Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  It struck McCloud that Whitey believed nothing would come of the judgment downstairs. This was astounding. Why would Whitey imply it? Unless he was right. Infallibly right.

  But he did not stay to be questioned.

  The next one to appear at the head of the stairs was Daisy Nakamura. “Hi, honey,” she whispered to McCloud. “This has all got right out of hand.” She lowered her voice even further. “That brave girl down there who did all the yelling? That’s your wife?”

  Again McCloud’s tears asserted themselves.

  “Oh Jesus, hon. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  But she staggered aft as if Taliq, who came next, were her shepherd.

  Hasni was the last to rise up the steps. He looked haggard, and he and his Polish automatic leaned over the back of the seat in front. “Your wife is not hurt,” he murmured. He sounded resentful. His eyes flickered away and then back to McCloud. After his earlier speeches, the lifting up of his grandfather’s history above that of any other miserable being, after his references to shitty little marriages, why did these politenesses and compassions continue?

  “Thank you for telling me, Hasni.”

  “Would you like me to take a message to her?” he asked. It was as if a lack of immediate gratitude from McCloud had forced him into this further offer.

  Trying to find the right small message, McCloud’s head ached. He seemed to be looking up at the underpinnings, the wires and struts of his family history and attachments, trying to make of them a simple shape.

  A tailor called Mr. Katz, who had once done invisible mending on one of McCloud’s jackets, had looked out on New South Head Road, Rose Bay, and told McCloud, “You want to know the reason I’m here? I’m here because I was the favorite of a certain NCO in Mauthausen. I don’t know why I was his favorite—he chose me, I didn’t choose him. He had his reasons, I had my reasons. And he is dead forty years, and here I am!”

  Would Hasni be McCloud’s NCO?

  “Tell her,” McCloud asked Hasni, “not to make any more outcries for my sake.”

  Hasni blinked. “Do you have any messages of … affection?”

  McCloud looked at the young man. He wants all the fathers to be brave, McCloud saw with surprise. All the husbands to be true.

  “Of course I have. If you would be kind enough to do that, give her my affection. Undying and grateful affection. And tell her to pass on to my children the news that I was thinking of them with love.” He coughed. “Just in case your friend Mahoud al-Jiddah doesn’t turn up at our next stop.”

  “Don’t joke about Mahoud. He has been to hell frequently. But when I see your wife again I’ll tell her what you said.”

  “Thank you,” said McCloud. “I do feel worried about my son and daughter. About what they might go through.…”

  “I will pass it on,” said Hasni through noncommittal lips.

  Hasni did not go at once, though. He sat for a while. At last McCloud ventured, “Could I use the toilet now?”

  Hasni deputized the husky one, the one called Musa, who had got some sleep up here earlier in the morning and had now just again arrived on the upper deck to take McCloud to the cubicle. Musa stood armed at the open door and looked in at McCloud. McCloud took off his placard and placed it against the wall of the compartment. His bowels were creaking and cramped. He attempted to excrete with dignity. He watched Musa’s square nose wrinkle.

  “What car do you have, Mr. McCloud?” Musa asked from the door.

  “Not much of a car.”

  “You were flying in first class. Your car must be a hot model. Mercedes 420 SE? That would be your style. Understated and not too jazzy.”

  “No,” said McCloud. “Mine’s a little Japanese thing. A Datsun. Quite serviceable.”

  “I like the BMW Six series. They’re the peak of the market in my opinion. The American cars, the Lincoln Continental and the Cadillacs—they’re right over the top. No restraint. The West can make fun of Arab taste, but not while they buy Lincolns and Cadillacs.”

  “I’ve never bought a Cadillac,” said McCloud in weary self-defense.

  McCloud began wiping himself. Unless Taliq remembered these things, the paper would run out after one more stop. McCloud had never known and could barely envisage a world without toiletries. Though, in view of his condemned state, he might not have to live in one.

  “Japanese cars,” said Musa, keeping his eye on all McCloud’s operations, “are very good and serviceable. But far too electronic for the Third World.”

