“Dave listen.” Her voice, distressed by the bout of coughing was barely a whisper, “I can’t fly this.”
A tone of annoyance crept into his voice. “Why not?”
“It’s not a bloody car,” she began angrily; angry at herself; angry for getting them into the situation; angry for letting him down. But then she picked on him, hoarsely shouting. “I’m not superman. I can’t just turn a key and drive away.” The exertion started her coughing again.
Stroking her forehead he waited until the convulsions stopped. “Look I know it’s not easy but we don’t have any choice. Remember what you said to me at the border?” She shook her head slowly—he sensed the movement and felt the vibes—she didn’t want to remember.
“You told me to do it for my daughter,” he reminded her. “Won’t you at least try for your kid’s sake.”
His words found their mark and for a few seconds there was utter silence—the world waited. Then a searchlight’s beam splashed across the tarmac, breaking the spell as it struck the windshield and spilled inside.
“They’re looking for us,” said Bliss as he held her tightly, feeling her frail body jerking and twitching as she sobbed. “I’m sorry,” he added, regretting he had added to her suffering with mention of her child.
“Who’ll look after him, Dave?” she asked, revealing she had a son.
The searchlight persisted, sweeping back and forth, probing, seeking, pursuing.
A voice full of fear cracked the tense air. “They’re going to find us.”
“They will if you don’t belt up,” Bliss whispered harshly. “Who’s got the guns?”
Voices murmured their acknowledgement.
“Right,” he continued. “Those with the guns get near the hatch—at least we can take some of the bastards with us.”
He started to rise but she held him back. “Do something for me.”
“What? Anything,” he said, thinking: It’s her child—she’s going to ask to me to take care of him if she doesn’t make it. Now what?
“Shoot me,” she said.
His gasp of surprise could be heard throughout the plane. “What?”
“Don’t wait ’til they find us. You might run out of bullets. Shoot me now.”
He tried to pull away—she held on. “Promise you’ll shoot me before they find us.”
“But we might get away.”
“How? I can’t run. I can’t even walk. Please promise you’ll shoot me.”
A splash of light picked out her features as her head lay on Bliss’ rolled up jacket. He could almost feel the pain dragging down the corners of her mouth and furrowing her brow. The sparkle in her eyes had evaporated in sadness. “Shoot me now,” she implored earnestly, “before it’s too late.”
He swallowed hard, and his right hand trembled, rattling his gun’s muzzle against the metal floor. The fingers of his left hand delicately traced the lines in her brow. “I can’t,” he said so softly she didn’t hear.
“Please, Dave. Kill me.”
“I can’t,” he insisted. “Not yet anyway.”
“You won’t do it will you.” Her sad eyes looked away and stared into the future. “You know what they did to the American woman. Do you think it will be different for me?”
“But you’re hurt,” he protested.
The searchlight had passed, he could no longer see her face but felt the shake of her head. The calmness in her voice belied her fear. “They won’t care. They’ll rape and torture me, then they’ll stone me to death, won’t they?”
She’s right, he said to himself, but would not dignify it by an admission.
“If I’m going to die …” she carried on.
He interrupted, “You’re not going to die … think of your son. He needs you.”
Tears he couldn’t see dribbled down her cheeks. Hurt he couldn’t feel gnawed into her mind. “He doesn’t even know me,” she whimpered, then catalogued her nightmare. A teenaged girl’s rebellious relationship—rejecting her father’s business wasn’t enough. A migrant Turkish worker—one of a million drawn to northern Europe in search of golden pavements: Darkly mysterious, dangerous, irresponsible, and irrational, reckless even—of course, but wasn’t that the point?
The pregnancy had struck like a tornado and she’d taken cover until it was too late to do anything—other than run or brazen it out. She ran—to him. Cut off from her father’s largesse she lost some of her glitz, and Mr. Mysterious quickly tired of supporting a snivelling teenager and her child, so he shoved off in search of a more glittering pasture. But with him went their infant son, destined for a traditional Muslim upbringing with a distant relative in Turkey. “What did you expect?” her father had scolded when she’d slunk home distraught. And he was right. Mr. Mysterious had always made it clear that marriage was out of the question, citing all the impediments of a mixed-race relationship she’d given Bliss. “You’re a foreigner,” he’d summed up, leaving her thinking: Aren’t we all?
