I watched his finger.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I told him again. ‘I’m working for Burdick, didn’t you know? That gets you another hostage for nothing, and you can use me to negotiate the exchange. So don’t throw away good material - you might be glad of it later,’

  He didn’t move.

  Shadia had gone inside the aircraft.

  Pat Burdick looked down at me but I don’t think she was taking anything in: her skin was yellow and her eyes dull and I could see why they’d wanted a doctor on board.

  Carlos Ramirez watched me with his gun steady, Zade watched me, his finger curled.

  I heard the cry of sea birds in the distance.

  Some kind of aircraft landed and reversed thrust, sending out a rush of sound that diminished slowly.

  I watched his finger.

  It’d be a quick pressure, then off again: with shells that size he only needed one shot to blow me right off the steps. ‘Work it out for yourself,’ I said. ‘It makes sense.’ There wasn’t anything else I could do now, because I didn’t want to oversell the idea: it’d look as if I were worried.

  It was his decision to make, entirely his decision, with nothing on my side to help me. Except the ghost of a chance.

  Chapter Sixteen: BOEING

  ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘It makes sense.’

  He didn’t answer.

  I watched the reflections in his sunglasses.

  He kept very still.

  Sunglasses are effective in two ways: they disguise the face and they conceal the thoughts in the eyes of the wearer, and in a poker-type situation that can offer a critical advantage.

  I couldn’t see what he was thinking.

  ‘Find out,’ he said at last, ‘where we are now.’

  He was talking to Shadia, not to me.

  She turned away and I watched her reflected back view in his sunglasses as she went forward to the flight deck.

  We were still over the ocean: the glare still lit the mouldings above the windows. I hadn’t been told anything but I assumed Zade would try for Washington: Flight 378 was originally scheduled for Miami so it would carry enough excess fuel.

  Shadia came back.

  ‘We’re a few minutes north-east of Miami.’

  ‘All right,’ Zade said.

  She looked into my face for a moment before she turned away and went aft to where Pat Burdick was lying on a tilted seat. Sometimes during the flight from Belem I’d found Shadia staring at me from a little distance, as if she still wasn’t sure what had happened. I think if I’d suddenly sprung up with a fiendish cry she would have passed straight out. I don’t use a gun so my experience with them is academic but I suppose when you pump six killing shots into someone’s body it must do something to you as well: there must be a kind of rapport between you, in the giving and receiving of so much hate. For several hours Shadia had believed she’d lulled me and when she’d seen me standing there on the flight steps a: Belem it must have been psychically traumatizing.

  ‘Do you think he would take your advice?’ Zade asked me.

  He meant Burdick. ‘Yes, he would.’

  We spoke in Polish most of the time, but he tried out some weird English phrases now and then to impress me, though I hadn’t actually heard them used before. We sat facing each other: he was on the inside seat of the front row in the first-class section and I was on the steward’s jump-seat I’d been searched and everything and they’d calmed down during the flight, though Zade and Sassine were still rather nervy and I had to watch what I said or they’d begin firing questions at me and I didn’t want to tell them some of the answers.

  Kuznetski was the quietest: his dossier had mentioned something about scientific training in Prague University and he was probably some type of bent boffin. He’d only spoken twice during the flight out of Belem and now he was sitting alone, preoccupied.

  Sassine was across the aisle from us, reeking the place out with pot Zade had told him to shut up a few minutes ago and Sassine had come off his high in a swallow dive. I’d noticed on other occasions that when Zade said anything, people really listened.

  ‘Then you can advise him not to make any trouble for me,’ he said, watching me with his sunglasses.

  ‘I don’t think he wants to do that’ I leaned forward. ‘He wants his daughter back with him, and I’m ready to advise him to do precisely what you say. From my personal observation that is the only way he can save her.’

  I tried to sound like a smooth Civil Servant, using that bastard Loman for a model, because the showdown might involve a modicum of close combat and I didn’t want these people to think I was any good at it. Similarly I was trying to persuade him that me Defense Secretary was also a pushover because a determining factor in any confrontation with an adversary is the degree by which you can get his guard down in the preliminary stages.

  ‘You have had contact with Burdick?.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘ I hadn’t.

  ‘ ‘So you know what we are demanding from him.’

  ‘ ‘Yes.’

  ‘ I didn’t ‘ He looked away from my face at last, turning his dark ‘ head to the window. I could now see part of his left eye, but ‘ couldn’t judge the expression at this angle: he was just star’ ing into the distant sky.

  ‘ ‘We know that Israel has the bomb, and we know that ‘ the United Arab Republic is building one. That is the key ‘ factor in the imminent Israel-Egypt accord, already outlined ‘ by Kissinger.’

  ‘ I looked beyond him to the pallid face of the Burdick girl.

  Dr Costa was sitting alongside her: he was the short man who’d been pushing his way through the crowd at Belem:

  the ‘brave humanitarian’. I hadn’t known, until now, how slight her chances were.

  A group like Kobra wouldn’t come together from the ends of the earth to acquire a single nuclear bomb. They’d want more than that: fifty or a hundred of them.