  “Are you a mechanic?” asked McCloud, upright now and beginning to wash his hands.

  “I am a student of mechanical engineering.”

  “Oh?” said McCloud, and asked, “Where?”

  “I am not allowed to say. And you know that already. You’re being cute. You see a time when you’re speaking to some fat policeman and saying, ‘Yessir, one of them said he was a student of engineering at Such and Such Polytechnic.’” Musa laughed, a very young laugh, not an unpleasant one. “I don’t blame you for trying.”

  The soap was but a sliver. There was only enough of it too for a very short life.

  “Do you notice,” asked Musa, “that in the Middle East the car bomb is the universal weapon? Generally placed in Mercedes and Peugeots. I could find you twelve-year-old cousins of mine who know how to install one. What a world, eh?”

  The building pressure of their descent woke him by the ears, taking him from another shallow sleep where he moved amid dreams of school and father, wife, agent, accusation, exoneration, failure, acclaim. There were no delays in this landing. There was no tentativeness, hardly any circling. So direct was the plane’s approach that you could believe the promised Mahoud al-Jiddah must be watching its descent, smiling up at his clever brother Taliq who had arranged his freedom.

  Glancing sideways, McCloud saw that the window blind at which Bluey had sat was still raised and revealed a sunlit beach, some irrigation, some long aluminum structures which could have represented agribusiness anywhere in the world, from the Sudan to western New South Wales. The city they swept over then was flat-roofed—the Mediterranean again, perhaps Africa. The Arab world, anyhow, since there were glimpses of minarets, and some of them were very modern and sharp-edged in their architecture, brilliant in their ceramics, their Moorish filigree exact, too, reproduced in prestressed concrete.

  Somewhere which had oil! McCloud decided. Not a poor country. One which could afford its army.

  And then, as the plane thudded down onto the earth, and while McCloud still kept an illicit eye out through Bluey’s abandoned window, the army in question presented itself. Personnel carriers, tanks, and men in deep green lined the runway.

  Were they forces friendly to Taliq? Or were they there to exploit his mistakes?

  The fringe of troops were still dashing past at a hundred miles an hour, the plane still not quite settled on the earth and still capable of taking flight again, when Musa staggered down the aisle and slammed Bluey’s window shut. Restoring blindness to the aircraft, McCloud thought.

  A burst of stale air came from the overhead vents, the plane’s fetor repeating on itself.

  While the plane was still taxiing, Taliq, Hasni, and Musa appeared once more. Taliq ordered the three prisoners to stand. Musa adjusted their placards in case there were still people downstairs who had not read them. McCloud looked with uncomplicated hope for some signs of the curse working in Taliq’s blood, but there was none, only a quite normal blueness of the overworked operative beneath his eyes.

  “What about a smoke?” Cale asked.

  Taliq and the boys ignored him.

  As the party began its descent, McCloud saw from the stairhead Daisy and the Barramatjara standing in their places aft, uncertain of their power, of what anyone expected of them. Hasni prevented them from coming forward. For the first time McCloud had ever known, the dancers looked reduced in efficacy and wan beneath their coal blue features. Fear rose like a cloud of acid in his throat.

/>   “This is it, boys,” murmured Cale on the stairs. “No Mahoud, no Christmas cake!”

  Downstairs, as the engines diminished to a whine, you could hear the rasp of Bluey’s breath as you passed the place where he slept under the German doctor’s care. The three prisoners were led past otherwise empty seats and made to kneel by the main door, the one by which passengers would have left at the end of a normal flight. No order of kneeling was indicated. McCloud found himself in the middle, a position he was not comfortable with since it seemed to make him a compromise victim. He found in himself a strong conviction that compromises were often the political outcome, even of the sort of extreme politics which prevailed aboard the aircraft.

  This door was the beginning of the section into which the other passengers had been crowded. The stewards and stewardesses were jammed in their own suburb of seats well down the plane. Some of them looked McCloud in the eye, willing to take action for him if the chance came but seeming to confess at the same time that they could not foresee what that chance would be.