Bliss listened, his mood darkening as she recounted the horror of losing a child—not by death. “I could have got over that,” she said. “It’s the not knowing that kills you inside.”
“And you never found him?” enquired Bliss, stifling a tear.
“No,” she admitted simply, “I never found him.” though the simplicity of her words discredited the years she’d devoted to her quest.
That explains her knowledge of Istanbul, thought Bliss, realizing immediately how little he knew and how wrong he’d been: Exotic luxury getaways, he’d assumed, and had imagined her being pampered and mollycoddled at the Yesil Ev—manicures, mud-baths and mountains of Bosphorus bluefish. Whereas, in truth, she’d been ferreting out clues, greasing greasy palms for snippets of information, and scouring the seedy back-streets and smelly bazaars of Istanbul for a spotty teen with strikingly blue eyes. No wonder she jumped at the prospect of a trip to Istanbul, and no wonder she was reluctant to get involved with another foreigner. She was still dealing with the aftermath of the last.
“I could help you …” Bliss started.
She stopped him with the force of her voice. “Dave, listen. I’m just trying to be sensible. If I’m going to die I would like to remember you were the last man who made love to me, not some …”
He tried again, more forcefully, “You are not going to die.”
“We’re in the middle of Iraq. No one knows we’re here. We’ve killed a load of their guards. Half the army’s probably looking for us and I can’t fly this stupid plane.” She gasped several deep breaths, winding herself up to a finale, then concluded, “We are going to die, and I’m trying to tell you I love you. I love you more than I’ve loved any other man.”
He was stunned into silence. This wasn’t happening, this wasn’t real. Then a line of lyrics from an old song flooded his mind. “If you love me, let me go.” Over and over the words repeated themselves as he sat in the darkness. “If you love me, let me go.”
“Dave, please say something.”
The words of the song raced round and around while he fought to find the accompanying tune. He wanted to say something, to give her an answer, but his mind was stuck in a loop. “If you love me, let’me go,” it repeated again and again. Finally, he broke free. “If you love me, kill me.” he said softly. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“Yes,” she replied firmly.
He went cold at the thought. “I do love you, Yolanda but…” he paused, his brain trapped in a deadly embrace. Knowing he could neither kill her, nor live with the guilt of not doing so, his senses withdrew and his mind clouded with a deep purple haze shrouding all conscious thought. He closed his eyes and found the words, “Kill me,” stamped on the inside of his eyelids. He looked inward and the same words leaped out of the haze. “Kill me,” he read. Everywhere he looked the words were there. “Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.”
A few seconds later,—that felt like a week—Owain returned. “I think they’ve gone.” Then he prattled on, picking up the rem
nants of his previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “They could sell the antidote to the highest bidders. They could hold the rest of the world ransom.”
Bliss, lost in his own mind, heard only the voice in his head. And Yolanda’s shapely mouth had now appeared through the haze, repeatedly imploring, “Kill me.” His entire body was trembling, he knew it and could feel it, yet it was a body belonging to someone else—he was miles away: in London rowing across the Serpentine in Hyde Park, with Samantha, his daughter, a carefree little six-year-old laughing and splashing the mucky water.
“They’ll have industry and governments begging them for the antidote. ’Kuwait,’ they’ll say. ’You want Kuwait? Take it.’ Israel,” Owain paused. “That’ll be the real test, when they ask for Israel so they can turn it into a fundamentalist Islamic state. What the hell will the Yanks do then?”
Images of Samantha grew in Bliss’ mind as his thoughts of Yolanda and her lost child swirled. What did his little daughter know of suffering compared to Yolanda or her son? Not that she was little anymore. Had she suffered? Had there been a Mr. Mysterious in her life—or even a child—that he didn’t know about?