  ‘Yasser Arafat published his manifesto in Al Thawra, two months ago, in Beirut.’ His head swung back. ‘Did you read it?’

  ‘I read the Newsweek interview.’

  ‘Good. That is his manifesto, and it is my manifesto. We may not be able to prevent the proposed Israel-Egypt accord, but we can prevent some of its consequences. Have you met Yasser Arafat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you met him, you would follow him. I can do nothing for Poland, but I can do something for Palestine. You understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was on a liberation kick and he was sincere about it and therefore dangerous: the political terrorist is the man who could create new and better worlds if he could express his dreams with intelligence; having none, he can only express his frustration.

  I leaned forward again, wanting to know things.

  ‘But you said that the bomb is the key factor. Do you mean -‘

  ‘The bomb is always the key factor. In the ultimate show of strength, that is the form of strength that is shown. Surely you know that.’

  He looked up as someone came off the flight deck: I heard the sliding door hitting the stops. I turned my head and saw Ventura. They’d been taking it in shifts to mount guard on the flight deck and Ventura had been there for the last twenty minutes. He was a narrow-chested man with a bald head and slow wet eyes: he looked like a disinterested assistant in men’s haberdashery but he had killed Hunter in Geneva and he would kill me when the showdown came unless I could preempt him.

  Zade moved quickly and I felt the power in him as he swung past me. The sliding door banged shut behind them and I changed my seat so as to face forward. Sassine went nervously for his gun but I didn’t take any notice because he was as high as a kite and his reactions were notably slow: I could ‘have got his gun and shot Zade or Ventura or possibly both as they came back from the flight deck but Kuznetski and Ramirez were behind me now and so was Shadia.

  Sassine seemed ashamed of his show of nerves and crossed his legs and pinched out his reefer and put it in a tin box marked ‘Aspirin’ in Czecho-slovakian and began talking rapidly about the paradoxes of political history and the undercurrents of popular thought and their influence on the world revolutionary scene in terms of pseudo-neo-Fascism and its abortive attempts to achieve liberation for the elite. One of the port engines cut out and came back on power while he was talking but he didn’t notice it.

  Behind him, farther along the aisle, Ramirez was watching me with one hand on a submachine-gun, and I saw him glance to the window. Sassine went on talking and I assessed his potential for creating difficulties: I thought Zade would probably have trouble controlling him when it came to the crunch. He was a thin, hollow-eyed man in his twenties, haunted by things he had done or perhaps by things that had been done to him, and I believed he would put a bullet into Pat Burdick’s head and my own as well if he thought it would be politically correct.

  The engine cut twice more, coming back each time, and five minutes later Zade and Ventura came back from the flight deck and stood talking in urgent whispers in the catering area forward of the passenger section. I couldn’t hear anything they said.

  Sassine was recommending the advantages of what he called ‘socialistically-oriented referenda’ as a means of ‘reaching the proletariat’ without disturbing the ‘mass-media syndrome’ when the port engine cut out and stayed out. The background noise was diminished by one quarter and was noticeable even to Sassine.

  Zade and Ventura had stopped talking and were moving forward again when the flight deck door banged back and the pilot stood there, a tall mahogany-faced type with four gold rings on his sleeve and his cap on the back of his head. He spoke directly to Zade.

  ‘Okay, you better get this. I’m the captain of this ship as long as she’s in the air and I want to tell you something in case you didn’t happen to think of it for yourself. We have one engine out and it can happen again so I’m going to take her into the first place that can give me clearance, and if you don’t like it you can shoot me right between the eyes and you’ve got a hundred and thirty thousand pounds of junk going through the air at thirty thousand feet and it’s doing five hundred knots and she’s all your baby, know what I mean? You think that guy in there can take her down? He’s not a pilot, he’s a navigator and he couldn’t land a goddam bicycle. I realize you’ve got the biggest ass in the ball-park so I thought I better just tell you the score.’

  He turned and went back to the flight deck and slid the door shut with a bang.

  The Boeing was in a wide turn and drifting lower.

  My watch read 12:31 and I altered it to 10:31 provisionally: I didn’t know which airport we were going into but it wouldn’t be far from the time zone for Miami because we’d overflown it.

  Zade and Ventura were on the flight deck and the door was open but I couldn’t hear any voices. Kuznetski had come forward to ask Sassine what was happening, and Ramirez was squatting on a front-row seat in the coach class section with a submachine-gun across his knees and the other on the seat alongside. When Sassine came back to talk to him I moved down me aisle to where Dr Costa was looking after the girl.

  Shadia was with them and I couldn’t say everything I needed to say but the main thing was to keep Pat Burdick’s morale up in case she had to look after herself while I was busy.

  ‘How are you feeling, Pat?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She was lying back on the tilted seat looking up at me with dulled eyes, but managed to smile.

  ‘You know I’m here to look after you, for your father?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  Her eyes showed a flicker of interest now.

  I’ve talked a lot to these people, and they’ve told me that whatever happens they’ve no intention of harming you. We’re going to reach a working agreement with your father, some time today, and then you’ll be free to go home.’

