Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  As for walking out on the deal, he seriously considered that, as generally happened in this sort of situation, he was in the clear. The organisations involved are far too preoccupied to start worming out some bit player, especially a bamboozled pilot, and bothering him. But here was a voice he didn’t know, with only a slight if unidentifiable accent, being fairly unpleasant (and loud with it) into his ear. The line was bad, like a vast and echoey room, but the content and the tone were clear: menacing. He kept up a mildly joky expression for the benefit of his friend, but in fact it was wholly natural: it was hard to take this voice seriously. His heart thought otherwise, apparently slamming its oleaginous bulk into his upper chest-wall as the voice droned on.

  Basically, it was most unfortunate that a professional pilot of the rank of a captain should walk out of an operation of such delicacy with all the facts of it still in his head, as if intent on informing others for his gain. Did he wish to be famous like Brad Pitt, or something? Bob turned his head slightly away from Muhib, and told the Voice that he had been strong-armed into a deal and that was not the way he operated, but the Voice talked over him halfway through in a most irritating way, and Bob’s own voice was acting up, it sounded strangulated instead of firm and confident. The Voice repeated that what he, Bob Winrush, had done was unfortunate, not only for them but for himself. What was he going to do about it? Bob reassured him that he was going to forget all about it, that he wouldn’t even think about it, that he had already forgotten the details.

  ‘If you say one word, you will be dead by Monday,’ the Voice said matter-of-factly.

  Bob replied that this was understandable, and he had no intention of dying, and that luckily he’d said nothing about what he knew to his crew, who he assumed were unharmed. A hoarse sort of rasp sounded, which Bob read as a sardonic snort, and the Voice said to his great relief that the crew were already doing their professional job, unlike a certain scumbag. Bob asked if that was all, and the phone went dead. He turned back to Muhib, who was distracted by some teenage girls hovering in front of a shop opposite, their long gold earrings waving at the two men to look and admire.

  ‘Plenty of beautiful girls in Dubai,’ said the royal cook, nodding sagely. ‘Eyes like jewels, lips like roses, dimples like wells.’

  ‘Hey,’ Bob said, feeling a little nauseous suddenly, a little faint, ‘maybe Allah wants me to meet them, Muhib.’

  4

  YOU WILL BE dead by Monday.

  That two-year-old phrase returned, dusted off and beautifully polished, as he sat in his apartment, pondering the loss of his logbook and diary. Why not by Sunday? Maybe they only worked on Mondays, these hit men. Maybe they went home on Friday evening, watched telly, took their kids to a football match, grumbled about work to the wife, woke up Monday morning thinking, Christ, I’ve got that pilot job this afternoon, over in Dubai. Never any break. There’s always someone in my cross hairs. The point, of course, was that arms smuggling is all smoke and mirrors: it probably wasn’t Mossad so much as some mafiosi types, of which there is no shortage, hired to deal with the small fry like himself.

  He thought of Mike Perceval, a pilot with a dodgy hand-sewn outfit called Worldwide Wings Inc. He had disappeared without trace in Belarus some years back after, apparently, refusing to fly a creaky 707 freighter to Yemen. The seven-oh had a kid’s collage of faded logos on its tail and no maintenance records, and was packed to the gills with Albanian military hardware. Bob had heard this from Mike’s Latvian co-pilot, unlicensed and about as trustworthy as a BAC 1-11 was quiet. Mike got cross and was then driven off in a BMW at Minsk airport by men in dark glasses, and that was that. ‘Putin,’ was all the co-pilot would say, ‘Putin pay a lot of that attention to detail.’ But then he hated Russians. Mike was a character, with the sort of moustache you expect to be ripped off with a triumphant snarl, but one couldn’t say he was sorely missed.

  Bob decided not to phone Matt Sharansky, although he half-suspected him of breaking in: after all, a Mossad operative might well pose as an investigative journalist, on the same principle as anti-arms campaigners pose as arms dealers, or butt-grabbing wife-stealers as bilingual therapeutic masseurs. He did consider, for all of ten seconds, telling the police about the break-in and theft. Dubai, the glittery city of intrigue, of deals in wraparound shades. Money falling over itself to make even more. Trust? That’s the real luxury in this city built on sand, where the streets can blow sudden whiffs of sour milk or the stench of sick into your face, as though to remind you.

