Pioneer Assault.
They won't have come this far if they haven't taken some risks. You don't knock an aircraft off and get this far without chancing your arm a bit. I wouldn't fancy doing what they've done.'
Herbie, Armoured Corps Maintenance.
'Cyril's right, though. Whatever they've done up to now, they chickened this time. Should have come on in, like Cyril said. The Hun always buckles. Pressure him enough and he buckles.'
Dave, General Staff, Batman.
'What do you bloody know about it, Dave? You were so far back, they never even bothered to give you a rifle. Never even saw a bloody Hun with a gun in his hand, you didn't.' Harry, Airborne machine-gunner.
And they all laughed, and Dave looked pained, and they slapped his back. 'Time for another beer,' someone said.
Harry Smith had been a sergeant when they'd all been in uniform a lifetime ago. Para too, and they admired that. Gave him a sort of leadership over the rest, that and his Military Medal, and the fact that he now had a sweet shop in Kilburn and was 'self-employed'. 'I heard a bit of what the chappie said on the radio, picked up a bit of the language when I was here. They're Jewish boys up there. I don't know whether that makes it all different. But it's not for us to call them cowards. We had a bloody great back-up scene behind us. Stores, supplies and orders, some other bugger to tell us what to do. So what have they got? Sweet Fanny Adams, not much else. If they're Jewish they'll have thought it was all over by the time they reached here. Thought they were home and dry. Think of it as they'll be seeing it now, think of it and you'll know why that bird over there was crying.'
'They're still bloody terrorists, Sarge,' said Dave.
'If you say so,' said Harry Smith. He stared hard into the lowering light, searching through his spectacles for the aircraft. But the haze and mist of distance had wrapped the Kingfisher flight, lifting it beyond his reach.
Had David but known it, the West German 'Crisis Committee' had anticipated that an attempt might be made to land the plane in spite of the precautions taken. The petrol tankers and the armoured cars all had members of the green-uniformed Bundesgrenzshutz at their controls. If the word had come from the tower that the Aeroflot plane was on irreversible landing approach then the order would have been transmitted to the cabs of the vehicles that they should drive on to the grass verges of the runway and allow the aircraft to land without further hindrance. In the first-floor offices of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn there was much congratulation and back- slapping among the team of politicians and civil servants who had directed the operation as the news was brought to them that the plane was climbing, and had taken a flight plan that ran to the south of Hamburg and to the north of Bonn, Cologne and Dusseldorf. A bottle of Scotch was broached. It was the opinion of the aviation experts that the course was for Schipol, Amsterdam.
' I had not thought,' said the Minister, 'that we would accomplish the plan so easily.'
' It was a new tactic for these people. Their protests have been verbal before; they have not attempted anything of this intensity. But it is surprising, as you say, that they could be so easily deflected. I think we will find when the business is completed that they were very young.' It was the contribution of the senior police officer present who had been on the ground in the chaos of the Munich police ambush of Black September at Furstenfeldbruck airbase, who had laid out the bodies of nine Israeli athletes and coaches, and who never wanted to be part of a similar confrontation again. 'But because they are young, and because we have turned them, that does not mean that the problem for someone else is in any way diminished. What we have done is temporarily to depress them. My forecast is that this set-back will, in the long term, serve only to harden their resolve.'
The policeman spoke with distaste, unimpressed at the enthusiasm with which the unresolved problem had been shuffled elsewhere.
Parker Smith had left in a hurry, his departure preceded, by a confusion of ringing telephones, summoned messengers with paperwork and shouting through opened office doors. He had just time to push his head round Charlie's door. He was excited, and did not care who saw it. Call from the Big Boys, from Whitehall, beckoned to the presence, to attend the Emergency Group meeting. He might send for Charlie later, and would he have his files at hand, and be ready to bring them if it was required that he should come? Charlie noticed he hadn't cared to comb his hair, a mess without the ruler- straight parting, and that was unusual for him; meant the flap was building.