  The entire after-sections of the plane otherwise had a feel of a tenement—people intent on their own affairs. Many passengers could—if they chose to look—see the three of them kneeling there, but not all did. McCloud could not find Pauline among the watchers and ignorers. Pauline was farther aft than he could see, he presumed, under a sort of capture herself. But in safe condition, according to Hasni, who had no reason to lie.

  McCloud listened to Taliq, behind him, telling Hasni and Musa in English that he was going to the cockpit. “The next half hour is the essential half hour,” he admonished them confidentially. “In half an hour we’ll know where we stand.”

  “And where we lie,” murmured Cale with his relentless, flippant irony.

  After seeing such confusion and lack of mana in the dancers’ faces, McCloud felt a shameful itch at the root of his tongue to turn and assure Taliq that he had no interest in bad behavior, that he would go on kneeling impeccably.

  But no sooner had Taliq vanished than Cale again violated the simple responsibility of prisoners to observe good order. He began to speak to the boys in his low, ranting voice. “So you’re the ones he’s chosen to pull the trigger, eh? What a privilege! He must love you dearly.”

  Stocky Musa appeared from behind and cupped his free hand under Cale’s chin, pushing his head upright.

  “So what sort of vehicle do you drive in, then, Mr. Fat Man?” he asked, seemingly half-amused. His eyes brimmed with his humane passion for vehicles. He was poignant and frightening at the same time.

  “My wife owns a Saab,” said Cale. “Is that an ideological crime?”

  “Saab is good, reliable,” said Musa. He drew one hand across his groin. “No sexiness in it. But why should there be? A good car for someone your age, and your wife’s years.”

  Cale still insisted on speaking out of lips forced together by Musa’s hand. “My wife is thirty-five years old and a features editor. What would you know about sexiness? Arab fucking lovers? You mutilate your poor sodding women!”

  This did sting Musa. He kept heaving his hand against the soft flesh beneath Cale’s jawline. “Don’t you talk of our women. Their names are profaned by your fat Zionist lips.”

  But Cale wouldn’t shut up. Daniel Stone raised his eyebrows at McCloud, suggesting that perhaps they too, Cale’s fellow prisoners, must begin to take responsibility for calming their fellow accused.

  “What do you jokers know?” Cale cried. “You grew up jerking each other off in some hothouse of a refugee camp, and then you got your scholarship to wherever, and then you did a little training in some camp in Iraq and learned how to blow things flat. You’re monks, you poor little sods. You’re stuck in childhood. How do you think you’ll look after the commandos shoot you down? Do you think you’ll look holy?”

  “What commandos?” shouted Musa. “Commandos? We are the commandos!”

  McCloud wondered had Musa seen the army—somebody’s army—lining the runway.

  By this stage, Hasni had appeared, too. He took hold of Musa’s shoulder and pulled him away, speaking to him softly in Arabic. A nice boy, Hasni; and so perhaps the most dangerous of all. For he was observing the forms. The word for punishment had not been given. For all these hours, McCloud acknowledged, he had been hoping that Hasni would prove susceptible to doubt. It had been there, this hope, since the night before, since McCloud’s first sighting of the boy seated beside Pauline and reading U.S. News and World Report with a mature dispassion, an air of applying judgment to every sentence, an air too of accepting the editorial bent of the journal. (It could not have been very favorable to his point of view.) But Hasni had seemed to accept editorial drift as a given, an interesting lens, not an affront, an invitation to rage.

  He seemed to be dealing with Cale’s editorial drift exactly the same way here.

  The engines had cut to utter silence now, and McCloud began to notice with interest the growing warmth of his flesh.

  Far down the plane a baby cried routinely. McCloud wondered was it the baby whose mother had at the start of the journey been seated beside Pauline. That mother would not have much care for the three men by the door. It was not her job to.

  McCloud saw Yusuf permitting an orderly traffic of passengers around and in and out of the toilets. There was an intentness in these passengers, the kind you saw in people getting ready to leave a plane and collect their baggage. The line was a self-regulating line, in fact. The whole plane seemed self-regulating now. Perhaps the captain and his crew, embracing their ethos of any form of order being better than none, were themselves now left largely alone.

