—full-mustached and with a more sensual and less scholarly face than Hasni’s, the not unpleasant face of a Levantine coffee drinker and doer of fast business—pointed to the two stewards, a middle-aged man and a girl with a stricken face, who now began to work the compartment, each of them with a silver tray.

  McCloud murmured, in the hope it could be heard by the dancers, “Passports, that’s all. They just want our passports.”

  Yusuf did not make any objection to this noise. He glanced briefly and placidly at the stewards with the trays and made little gestures of the head to show they should start at the front.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” you could hear the stewards tell passengers. “Our chief purser refused to cooperate at first but was threatened.…”

  Bluey Kannata was a world traveler and did not need McCloud’s extra advice on what was required. The others had not traveled much outside the continent at whose core lay their millennial home, the Barramatjara country and the settlement called Baruda. They were not as accustomed as Bluey to the European rituals and meanings of the p
assport.

  For that very reason, perhaps, because they couldn’t see passports as having any intimate connection with themselves, all the members of the dance troupe gave them up without wavering, without feeling as orphaned and naked in the world as McCloud did when he let his drop on the anodized silver of the tray.

  One of the American businessmen on the other side of the cabin, a well-ordered and athletic-looking man, threw his American passport down on the tray and then covered his eyes with his hand, as if he had suddenly been deprived of the power to see. But no one argued with the stewards. Everyone, McCloud was sure, had in his head an image of the suitcase down in the hold, which, if caressed with the right word, would blow this little planet, the Frankfurt flight, to pieces, scattering passengers out into the untold darkness.

  Across the aisle, Daisy Nakamura was yielding up her U.S. passport by its patent-leather cover, the kind of thing friends give to those who are making the first big journey of their lives. A bald eagle was embossed upon Daisy’s leather. McCloud wondered did she know that that emphatic eagle might be enough to stamp her as guilty in the present company? He looked at her, but she merely seemed engrossed in the procedure, as the dance troupe were. As if she too were studying an alien ceremony.

  In fact, her expression, McCloud noticed with some fascination, resembled that of Gullagara at his side. Tall Tom Gullagara was sitting up straight now, peering over the tops of the seats. He observed the collection for its educative value.

  McCloud remembered the night—it could only have been a few nights past, in fact—when Gullagara stood outside an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village watching him stuff coins into a parking meter. The van Pauline had organized for transporting the troupe on their little jaunts around the city stood by the curb. As he assessed McCloud’s actions an amusement had entered Gullagara’s face. He never looked like that, squinting over a tolerant smile, unless he’d had a few evening drinks. And similarly, he rarely asked questions during the day; he had an easy air of omniscience and might have been loath to risk losing it. Anyhow, he was at his ease that night in the Village—or rather at a different sort of ease than he seemed to be at during the day.