Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Musa pushed McCloud along past this mute face. But the glimpse of Bluey, his brother and his inquisitor, came to McCloud as a sort of revelation, an urgent demand. The revelation had the resonance that the obvious achieves when it stops being the obvious and becomes the only option. Bluey had taken his action and become a judge. Whitey his, peculiar to him, and cursed Taliq’s bloodstream. Cale had acted, too, not simply waiting—under the general threat of Plastique—for the bullet.

  Whereas marriage befell me, my book befell me, the hostage taking befell me. I must not let anything more befall me. I have been a mere, brute medium on which other forces have acted. I have sung the tunes promised by other impulses than mine. Now I must become singer of my own songs. Now I must become an actor.

  This plain conviction came to him with all the accoutrements of enlightenment, a light sweat, an annoyance at being so long in the dark, a transcendental excitement, a fit of delicious fright.

  The necessity for doing something became absolute in a second now. He knew he’d be damned if he failed to obey it. If shot dead by Hasni or Musa having failed to act, he would never be liberated from the fragments of the plane. His blood would never rise from the functional carpet. His memory would poison the lives of the Girl and the Boy.

  The dancers and Daisy, still hostages to ideas at the rear of Taliq’s cabin, all stood, watching Stone and McCloud arrive. They frowned and—McCloud was sure of this—counted and took account of the returning faces. Their stares had enormous solemnity. But McCloud saw Phil the Christian’s face begin to flutter and close down on itself at the sight of the two of them, perhaps at the lack of Cale.

  Before anyone could speak, Stone and McCloud were seated on opposite sides of an aisle. Stone settled grimly into his place. He looked pale behind his tan. Yet he had his faith: that on the ground governments using his software were fetching up from their computers a design of how to act.

  Therefore Stone had his weapon, though it was far from his hands. There was still a blessedness in that.

  The young murderer in the cricket sweater—Musa—sat down in front of Stone. He wriggled his shoulders. Cale’s death sat lightly on them, or so Musa thought. It did not seem to disqualify him from his stature as dormitory mechanic, willing to discuss and work on anyone’s jalopy.

  Wappitji came up the aisle, or—more exactly—appeared at McCloud’s side with the old Barramatjara suddenness. He looked severely at McCloud, as if saying “You never told me it would get as serious as this!”

  Unchallenged, he now sat at McCloud’s side. Taliq was still busy farther forward, though even if he hadn’t been, a certain leniency of contact still prevailed between the chosen and the condemned. Maybe this was based on Taliq’s idea of democracy; maybe on a conviction that Daisy and the dance troupe, by speaking to the treacherous McCloud, would be brought to true understanding. Or maybe he thought, I can blow up the plane in any case, or I can shoot the condemned at any second.

  In any case, Wappitji was here now, beside McCloud.

  He took out his bandanna, the one still marked with Taliq’s blood. He gave it his attention.

  “There’s none of that Plastique down with the luggage,” he announced, eyes still lowered to the cloth. “Down there in the hold, there’s none. You can tell. That’s all a kind of bull dust. There’s no Plastique. Taliq won’t blow himself up, Frank. He wants to have a voice left.”

  That was what Whitey read in the hijacker’s gore. Whitey, forced back to this text, forced to a more profound study, by Cale’s frightful end.

  Whitey said, “If he’s holding the Plastique over you, there’s nothing in it, Frank. There isn’t any of that Plastique.”

  McCloud’s faith in Whitey’s imprecation, tested by Hasni’s wavering automatic and by Musa’s quick dispatch of the Englishman, revived now. He believed he had been told something utterly crucial.

  Whitey stood up then and passed aft without another word.

  I will go downstairs then into the rear of the plane, McCloud told himself. Pauline must be told instantly about this startling shift. I will get paper and pass out notes to all the passengers, the ones who can safely be told. There is no Plastique.

  It meant that in the world of this aircraft there could be a limited and not an absolute war. Protest and rebellion could mean the death of the individual flyer but did not mean that the plane must be torn apart. Taliq had chosen to tell his hostages that disobedience would destroy everything and chosen at the same time not to pack the means for accomplishing what he threatened.

