She watched the second helicopter circle slowly around and out of her vision. The message transmitted to the outside world had been emphatic. One helicopter must come.
One.
Leila lifted the intercom. Selim answered.
“The first,” she said. “Now.”
Selim replaced the receiver and walked up the plane, through economy, into the business class section, using the starboard aisle. Immediately beyond the curtain, on his right, was the seat occupied by Jan Van Tonder. Selim carefully folded back the curtain and secured it, so that those passengers sitting at the front of economy class could see what was about to happen.
The South African glanced up from the magazine he was leafing through, caught sight of Selim by his side, and sniffed. Then he went back to his reading.
“You,” Selim said softly. “Get up.”
Van Tonder must have known this was directed at him. Everyone else knew it. When Selim came in, Robbie Raleigh had been refixing a crude bandage, made from a napkin, to Sharett’s wounded forehead. Now he stopped what he was doing and turned to look.
“I said, get up.” Selim was slim, elegant: his Dunhill blazer and Hugo Boss gray flannels, still looking good after a night and most of a day, would have commanded respect from any hotel doorman. They had no noticeable effect on Van Tonder, who continued to thumb through the magazine in his lap as if he were alone in the cabin. Only when Selim prodded him with the muzzle of his very inelegant, unstylish M3A1 did he react at all, and then not as Robbie expected.
“You people,” Van Tonder said, with a contemptuous sideways inspection of Selim, “haven’t the brains of a kaf-fir between you.” When Selim said nothing, he went on. “Did you hear that noise, just now? Do you know what made it?”
He calmly closed the magazine and slipped it into its elastic pocket on the seat in front of him before sitting back and clasping the sides of his seat, like a disgruntled judge.
Selim still said nothing.
“That noise was the beginning of the end, for you and for your comrades in back. Helicopters. The enemy is at hand, my friend. It’s what we call a standoff. They wait. Eventually—not today, perhaps, not tomorrow—you grow tired. You drop your guard. Then they come.”
This time he smiled up at Selim.
“It would be easier to surrender now. We know all about the deals you people do. You’ll find a refuge, I’m sure. Tunisia, maybe. Algeria.”
Selim returned the smile.
To Robbie, sitting immediately in front with his head twisted around, Selim’s expression was how he imagined the smile of an angel must be; it contained good humor, patience, compassion. Above all, compassion. Selim’s face was beatific. Looking at him, Robbie knew himself to be in the presence of a man who had reached a turning point in his destiny, but he could not guess why.
“You are South African,” Selim said, and although it wasn’t a question, Van Tonder treated it as such.
“Yes, I am, and furthermore I am proud of it.”
Selim reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and took out a passport. “This is yours,” he said quietly.
Again, although he had not framed it as a question, Van Tonder answered him. “Yes.”
“Take it.”
For the first time in this exchange the South African’s arrogant self-confidence faltered slightly. He continued to grip the armrests of his seat and to stare ahead of him, but he hadn’t quite enough self-control to prevent the quick movement of his head that showed he had heard.
“Take it.”
Van Tonder’s left hand seemed to lift off the seat of its own accord. It hovered a moment, undecided; then his fingers closed around the passport and Robbie, transfixed, saw how they turned white.
“You are free.”
When Selim spoke, Van Tonder’s head slowly twisted around, like a flower revolving on its stalk in an effort to catch the sun. Now a strangulated sound came from his mouth, something between a groan and a rattle.
Robbie closed his eyes and faced the front. It was all so damned unfair! He wanted to cry, but anger predominated. If anyone got to go it should be him, Robbie—he was just a kid, innocent—but that this—this
idiot,
this
turd,
should be the one to get out…
He blinked back tears and stared out the window at the ash-gray desert floor. So damned unfair! And yet … and yet… at least they were letting someone go. That was a kind of victory, wasn’t it? No one had died, no one was badly hurt, not even Dad’s pal Raful, his neighbor, whose head was healing nicely. And if they let one go, surely in time they’d let others go too? It’s a
hopeful
sign, god-dammit! A
development.
