Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Christ,’ said Al. ‘The Taliboys. So who’s brokered this deal? I’ll bet it wasn’t Save the Children.’

  ‘That, my friend, is out-of-bounds knowledge.’

  ‘The Saudis, I’ll bet. My situation awareness is improving to a point I don’t want it to.’

  ‘Ignorance is joy,’ said ex-Swissair.

  ‘Bliss,’ said Bob. ‘Ignorance is bliss. As I can confirm from personal experience.’

  ‘Bliss?’

  ‘Rhymes with kiss.’

  ‘And piss,’ growled Al. ‘As in fucking grand piss-up.’

  They were standing by the cockpit door, backs to the cargo bay, where the second container was being rumbled in. Napalm, probably. The heavies stood on the steps. The trio passed into the cockpit and consulted the charts. Bob spotted another man down below on the tarmac, near the nose, passing what looked like a curry comb over his black knee-length coat.

  ‘I wonder who he is.’

  ‘The devil, grooming himself,’ Al said. ‘Well, it’s pretty obviously never just medical supplies, is it? I’ll bet you it isn’t. Istanbul’s not called the crossroads of Europe and Asia for nothing.’

  ‘I suggest you speak in dulcet tones,’ Bob said, lowering his voice. ‘I’m not happy with this operation, but we’re stuck in it. Never walk away from a deal. You’re probably right,’ he added, just to cover himself. ‘It’s bound to be green boxes and stuff, but we’d better not check.’

  He didn’t fancy letting on that he already knew.

  Ex-Swissair said, ‘I’ve need of the money.’

  ‘And what are those guys all about?’ asked Al, squinting through the port window at the three guards, now happily smoking where they shouldn’t.

  Bob popped his head out of the exit door with a pretend look of dismay and asked them to extinguish their cigarettes. They laughed and blew smoke towards his face.

  ‘Over to you, Al,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s your authority, skipper?’

  ‘Authority requires some kind of system. The only system here is naked greed.’

  Nothing much in this hopeless, hapless world could surprise him these days, but Bob was genuinely shaken up by what Posh Boy had told him. Evron Bensoussan! The biggest Israeli arms dealer! For all his experience of naughty cargoes and dirty brokers, this one had still managed to take the bolts out of his jaw. ‘Let’s go kick some tyres,’ he suggested, ‘while we’re waiting.’

  They passed the guards on the steps and the guards followed them down while they half-heartedly went through the motions of a general look-over. Bob wondered about finding a hairline crack in the fuselage, a loose bolt in the wing stub, but didn’t trust his acting abilities. The three heavies stood about under the belly smoking away until the guys in the refuelling truck yelled at them in Turkish and English, and they obeyed. The cockpit crew kicked the tyres and then gathered in a thoughtful knot.

  ‘I don’t believe I’m that desperate for money,’ said Al, as if he was two people. ‘They can find another crew.’

  ‘We know a certain amount, though,’ said ex-Swissair.

  Al said, not very convincingly, ‘We’ll collectively reassure them of our silence. We’ll say nothing about it. Strictly hush-hush. I’ve been in this position before.’

  ‘Listen, I haven’t told you everything,’ Bob said, ‘so you’re safe. If I told you who the client was, the boss man himself, you wouldn’t be safe. You may not believe it, either.’

  ‘Tony Blair,’ suggested Al. ‘No, the Pope!’

  They laughed. In fact, either might have been more credible than what Bob had just been told.

  ‘If it’s just medical,’ said ex-Swissair, ‘then maybe it is in fact the Red Cross. They have no political bias.’

  ‘That’s a point,’ said Al.

  ‘No way,’ Bob insisted. ‘That’s aiding and abetting terrorism.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Al. ‘I can see the Jesus sandals coiling around your feet.’ The refuelling truck had wrapped up its hose, and they were enveloped in kero fumes. Bob kept an eye on the heavies. The man in the knee-length coat had vanished. ‘You know,’ Al went on, ‘I was flying into Damascus some years back in a seventy six, with a Reuters man on the jump seat, the last one out of Iran after the Shah fell, and he told me the Ayatollah was a US stooge. As we were landing he told it me. I said no one talks when landing except to count down the feet, but it stayed with me. I think the experiment backfired.’

  ‘Let’s take a vote,’ said Bob, cutting in. ‘Who’s happy to go?’

