who would not permit prayers to be said by the ditch where the Jews had fallen, that had become a tip for rubbish. Nor was it they who sent the Jews to the camps, arrested those who sought passage to Israel. They had no guilt, yet one had died and it had been intended another should have fallen in his place.
If that was the cost of avenging Babi Yar and all that it had accumulated in shame, then the price was too high, that was the feeling of David as he stood far from the others at the rear of the cabin aisle. How to surrender? How to conclude his part without destroying what Isaac sought, without betraying his friends? He had thought long and hard behind the unmoving eyes, struggling with his tiredness till the solution came reluctantly upon him. A brutal, desperate solution that brought a chill over his body. And then the decision was made and there followed a calm and a clarity of thought that had been denied him for many hours.
Often the American had looked at him, peering and twisting round in his seat, inviting conversation, still crowned with the knotted handkerchief that he wore across his scalp. While David had wrestled with his problem the man had kept his silence, bided his time. Now Edward R. Jones Jr recognized the lightness in the face, appreciated that he could speak.
'How long do you go on like this? You shoot one, you lose one, but the British aren't talking, they aren't moving, not an inch.' The same nagging, grating voice, primed with aggression. David understood not a word, knew only that behind the deference to the gun and his youth the older man sneered at him. He shrugged his shoulders, and looked on down the aisle.
' I said, how much longer do we have to sit on our backsides here, waiting for you to call it quits?' David turned with the tolerance of one who is irritated by a wasp but cannot gather the energy to swat it, a half smile on his mouth.
'Don't you speak English? Don't you understand me? Was it only the girl that went to school?'
David no longer cared to listen, shut himself apart again, sensing the subsidence of the American in the face of his inability to communicate. Heard him mutter to his wife with her loud clothes and rinsed hair and hands that sought to silence her man, prevent provocation. What did that fool know of Babi Yar, or the labour camps? What did he know of militia headquarters, of the interrogations, of the humiliations?
His eyes roved over the heads of the passengers. Through the hours he had come to recognize some, to know which were eager for his approval and would cringe for him, which tried to hide their pent-up hatred. He had begun to acknowledge them as individuals, had carved faces and personalities from the initial mass that they had taken on the journey. The children were still quiet, he could not say how or why. The old man with the farm boots bristled with independence as best he could from the confines of his seat belt. The pilot, Tashova, with her neat and close-cut hair, who held herself above them, superior to their struggle. The navigator, cautiously interested in what happened close to him, but never speaking. The Italians who had screamed, some of whom still cried and held each other's arms. The woman halfway forward, in the widow's clothes, with the baby on her knee and a pitch of smell around her and the reddened weather-stained face of the country and who asked each time he passed for milk for the child. The man beside her, who seemed a stranger, and whispered that she should not speak lest she draw attention to herself.
Those who were frightened, those who were bold, those who were indifferent, those who rested on their nerves and those whose eyes darted to accumulate each nuance of mood from their captors. He had begun to know them all. But the familiarity had won him no friendship. No warmth, no love, no affection, only the loathing of those who watched him now.
Abruptly David started to move the length of the aisle. His hands had tightened on the gun barrel, fingers entwined around the trigger guard. In front of him, their faces masked in shadow, were Isaac and Rebecca. Without a victory, he thought, not even there where it had lain waiting.
Should have won her by conquest, should have taken her, hours, weeks, months ago. Isaac had struck her, out there in the full gaze of the passengers, and now she fawned at him and played to him, and was close so that their bodies touched and their voices would be soft with the intimacy of equal conversation. Perhaps that was the defeat that hurt him above all. One could be proud and surrender to an army, capitulate to a government, but when defeat came from the hands of your friend, when the prize at stake was not great but the way between the thighs of a girl, then there was the capacity for wounding. He had hit her and she had come back to him; the bitch that snivels at the ankle when it has been whipped. And Isaac no better, on no higher a pedestal. He had been betrayed by her, yet now he nestled his shoulder close and protectively by hers. But irrelevant now, decision taken. Just a child she had seemed to him, a follower, who was not worth the attention of affection or love, and now that she was taken by his friend regret dominated him, and he fought to hold back the tears that welled in his eyes.
As he passed the woman with the baby arrested his arm.
'Sir, there can be milk for the baby. That cannot hurt you.'
He saw the pleading, and the screwed, torn face of the infant, and the nervousness of the man who counselled quiet.
' I don't know,' he said hollowly.
'But you are the leader,' she persisted. 'If you tell the others to allow it then they will not prevent it. Milk can be sent to the plane.'
' It is not easy…*
' It is just for a child. Many hours it has not fed. A child can do you no harm.'
Angrily David wrenched himself clear from the clinging hand and continued down the aisle.
If he had taken the girl then it would not have been as it was now. Could have been in the hut, on the dry and dusty planking, or on the sacking of the window cover if they had first shaken the spiders and cobwebs loose, or in the forest among the leaves and watched by the birds. He looked at her closely, eating into her clothes, his thoughts drifting to the whiteness of her skin, the softness that would be her breasts, the firmness of the hips on which he would have spent himself. Why had it not happened? Why had there never been the moment? And when he had gone would either understand that it was because he loved them, both of them as his sister and brother?
Isaac and Rebecca had ceased to talk and watched curiously as he came awkwardly towards them, sensing in their separate ways that the control he so obviously sought to maintain was a wasted, puny thing.
There were many contrasts between the two men who walked together across the car park that had been designated for operational traffic only.
Both were trained and expert Counter Insurgency Operators -CIOs in the restricted training manuals – but the methods they had learned to use and that suited their differing temperaments were hugely varied. Charlie Webster, 49, married, two kids, hard-put to meet the bills, keep the garden trim, done it all and seen it all, and opted out, tried to close the file. Arie Benitz, 32, single, devoid of ties and personal relations, a room at the barracks, the seven-days-a-week student, top of the tree and looking for a higher summit. Charlie who had survived to grow old and paunchy through cunning and stealth and the ability to merge into backgrounds. Benitz, the direct, hedonist fighter, faster and dirtier than those they pitted him again. Charlie, who saw all points of argument from whatever side of the spectrum. Benitz under no such disadvantage, his world neatly divided into compartments of right and wrong. Charlie, with the flesh to spare under his chin and the haunted flickering eyes of a man who has been hunted and harried without the strength of military unit comradeship to turn to. Benitz, muscled, vibrant, his strength undisguised by the hanging, ill-fitting clothes the Royal Air Force had dressed him in, having to shorten his stride to keep pace with the other.
Charlie had never been part of a spearhead attack team. Benitz had never taken the role of the deep-sleeper infiltration agent. Out of the very diversity the men found a respect for each other.
Acting without an order, was Charlie, but then there were many precedents in his career for that, and he didn't give a damn for the inquests his initiative might rain on him. He had made his decision that Benitz alone could help him avoid the mayhem that he believed was the only possible result for a storm assault by the SAS on the Ilyushin. In his conceit-and Charlie was not short of that as befitted a man who had spent an operational life outside the barrack's walls – he had told himself that he alone of the crisis committee, Charlie Webster, understood the capabilities and state of mind of the three young people, and the heart of ft was his conviction that Isaac, the little bastard, would stand and shoot it out, and be prepared to die. Across the car park he saw it all – the crossfire, the smoke, the screaming, the children rising from their seats to escape the blasting of the automatics, the bodies cut and ripped by the tempered steel of the shells, and when it was over, just the blood and the moaning, the shock and the pain. Children like his, like the ones in his road, like the ones at the bus stop in the morning, the ones who chased a football across the street. And all because they'd lost their cool up in the control tower clouds, just like
