By the Rivers of Babylon (9 page)

The room became quiet in stages. Heads turned. They noticed the small man in the oversized white uniform, who wore bifocals so thick that his eyes looked like oysters.

Leiber put his back to the bar. “Good afternoon. I am Yaakov Leiber, Chief Steward on El Al Concorde 02.”

“I’m glad he’s not our pilot,” observed a man in the back. A few people laughed.

Leiber smiled. “Actually, I used to be a pilot, but once I forgot to bring a telephone book to sit on and I crashed into a hangar.”

There was laughter and even some applause.

Leiber stepped closer to the crowd. “I just want to acquaint you with some things.” He spoke about seat selection and the new boarding time for several minutes. “Are there any questions?”

The mission’s Orthodox Rabbi, Chaim Levin, stood up. “You understand, young man, that today is Friday—and you are confirming for me that we are going all the way to New York and will still land before the Sabbath begins. Is that correct?”

Leiber held back a smile. It was a peculiarity of El Al flights that there was hardly ever a rabbi on board, even during the week. Some rabbis wouldn’t fly on the national carrier because the El Al crews had all broken the Sabbath at one time or another. They flew on foreign carriers because it didn’t matter to them if those crews broke the Jewish Sabbath or their own Sabbath. The two rabbis on the peace mission, one Orthodox and one Conservative, had decided to make an exception and fly El Al for the appearance of national unity. “Yes, sir,” said Leiber. “Sundown in New York is at 6:08. But we’ll be going a little faster than the sun, so we’ll land at about two
P.M.
New York time.”

Rabbi Levin looked at Leiber for a long time.

“In other words, Rabbi, we’ll land one and a half hours before the time we started,” said Leiber. “You see—”

“All right, I understand. I’ve flown before, you know.” He regarded Leiber, the Sabbath-breaker, with a stare he usually reserved for pork-eating Jews. “If we land one second after sundown, you’ll hear from me.”

There were some laughs, and Leiber smiled, too. “Yes, sir.” He looked around. “The meal is pot roast and potato kugel. There will be several movies available if anyone is interested. My wife, Marcia, who is much prettier than I am, will be one of your stewardesses on 01.” Like many couples who flew often, it was the Leibers’ policy never to fly together. They had children. He hoped no one would infer anything from this arrangement. “Are there any questions? Then, thank you for flying El Al—although I don’t see how you could have done otherwise.” He held up both hands.
“Shalom.”

Captain David Becker completed his line check of Concorde 02. He stood in the shadow cast by the drooping nose cone. A squad of infantry stood around the aircraft and glanced at him from time to time. An El Al security man, Nathan Brin, approached. “How’s it going, Captain?”

“Good.”

“We’re satisfied. You?”

Becker looked at the plane and nodded.

“See you upstairs.” He walked off.

“Right.” Becker stared up at the craft. This white bird of peace looked like anything but a dove. It was a sea bird of some sort, Becker decided. A stork. A gull, maybe. It sat up high on long legs because of the high-pitch angles you had to use with a delta wing. If it weren’t for the long legs, it would drag its ass on the ground when it took off or landed. God made sea birds with long legs for that reason. The technicians at British Aircraft Corporation and Aérospatiale had come to the same design conclusion. So had the Russians when they built their supersonic airliner, the TU-144. Brilliant. It was good to see that God was right, thought Becker.

Then there was the nose cone. The beak. It stayed down during takeoffs and landings, like a bird’s, for better visibility. It was raised during flight for aerodynamic streamlining. The British, French, Russians, and God—not necessarily in that order—had independently found the same solutions for the
problems of flight. Aircraft had started off as rigid structures and their performance was, therefore, confined to rigid parameters. Birds were flexible. Man started making aircraft flexible with movable ailerons and rudders. Then came the retractable landing gear. Then the swing-wing jets. Now there were noses that dropped.

Becker looked down the length of the plane. It was not really a big aircraft. The fuselage was fifty-two meters long and the delta span was only twenty-seven meters. Gross weight with passengers and fuel was 181,000 kilograms, about half as heavy as a 747.

One of the last refuges of the old English system of weights and measures was to be found in the cockpit of an airplane. All the world’s pilots had been trained in both the English language and the English system of measurement. It was a world standard, and it was not easy or necessarily desirable to do away with it altogether. Most instruments were dual marked and pilots shifted easily from one system to the other in their conversations. Next to the Mach air speed indicator in the Concorde was the quaint knot indicator. To Becker, it was a fixed point in a rapidly changing world. He pictured an old square-rigger bravely trying to make five knots against a headwind.

Becker began a final walk-around. He stood under the portside delta and looked up. No, it wasn’t built to move a couple of hundred tourist-class passengers around. It was built to move seventy VIP types faster than sound to their peace missions, oil deals, and foreign lovers. An elitist aircraft. Maximum speed was Mach 2.2—about 2,300 kilometers per hour, depending on air temperature. The speed of a high-velocity rifle bullet. And at that speed, flying was an aeronautical limbo where many of the standard rules of flight were suddenly changed.

There were a lot of peculiar demands at supersonic speeds. There was the big drag factor at the speed of sound. The delta wings helped there, but deltas had poor handling characteristics. They yawed and rolled and the plane became difficult to fly. Delta wings had to approach at high angles of attack, and if you got on the back of a thrust curve, air speed management was very difficult.

If you lost an engine in a regular commercial jet, nobody got too upset. Lose one at supersonic, and you could easily lose
control of the aircraft. Then the plane would flip-flop and disintegrate.

