Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  One look told McCloud that Stone’s objections hadn’t softened Hasni, who was still out to assert his revolutionary character. He spoke to Taliq through pursed lips. “Not the Jew. It’s too easy. The other one first.”

  “But,” argued Stone, who must have heard Hasni, “if you shoot us, where is your leverage? See, you did declare the rest of the plane innocent, for Christ’s sake! And if you change your mind on that, why will they trust you further?”

  But Taliq—with a nod—indicated the reason. Hasni’s black and awful weapon.

  “Hasni,” said Taliq simply to the boy.

  McCloud did not look at Hasni but at Taliq. He could see the leader waver on his feet. Right on time, pain and nausea were bringing him unstrung.

  Under cover of Taliq’s duodenal crisis and of the minor debate Stone had begun, McCloud had shifted his kneeling angle. He rose toward Taliq’s face. In the peripheral dimness where Bluey Kannata lay, the features of those exempted from sentence, of Daisy and the dance troupe, could be vaguely seen.

  He was quickly shoulder to shoulder with Taliq.

  He hunted down the front of his singlet for the handful of paper wads and threw them over the nearest seats of passengers.

  “Read that!” he cried. “Read that! There’s no Plastique in the hold … none!”

  This must have taken many instants, and neither the resolute Hasni nor the confirmed killer Musa had done anything to prevent it. He felt sure that this was because they were accustomed to the idea of his powerlessness. If he rose up, they may have thought, it must be at Taliq’s mandate. Even now—McCloud could see it—they believed that their power would easily be reasserted. They had not yet reached the assessment that everything was altogether changed.

  In fact, McCloud watched Musa give a quite charming shrug, the shrug of a young man pretending still to be in the game, a shrug which carried with it at the same time an expectation of the bizarre; the gesture of a young man whom history has taught to expect erratic turns.

  McCloud wrapped his right arm around Taliq’s waist. It yielded. Taking further hold of Taliq, he felt the man stagger within his arms. Taliq, McCloud was astonished to find, had little strength; had postured, radioed, and threatened with no more than a minor sinew or two to drive him. And perhaps every movement had been for him a crisis of will, since—rather than move now, in this new and unscannable arrangement—he gave himself up to McCloud for the moment like a child.

  “Pauline,” McCloud screamed at the height of certitude, “there’s no Plastique!”

  Under cover of this liberating cry, McCloud believed he saw his wads of paper being passed from seat to seat, the data about no Plastique, read by Whitey Wappitji from Taliq’s blood, creating speculation, unleashing debate, falling like a unifying net over the cabin. Making everyone relatives, to use a Barramatjara phrase. Not everyone, of course—that was fanciful to expect. There would be unbelievers, he knew, and there would be mothers, like the one who had sat beside Pauline at the outset and who would have duties outside belief. But enough relatives. Enough.

  Hasni and Musa were still scanning the tangle of movement, McCloud embracing Taliq, holding him as a buffer between the muzzles of their Polish automatics and himself. He was triumphantly convinced that now they thought he was armed and had some weapon stuck against Taliq, and that they held their hands at this early stage for love of Taliq. It just showed you. Act, and the world fell into place!

  Hasni looked as if he were not only uncertain what the revolution might demand of him in this subtle new setup, but as if this too might be blamed to his account.

  McCloud caressed Taliq more tightly. Taliq now tried to evade his hold but could not. McCloud’s musculature had been sung up by the same Barramatjara seer who had sung down Taliq’s musculature.

  “I’m watching him,” McCloud announced. “I’m with him. Both of us will go.”

  It was an unerring statement, beautifully crafted for its purpose, lacking in any reality. But he believed they saw its shining infallibility.

  Extracting his radio from its case at his hip, Musa the car enthusiast began without hysteria to communicate the news of this altered circumstance to the unseen others, to Yusuf and Razir, who were elsewhere in the plane.

  Smelling Taliq’s sweat and the sourness of his pain, McCloud looked down the angle of the hijacker’s shoulder and saw Stone regarding him, a wistful doubt in his eyes.