  And so as Whitey had announced, Taliq did not want the physical ruin of the plane. He would use conventional means to suppress a revolt. For he had not packed Plastique! He could shoot people down, yes. But his utter dominion was a lie.

  Hasni, it turned out, had been delayed by Taliq, who had pulled the curtain at the front of the cabin to allow himself a private discussion with the boy. When it was over and Hasni emerged, he wore without any apparent pain a bruising over his right eyebrow. There was an unnatural glitter in his eyes as he climbed over McCloud to get to the window seat.

  McCloud reassumed his old jacket, the one invisibly mended by Mr. Katz, favorite of some forgotten Oberscharführer in Poland.

  He was delighted with his banal discovery about the sin of passivity. It was never the answer. The enlightened risk was the human way. If you died of it, your death was holy.

  And what Whitey had said to McCloud seemed to be unreasonably but potently verified by what happened next. Coming from the direction of the cockpit, of the alcove where he had disciplined Hasni, Taliq himself appeared in the aisle, level with McCloud. He looked ahead pensively for a time before taking three steps, then wheeling, gasping, and putting both hands to the left side of his stomach beneath his grenade belt. As he fell, Hasni rushed up past McCloud and leaned over his leader.

  “What is it?” Hasni was asking. Whitey had also appeared, and then Daisy Nakamura, who knelt and took hold of his shoulders.

  Taliq drew his legs up twice and released them. “I have an ulcer,” Taliq told Daisy. “Get that German doctor!”

  It was the dutiful Hasni who went.

  “It’s duodenal,” Taliq explained through clenched teeth to Daisy and Whitey Wappitji.

  He arched with pain once more, but Daisy held him strongly and, after the paroxysm, drew her hand over his brow. It was a sort of daily, curative, maternal stroke. But it made Taliq aware of being held. For two or three seconds more he was happy to lean back against her. Daisy raised her eyebrows at McCloud. “Well,” said her expression. “Here we are. And what can I do?”

  The doctor who had tended Bluey arrived and knelt by Taliq. A glass of milk in his hand, young Hasni was also in attendance.

  The doctor turned to Hasni. “Take the milk away. It’s bad for ulcers.”

  Hasni looked affronted. “My grandfather always had milk.”

  “Do you have painkillers?” Taliq asked the doctor. “Nothing narcotic. I know the pharmacopoeia, so don’t try to fool me.”

  “I have only codeine,” the German doctor said. “I have no antispasmodics left—the one injection I had I used on the black man downstairs. As you must know, sir, if you take codeine, it may cause you to hemorrhage.”

  “Give it to me,” Taliq ordered as one more convulsion drew his legs up. “I need only a few hours.”

  “Don’t drink the milk,” the doctor advised him. “Above all, don’t take the codeine.”

  “Bring it to me!” said Taliq.

  The doctor went for the codeine. Taliq waved Hasni and the milk away. He reached up behind him with his scarred and bandaged right hand and grasped Daisy’s shoulder. “I will be well,” he promised her, as if he feared his throes must have given her especial distress.

  The doctor was back with a small bottle of white pills and a sheet of paper, handwriting on it. He pushed the sheet of paper toward Taliq.

  “What is this?” asked Taliq.

  “It says you take the cod
eine against my advice and by your own authority. I do not want to be sued.”

  Taliq grabbed the sheet, crumpled it, tossed it over his shoulder and Daisy’s, seized the codeine bottle, and took four or five of the pills. He chewed them. He wanted quick efficacy.

  Soon he was on his feet again. He half leaned against Daisy, unwilling to leave her totally until he saw where he stood with the pain.

  After a little while, though, he was strolling independently. He dismissed the doctor. He took further experimental walks up and down the cabin. Having survived them, he readjusted the set of his shoulders. He had resumed command and wished everybody to believe it was so.

  With a smile toward Daisy and Whitey, he turned back to the cockpit and his magisterial purposes.

  Confident in his leader still, Hasni had closed his eyes. Everyone seemed somnolent as the engines turned and cold descended from the roof. The bruised young warrior beside McCloud may even have been asleep before the plane had got into the air or leveled off again.