Owain’s questions had become rhetorical. “The Yanks will posture and bluff, I s’pose, they’re good at that, but they’ll have to give in eventually. Try fighting the Gulf War again without computers and you’d get an entirely different result.”
Bliss finally managed to get his mind working again, forcing himself to come up with the title matching words, “If you love me, let me go.”
“Can you imagine what will happen if we escape and try to tell everyone what is going on?” Owain was questioning, oblivious to Bliss’ inner turmoil.
Bliss thought for a second, his mind still wrestling with the lyrics. “They’ll isolate all the computers and try to find a way of stopping it,” he said eventually.
“Don’t be so naïve, Dave,” scoffed Owain. “Just the knowledge of its existence would destroy the economies, and jeopardize the security, of half the world. They’re not going to admit it’s even possible. The slightest hint it could be happening would send the stock markets into a nose dive.”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
Owain and his fellow captives had obviously given the subject considerable thought. He knew the answers: “The Government will deny it; claim we’ve been brainwashed; make out we’re lying; try to buy us off. They might even try to liquidate us. It wouldn’t be difficult, after all, we are officially dead anyway.”
“I don’t believe you,” snorted Bliss in disbelief.
“Get an education, Dave. The press and our families might have swallowed the stories of our deaths, but I bet the people at the top had their suspicions—how many inexplicable train and plane crashes can you put down to pilot error?”
“But what will they do when computers start crashing?”
“Probably blame some fifteen-year-old hacker from a flea-ridden backwater in south east Asia; hold a show trial just to make everyone happy, and pray it doesn’t keep happening.”
“We’ll sort something out,” Bliss replied dismissively, more concerned with Yolanda. Her words wouldn’t leave him. He didn’t want to think about anything else. He couldn’t think about anything else. “If you love me, let me go,” swam around in his mind and finally met up with the right tune as he remembered the correct lyrics. “If you love me, let me know. If you don’t, let me go.”
“I love you,” he said, no intention of letting her go, then he lay down beside her and protectively rested his arm across her chest, feeling the soft swell of her breasts as they rose and fell in time with her breathing. “You’ll be O.K., Love,” he whispered softly, but she was asleep.
The stars evaporated at the first hint of the rising sun. The moon’s golden face, still visible above the western mountains, faded to a fuzzy white. Those who had managed to snatch some sleep were stirring and now they crept, one after another, to a far corner of the plane to relieve themselves. Someone farted. No one laughed.
Bliss woke Yolanda with a gentle shake. “It’s Wednesday. Time to go home.”
“Is it morning?”
“Almost,” he replied, desperately urging the day to dawn.
Her face screwed up at the foul taste of dried blood in the back of her throat and she turned her head away to spit. “Dave, I need a drink.”
“We haven’t anything.”
She coughed and retched again. “Water,” she whispered.
He frantically searched his surroundings in the dim light but found nothing. Owain had heard Yolanda’s plea. “What about the river, Dave?”
A few minutes later Bliss was running, crouching, and weaving across the tarmac, constantly expecting a bullet to rip into his body. He tore across the flat landscape, heading for the perimeter fence, and the river-bank beyond. Suddenly, not a hundred yards away, a platoon of guards swept out of the early morning haze. He threw himself headlong to the ground and cursed as his gun went spinning out of his hand to clatter noisily across the stony soil.
They must have seen me, he reasoned, as he lay in the scrubby grass awaiting a burst of machine gun fire. Anticipation of pain was almost as painful as pain itself; it wasn’t courage that urged him to raise his head and invite the zap of a bullet—his mind had chosen instant death over tortured life. He looked up, the guards hadn’t moved. Instinctively he ducked again, then froze. There was something odd about some of the guards: Too skinny, too straight, too rigid. Opening his eyes wide he stared. At any other time, in any other situation, he may have laughed out loud at the realization he had tried to surrender his life to a regiment of spindly trees.