  “You’re really pushing it, McCloud,” murmured Stone. “Do you think you can be madder than they are?”

  McCloud was half-amused. “I am madder,” he claimed with berserk pride. “I am fucking madder.”

  He was willing to let the closely embraced Taliq be torn apart with him. As far as McCloud cared, they could all wail with sorrow. Musa and Razir could go crazy with an orphan grief.

  Taliq began to move himself tenderly in McCloud’s arms and stared him more or less full in the face. Taliq’s eyes blazed with a fellow madness. “My brothers,” he told McCloud, “are dead. My wife was beaten by Israeli security forces in Ramallah and is on life support in Damascus. The Syrians foot that bill, and I foot this one.”

  McCloud remembered that in the remote origins of this flight, Taliq had mentioned a savaged grandmother over the intercom. Now he was appealing to a savaged wife. Were they—an awesome idea—both genuine? Was one? Was neither?

  “Yes, true stories!” cried Taliq. “Don’t think I give a damn about the instant of impact.” He raised his voice. “Hasni, Musa, fire at him!”

  But neither of the young men was happy with the order. Hasni looked at him from beneath a bruised brow, still perhaps believing McCloud to be armed. He began to weep. “We love you too well, Taliq,” he explained. “We forgive you the Japanese woman! We love you too well.”

  It struck McCloud now with some astonishment that it was true—their brotherly love gave him his margin.

  “There is no Plastique,” he screamed a last time for the benefit of residual unbelievers. His war cry, his revolutionary slogan.

  People were advancing from the rear of the plane—Razir first, yes, his radio in his hand as if there were indeed an explosive code he could punch into it. Behind him could be seen Pauline and the middle-aged people who had earlier dragged her aft as if for her own safety.

  He wondered what had made them advance. Had it been his yelling about no Plastique? Had it been Mungina’s unheard but penetrative didj music? Did they know without even knowing it that Taliq had been cursed by magisterial Whitey?

  The reemerged Pauline was intact but barefoot. She looked wan. She wore her overcoat, and, as the blanket had done for Daisy, it gave her the appearance of a shipwreck victim. Her eyes were wide, appropriate for assessing such a scene. Everyone seemed to stand still, even Razir, as if to allow her her learning period. She filled out so perfectly the limits of her spacious smallness that he began to laugh. She was the daughter of the revolution wrought by Whitey and now half delivered by himself.

  Strangely, she smiled and moved her hand, something like a wave, and it showed him that all actions would be as untoward and deranged as his own from now on. What he could tell was that none of them had expected to see this; the seizing of Taliq’s body by a class-and-race criminal.

  In the added fragment of time this gave McCloud and his uprising, there was a movement of people from among the seats to which McCloud had shouted his heresy, where he had thrown out his slivers of paper.

  Pauline and the others behind Razir looked for a second as if they were holding back pressure from behind. McCloud saw form in Pauline’s face the scheme not so much to give way to that pushing, but to be the brunt of it. He saw her heave against Razir’s back. That would not have meant much if a dozen of her fellow rebels had not also pushed.

  Razir had all at once fallen to his knees. There was now an awesome crush of people from behind who wanted to trample him. McCloud saw his jaw his scatter of sad acne scars, go down in the ruck of passengers.

  Pauline did
not seem anxious to tread on him, though. She broke through the melee, projecting herself off the shoulders of taller passengers who were themselves pushing forward and grinding downward. It was just like a print of any revolution in full fervor, and shining in the midst of the enraged, Pauline held her breath for an instant and then returned it in the form of a smile without precedent in the years he’d known her: the wild but compliant smile of one primitive conspirator to another.

  This smile, this outletting of breath, restored him to all his lost ranks, set him up in business, restored him to all the basic functions of his state, to all his frittered-away authorities. It ratified him as husband, sure announcer of directions, arranger of events, adequate manager. There was no vainglory in any of this, in having been made complete by a smile, in going through the sudden heat of this curative glimpse of Pauline. But, being who he was, still wanting this subtle, knowing, and worshipful instant to last without limit, he saw too that the smile had somehow been a trigger. For he had a sense of the dancers and Daisy and the German doctor advancing from the other direction and a wing of passengers, the ones among whom he had thrown down the dangerous wads of messages, surging at Hasni and Musa.

