Blood Rules (10 page)

The first class passengers were sent back to the economy cabin, along with the cabin crew. One gunman kept business class covered; two others stood by the toilets at the back of the plane, from where they could survey the whole of the economy cabin. Fouad was dealing with the four Israelis who had identified themselves by standing up in an attempt to frustrate the hijack. He found no firearms, just a selection of oddities: aerosols that didn’t seem to work, penknives with strangely tinted blades, cigarette lighters that refused to open. All these he pocketed, before forcing the Israelis to lie on the floor, hands clasped to their necks, until Selim came back down the aisle to help bind them fast.

All except Dannie Neeman, in seat 24H. Dannie had not risen with his colleagues; he had obeyed orders and remained seated, for it had always been Raful’s intention to keep him in reserve. Now he sat staring stonily to the front, wondering if his false Kuwaiti passport would stand up, mentally practicing his Arabic, and praying with all the considerable passion at his command that Raful might yet be alive.

Robbie, too, wished that Sharett would live.

The hijackers had overpowered the Israeli and dumped him in the vacant seat next to the boy’s, where he lay like a shapeless sack of flour and of the same color. Blood ran down his cheeks, enhancing their pallor. Robbie wanted somebody to talk to, wanted comfort from his father, but all he had was this unconscious stranger whose blood-soaked head lolled on his chest with the pathetic helplessness of a broken doll’s.

Robbie’s bag lay on the floor between his feet. He waited until the hijacker guarding their cabin was looking the other way, then rummaged around inside it until he found notepaper and a pen.

Dear Celestine,
he wrote.
We’re not going to make it. Maybe someone will find this.
He swallowed. He could not think what to write. All he knew was that he should leave some testament to what was happening, draw a line under his short life. His pen hovered over the paper.
I
know I’m going to die.

He was not alone: other passengers begged total strangers in nearby seats to pass on last words to loved ones, if they succeeded in getting out. As the minutes ticked away into eternity, the people on that plane discovered things they had not previously known about themselves. They learned how extreme fear sends adrenaline coursing through the system in overdrive, producing unendurable back pain. Their bladders distended to limits they’d never been meant to bear. Cold descended over them like an invisible blanket of snow, chilling their feet to the point where they could no longer feel them. Prayers, long forgotten, elbowed their way back into minds suddenly grown receptive. God revealed himself to many, collecting promises of better conduct hereafter, if only they could be given another chance. But once the initial shock diminished, for the most part the passengers simply focused on how best to ingratiate themselves with the ones who mattered.

The light had started to go by the time NQ 033 arrived over South Yemen. Morgan was surprised that no fighters had come to intercept him.

“What do I do if I’m attacked?” he asked.

“You will not be attacked.”

He believed her. He could smell sweat and gun oil, but these scents did not originate with the woman. She smelled as she looked: like something out of the Arabian Nights. She had planned this down to the last detail, and if she did not fear aerial attack then neither did he.

He had plenty of other things to worry about.

“There?”

Morgan looked down through the windshield and his voice was hushed. Ross whistled softly through his teeth.

“There,” the woman confirmed. “You can have contact with my men on the ground, if you wish. The frequency is eighty-nine decimal two. They will give you details of wind and visibility.” From his seat on the port side, Morgan saw an indigo sea lying almost dull in the late afternoon sunlight. Beyond that, a coast of white sand, with mountainous black cliffs to the west. He was steering magnetic north; far ahead the red Jabal Al Fatk stretched across his flight path like a ridged palate. The land below was flat, utterly featureless. What looked like a vast forked estuary narrowed into deep wadis at the foot of the mountain range, and by craning his neck he could see the small conurbation of Al Ghaydah. According to his charts, there was a minor airfield there, with a soft landing surface only, but nothing rose up out of the mauve twilight to intercept him, and his radio remained silent. Since communicating his new circumstances and course to Dubai ATC, no one had tried to contact him at all.

The absence of military interference both reassured and worried him. He knew of times when fighters had flown slowly in front of commercial aircraft under hijack, forcing them to lose speed and consequently height. Sometimes the fighter pilot got it wrong, causing the civilian plane to crash. But why was nobody apparently interested in their fate?

