Bolt Action (14 page)

Threshold of Runway 12

Benazir Bhutto International Airport

Islamabad, Pakistan

On board PK412 to Manchester, England, and thence to JFK, New York

0219 Pakistan time – Monday; 2119 UK time – Sunday evening

T
he particular kind of mosquito that General Ali Mahmood Khan had in mind when he conceived Operation Macchar is an awesome sight. Especially at dead of night. A wingspan of more than two hundred feet, a tail reaching sixty feet into the air, and two-thirds of the length of a football pitch. For the company building the plane, it was a huge leap into the twenty-first century. The first time Boeing had produced a fully glass cockpit: the contractors had to build aviation’s largest ever central computer to manage the fly-by-wire system that controls the jetliner. Five hundred software developers wrote more than 600,000 new lines of code to handle the flight and navigation functions. One such behemoth now stands with its two massive General Electric turbofan engines idling, on the threshold of Runway 12. Waiting for final take-off clearance from Islamabad tower.

Call sign Victor Sierra,
City of Risalpur
is the last of the nine Boeing 777s purchased by Pakistan International Airways in what was the country’s largest ever capital goods order.

In command of tonight’s 412 flight to Manchester is Captain Saaed Salahuddin, known to one and all as Harry, a nickname
bestowed in the early 1980s by the grizzled United Airlines instructor who trained him up as a Boeing 747 first officer.

The old, seat-of-the-pants instructor was dazzled by Salahuddin’s ability to escape all manner of simulated emergencies, multiple-engine failures and thirty-knot crosswinds. ‘Salahuddin, you’re no ordinary pilot, more like a goddamn Harry Houdini.’ Later, while demolishing an excellent bottle of twelve-year-old single malt whisky, they agreed Saaed
Salahouddini
didn’t quite work, but
Harry
Salahuddin . . . that sounded right.

With his van Dyke beard, waxed moustache and slightly faded movie-star looks, Salahuddin has the absolute authority of a man with more hours’ flying time (21,000 hours and rising) than anyone else in the airline. But no additional airline baubles hang around his neck: no Chief Pilot Technical, no Chief Pilot Fleet 1 (Boeing 777s). Not even Chief Pilot Lahore Base (where Salahuddin lives). No. His reputation as an ornery, argumentative and uncompromising stickler has put him in the wilderness of airline politics.

That’s OK with him. It gives him a certain freedom. Like the time he wrote an open letter to the Civil Aviation Authority, copied to his employers and all his fellow captains. Beware: the centrelines of a freshly painted taxiway leading in and out of a maintenance hangar at Karachi have been incorrectly measured. Even though taxiways and aprons weren’t the airline’s responsibility, he knew if he didn’t warn nobody else would. So he paced it himself with a measuring wheel. Three times. He sketched out the problem and warned that the dimensions guaranteed an on-ground collision sometime in the future. There was simply not enough separation.

Harry on his hobby horse again
, his brother pilots had no doubt mocked,
Captain Doom
. . . but sure enough it happened – a wingtip from one 777 ripping off the tail cone of another, early one morning when both were being tugged into position.

Salahuddin went on to ruin a perfectly good cocktail party by raising his voice to, . . .
That was your people’s responsibility,
and so this is your fault
. . . and finger-poking at some of the country’s most senior CAA board members. His lack of deference was striking:
You are all too interested in politics to do your jobs properly
.

When he spoke to the clutch of TV reporters who had staked out the family farm after his letter came to light, Salahuddin was slightly more diplomatic (on instruction from a furious wife). The incident would have been comical, a Mr Bean sketch perhaps, he said, except that $300 million of inventory almost got destroyed.

Salahuddin keys the radio, irritation in his voice. ‘Islamabad Tower. This is Pakistan 412. On threshold, Runway 12 . . . awaiting your instructions.’

After a lengthy delay a thin voice stutters out a reply, embarrassed, as if this is the first time he’s ever spoken into a microphone
.
‘
Four one two. Please hold . . . traffic in vicinity.
’ Salahuddin frowns, a pair of half-glasses balanced on the end of his nose. The pilot’s eyes sweep left and right. Nothing. Moreover, he knows from checking the approach frequencies nobody is inbound.