  There was immediate firing now, awfully loud yet somehow customary. Its size seemed reduced by the crush of people, and it was momentary. There were screams, which he was sure were not his or Pauline’s. They stunned him, however. He astonished himself by letting go of Taliq. The man had felt so supine in this noise and fury, so slack-muscled, that to McCloud’s mind—which seemed to be ruggedly headquartered somewhere between his heart and intestines, in the piratical gizzards—the task of continuing to hold him seemed unnecessary.

  As soon as he let go, though, Taliq vanished. In doing it, he must have sidestepped even the dancers.

  People began pursuing him up the aisle past the place where Bluey rested in his dazed condition. McCloud was only one among the chasers. They came to first class and the stairwell, up which Taliq was dragging his body and disappearing. Someone close behind McCloud was yelling, “Bastard!” in the same way people had earlier yelled it at Cale, Stone, at himself.

  On the far side of this pursuit and capture of Taliq, he promised himself, I’ll see Pauline. The revolutionary smiler.

  Squeezing onto the stairs, competing to be in the impassioned front rank but not quite succeeding, McCloud noticed that—just below him—Tom Gullagara also fought his way upward toward Taliq’s garden of ideologies and control center. Near Cowboy Tom was the balding steward who had once, in another history, bravely declared himself a witness.

  There was urgency in the people ahead of, around, and behind McCloud. They knew that Taliq might try now to call in reinforcements from the army which lay at the airport perimeter and by these means reduce the pursuing mob back to the status of hostages.

  From the top of the stairs, McCloud briefly saw Phil the Christian standing by the bottom as people milled past him. There too—a witness like Phil—was Stone, regarding the scene as if he were wondering whether McCloud might be as great a source of peril as Taliq himself. There had been no more shots, though, and Stone was intact. Stone’s widow would not need to call on the lawyer called Freilich. What was his problem, then?

  Then, smiling, Stone displayed a weapon taken from one of the boys, snatched from Hasni or Musa. He had cornered it, like a professional warrior who did not want it to fall into the wrong hands. McCloud hoped Hasni had not been hurt by this capture. But it was a side hope. It was not a main issue. Hunting Taliq was the main issue.

  Sure of his primacy as revolutionary leader and full of plans for Taliq’s recapture, McCloud began forcing his way through the scrum of insurgent passengers at the top of the stairs. He made headway. He had authority now. He thought, with some wonder, that Taliq’s mind must have worked all along as his own did now, at the peak of this upheaval. This is the mind of an autocrat, McCloud marveled. With a mind like this, everything would have added up for Taliq. The sifting out of the criminals and the chosen, the making of a judge, the shooting of Cale!

  Just as McCloud reached the upper cabin, word was passed back that the door to the cockpit was locked. Men and a few women were hammering on it. One of the men who wanted to get in was the same one in the baseball jacket who had once attacked the German cripple.

  The intercom crackled, and the pilot’s voice was heard at full volume. McCloud heard it, beneath its po’-boy intonation, as an extension of Taliq’s now neutralized voice. Desperately, it commanded silence. But then it resorted to the rustic, commonsensical, and seductively paternal tone which was its norm.

  “Folks,” it said, “I believe that one of our passengers has assaulted Mr. Taliq and some of his friends. I speak to you with an explosive device held to my ear. It is held by a Mr. Yusuf. If Taliq is harmed, Mr. Yusuf will detonate this device. He is a determined young man. And so I demand that all passengers return to their seats. There are women and children aboard. We are trying to settle this in an orderly manner.…”

  McCloud and the other rebels, including the man in the baseball jacket, began to look at each other consultatively now and to talk all at once. McCloud noticed that Stone had arrived in the upstairs cabin. He began waving the Polish weapon he had acquired around in the air, as if he were no longer happy just to keep it safe but would think of using it. You could tell he found it beyond belief that the voice on the intercom seemed to recognize the legitimacy of Taliq’s dispensation.