As if reading his thoughts, Leila said, “South Yemen is a communist country, one of the poorest in the world. You are entering its easternmost province, the Sixth Governorate, Al Mahra. There are almost no roads, the scattered tribes cannot speak Arabic, the government itself does not claim to control its hinterland. It is desolate beyond belief, lonely beyond description; there is nowhere like it in this quadrant of the globe, which is why I chose it.”

“Any fire-fighting equipment on the ground?”

“None.”

Morgan gripped the yoke harder. “I’ll need a fly-past at a thousand feet,” he said at last. “And I’ll need to ditch fuel. Right down to the stack pipes.”

“As you wish. You are as aware as I am that without fuel the aircraft’s air-conditioning units will rapidly fail. The weather is hot and humid; I cannot tell you when your ordeal will end.”

“I can’t risk landing with all this fuel aboard.”

“It is your choice. If you jettison down to the stack pipes, you will still be left with ten or eleven tons. Call the ground now, please.”

She had not used the word “please” before. Morgan chalked that up as a minor victory. He did not register that it was merely the first of her steps along the path toward subverting him.

Ross made contact on the frequency she had given him, recording visibility, wind speed, and direction. The man on the ground spoke clear English, though it plainly was not his first language.

“What is your QNH?” Ross asked. The voice answered with sea-level air pressure, and the copilot automatically reset his altimeter without noticing that whoever was on the ground must have done this before. But Morgan understood, and once again he experienced the by now familiar crawling sensation along the nape of his neck. When the voice added a vector for final approach, the impression hardened. These people were technically perfect.

He circled counterclockwise, because that way the port wing tilted down and he had a better view of the ground, reducing height all the while. The surface looked flat as an ice rink. At three thousand feet, he couldn’t see the gravel, but his mind had insidiously come to accept whatever the woman told him, and he knew the gravel was there.

He called for the log, not content to rely on memory. His plane was hardly new, but it had only flown thirteen hours since its last B check, when every system would have been examined and either passed or replaced. Short of a full month-long overhaul, it was the toughest inspection an aircraft could undergo. In theory she was as capable as the day she received her airworthiness certificate. And by God, thought Morgan, she’d better be.

He put away the log and looked down. Somebody had lit a fire. No, more than one … four pillars of dense black smoke billowed into the air, seemed to hover, then began slowly to drift from left to right, toward the sea. They pinpointed the four corners of an elongated rectangle. The runway.

Morgan glanced at Ross. “What do you think?”

Ross compressed his lips and drummed twice on the side of the yoke. Morgan understood. His second officer was saying, If it’s flat enough, and broad daylight, you can put her down anywhere. Which was true, as far as it went.

Morgan glanced up at Leila. “I’m going to fly due east, out to sea, very low. If it’s
yes,
I’ll come around and start my approach. If
no …”

“It will
be yes.”

“And if I judge we can’t make it, what then?”

Leila replied with a shrug, “Then we shall go our separate ways, we to heaven and you to hell.”

Morgan looked into the glossy darkness of her eyes, saw the charcoal glowing there, and told himself, She means it. He took the TriStar down to a thousand feet and let Ross fly her while he stood to peer through the left-hand windshield panel. Smoke clouded his vision for a second; then they were through and climbing again to a safe height.

Ross looked at him questioningly. Morgan felt the wetness on his back and tried to ignore it, tried to clear his mind. “All right,” he said at last. “It’s a go.”

Leila did not relax by so much as one iota. Indeed, her concentration seemed to wind itself up in tune with Captain Morgan’s, while he dictated flap settings, altitudes, vectors. All the while the two pilots were conscious of her listening, monitoring their discussion more closely than any of the company’s test captains, astute to detect the first hint of trickery.

“I will do the landing,” Morgan announced. “No one else is to have any responsibility at all. Is that understood?”

Ross said yes.

“Peter?”

A momentary hesitation; then the flight engineer nodded.