  In any case, Yusuf detached himself and sauntered toward his brothers and their prisoners by the door. He nodded at the bulkhead, in the direction of the outside world.

  “You notice they’re using machine guns mounted on Toyotas out there?”

  “The latest fashion,” said Musa. “Everyone’s crazy about Toyotas. Ever since the Chadians used them against Libyan tanks at Wadi Dhum.”

  A groan escaped McCloud. He had had enough vehicle talk. And this spate of it meant that the boys knew an army waited outside and considered it friendly, the basis of a casual chat about hardware.

  “And T-55 tanks,” murmured Yusuf the tailor’s son, nodding again at the bulkhead.

  “The Russians have no shame,” said Musa. “They palm them off on everyone. But they’re dinosaurs. Just not maneuverable enough in open country. Built for the streets of Eastern Europe. Good at forward and reverse.” He laughed. “A bloody rotten family sedan!”

  Yusuf joined in the laughter and turned away again to take up his casual duties aft. From one of the water closets came forth the man who had punched the German cripple. He wore a look of gratification. He did not seem dismayed by the declining quantities of soap and niceties, he was an adapter, a glory of the species, a taker-on of protective color. When it was all over, he might recount how his attack on the wheelchair case had appeased the captors and saved an evil scene. But he would most likely just forget.

  And like the baby’s cry earlier, this man had an utter lack of connection with McCloud and with Pauline, wherever she might be. He does not see himself as my brother. He cannot even share a joke with me, thought McCloud, the way Musa and Yusuf have just shared a joke about Russian tanks.

  Behind him, McCloud smelled Daisy’s musk suddenly and briefly, an exciting composition, part staleness, part promise. So, she had come downstairs! And were the dancers with her?

  “Don’t turn round, you boys,” she murmured. “I don’t like any of this. The dancing guys think nothing at all will happen, that it’s all talk. But I’m uneasy as hell. I talked that boy Hasni into letting me come down here. God damn the lot of you!” She said nothing more for a while, but her complicated scent reasserted itself. “I’ve given Mr. Taliq the right message. A man of his experience can take it from there.”

  McCloud heard Stone sigh, or gag on breath. Cale said, “How can we thank y
ou, madam?” McCloud looked at him, to check whether the features confirmed the neutrality, the apparent cool respect, of the statement.

  “We did this to you,” said McCloud, knowing that what he said was so inexact. It now seemed exorbitant, the thing they expected of her.

  Stone was reconciled to it, though, and now made a businesslike suggestion. “Don’t mix with all of them, miss. I know you don’t mean to, but I had to say it. Let the young ones get to resent Taliq.”

  She said nothing to this. It became apparent that she was gone, though. Her scent was still there but lacked substance.

  “I hope I said the right thing,” Stone murmured.

  As surely as he had identified Daisy by her scent, McCloud could smell Taliq’s return, his individual cigarette reek. He joined Hasni and Musa in their position behind the prisoners. They emanated a musk of awesome casualness somehow appropriate to this hour of the hijack, when everything hung on a word from beyond the plane; and Taliq clearly stood near them. An order must then have been given by gesture, since one of the stewards, the balding man who wore the badge which said “Chief Purser,” moved toward the door of the plane, worked its long lever, and opened it on the day.

  As it swung back sighing and admitted the outside air, McCloud was struck by a succulent sky. In its illimitable plenty it hit him like a reproach. It implied he’d lived so poorly, shown such average love, evaded the immensities. It declared him in fact not unfit to live, but unfit yet to die.

  The balding steward, his face flushed, spoke over the heads of the prisoners to Taliq and the boys beyond. “My colleagues and I have to remind you that we are all witnesses.”

  “Very well,” said Taliq lightly, “that’s what you’re intended to be.”

  The steward’s bold, polite fraternity stung McCloud’s eyes.

  “Brave lad,” said Cale, though the man was not noticeably young.

  But the brave lad was ordered back to his seat.