  Only ex-Swissair put his clean, almost glossy hand up, although tentatively. ‘I wouldn’t say happy,’ he admitted, ‘but I need the money.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ murmured Al. ‘There isnae going to be a cargo check here, and there isnae going to be one in Turkmenbashi. They’re in it up to their necks.’

  ‘What’re you saying?’

  ‘That if you say yes, skipper, we’ll follow your lead. Otherwise it’s no.’

  ‘I don’t want to say yes, given I know too much. But that’s not fair on you. Your state of blissful ignorance makes you party to nothing. Even that crew caught flying on the Barrett-Jolley jaunt got away with it, because they genuinely did not know what they were carrying, or who the customer was.’

  ‘Where did you pick up that piece of shite?’ scoffed Al, quite put out. ‘B-J’s crew went down for a lot o’ years. You’d better tick the box that says, “I don’t know – anything.”’

  When Posh Boy came back, he had a small white box of antibiotics. Clearly a man of influence. He was beaming from ear to ear as he handed it over.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Al. ‘Have you a migraine, skipper?’

  ‘Terminal illness, as it were,’ joked Bob. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ He turned to Lennart, taking him away from the others to the foot of the steps. ‘We’ve been parleying,’ Bob said. ‘And the conclusion is not good.’

  The beaming rotated to a scowl. The better light now revealed the man to be in his late thirties, possibly more. Or maybe ten years had passed in his absence. He said, ‘There’s no more money.’

  ‘Listen, we’re not fooling about. This is not a safe operation. If we’re caught … I mean, we’re hanging about here with the doors open. I haven’t told my crew about the real nature of the cargo, nor about your boss. Only about the source of the brown envelopes. And they’re still unhappy.’

  Posh Boy shrugged. He was so much more in control of his nerve that Bob wondered if he’d taken a snort in the airport toilets. He fluttered his hamster eyelashes. ‘The extra cash,’ he said. ‘We expected more crew. You’re only three. I won’t reduce it.’

  ‘727s always have a three-man crew,’ Bob said. ‘You don’t know your equipment, do you?’

  ‘You’ll only get the cash on arrival,’ the Swede pointed out. ‘For this leg, nothing.’

  ‘Fancy thinking a 727 uses a five-man crew,’ Bob muttered, shaking his head. ‘Young people today, I dunno.’

  In truth, Bob Winrush was flummoxed. The money was very good, the flight was no challenge, and he was used to brown envelopes from all sorts of curious personages. The runway at Turkmenbashi was no bumpier than Frankfurt, and always dry. But everything inside him was wanting out. Pilots feel this sometimes: premonitory warnings. They know the aircraft better than themselves: they can give you the thread diameter and metallurgy of the four bolts that secure the engines to the fuselage on a 727, but not how the human head swivels on its neck, or what nerves connect the fingers to the brain, or why the heart should suddenly contract for no concrete reason.

  The man had lied to him. That was it. He hated being lied to. He hated being cheated. It was humiliating. It was an invisible undertow of rage that was pulling him out of this deal, taking him out into open water. But rage hardly ever paid.

  ‘I thought your kind were tough,’ Posh Boy sneered, getting his own back.

  ‘Tough and crazy. A blindness to danger and an eagerness to die: I should join
the Taliban. I’ll ask them if they need recruits. Can’t wait to wear my explosive vest and walk into a school for girls.’

  ‘They’re actually very polite,’ the Swede said, seeing a glimmer of hope. ‘It’s all just politics,’ he added vaguely.

  The airport’s ops agent, a frighteningly young man in an impeccable white shirt under his fluo jacket, came up with the papers to sign, handing Bob a biro with Snoopy decals down the side. He could see there was no way out. The only solution was to do a bunk. He watched the high loader go off and the cargo door close, then turned to the simpering Swede.

  ‘OK. I guess I’ve signed my death warrant. Hello, death. When have we got clearance exactly, Lennie?’

  Posh Boy went over and talked to the ops agent, who consulted his sheets. They had just over four hours. ‘Fine,’ said Bob. ‘Time to visit a Turkish toilet, take a shower, brush my teeth, swallow a couple of these pills, a brief shut-eye, then be fresh for ops. It’s called crew rest.’