  Still convinced of the beatitude of action, McCloud searched the pocket on the back of the chair in front of him. He found the airline’s in-flight magazine and a cheap ballpoint pen. It barely wrote, but it wrote. In the clear spaces at the tops of the magazine pages he scribbled, “There is no Plastique.” He wrote partly to reinforce and assert himself, for he did foresee the chance of disseminating this, his underground tract, amongst others.

  He wrote the message eight times, on eight separate pages, before the pen ran out for good. He tore off the top of each of the eight pages, folded the message up, and dropped all eight little wads down the front of his singlet. He felt the edges of folded pages rankling against his skin; this message of utter heresy for which he would happily perish.

  By now he was dizzy and had no breath left. He sat back and considered the boy Hasni, examining the bruised eyebrow, the minor stubble on the neck, his shirt collar, and all his equipment. The same belt which held his radio, with the buttons which could supposedly command the Plastique in the hold, also held little leather sockets in which small grenades sat. The metal rods of their necks emerged through holes in leather flaps. These flaps were connected to the holders themselves by press studs.

  Standard issue from some army.

  From one of these grenade pouches, hanging from Hasni’s left side, the stud had come unstuck. A small, brassy grenade sat there exposed. Presenting itself, you could say, if you wanted to stretch things. If the audacity could be found to snatch out that small bulb, and if the stud were then pressed down, Hasni would not notice it was gone, at least not by the weight. His tired revolutionary brothers might not notice, either.

  McCloud knew he could not make efforts of will to take the thing. That would be useless. The daring would need to descend upon him as if from outside.

  The question was, though, whether this was the activity he was waiting for. He’d expected something subtle. Something like Cale’s ill-destined speech, some device, however, which—if possible—left you alive at the end of the process. For he was a kind of artist, and he was best at the less obvious stratagems.

  Yet of course that was his failing, the limiting factor of his existence: to neglect the evident and wait for something more exalted to present itself. To remain a passive man because the instruments of action didn’t match his self-defined, high sensibility.

  At the back of the compartment, as earlier requested, Paul Mungina began playing his didj. It was a solemn, throaty rendition of “God Save the Queen.” Paul the royalist could not imagine a white man who would not be reinforced by this weirdest of renditions of the old anthem. From the throats of lizards and serpents it rose, from this dinosaur of an instrument. It all had the feeling of an overture to the final arrival. Predestination music in the strict sense, if you liked. It opened up above McCloud’s head like a cavern in a dream. Paul trying to sedate the plane, to sedate the revolutionary force of Taliq and the boys, to soothe the energetic despair of the people who had attacked Pauline. Paul trying to gentle all that back down to earth.

  Yet the effect on McCloud wasn’t sedative at all. He felt twice as alive. He felt astringent, ready for the deed.

  But once more, what was the deed to be?

  A voice joined the line of the didj’s plaint. McCloud was sure that it was Cowboy Tom Gullagara’s voice.

  The ordained style of a Barramatjara singer lay somewhere far out beyond the normal strain of sounds people heard; far out beyond the lyric tenor, say, of Irish sentimental ballad or the piercing delivery of Chinese opera. It had more of a twang than either. It worked by longer intervals. It carried in it the pulse of a genuinely murderous sun. It shimmered with bemusing distance. As well as inviting the planeload to shut its eyes, it also lulled them to avert their faces from Cale’s confused spirit and offered to Cale himself a seductive invitation to rise from the essences of his body staining the carpet downstairs and slip to earth along the filament of his own murder.

  McCloud became convinced too that the song was meant to add muscle to Whitey’s already uttered and sealed curse. It was a surprise to McCloud that Taliq could not hear that intention in it. If not in the training camps of Iraq, then surely around the refugee hearths of his childhood Taliq must have learned to read such clearly uttered tribal purposes.

  Mungina’s didj and Cowboy Tom’s voice continued to wash into him. It struck him that, for no easily defined reason, they were singing him safe.

  “God save our gracious Queen,

  “Long live our noble Queen.

