behind her, and who switched off his radio each time he relayed the instructions to his pilot, as if they didn't want anyone else to hear the backchat of the flight deck. Meant you couldn't evaluate her state of mind, didn't know what her condition was.
'Trim's right. Height right. Speed right,'
'Roger.'
'No problems, take it steady.*
'Roger.'
Don't give anything away, the buggers.
The shape of the plane eclipsed the lights at the far end of the runway, and in the tower they heard the roar of the reverse thrust being applied: that meant she was down, the big bird had made her landfall. The tower's rotating searchlight caught the Ilyushin halfway down the runway, flooding the white and red and silver of the fuselage as it began to slow for the taxi-ing run, and in a moment as the beam moved on the plane was lost, and there was only the noise and to the front the lights by which the men in the control tower could follow its progress.
All eyes fixed on the plane.
Like men who've seen a topless swimmer for the first time, and stare on unashamed – voyeurs, that's what we are, thought the controller. Fascinated by it, and it looks no different from any other plane, not from the scores he talked down each week. But they stared at it, as if hoping by their very persistence to see men with guns, or the passengers, unwilling to accept the shroud of night and that the Ilyushin was still a full six hundred yards away. They'd plotted on the airfield map where they wanted him to direct the aircraft to take its stand; the position had been carefully worked at, not for this flight, but years back when the hi-jack plan for Stansted had first been rehearsed.
'Turn her through 180, and back the way you came. Two hundred yards up on the starboard side you'll see a 'Follow Me' van, with yellow lights. He'll take you to the stand. And well done to the pilot officer. Pass that to her, please, from all of us in here.'
'Roger.'
The controller saw the plane turn in the distance and begin a sedate progress back up the runway towards where the truck with the flashing amber lights waited. The searchlight on its pass picked out the two Saracens that crawled in pursuit – invisible to anyone on board.
'I'll stay with them till they douse the engines, then it's your problem, gentlemen.' Half a minute more, and wringing in sweat and knowing he'd slipped half the procedure rules but feeling for once in his life he'd achieved something, the controller eased out of his chair.
The Assistant Commissioner of Police for the county had taken his place beside him, looking warily at the equipment. Too bloody right, he thought, now it's our problem. Till the heavies get down from London.
Three green and white petrol tankers parked close to each other and forming a half-moon barricade. A little to the right of them a squat single-level building. Close to here that the Ilyushin should taxi and come to rest. Simple, logical, as all military plans should be, cover for the troops close to the aircraft, offering no risk of detection. Ten of the SAS team here, with their control radio set, their chests heaving slightly from the exertion of running to their hide with their equipment as the plane was readying for its approach. A hundred yards from it, perhaps less, certainly no more. They wore no badges of rank, were dressed in dark blue, boiler-suit overalls and had covered their faces with the newly-developed lotion that turned the brightness of their skin into an indistinct mess. Stirlings, rifles, machine-guns, an anti-tank rocket launcher, a crate each of the incapacitating CS gas canisters and smoke grenades. Via his elaborate radio net Major George Davies, 22nd Regiment of the Special Air Service, learned that the first stage of the planning blueprint had worked as had been hoped. But he was not a man who suffered from self-delusion, and he could recognize that this was a small bonus, trivial. Out beyond them, quiet, hidden and silent, lay the cordon of armoured cars and the prone and crouching soldiers of the Fusiliers.
The passengers' reaction to the successful touchdown was a great and spontaneous burst of applause. Shouts in Russian and Italian, and one in the English language, and all carrying the same message of admiration for Anna Tashova, a desperate gratitude for her skill and stamina.
As the plane slowed some gave way to tears, noisily, silently, publicly and behind clenched fingers. Others hugged those who sat next to them, total strangers embracing and pressing their cheeks together, and there were smiles on the faces of the children who took their cue from their elders and realized that this was a moment of celebration. The experts who have studied the subject of hi-jacking, and who sit in the offices of the Secret Services or Defence Ministries of those countries that regard the problem with care, would have said that this was a totally predictable emotion for the passengers to be showing. They would point out that the morale of men and women and children who have travelled for many hours at gunpoint and at risk is a very fickle matter, that they are constantly seeking for the sign that their ordeal is over. On Aeroflot 927 there was a general feeling that their troubles were now gone. They had forgotten, because they wished to forget, the words spoken by Isaac in the passenger aisle a bare hour earlier.
Silly, helpless, laughing tears on the face of Luigi Fran- coni, something they would never have believed in his office in Via Botteghe Oscure; not little Luigi, not the silent one. He found he could barely talk, not with coherence, and felt the muscles of his stomach slacken, his legs lapping hopelessly together. The arm of his friend round him, the comfort of Aldo Genti, who supervised in party headquarters the world of economic affairs, and who was a man who chose not to show his emotion.
' I did not believe it possible.'
' It is not finished yet, Luigi.'
' It cannot be worse than it has been. They will see reason now. The worst must be over.'
Further back towards the rear Edward R. Jones Jr swivelled his backside in the confines of his seat once more to face Rebecca.
'What now, Miss? Where do we go from here?'
'We refuel. Then we go to Israel.'
It was an involuntary reply, and she knew that she was not supposed to talk, and hated herself for the weakness and loathing the moment because there was no one with whom she could share the joy of the landing that was all around her. An outcast, her link with the general pleasure severed.
'Might not be easy, Miss. Like I said earlier.'
She bit at her tongue, stifling the desire to argue. Who was he to tell her what would happen?
Sneering at her, contemptuous of her.
'What happens if they don't give you the fuel? What happens then?'
She did not reply, only stared back at him, trying to outlast his clear and unwavering gaze till she accepted defeat and focused again down the line of the cabin, unable to look back at where he sat. She heard him say to his wife, his voice loud and unrepentant, 'They haven't an idea in hell, these kids. It's what makes them so damned dangerous. If they were a bit more pragmatic about it all you could assess what they were going to do. But they're out of this world, don't know what it's about, and Christ only knows what they'll do when the truth sinks in.'
The art teacher leaned over from his window seat towards the headmaster, sandwiching the boy who sat between them. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him, first time for a life-span and his face was haggard with the strain of the silence, lines at his eyes, age at his mouth.
'Headmaster, we will support you. We believe in what you did. It was right what you attempted.' What they would all say. But who had joined him when he needed their strength, who had come to him with anything more than a medley of desultory kicks at the little bitch? Held their ground, hadn't they? Waiting to see the outcome, fearful of committing themselves till they knew who would win, who would stand condemned.
Forward in the cockpit Anna Tashova sat immobilized in her flying harness, head flopped on to her chest, eyes closed as if she were asleep. A very great tiredness she felt, and a desire only to immure herself behind any barricade that would protect her from the talk of the two men who had dictated her route and from the eyes and fingers of the dials and switches that peered back at her from the control panels. For her too the flight had seemed an infinite nightmare of darkened, cloying turnings chased and harried by endless closing pursuit with the only sedative to block out the images found in the mechanics of the aircraft, the occupation of controlling the insensate instruments. Like the American passenger whose existence she did not know of, she too wondered what would happen next. But unlike him, now that she had shut down the four Ivchenko engines, she cared not a damn.
The navigator – she had been briefly introduced to him before take-off by the captain because they had not