  “They were about to murder one of us,” he screamed above the hubbub—in fact McCloud may have been the only one listening. “Does that hick up at the front understand that?”

  “Let me tell you,” the captain continued, “there are troops surrounding this aircraft, and their orders are to shoot anyone who leaves. They are here to witness the arrival of Mr. Taliq’s confrere, and they fear disorder.…” It was the second time the captain had used that word. “They fear disorder which might attend any exodus from this aircraft. I urge the passenger concerned in this senseless activity to desist, to put the safety catch back on any weapons he may hold and hand them to one of the cabin crew for safekeeping.”

  It was at this time of greatest chaos, when some ordinary citizens who had not joined the crazed uprising wept in their seats downstairs; while others close to the doors were contemplating the terrible jump from the plane to the unidentified pavement below; while still others—McCloud and Tom Gullagara and the steward and the man in the baseball jacket among them—pushed toward the cockpit; while weapons taken from Razir or Hasni or Musa were being passed from hand to hand to the front of the plane, many wanting them used but few willing to assert they knew how to use them—it was at that point, when the universe did seem to McCloud to have a malleable shape in spite of the temporary bafflement inherent in the locked cockpit and the captain’s voice, that a cataclysm, a massive, unbalancing incident occurred, so unexpected that no one at the time understood its meaning.

  Commandos flown in for the crisis, commandos for whom the authorities on the ground had waited, kept on a lead, and now decided to unleash, commandos who were the world’s response to Taliq’s demand for the iconic guerrilla Mahoud, now surged into the plane by ropes and ladders run up to the opened door. They found the downstairs section already secure—Razir and Hasni and Musa battered and disarmed and lying on the carpet. Hacking their way upstairs with fists and gun butts, bludgeoning for their own good the people they had been sent to rescue, they came to the mass of passengers in Taliq’s former headquarters, the cabin at the head of the plane.

  They knew they must clear a way to the cockpit.

  Then began the brief but enormous rage of firing which stunned the hostages and made the lay besiegers of the cockpit drop to their bellies and hug the floor. McCloud, no longer a leader, his authority shattered by this new, astounding fracas, took to the carpet with him an image of the suddenly opened cockpit door and Yusuf, beige with terror, holding a grenade in hand.

  It would be discovered by
the commandos that Yusuf had not pulled the retaining rod on the grenade. That through confusion or mercy or overconfidence he had not done what Taliq had promised from the start, had not held to the captain’s ear a primed device. Whatever his reason for merely holding the thing in its safe condition—it may even have been that he welcomed the commandos as liberators—a time would soon come when McCloud found that news affecting. Had Yusuf taken a care for lives? Was that it?

  Taliq also perished in the shambles of the cockpit. The commandos shot him down with a special urgency, since with the bandaged hand he had injured trying to open cashews for Kanduk Kannata, he had been punching the keys of his radio as if sending a coded message.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Down to Earth

  When the passengers descended that night, rediscovering the earth across the pavement of an African airstrip, they knew neither the name for where they were nor why they were rescued.

  The papers would give great credit to the authorities, who had withheld Mahoud and unleashed the commandos at the right moment. They wondered also, as well-informed Cale had in the electronics bay, whether it was Iraq or Syria or even extreme elements in the Israeli secret service which had put up the money for Taliq’s adventure. The trail was hard to trace, and Hasni, Musa, and Razir, recovering but grief-stricken under guard, proved to be as largely in the dark as Cale had always maintained they would be.

  Rumors about Mahoud would multiply in the press: he had been turned in captivity and had come to terms with the moderates. He had already suicided or been shot. His helicopter had crashed on the way to Taliq’s plane, leaving the authorities no choice but the military one.

  The popular media concentrated on personalities. Mrs. Cale appeared on television as an elegant widow to explain what a character Cale was and how she would miss his humor. The British tabloids, however, concentrated on her “close friend,” a morning television anchorman. The claim was that even as that British bulldog Cale was bravely baiting the terrorists, she and the anchorman had been tenanting the one flat.