  “God save our Queen …”

  More astounding still, they may even have been singing him brave.

  Stone was not aware of this shift, though. Cale’s death had not slowed Stone’s rate of reasoning. He leaned across the aisle and muttered, “I’ve been thinking about all this. It doesn’t compute, McCloud. If the people on the ground meant to give this Mahoud back to Taliq and the boys, they would have shown definite signs back there. They wouldn’t have told us to take off again and cruise along to some new rendezvous. They could have had Mahoud flown to us in a supersonic fighter, for Christ’s sake, if that had been their wish.”

  McCloud half smiled. He felt indulgent toward Stone. A doomsayer from the start. A man who’d needed software to discern his enemy.

  “I’m afraid, my friend,” said Stone, beginning to sneeze and having to stifle the noise with the rim of his blanket, “that from the larger view, you and I account for very little to our masters.”

  “But I don’t have masters,” McCloud said.

  “Well,” said Stone, “neither—in the strict sense—do I.”

  The light beyond the shutters turned glacial blue: the coming of the high, icy night. Handsome Yusuf the tailor’s son was suddenly among them, slinging cellophaned packets of water biscuits into McCloud’s lap and Stone’s. Even tearing open the package, McCloud found that he could not take his eyes from Hasni’s little grenade of unknown manufacture. He imagined it stuck intimately and organically in the socket of his arm. Its bite would give him a slight, improper pleasure. It would be something Stone lacked. Stone had trained and tanned, played tennis, and kept two passports against this moment. He had won his argument with Cale. He had even made arrangements for his widow. He had done everything. He had nothing more to draw on.

  So McCloud fished down the front of his singlet, extracted one of the heretical wads of paper, and—picking his moment—passed it across the aisle. Stone did not seem pleased to receive it but at last, under cover of the crinkling and wadding of cellophane, opened the message one-handed and read it.

  Stone frowned. How do you know? he mouthed.

  McCloud deliberately gestured, suggesting that proof existed in some palpable, legible form but could not in the circumstances be produced. He did not feel this was misleading. The evidence did exist, but only he, McCloud, understood its force. He felt exalted. The distribution of the message had commenced.

  Stone put the paper in his mouth and swa
llowed it. It did not go down easily. Then he covered his eyes with his hand and considered the advantages and disadvantages of believing what McCloud had written. As McCloud himself had, Stone too had cherished, you could tell, his belief in the Plastique. There was the comfort of being powerless. As soon as Whitey had uttered the truth, McCloud had shrugged that comfort off without thinking. Stone, a more careful man, did not want to let go too easily of any of the condemned prisoner’s standard mental props.

  He closed his eyes for a time and then, swallowing once more, stared at McCloud and smiled marginally. The mystery of faith, unleashed in McCloud by Whitey, had now mysteriously crossed the aisle and worked, more modestly and without any supporting data, on Stone.

  So, thought McCloud, heady with revolution, a network has been set up. This making of a cell, he saw, was the action he had been straining toward. Hasni’s grenade meant nothing, was not the option. In its unfastened state, it was supporting evidence of an incompleteness in Taliq’s plans. That was all.

  McCloud’s mouth was full of biscuit when Philip Puduma visited him. The Christian dancer arrived at his side, dropping to his knees in the aisle the better to confer. He touched McCloud’s wrist.

  “Frank,” he confided solemnly, “I wanted to tell you this, mate. In this mucked-up setup we got here, you’ve got to put your trust in the Lord as your Redeemer. I mean, this is serious business, Frank. They shot a man. You can’t have any big faith in them old people, those ancestors. I say it though I love them and they’re my people, mate. But Jesus is Lord, brother. Them others do what they do. But they couldn’t handle that booze for me. And see, they won’t handle Taliq for you.”

  He coughed. He looked forward toward the cockpit and aft again. He wanted to be certain his complicated message would not be interrupted.

  “I mean, you know me and Whitey, we respect each other. And Whitey has to do what Whitey does. He’s angry with that Taliq, and he thinks he’s fixed his wheel for him now. But only the Lord can fix wheels, mate.”