So be a man and face it. Dad would want that; make him proud of you
Van Tonder staggered as he rose, his legs weakened by hours of inactivity. He held on to the back of Raful’s seat, breathing heavily. When Selim offered him his right arm as a support, he accepted, almost falling on it in a sudden burst of gratitude.
“My briefcase … “ His voice was no longer peremptory; it bleated. “Please help me, I can’t …”
Selim, his transcendent smile unfading, reached up with his free hand and took the briefcase out of the overhead locker.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
Robbie, hearing the pathetic note in his voice, felt scorn rush through him and fought to resist it; yes, Van Tonder had gone over to the enemy in these final minutes, but what the hell—who could be sure of not doing the same? He looked up as the two of them moved forward and saw tears trickling down Van Tonder’s cheeks. Suddenly, without knowing why, the boy cried, “Good luck!” and Van Tonder smiled at him, but vaguely, as if in shock. He muttered some words, perhaps “Thank you,” Robbie couldn’t be sure.
Selim and Van Tonder reached the curtain separating them from first class and went through it. This time Selim did not pin back the curtain. The first class cabin was empty. He pointed Van Tonder toward the port exit, where the escape slide sloped downward to the desert, himself stopping while still short of the doorway.
“You must take this,” he said; and Van Tonder turned to see Selim holding out a large yellow envelope with airmail streaks on its edges, the kind of container airlines use for flight manifests.
“What is this?”
“A message for the world.”
After a few seconds’ hesitation, Van Tonder accepted the envelope. At the bottom he could see a bulge, and his fingers told him that the envelope contained something small and solid, apart from papers: a roll of film, perhaps. The envelope was sealed with thread wrapped around a washer. He began to unwrap the thread, but Selim commanded him to stop, and he did. Even he seemed to perceive that here, on the last frontier post with freedom, was no place to pick a fresh quarrel. He stuffed it into his briefcase and turned back to the door. As he did so he glanced to his right and thought he saw a figure in the shadows beyond the cockpit door. A woman…. Then he looked at Selim for the last time and, with a foolishness, a lunacy, that he was to regret the rest of his life, he mumbled, “Goodbye.”
Captain Morgan and Second Officer Ross had been placed in business class, on the port side of the plane, but were not allowed to sit next to each other. Ross occupied seat 10A while Morgan was in 11A, immediately behind him. From where they were sitting they had a good view of the helicopter that had landed outside, with occasional sight of the second machine as it wheeled above.
Three men had emerged from the helicopter on the ground and mounted a video camera on its tripod. One of them was looking through the viewfinder, while another checked the light. Morgan deduced from their general demeanor that something was about to happen and that these men knew what to expect.
When he felt the aircraft rock, ever so slightly, at first neither he nor Ross could guess what was happening. Only when Van Tonder was on the ground and well on his way toward the helicopter did they grasp the truth.
It struck both of them simultaneously, with great force, so that their exclamations—"Oh, Christ, no!"; “Dear God!"—came out together. Ross half rose in his seat, but Morgan’s shouted order to sit down stopped him just in time, for one of the hijack team was already bounding down the aisle.
Morgan waited until the man reached his seat; then, without waiting to be admonished, he said, as evenly as he could, “Please suggest to your leader that I be allowed to make an announcement to calm the passengers.”
“No announcement is necessary.” The man raised his eyes to look out of the window. Morgan saw how they widened, and he flinched.
The burst from Selim’s M3A1 crashed through Morgan’s eardrum like a two-stroke engine being started; it rose and died all in a matter of seconds, leaving his hearing muffled. He made himself look out of the window. Van Tonder lay sprawled on the gravel, the briefcase lying a few feet away from his body. From around the area of his waist spread a long, wet splash, scarcely standing out against the grayness of the desert’s surface.