  Al and ex-Swissair seemed quite happy when their skipper told them that they were on. The three heavies accompanied them to the airport hotel, which at that hour was all massively empty conference spaces humming with the odd Hoover. The crew booked into a business class room equipped for four adults, with a long frosted mirror and a trio of spotty prints. It was hard in such a place to imagine they’d be bumping onto a dusty desert in central Asia before the day was out. The heavies watched satellite TV from one of the twin beds, but the crew complained and when that didn’t work phoned Posh Boy Lennie. ‘Our room’s overweight on the live load,’ was how they put it. ‘By three armed oicks.’

  The heavies grumblingly exited, standing about in the corridor studying their mobiles as once they’d have studied their nails.

  Bob closed the door on them politely and checked out the window height: the room was on the second floor, luckily, and below it was the kitchen quarters’ flat roof. He asked Al to come out from the bathroom; his long-time flight engineer emerged dripping from the shower, skirted by a fluffy towel.

  ‘Listen, chaps,’ Bob said. ‘You don’t know something I do.’

  ‘The wing’s got woodworm,’ Al joked.

  ‘Worms don’t go for balsa.’

  Ex-Swissair, in his underpants, applying eau de cologne, asked what the hell was going on.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Bob said in a Fawlty voice; ‘he’s from Lausanne.’

  Al laughed his very loud and raucous laugh, which was Bob’s intention. Unless they were very stupid, the heavies would be listening to the way the room’s voices were intoning, or for silence. So Bob kept up a slightly manic tone: ‘You know what? I am not doing this one. I’m scarpering. Out of that window. Maybe it’s my foot. Maybe the operation’s too hot. But I am not doing it.’

  Al grimaced. ‘It’s not airworthy, or what?’

  ‘No, it’s to do with the boss. The client. As I said, that stupid public-school boy told me who’s setting up this deal when he should have kept mum. It’s done my head in. That’s the only reason. Oh, and a bad kind of premonitory feeling.’

  ‘I never care who the fuck the client is,’ said Al. ‘And the client doesn’t care about me. As for feelings, I get a bad one every time we roll out.’

  ‘Really?’

  His flight engineer all but glared at him. ‘You’re committing a runner, skipper.’

  ‘Keep your voice down. This wasn’t in the contract. We were bamboozled.’ He had to explain ‘bamboozled’ to ex-Swissair.

  ‘Fuck a duck,’ said Al. ‘They’ll shoot us.’

  Neither of them wanted to come with their captain, though. ‘This is always happening to me,’ Al moaned. ‘It happened to me in Kigali. The captain scarpered in the night. They really took it out on me. Fists, boots, the lot.’

  ‘They were military, that’s why,’ Bob said. ‘Far from civilisation. This lot’ll find an equally disreputable replacement with proper stripes in minutes. This is Turkey. One foot in Europe.’

  ‘I tell you what: you could raid our drinks bar,’ Al suggested brightly. ‘One J and B miniature would push your levels way over the FAA limit.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that would bother them.’

  ‘Ginger ale’d do it, probably.’

  Al had been in rehab before shifting out of passenger into freight. He was still bitter about it, as he’d always been careful to stop being an alcoholic the stipulated twelve hours before each flight. Ex-Swissair shrugged. Bob was to find out later – when it was necessary to do the research – that the man wasn’t actually Swiss, but formerly of the East German air force, and had a profitable sideline selling Stasi files to interested parties.

  Bob told them to lock themselves in the bathroom. ‘Wait inside about ten minutes, with some tap activity, then come out and alert the bouncers with shock and awe in your voices. Alternatively I can hit you, suggesting you struggled to hold me back.’

  ‘I suppose in the bathroom is better,’ said ex-Swissair. It was hard to picture him faking shock and awe.

  Al looked worried. ‘In the bathroom together?’

  ‘I’m sure they’re broad-minded, underneath,’ said Bob.

  The modest jump was painful only because of his foot. There were windows looking down on him, but presumably everyone was still asleep, or simply assumed a randy pilot had been caught out by the unexpected return of the husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He hadn’t changed into his civvies for fear of meeting Lennart, in which unfortunate instance he could plead his need for some duty-free. He avoided the hotel itself and limped to departures and its taxi rank, where a sleepy-looking driver deposited his small case in the boot, but in slow motion. Bob kept low in the back seat, feeling very unprofessional, and picturing the three heavies emptying their handguns into his co-pilot and flight engineer: he could even see the bullets shattering the TV screen, Al’s brainpan disintegrating like JFK’s.