  She went on looking up at me, frowning a little against the reflected light on the ceiling.

  ‘Are you just kidding me along?’

  ‘No, I’m not. You don’t need any false reassurance - you’re too tough for mat.’

  Dr Costa took the pad off her forehead and dipped it into the bucket of ice and squeezed it out and put it back.

  ‘I don’t feel very tough. I feel really spaced out, over all this. Do you know what they want from my Dad?’

  ‘Yes.’ Because Shadia was listening. ‘And it’s nothing he’s not ready to give them, in exchange for you.’

  I pressed her ‘hand and straightened up and looked at Costa and he came back along the aisle to talk to me.

  ‘How bad is she?’ I asked him.

  Shadia hadn’t followed us. I think she didn’t like to come too close to me, possibly because she was superstitious: with part of her mind she saw me as someone who’d come back from the dead.

  ‘She needs to be in a hospital,’ Costa said.

  He was short and rumpled with soulful brown eyes that spoke of devotion to a dozen gods, whichever could get his attention first. He smelt faintly of herbs.

  ‘What’s your diagnosis?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It could be blackwater fever, or it could be yellow fever; the symptoms are much the same in the early stages.’ He looked up at me dolefully. ‘Do these people mean what they say?’

  ‘It depends what they say.’

  He looked along the aisle.

  ‘Poor child. They say they will show humanity. Where will they find humanity?’

  I turned round a little so that I had my back to Shadia:, this wasn’t an intelligence cell but she might have had training in lip-reading somewhere along the line.

  ‘Dr Costa, have you given any sedation?’

  ‘Sedation? Oh no, she-‘

  ‘Don’t give her any. If you can give her stimulants without doing any harm, you should do that.’ He broke in but I stopped him. ‘I might not have long to talk. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I want to get the girl out alive if it’s possible. She might have to run, or look after herself in an emergency. If I can give you any warning, I’ll do that.’ I moved again, walking back with him along the aisle. ‘I’m quite sure we can all reach a peaceful agreement as soon as contact is made with the other party.’

  ‘But of course.’

  The aircraft was still settling and when I looked through the windows I could see a control tower and the roofs of buildings and then a whole row of military jets with US Air Force markings: the pilot had obviously put the fear of Christ into Zade and persuaded him there was an emergency and this was the nearest airport that could take us. I suppose he thought the best place to land a bunch of terrorists was at an Air Force base and that was a logical thought: the moment the Boeing touched down it’d be surrounded by enough fire power to blow an aircraft-carrier out of the sea. But I wasn’t too happy because the thing we’d all have to avoid was a shoot-out because in a shoot-out there wouldn’t be many survivors.

  10:34.

  Timing was now important. I didn’t know if Ferris could do anything for us at this stage: there might be a short-wave transmitter at the airbase he could use for talking to London but I didn’t know if London could do anything for us either. This was the end-phase and in the end-phase of a typical penetration job it’s usually the executive hi the field who has to complete the mission without anyone’s help: it’s in the nature of the operation because he goes in alone and he’s got to get out alone for the simple reason that that is what he’s for.

  Ferris would be ‘here in two hours: I’d worked with him before and I knew his style. The minute we’d stopped talking on the phone when I’d called him from Belem he would have got on to the Secretary of Defense direct and asked for a pick-up in Manaus, and Burdick was capable of ordering a unmarked military aircraft to go and get him. This Boeing had been on the plot tables ever since it had taken off and Burdick would know it was now landing.

  He would be here sooner than Ferris.

  We were reversing thrust and I leaned against the bulkhead between the coach and first-class sections until the deceleration eased off; then I went forward and spoke to Kuznetski.

  Zade had said that the bomb was the key to international power politics and of course he was right but he was here for more than one of the bloody things and they couldn’t expect to get away with a shipment.

  ‘I hear you studied at Prague,’ I said to Kuznetski.

  He turned to look at me. He was holding himself hi a lot, and only his eyes showed his nerves; he didn’t look a typical terrorist, if there is such an animal: he’d set up the Simplon Tunnel operation and shot his way out of gaol and all that sort of thing but he didn’t look like a dedicated revolutionary; he looked as if he liked the technicalities of violence as distinct from its political excuses.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was in Prague.’

  'In ‘69?’

  He watched me quietly with his nerves in his eyes.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was there hi ‘70, on one of those exchange things. You’ve got a doctorate in physics, haven’t you?’

  His shoulder hit the edge of the bulkhead as the Boeing swung off the runway and gunned up a little, but he didn’t take his eyes from my face.

  ‘No. I have a degree.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In Prague.’

  He hesitated, wondering whether to answer.

  I heard voices from the flight deck now, and radio static.

  ‘I did some revision techniques on deuterium moderators,’ Kuznetski said. ‘I was with Dr Schwarz.’

  He seemed to be waiting for some kind of answer.

  ‘Are you going after your doctorate?’

  Again he waited, watching me.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  We could hear the pilot clearly now.