  What the prince had said in the jacuzzi suddenly came back to him over his internal tannoy, like his old recurrent nightmare in which he heard his own flight – the flight he should be captaining – announced in the former Woolworth’s in Sudbury, fitted by the dream engineers in their hi-vis smocks as a departure lounge in Chicago: ‘I see you have a history, too, Captain.’ Maybe Sheikh Ahmed had done a bit of research. Easy as falling over, these days. You don’t have to shift your plump carcass an inch.

  Bob made no change to his plan to eat, swim, pack, sleep and depart the following day – until he saw that all flights were full out of Dubai except for one that cost over $800. He wasn’t going to risk going subject-to-load on a British Airways flight (which as an ex-BA pilot he got a lot cheaper), only to find himself stranded when the load turned out to be at max. It was the same story in Abu Dhabi; Doha was way too far.

  So he booked a flight to Heathrow for the day after, first thing in the morning, giving himself more time to sort out business with the green-eyed secretary among the cheetahs. He did a quick Google-search for the main actors in the game, and fell upon a Matt Sharansky who seemed likely: worked for an Israeli paper he hadn’t heard of, author of articles about the arms trade and general politics from a leftist angle, no photos. He began to hope it was this guy who had stolen the logbook and diary for his own benefit, and not some nameless shadow in shades, hired by big-time Bensoussan. Matt Sharansky had attracted a lot of bile from fellow countrymen to his right, some of it strikingly venomous.

  Bob had a bite in the luxurious local tandoori among expat executives in the construction business (every one of them with self-shaved heads, as if pretending to be workers), and then, still in the pre-digestive period, got the pool slapping its sides with a vigorous crawl under the night’s glow. He had the water and lemon trees to himself.

  Better than the sheikh’s chic sauna’s heat. Tongue-twisters would keep them from nodding off in the cockpit. My landside folder’s glider flight guide’s filed. The tower would presume they were speaking Japanese, or something.

  As he towelled down, he felt his life had divided itself into two versions which were running in parallel: the normal version whose emotional centre was a hole once occupied by his ex-wife, dangerously plugged by a pretty-looking DC-10 and (at present) lovely Leila; the other a patently absurd one in which a deadly secret service or one of its acolytes thought him important enough to break into his apartment and possibly do him harm.

  The one time he had crashed a plane was memorable for the way everything slowed right down in the preceding seconds: the touchdown, the brakes not responding, putting it into full reverse, mud and stones rattling through the engines as they ingested the runway, a nice view of the forest’s trees straight ahead instead of to port and starboard, their foliage expanding as the yards in between reduced. He understood why birds and winged insects are said to have a slowed-down viscous sense of time: all those acrobatics. As he dried himself by the pool, this was the time he was moving in. Not because he felt in someone’s cross hairs, because he didn’t. No, he just felt he was about to crash. The man without his logbook. The man without his diary. The man without his job. The man without his house. The man without his wife.

  The pilot without his plane.

  I must phone Leila, he thought. As Al had advised him when he’d turned up in Maidenhead from the trip up north after the catastrophe, ‘You’re at rock bottom, pal. Start to dig.’

  He liked th
e glow of the city’s night sky on the pool water, all those wobbly lozenges on the bottom, the scent of lemon blossom over the chlorine, the little blue-and-white tiles at his feet, the cool desert air on his skin. He didn’t really want to leave this for his Crowthorne flat, or worse. For nothingness. But the crash felt imminent.

  As he went up in the lift, it occurred to him that his son, David, might know this Sharansky character, if only by repute. David had recently gone student-political and joined various activist groups, including AAW, or Action Against Weapons; so he was annoyed that his father had stopped being a freight pilot, he could have serviced their campaigning needs, provided info. David would quizz Bob on what he had seen exactly on the tarmac in Entebbe or Accra or Ostend or Minsk. The Ilyushins, the Antonovs, the refitted 707s. Dad was not a lot of help, mainly because he hadn’t seen much except crates on pallets, containers, goods hidden under shrink wrap.

