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 Defence 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 staring 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.

'I need you up front,' he said.

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 Czechoslovakian 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 sub-machine-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.