“All right. I have the yoke. Speed brakes … three, two, one,
now.”

The plane shuddered and perceptibly slowed. They were coming around, into the wind, still far out over the Arabian Sea, and the sun was in Morgan’s eyes. He nudged the nose down, keeping his speed constant, and began a standard series of landing checks, as if they were making a daylight approach to Heathrow: fuel reserve, altimeters, flaps.

Ross picked up his mood. His hands no longer grasped the control column as if it were the only thing between him and the abyss. This was his world, the one he knew best, the one he’d been trained for, and as long as he could take refuge inside it, working from second to second, he feared nothing and no one.

They calculated throttle settings in case they had to abort, although both of them knew they were only going to get one shot at this. Through the windshield they could see the four great bonfires gliding up toward them, inexorably as on the simulators, only this was real and the rock was real and if they misjudged the approach there would be no friendly voice over the intercom saying, “Ouch! Why not run it through again, Rog?”

“Speed: two hundred thirty knots.”

“Flaps eighteen.”

The flaps extended, the aircraft shuddered again and sank. The bonfires were billowing up now, in vast towers that seemed to fill their vision.

“Two twenty knots.”

“Gear down.”

A distant rumble. “Gear down and three green lights.” “Anti-skid five releases.”

Speed dropped dramatically. Morgan edged the plane onto its final approach path, boosting the throttles to overcome the danger of a stall on the turn.

“One ninety knots.”

“Flaps twenty.”

“One eighty … full flaps, forty-two.”

At five hundred feet, the runway was one and a half miles away. Just in time, Ross remembered to turn on the seat-belt sign, make a hurried announcement. In the passenger cabin, people braced themselves. They were noisier now. Many were crying or praying aloud. “Mary,” one man kept shouting. “Mary, Mary, Mary…. ”

The hijackers strapped themselves into rear-facing crew seats, keeping their weapons trained on the cabins.

Raful Sharett lay slumped in his seat. Leila had chopped him when the engine failed. Blood streaked his face; a strip of skin had been torn back from his skull, revealing white bone. With every jolt of the plane his body shook, a helpless doll. He moaned, licked his lips, opened his eyes. Where was he?

Robbie folded up his letter and stuffed it into the seat flap in front of him. He gripped his knees and tried hard not to think about what would happen next.
Dad,
said a small voice inside his head.
I
love you.
And then, he wasn’t sure why:
I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better son…. I’m so sorry, Dad … Mum.
At the word
Mum
a tear trickled down his cheek and he dashed it away, but he could not still that small voice, not even when it suddenly burst out,
Why, why, why did you have to go away?

In the cockpit Leila slid onto the observer’s seat and shouldered the belt.

“Four hundred feet,” Ross said. “A hundred to go … three hundred,
decision height!”

And Morgan answered him, as smoothly as if calling a bridge hand, “Continuing. Touchdown at one hundred and fifty knots.”

“That’s too high!” Ross’s voice came out almost in a scream.

“I’ll need the control on that surface. Now
be quiet and fly!

One hijacker had been left to cover the Club Class cabin. Raful’s eyes focused painfully on him, sitting upright and alert in the crew seat. Sometimes he looked down the port side of the plane, sometimes the starboard. Raful’s right hand strayed to his pocket, made contact with a hard object

Meanwhile, Morgan was planing between the first pair of bonfires and he was too high; Ross’s shout had thrown him,
damn,
nose down, left rudder, just a touch,
just a
touch

He throttled back.

The plane shuddered; Raful Sharett saw the hijacker’s watchful eyes squint in apprehension. Now or never. He leaned forward, bringing his head as close as he could to the seatback in front of him, and gagged loudly.

“You! Sit back, or I’ll shoot!”

Raful heard the click of a safety belt being undone, but the lethal cigarette lighter containing cyanide gas was no longer in his pocket; it lay deep in the elastic pouch sewn onto the forward seat. He slumped backward, exhausted but triumphant. The hijacker lowered himself into the crew seat, keeping his eyes fixed on Raful. By now the plane was quaking like an animal in its death throes.