  One day David had phoned Bob after some weekend conference or other and said straight out, ‘How could you do it, Dad?’ With the zeal of the convert.

  ‘Do what, David?’ When his son explained, Bob said, ‘I just fly. It’s always a mixture of things. Polio vaccines, tractors, livestock, art works, sweets.’

  ‘But you flew for Viktor Bout.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was flying for Bout.’ Bob had told him yet again how a plane could be leased and chartered three or four times over by various holding companies. He compared it to banks putting your savings into arms, plastics, nuclear stuff, pesticides while their adverts showed a happy family in a flowering meadow. ‘We’re all flying along totally compromised, David. Angels are only found in heaven. You need to introduce some nuance.’

  ‘And Africa?’ David persisted. ‘The Congo? Uganda? Rwanda?’

  ‘Africa’s Africa. Lots of different stuff came up. You just went along and did it. General cargo or military or medical, you just did it. Freight dogs aren’t vicars, you know. We don’t exactly pull the triggers, either. And I’ll bet even vicars have some malicious, malevolent members in their congregation. But they still carry on with the service.’ Since Olivia had started going to church in the village, this was an obvious reference, and unnecessary: Olivia was neither malicious nor malevolent.

  At the end of these conversations his son would get grumpy, and Bob would try to change the subject to rock bands, which names had been playing gigs in Dubai, but he could never remember them correctly unless they were called something like Pink.

  The more he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed that David had put Sharansky onto him. These guys talked to each other at conferences, on Facebook, via campaign websites. No one else, or hardly anyone, knew precisely where he lived: he’d drawn a map for David so he could copy it onto the envelope if he was sending his father a card or a letter. Since David had forgotten his birthday last year, and only ever texted (usually for money), the map remained unused. Until now, possibly.

  What’s more, David knew about the logbooks. He would see them as a kid, on the desk in Bob’s box-room study. Recently, David had asked his father if he could cross-check a logbook against some cargo histories they were looking at: his overlords in the campaign group had paid a considerable sum for satellite photos of tanks being disembarked at Addis Ababa, but Bob could truthfully tell him that he’d never landed there. Then he compromised. ‘OK, if you want to take a look, you’ll have to come to Dubai. I’d love you to come and see me here, as you know. Great clubs, nice beaches, incredible girls.’ Too late, he realised that these would not be a draw for David in his new guise as world saviour.

  ‘You can scan it, email it to me.’

  ‘No way. Absolutely nyet.’

  The more evasive Bob was, the more interested his son became. Sensitive material, all that. Bob ended up asking him if he really wanted to get his old dad into trouble. The reply reminded him of what a smoothie rebel colonel riposted when he wondered about human rights in some airstrip shack near Kisangani: the man had swatted mosquitoes from his nose and said, smiling, ‘Human rights is a bourgeois concept.’

  What David said was: ‘Your trouble, Dad, isn’t quite as serious as the victims’ trouble.’ His father said he’d think about it.

  Anyway, he now felt disappointed, and all sorts of angry rubbish flowed in to do with Olivia and that glossy-fingered Canadian prick. Before long he was out on the terrace with another large chaser and a beer to be chased. He stared out upon the usual glitz and could have sworn another few storeys had been added by the cranes and diggers grinding and banging away.

  He was itching to phone David, but it felt a bit late. He liked phoning his children from Dubai. David or Sophie. Sophie or David. Both at seats of learning so that, whenever they answered, it was with a real pub’s racket behind and he could say, ‘Glad to hear you’re in the library. I’ll whisper.’