  The captain had abandoned ship, walked (or rather jumped) out of a deal. But he told himself that he’d fulfilled the original contract: he’d done nothing wrong except refuse tens of thousands of dollars. Other men would have gone ahead – Bob Winrush might have gone ahead a few years earlier despite a happy family and comfortable home. But he was older now and lacking a certain zip, and his concentration was not crystal-clear at present. Things on his mind. Domestic interference. He remembered how out in Angola or the Congo or Sierra Leone, you’d meet old hands, yellowish by now rather than white, whose total analysis of the human character had boiled down to this: there were those who fucked everything in sight and all the time, and those who were choosier and fucked every now and again. He knew which category he slotted into: a third, unmentioned one. Those who were fucked.

  But he still managed a cultural tour of Istanbul, waiting for the night coach to take him to Izmir. He certainly didn’t fancy returning to the airport. And he hadn’t even had a shower, so he booked an hour in a historic hammam he remembered from years back when he was doing the Heathrow–Istanbul run.

  He splayed himself naked on the slippery expanse of marble along with a bulky party from Rickmansworth, some assorted Chinese and a few young Turks discussing what sounded like football. He stared up at the ancient star-punctured dome and deeply regretted his late action. Not because of what it might lead to – he was never in the business of alarmism – but because he had denied himself a challenge. Right now he’d have been at altitude, in control, in his element, off the airwaves and not talking to anyone on the ground, beyond the ordinary limits yet still secure, just resting on his own wits and skill and the machinery.

  Proper flying.

  Raising his head, all he could see were corpses with towels on their groins, laid out on a massive slab. It reminded him of a fish stall in the souk. He could have been in the front office with his hand resting on the throttle and some tens of thousands of dollars waiting to greet him. He told the masseur to avoid his foot, but the man made up for it on everything else: not a joint missed. Slappable fish-meat. The b
ones sounded like distant firecrackers. Or guns popping off from behind rocks in some waterless Afghan gorge. Afterwards Bob poured freezing water from the faucet over his head, drank several glasses of applemint tea in the hammam’s café and felt fantastic.

  It was time he called it a day. Freight. All that lark. He should retire early and open a little pub. The pleasant divorcee with the sympathetic ear, pulling the real ale and spinning his yarns. And as if his personal angel had suddenly remembered his existence, a portly man flashing a gold tooth caught his eye at the next table and asked him where he was from.

  ‘England,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I am from the Emirates,’ the man said, with pride. ‘I am a royal cook. My name is Muhib. Actually, I am Moroccan in birth. I work for a prince. He has a house here, in Istanbul. A big house. He has one in Paris, too. Very big. But the biggest is in Dubai,’ he added, as Bob’s attendant angel screwed up the original flight plan and unfolded a brand-new chart. ‘Many fountains, trees, so beautiful. Gold taps. Many old things. Very very old.’

  When Bob said he was a pilot, the royal cook raised his hands in admiration and said that his prince had just bought his own big jet, a DC-10, because when he flies on a passenger plane, even first class, the time comes to pray to Allah, and he must stand because you must always stand before Allah with obedience, and that is not allowed when there is turbulence, and often no one can tell him the direction of the qiblah. And this jet was being refitted in a way you would not believe, with a sauna, jacuzzi, all that stuff.

  Bob asked him if the prince had appointed a flight crew.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, and spread his hands. ‘Allah has brought you to this spot, I can see. Praise be to him.’

  Bob chuckled, then saw the man was being deadly serious.

  ‘Allah does seem to know best,’ he said, raising his glass of applemint.

  Then came the coarse ringing of an old-fashioned phone, the kind you’d still find on airport desks in places like Bangui or N’Djamena a few years back. Bob looked about him before he noticed his new-found friend pointing at the mobile winking away on his serviette. How reliable is a pilot who can’t recognise his own ringtone? Bob picked it up with an embarrassed snort, but without a qualm: Olivia, for instance, only sent emails. Or rather, her solicitor sent emails; it was a kind of autism, as Al had put it, this refusal to communicate like an adult. ‘That’s not very fair on autistics,’ Bob had replied.