Morgan watched, fascinated, while the technician on the ground who earlier had been testing the light walked forward to collect Van Tonder’s briefcase. He extracted from it a yellow envelope which Morgan found somehow familiar: the kind of thing he himself used to store the aircraft’s waybills and manifests. The man opened this envelope. He pulled out some papers and what might have been a passport, along with another small object, the last two of which items he pocketed. Having studied the papers for a few seconds, he advanced until the cameraman raised a hand, then halted and held a document close to the lens.
There was a difficulty, however, inasmuch as some of Van Tonder’s blood had splashed the glass. So they all had to wait while the cameraman ran back to the helicopter for a cloth. When he’d finished cleaning the lens, he looked up to where the second machine was hovering and waved the cloth from side to side in an exaggerated gesture, for all the world like a Victorian lady bidding exuberant farewell to her beau. And so the second helicopter pilot must have construed it, because he climbed, hard, for the protection of the low cloud ceiling and put himself on a course to the southeast.
The noise of the submachine gun had been so diluted by the time it reached the rear cabin that most of the passengers in economy had no idea what it meant. Then a few of them sitting on the left side cried out in horror, others leaned over, craning to see, and by the time the guards intervened the cabin was awash with rumor and half-truth.
“They killed a man"—that was the kernel of reality which flashed through them with the speed of intuition. A psychological barrier had been smashed down, leaving passengers and hijackers staring at each other across its ruins. The first to die … had died.
Some people stood up, perhaps to challenge their guards, perhaps in a bootless attempt to run away; whatever their motivation, the hijackers brutally pushed them back into their seats. Some, men as well as women, sobbed. Hysteria hung in the air, pungent as the smell of stale smoke the morning after a drunken party. But when a man broke from his seat, waving his arms and shouting, it was nearby passengers, not terrorists, who seized him. By the time Selim arrived on the scene, they had the man trussed up by the sleeves of his jacket. They handed him over like hounds delivering prey to their huntsman before awaiting his praise and he took it from them in the same spirit, with a smile that was part contempt for something animal and part pride.
“Be calm,” he told the hysterical man on the floor. “There is nothing you can do; accept it.” He raised his voice, addressing himself to the cabin at large. “You think that people on the outside are trying to help you. Perhaps they are. But when they play games with us, they leave us with no option but to retaliate against the only targets available: you, the innocent.”
When he stalked into the business class cabin he left behind him a cowed and frightened herd of people whose loyalties by now were shifting dangerously.
Robbie, gazing at Selim as he passed through the cabin, had not yet detected the subtle changes that were going on inside him, as well as many others. He simply felt, in a raw kind of way, that anyone outside the aircraft couldn’t possibly understand what hell those on the inside must be enduring. Those inside were lumped together in his mind without differentiating between passengers and hijackers, friends and foes. Us and them; in and out.
“Robbie.”
The boy turned his head. Sharett was awake and staring at him. For a moment Robbie wondered how this man knew his name; then he remembered Colin introducing them while they were on the ground at Bahrain.
“Robbie, what day is it?”
“July twenty-first.”
“And the time?”
Funny, Robbie thought; I haven’t looked at my watch for hours. “Twenty to six.” He hesitated. “Are you feeling all right?”
Sharett nodded. “I remember … remember you bandaging my forehead.”
“A long time ago. Last night. After they took the photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“One of them came with a camera and took a picture of your face.”
“Ah. I can’t recall.”
For a while after that, Raful gazed at the boy without speaking. He looked like a man whose pride both obliged him to make and prevented him from making some big concession. “You’re grown up,” he said at last.
Robbie shrugged, blushing.
“You heard the … you heard what happened outside?”
“Yes.” Robbie’s voice was scarcely audible. He might look grown up, Raful told himself, but inside he was still just a terrified boy.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you. Let you go hungry … maybe. Hurt you, no.”
Robbie’s lips twitched. “How do you know I’m safe?” he asked.
“You’re a kid. People like them want publicity,
good
publicity. Dead women and children they don’t need.”
Selim chose that moment to come through the curtain. He marched to the front of the cabin before picking up the intercom and speaking a few quiet words into it. Seconds later he passed out of sight behind the curtain that screened them from first class. It was as if he had to ask permission before advancing farther up the plane.