  Instead, he tried Leila’s number again but it was still on message. She’d be at work, busy behind the bar. Behind him – or rather at his shoulder, where he could keep half an eye on it – the apartment felt slightly alien. On coming back from his swim, he had smelt a strange aftershave as he stepped inside. It was doubtless the trace of another resident passing in the corridor, swirling in with him, but it did make him especially alert as he picked up a few things and snapped open a couple of suitcases, before succumbing to the drink – which he eventually noticed had a film of dust on its oily-looking surface (the beer was straight from the bottle). Construction-site dust, that’s what it was. Not desert sand. Or maybe both. He’d never thought about it, really. But you could see clouds of it, like smoke, in the cranes’ floodlights as they winched and whirred.

  It was fine to be leaving.

  He couldn’t sleep, of course. It was a tangle of things: losing his job, the drink, the feeling that someone else was in the apartment. He was nose-heavy and over his maximums, as they always would be in Africa – ten or twelve tonnes over max landing weight at times. Just enough to make it delicate, to reduce the get-out clause to zero. He was wiggling away at the analog switches, knobs, pressing what have you, pushing the throttle and so on, and there was no response.

  He tossed and turned, got up at 3 a.m. to watch some international pap on cable, swallowed down a basinful of bottled water, then tried to lure unconsciousness with earplugs (which simply drowned out the grumbling air con with the dim baboon-shrieks of his tinnitus). He considered phoning Al. He hadn’t talked to him properly for ages. He stood shivering on the balcony, disco beats faintly pounding as the place partied, but Dubai’s glitz was completely overruled by a full moon.

  This reminded him of an old, recurring nightmare: he was flying a 747, filled with pax to the last seat, between the skyscrapers of some unnamed city, his rate of climb so weak as to be pretty well invisible; but he’d always do a great job of squeezing the fuselage between two towering glass edifices, and somehow the wings followed. ‘Piece of cake!’ he’d shout over the shuddering yoke. At last a gap would prove too narrow, and he’d wake up practically on the floor unconstrained by sheets. But what he most remembered about the dream (it stopped when he only carried freight and the odd self-loading batch in the form of hundreds of soldiers) was that, just before the fatal moment, a cabin attendant with a huge beehive perm like his first stepmother’s would whisper in his ear, ‘At least it’s a full moon, Captain.’

  He did drop off, about half an hour before the alarm (set for eight o’clock), but he didn’t fly between skyscrapers. He was bringing a heap of loose flowers in his arms for his master, Doug Rydale, an ex-Pan Am pilot near retirement who had done the Berlin airlift run and flown the Beatles twice. Doug was definitely the nicest, kindest man Bob had ever known. It was under Doug’s captaincy (he’d moved to BA after Lockerbie) that Bob had begun his own real-time flying career, so fresh out of the simulator that he was, as Doug joked, ‘still out of focus, in two dimensions, and distorted’.

  Bob learnt many things from Doug Rydale. Most of all, how to treat everyone as your equal – in
cluding the service crew, the ground staff, the cleaners. How to look the steward or stewardess in the eyes when you say ‘Thank you’ for bringing you coffee, and not just when you want to date them. Doug was what used to be called a gentleman, with a moustache made for twirling. He only read the International Herald Tribune, and hailed from Minneapolis. ‘That’s the outside world,’ he’d say, when some unpleasant event was reported. ‘That’s the outside world big time. When all we want is beauty, justice, and at least two engines working.’

  In Bob’s dream, Doug (who had died suddenly on the eighteenth tee in Florida about ten years ago) was still alive and in a retirement home. A pretty nurse came up and said, ‘It’s all through-carpeted,’ and then Bob entered Doug’s room. It was empty. He came back out into the corridor and the floor was awash with muck and blood: the corridor was as slippery as the worst runway in the Congo or Uganda or the Central African Republic. Bob couldn’t get out; he couldn’t get to a clean place, no matter how he tiptoed and lurched. It was foul.

  He woke up, nauseous. He didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to realise what the dream was all about. Doug Rydale was his hero, his master, his ideal. And Doug had gone. Instead, there was blood and ordure and old age.

  * * *

  The phone went at eight, while he was packing. He thought it might be Leila.

  ‘Hi there.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Am I talking to Robert Windrush?’

  Young voice. Thin, nervous, clever. Accent: North American, plus slight foreign inflection.