towards the cockpit 'Shut up, you fool. Shut up and come in here.' A moment to see the relief sucked from the faces of those passengers closest to him, and David had dragged him too deep for them to follow his whispered words. The Germans say we cannot land. They forbid us to use their airfields.'
'It's a bluff… like the Migs.' Even as Isaac spoke the cold sweat that comes from chronic uncertainty, comes when the mast is broken, when the ladder slips, was spearing its way across his stomach, into his groin, an awful chill. 'They don't mean it…'
'How do you know they don't mean it? They say they will prevent us from landing.'
'Perhaps it's just an airport official, someone who had not been notified about us. Do they know who we are? Do they know we are Jews?'
They know everything about us. They know we are Jews. They know our names. They know we have passengers on board. They say that they know we have fuel, and they say we must fly on.'
'Which is the nearest airport to our present position?' Isaac snapped at the navigator, seeking to regain the initiative.
•Still Hanover.'
Tell them that we are going to Hanover. Tell them we are going to land at Hanover.' Isaac was shouting; they were coming to the West, they were coming to freedom, they were coming to the democracies. 'Tell them that, and hold the course for Hanover.'
'Only one person that can give orders in the cockpit, Isaac, and that is me.' David, animated, creased in anger.
'Well, give some orders then. Take the plane down to Hanover.'
Take the plane to Hanover,' David told Anna Tashova. The transfusion of energy from his fury was short- lived, and he seemed to crumple again, the belief in the outcome slipping. The girl's hands moved to the instruments to make the changes and deviations that were called for by the navigator. Checking altitude, checking airspeed, asking him to seek a talk-down into the airspace, and with her face set tight as he shrugged and said they would give no co-operation, that they could only repeat the message already passed to the airliner, that they were sorry.
'How long?' David asked the navigator.
Ten minutes and we will see the airfield. I will tell them again that we are coming. But you should know that they were very definite. They said they would prevent us from landing.'
Because he was a big man and sat high in his seat Edward R. Jones Jr had seen David pull Isaac back towards the entrance to the cockpit. All the passengers, adult and children, were susceptible to the changes of mood in their captors, studied and analysed them, because they had little else to do, and because these were the only clues they possessed as to the future of the flight. Every smile, every furrowed forehead was noticed and evaluated as the passengers sought for information. It was as if the act were mimed, because the voices of David and Isaac were far removed, and were lowered, and the yowling of that bloody baby Obliterated any possibility for even the keenest ears to eavesdrop. But Edward R. Jones Jr was not totally disappointed by his inability to hear the words that were spoken; his eyes had not betrayed him. They reported a new mood, a new urgency, a new tension at the front of the aircraft. He and his wife were seated at the back of the plane, among the last rows of the cabin, while the mass had herded towards the front because they had not read, as the American had, that the only possibility of survival in an air disaster is to be sitting in the rear. He and Felicity Ann always sat at the back, and it was that which put him in easy conversational range of Rebecca, as she stood with the gun still unfamiliar in her hand watching her charges and as ill-informed about what was happening in the cockpit as they were.
'Miss,' he said, hands still on his head, 'Miss, do you speak English?'
'You have heard the orders, it is forbidden to speak.' Clipped, hostile, shunning the contact; but an answer in the language that he sought.
'Forget that crap, Miss, if you'll excuse me. The question was, 'do you speak English?' and the answer was that you do.'
It is not permitted for you to talk.' Halting and styled by school classrooms, but she could understand what he said, and reply in a fashion.
'It strikes me, Miss, and I'm only a passenger here, but it strikes me your friends up the front have a problem. You get that impression?' She ignored him, wondered what else she could do.
Couldn't hit him, not without coming from behind her barricade, and she couldn't call David or Isaac because they were at the cockpit, and she had seen what the American had, and the two men had looked anxious. 'Perhaps the problem is, Miss, that no one is that keen to have you. Thought of that one, have you? That there won't be a red carpet down there waiting for you.'
'We are Jews, we are persecuted. We are fleeing from a system of intolerance, and so we go to Israel. In the West they are the enemy of the Soviets – you tell me they will not help us?'
Edward R. Jones Jr turned full towards her, eye to eye, face to face. Quite a pretty girl really, if she did something about her hair, bit of make-up, little eye shadow – not a beauty but presentable, dreadful frock, but they all wore things like that over there.
'Have you thought, Miss, that it could all be a bit harder than that, that people this side of the line might not be quite as cosy, quite as friendly as you thought they would?' A rhythm in his voice, monotonous like the drip of a tap that needs a new washer, hypnotizing in its way, and dulling and wasting. 'When the Palestinians fly the planes into Arab countries they get locked up now, you know. No more garlands and a big villa to lie around till the heat cools. They shove them in the cells. Times move on, Miss.'
'We are not Palestinians, we are not terrorists. We are Jews and we have been oppressed, we have been persecuted, and now we have fought back…' She too had now raised her voice, the last of the group to do so, but responding in her own way to a strain that was becoming intolerable, crippled all the time by the isolation of her position, divorced from the others, wanting comfort, reassurance.
They all say that, Miss. All reckon that their God is on their side, that he looks with a friendly eye on their cause.
You're not the first to join this merry-go-round, Miss; there are plenty before you. Proper all-sorts they are- Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, Tupamaros, Zeepa, Provos, Baader- Meinhof, ETA 5, PFLP. They're all in your line of business. And one problem they all face – they need somewhere to go, somewhere to sleep, somewhere where they aren't going to be hunted. Rest* houses are short on the ground, Miss. If you can't put this bird down in Tel Aviv you're lost, you'll be like all the other lepers and pariahs. No one will want you.'
'We are going to land, Isaac told you so. Isaac told you we were going to land. And the plane is now descending.'
Close to shrieking, and the words carrying the length of the cabin, enough to rouse Isaac from far away so that he ran the distance of the aisle, and when she pointed to Edward R. Jones Jr she could not speak because the tears choked in her throat. He seemed to dare the boy, to taunt and anger him in the very defiance of his steadied, aged eyes. Not even the hands raised in self-defence across his face, nor his body turned away that a blow might be warded off. Isaac swung the barrel of his gun in a short, chopping arc on to the apex of the American's skull, one blow to submerge it under the protection of Felicity Ann's arms, and there was blood on heir dress and the sound of the distress of an old man for protest.
'Rebecca, it will be over very soon. We are nearly there. We are losing height. Courage for a few more moments. Courage.'
Isaac's was the only voice in the great hushed cigar of the cabin. But he had not told her of the message from the ground, had not thought to. Flaps moving and arresting the progress of the plane, causing it to yaw from side to side, thrust sound changed to a higher pitch, and the rumbling of the extraction of the undercarriage.
The movement of the plane made it difficult for David to stand in the cockpit, but there was nowhere else for him to go. The pilot officer in her seat, the navigator in his, and only the captain's place with the strapped-down body available to him. Couldn't bring himself to touch the man, different if they'd meant to kill him, if he had been an enemy and his death had been reached by decision. But it was just an accident, an empty and hollow accident to a man whose status represented no threat to them. Not like killing the policeman. And so the captain reserved his seat, his head rolling with the motion of the aircraft and the blood trail congealed and darkened.
We are talking again with the tower at Hanover. They repeat that we are not permitted to land there. They call it a blanket order for the whole of the Federal Republic. They are emphatic that we will not be permitted to land there.' The navigator seemingly calm, unaffected by the bow-string tension around him, and repeated his messages