He turns to his first officer, Mirza, a painfully anxious and washed-out-looking man with bony knees that almost touch the glass screens of the cockpit instrumentation. ‘Must be a lady working in the tower tonight. All the randy old goats off preening themselves in the washroom.’

First Officer Mirza looks blankly at his captain. Understanding the words but not the joke. Somewhere deep inside Salahuddin his soul weeps a little, for the blandness of these young pilots, for their lack of vitality. Mirza’s ‘position and hold’ approach to the threshold of the runway had been . . . nervy.

What worries him is that this new generation of pilots had never actually wrestled with a stick or control column. Or, as he had done on too many occasions, coaxed the engines of an overloaded craft, fluttering her off the runway at Chitral high in the Kush and nursing her home, with the mountains soaring above on either side and the wind clawing from four different directions.

His father had taught him to watch both the trees, the way they move, folding and bending to the pressure of the wind, and the birds, how their feathers splay open on landing like fingers reaching for safety. Learn about flying from those that actually fly, he would always say. Even a kite, playing the currents, taught you more about bare-bones airmanship than some of these FOs would know, spending all their downtime in darkened rooms playing the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator package.

His wife, having moved to Dubai more than five years ago to be with their son and grandchildren, pecked at him consistently about flying for Emirates, or Etihad or what was left of Gulf Air.

‘Why do you stay, Harry?’ would be her constant refrain as she knitted away, and he detailed his battles within the company when they were together. ‘It’s not as if they even like you.’

True enough, but how could he explain what keeps him in Pakistan?

Firstly, there is the job. When Pakistan was created in 1947 it was the national flag carrier that kept the country whole, shuttling back and forth between east and west Pakistan and servicing the remotest, most dangerous of airstrips – creating a visible, secure bond between a fledgling government and her disparate peoples. That strong sense of nation-building, that the airline’s destiny was wrapped up in his country’s, would never leave him. I am working for the national flag-carrier, he would tell his wife,
I carry the flag
, and she would cluck noisily at her teeth.

It worked both ways, of course. Salahuddin’s employer was only as competent as the government, more specifically the management, that it put in place. So as the country lurched into its first bout of madness under General Zia, slowly at first, then at a gathering pace over the years that followed, the airline found itself towed backwards by its political masters and the turbulence of poor decision-making that they churned up. Many did walk away, took jobs in the Gulf or with the low-cost start-up airlines. But, to Salahuddin, that was not what you did when your country was in crisis. You stayed. You gave your all. And when you saw
something you didn’t like, a compromise, a fudge, you raised your voice. Loud, and louder still, and hoped somebody listened.

Perhaps also, he stayed in Pakistan for selfish reasons too. Because it is only somewhere like Pakistan that a pilot can indulge himself in something truly wickedly mischievous. The sort of real flying that first world airline pilots dream of, as they gaze glass-eyed at the computers flying them hither and thither. Sneaking to the Walton airfield in Lahore, being paid to fly the club’s Cherokee or Cessna 152 around the city. Doors taken off. Wind whistling through the cabin. No ashen-faced first officers, no paperwork. Breathing freely at last as he bombs the citizens from five hundred feet with leaflets about some new Coke promotion, or a must-see movie. Or angling the plane on its side so he can tip sacks and sacks of flower petals, blessing the opening of a factory, or the nuptials of a newlywed couple.

That is freedom. And only in Pakistan . . . a crazy-eccentric sort of place, where you still have the freedom to do crazy-eccentric things.

First Officer Mirza clears his throat. A gentle reminder. Mirza is handling the take-off, so Salahuddin works the radio. ‘Islamabad Tower. This is
still
Pakistan 412.
Still
holding on threshold, Runway 12 . . .’

And the reply comes back quickly, a little too strong, as if to say,
Why the delay, Salahuddin?

‘
Pakistan 412. Permission to take off. Runway 12. Surface wind 110 degrees. Four knots . . .
’ A different voice from earlier.

Salahuddin thinks about a smart reply,
Sorry to keep you from your beauty sleep
, but decides against it. His professional instincts tell him it’s not worth the distraction. Instead he confirms the controller’s information: ‘Wind four knots, at 110. Four one two.’