Daylight came long before the sun had climbed above the surrounding mountains. Yolanda, refreshed by the cool river water, resurfaced and allowed Owain and Bliss to prop her into the pilot’s seat. Then she sat, immobile, staring at the unfamiliar instruments with a puzzled expression. The delicately etched indentations at either side of her mouth, the one’s Bliss had found so enthralling at their first meeting, pulled into deep grooves by her pallid, sunken cheeks. Worry lines scarred her brow.
Ten minutes later the spluttering cough of the starboard engine ripped into the milky atmosphere of the early morning. The engine barked to life with a throaty howl, and injected a wad of oily black smoke into the clean, misty air. Then Yolanda turned her attention to the port engine and teased it to life.
“Let’s go,” shouted Bliss above the roar, but she shook her head and pointed to the dials with a sweep of her hand that explained nothing.
Two figures, ghost-like in the hazy dawn, emerged hastily from the control tower, seeking to confirm their suspicions. Bliss, still edgy from his encounter with the phantom patrol, furiously waved at Yolanda, urging her to take off. She looked at him with a pleading expression, trying to tell him something. Her mouth was moving but the weak sounds were lost in the maelstrom of noise and vibration. Realising it was important, he leaned over and stuck an ear to her mouth. “Chocks,” she breathed.
“Shit!’ he exclaimed, then shouted to Owain, above the noise, “The wheels are still chocked, I’ll have to clear them.”
The distant figures were approaching haltingly, unsure of the wisdom of their actions.
Without a moment’s hesitation Bliss slipped out of the cargo hatch and made for the massive wheels. As he kicked away the second chock the plane started to roll, threatening to leave him behind. Running wildly he lunged for the hatchway and narrowly missed a bullet which ricochet off the underbelly with a high pitched “zing.” The next bullet came even closer, burying itself into the flapping hatch cover as he fought to drag it shut against the increasing wind pressure.
The plane slewed down the runway, gathering speed as Yolanda fought with the controls. A couple of bullets, silenced by the engine’s noise, went unnoticed as they perforated the fuselage. The heavy plane lumbered into the air with less enthusiasm than a 301b turkey at a Thanksgiving shoot.
Bliss, breat
hless from his run, slid into the co-pilot’s seat and watched, awe-struck, as Yolanda deftly handled the controls—swinging the plane to follow the river valley. Pain, severe pain, had drained all colour from her face, her clothes were ragged and filthy, yet he found himself totally entranced by her features. “I love you,” he said not realizing she was paying him any attention.
Her reply was reproachful. “But you wouldn’t shoot me.”
“I don’t believe you …” his response came quickly, angrily, then he checked himself as he detected the shadow of a grin on her lips. She could still tease. He looked at her for a moment and deliberately held his reply, allowing her grin to subside. “Maybe I’ll kill you when we get to Istanbul,” he said sternly.
“How?”
He laughed, “Screw you to death.”
“Dave!” she exploded with mock offence, and the exertion took its toll, doubling her in another bout of coughing.
“Take over,” she yelled in alarm as her convulsing limbs snatched at the controls and started the plane bucking and twisting. Bliss overcame a moment’s indecision and grabbed at the control column in front of him.
“Gently,” she cried, as she let go of the controls and was immediately slapped back into her seat by a spasm.
Bliss’ brain was on fire. Sweat leaked freely from every pore. Muscles, paralysed by fear, locked his limbs. His fingers clamped so tightly around the controls that his deathly white knuckles appeared ready to burst. Paranoia seized him. “We’re going down!” he called, convinced the fast moving ground was rushing up to meet him.
Owain’s high-pitched Welsh accent twanged in the taught atmosphere, “You can do it, Dave.”
Bliss found himself mesmerized by the speeding landscape and the ground’s magnetic pull seemed to be enticing him earthwards. Then survival instinct overcame the almost irrepressible urge and he was relieved to see the plane’s nose rising as he hauled back on the stick.
Yolanda, clutching her heaving chest and fighting for breath, flapped her free hand at him. “Not too fast. Take it slow.” He relaxed a touch and eased back on the stick, dipping the nose until it was pointing at the horizon, then he patted himself on the back: “I did that.”
The Fish Kisser Page 36