'Getting a bit nervy are they, Sir? Our masters?'
'Decidedly so, Charlie. You've seen the Russian note, and it's very tough. You've seen what the Hun's reaction is. Pass-the-parcel games, and it's with the Dutch next, and FO are trying to establish what position they will take. If they don't come down in Holland and they keep going we're next in line, and not much fuel to play with. If we send for you, look snappy.'
' I'm not a counter hi-jack expert, Sir. Home Office do that.. .' Caution from Charlie. Long time now since he'd been involved in anything fresher than stacking paper.
'Course you're not. But you're supposed to know these bastards, that is what we'll be requiring from you, every damned little thing about them. So don't shift off that telephone.'
Parker Smith was gone, not finding the time to close Charlie's door, lost in a welter of shouted farewells. And the word that the section was involved spread through the offices like a grass fire.
Huddles in the corridors, and voices raised in anticipation, and pleasure that the 'old man' had been sent for. Charlie went to his steel-grey cabinet, fished in his pocket for the keys, discarding those of his front door, his car, his office door, his garage. He unlocked the combination fastener and began to rifle through the buff-coloured folders. Kept a good system, did Charlie, something he'd learned in his old army days. Extracted seven-two of them marked with a red sticky-tape 'X' diagonally across, denoting the classification 'Secret', five with blue-tape crosses that were simply denoted as 'Restricted'.
Time for some fast reading, Charlie.
The helicopter that carried the Israeli Prime Minister had left the Golan Heights in a swirl of choking, rasping dirt, saturating all those who had gathered at the stone-cleared landing-pad to see him off.
His tour of forward positions on the Syrian front that overlooked the ruined and war-broken city of Kuneitra had been scheduled to last for three more hours, but the radio transmission from Jerusalem had caused it to be cut short. And there was enough for him to be concerned about without the burden of new fashioned crises; in his mind he was attempting to obliterate the problems of perpetual argument between Defence, who sought more planes and more missiles and more anti-tank weapons and more cement for fortifications, and on the other side Finance, who bleated at every Cabinet meeting at the cost of it all and the effect on civilian morale of the creeping taxation that was the corollary of sophisticated and modern fire-power. Shut it out, block it, as the helicopter staggered off the ground and hovered before seeking its route. The Prime Minister had been a military man before entering politics, and prided himself that he had spanned the gulf, that he understood both points of view, but that in itself made it no simpler for him. Three devaluations, and that inside the last nine months, and no change in the precariousness of the national budget, and still the army demanding more hardware and showing no interest in where the money should come from. The visit to the Golan and its strongpoints was long-planned and was supposed to have been a sweetener to his generals. He was to have walked around behind the sandbags and the barbed wire and laugh and joke with them in the slang they had used when they were together as lieutenants and captains, and look serious and understanding when that was required of him, and sympathize with their complaints and shortages, and make promises that would be vague and that would not sustain analysis, but that would mollify and placate.
And now the effect of the day was wasted.
The summons had come from his offices on the hill in Jerusalem that he should return forthwith, and there had been no time for explanations and excuses, just the opportunity to shake the hands of men who showed their disappointment, and who had the look in their eyes of soldiers who do not trust the commitment of their political leaders.
An hour and twenty minutes he sat in the helicopter. They'd brought an Alouette in from Rosh Pinah to ferry him back, a maintenance problem, fractured oil-feed pipe, denying him the use of the faster, more comfortable Sikorski that had made the morning journey from the capital. Room for only three passengers once the army fliers had taken their seats- ADC and a bodyguard. No one to talk to, and he'd left the majority of his party on the bare, stripped ground of the Heights, to follow on by car. There was a radio in the helicopter but that must be kept clear for operational messages, so that effectively he would be out of contact for the duration of the flight. Little enough information to consider at this stage. Russian aircraft hi-jacked, internal flight, on its way to the West, that the involvement was Jewish, that the Soviets would take a hard line. Not much to chew on in that.