He looks over his half-glasses, gives a little flick of the head. ‘Pre-take-off checklist . . .’ And Mirza, in command, calls off the few remaining items on the console between them.

‘Parking brake . . .’

‘SET,’ replies Salahuddin.

‘Throttle . . .’

‘IDLE.’

‘Flap position lever . . .’

‘FLAPS FIVE DEGREES.’

‘Spoilers . . .’

‘RETRACTED.’

Another twenty seconds and the list is completed. Salahuddin, leaning on his armrest, says in his most encouraging voice, ‘First Officer Mirza, take us over the oceans and far away.’

And within a handful of seconds the Boeing 777 is bounding down Islamabad’s long east–west asphalt runway. Then rotation, and a slow right-handed turn through almost 180 degrees until the plane levels, still climbing, on a westward track. Towards Europe. Crossing into Afghanistan just north of Peshawar to pick up the international air corridor that will take them all the way through to Manchester in the United Kingdom. Then onwards to New York.

Three hundred and nineteen souls on board.

Just an average, everyday flight travelling through the average, everyday night.

By the time PK412 takes off, in both Britain and the United States more than sixty separate data fields in each individual’s Passenger Name Record or PNR had already been crunched by high-powered computer programs looking for red flags, payment in cash, one-way tickets, names on a particular watch-list. Tonight’s flight offers nothing that shouts,
Alarm
: a large delegation from Gujranwala (City of Wrestlers) – twenty-nine athletes and another thirty close family members in support, travelling to the east coast of the United States for various collegiate wrestling competitions. All okayed by the US embassy in Islamabad, which always has an eye to winning hearts and minds in Pakistan.

Forty-four moderate Islamic scholars, women lawyers and government officials travelling together to attend a conference on sexual politics and Islamic ideology in Denver. Excellent. To be commended. And the US consular section almost couldn’t issue the visas fast enough.

But the largest contingent on the flight, almost fifty, are former members of the Peace Corps who had served in Pakistan during the 1960s, returning home after spending more than a fortnight touring the various places they’d served over forty years before. People who gave some of the best years of their lives to what was then a young country, to improving public and rural health, and starting off farming schemes in faraway places like Sialkot and Dera Ismail Khan.

For General Ali Mahmood Khan and his Operation Macchar to have such a cross-section of good, decent folk on board, especially those Peace Corps volunteers – all grey-hairs, in their sixties and seventies, pillars of their communities in Tiny Town, Idaho or Missouri – is an astonishing bonus.

More than he could possibly have hoped for . . .

As the mosquito that gave its name to Operation Macchar starts its long journey from Pakistan, droning onwards into the cloudless night sky, Bill Lamayette trudges back to the madrasa. His mouth parched, his eyes becoming heavy with sleep, operating only on some kind of primitive autopilot. The one thing in his mind, helping him slap one foot down in front of another, the banging rhythms of Twisted Sister. Mumbling. How he wasn’t going to take it. No, dammit, I’m just not going to take it.

High above Lamayette, at almost thirty thousand feet now and twinkling with strobe and anti-collision lights, Captain Salahuddin and First Officer Mirza note from their glass-cockpit navigation display that they are directly abeam of Peshawar. Salahuddin slips into a little routine about how it was from Peshawar airport that the American Gary Powers departed in 1960 in his doomed U2 spy plane . . . how Powers ended his days as a helicopter traffic reporter in California, how he died when his Jet Ranger ran out of fuel. ‘Of all the mistakes for this great pilot to make . . .’

. . . and in a factory space just north of Peshawar airport,
faithful Jahanghir hops down from the tow truck. Smiles up at the jingly-jangly Bedford truck and the lack of any sign of his boss, Mr Bill.

He decides it would be a good thing to let Mr Bill and the nice lady with the red hair, the flashing green eyes and very becoming hips spend as much time together as they need.

He mimes to his four cousins that they should exit quietly. Leave the garage door ajar . . . have some food, relax, and wait for Mr Bill to unwind himself from the arms of a giving woman.

Very good.