The skin temperature could get up to 127 degrees Celsius at Mach 2. If you got above that, the plane wouldn’t immediately become unglued, but you would weaken the structure and you might pay for it on another flight.

At Mach 2.2, you have to think fast. If you wanted to level at 19,000 meters, for instance, you had to start doing it at 17,000. If you corrected too fast, you’d have the passengers hanging from the baggage racks.

Then there was the thing that had bothered Becker from the first day he had taken the Concorde up to 19,000 meters. It was the problem of sudden cabin decompression of the type that can happen if you are hit by a missile, or if there is a small explosion on board, or if somone shatters a window with a bullet. In a conventional commercial aircraft, flying at relatively low altitudes, about 9,000 meters, cabin decompression was not a critical problem. The crew and passengers put on overhead oxygen masks and breathed until the aircraft descended into thicker air. But at 19,000 meters, you needed a pressure suit to make breathing possible, even with an oxygen mask. Lacking pressure suits, you had only a few seconds of usable consciousness to get down to where you could breathe with a mask. There was no way to do that at 19,000 meters. You put the mask on, but you blacked out anyway. The on-board computer sensed the problem and brought the plane down nicely, but by the time you got down to where you could breathe with the mask, you woke up with brain damage.

Becker had a recurring nightmare: a brain-damaged crew coming out of their blackout—sucking on the oxygen masks, if they still had the wits to grasp that simple necessity—trying to figure out what all those funny lights and dials in front of them were, while their eyes rolled and saliva drooled from their mouths. And all the while, the computerized Concorde held steady, waiting for a human hand to guide it. Neanderthals in Apollo. And in the back, seventy idiot passengers, in different states of mental debility, making faces and grunting. In his nightmare, the Concorde always landed and there were people on the observation deck waving. Won’t they be surprised when their friends and lovers come down the stairway? Becker closed his eyes. He knew it wasn’t possible to bring it home from those altitudes after more than thirty seconds’ loss of oxygen. It was
only an irrational nightmare. Yet he kept feeding a simple command to the conditioned-response part of his brain:
If
nothing in the cockpit looks familiar anymore, touch nothing.
The fuel would eventually run out.

Becker wiped the sweat from his face and looked out across the field. Fifty meters away, Avidar was looking up at Concorde 01. He wondered if Avidar had nightmares like that. No, not Avidar.

Miriam Bernstein sat in the VIP lounge, drinking coffee with Abdel Jabari. Jabari saw the other Arab delegate, Ibrahim Ali Arif, come in, and he excused himself to speak with him.

Bernstein saw Jacob Hausner sitting alone at the bar. She stood up, hesitated, then walked toward him, but he didn’t turn. “Hello.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Oh. Hello.”

“Look, I’m sorry if I made some people uncomfortable before.”

He stirred his drink. “No problem.”

“Good.” She stood silent for a moment. “So. Are you coming with us?”

“Yes. I just heard from the PM. I’ll be on 02.”

She didn’t know why that should be good news, but she felt a sudden surge of something like well-being before she could sublimate it. “I’ll be on 02 also.”

There was silence.

She forced a smile and spoke again. “Do you want to change planes—or do you want me to?”

Why did he feel so strongly that the remark was made to provoke him? Hausner had a gut feeling that she was repressing some strong emotion and that it had to do with him. He looked at her. There was absolutely nothing in that face to reinforce his feeling, but it persisted. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

She looked into the mirror. Her eyes drifted between her own expression and Hausner’s as if to make sure no one’s mask had slipped. Her expression was all right, but she could see the tension in her body. She realized that she was almost standing on tiptoes. He always had that effect on her. She relaxed and smiled neutrally. “Nice of you to come. Can they spare you here?”

Hausner drained off his drink. “They had their choice of keeping me here for a crucifixion or letting me go and hoping I’d go down with the ship if something happened.”

She nodded. “So you chose to go down with the ship.”

“They chose. I think they’d like to see me go down and the ship stay up. But you can’t have it both ways. Buy you a drink?”

“I don’t drink, but—”

“Nobody in this goddamn country drinks. When I was in the RAF, nobody flew unless they were blind.” He pushed his glass toward the bartender. “Well, see you on board.”

She looked at him. “Right.” She turned and walked off.

Matti Yadin came up to the bar when he saw Miriam Bernstein move away. “That bitch giving you a hard time again, boss?”

Hausner thought a moment. “I’m not sure.”

Teddy Laskov walked into the VIP lounge, looking for Tom Richardson. He had some things to ask him. He was also supposed to give Richardson the alternate tactical frequency that he and Talman had just selected. He considered calling it into the American air attaché office, then thought better of it. For a reason that he couldn’t fully explain, even to himself, he decided to keep the information from Richardson. If the Americans really needed it when he got airborne, they could get it from Talman at The Citadel.

Laskov saw Hausner and Miriam speaking at the bar. He saw her turn and walk off. If he didn’t know that they detested each other, he’d have to say that she looked hurt by something Hausner had said. He was surprised at the jealousy he suddenly
felt. Laskov watched her. She didn’t see him. They had already said their good-byes. He turned and walked with his bearlike gait down the back stairs where a jeep waited to take him to his squadron.

General Benjamin Dobkin stood near the coffee bar, speaking with Isaac Burg.

Dobkin looked at Burg. “So you’re coming to New York with us?”

Burg nodded. “I think I should check on my agents in New York. Also, I have a lady friend there and she is going to feel the Wrath of God in about seven hours.” He laughed and his eyes twinkled.

Dobkin stared into his cup, then looked down at Burg. “It’s their last chance, isn’t it? I mean, if ever they were going to strike, it would have to be now. If they don’t, they are completely washed up in the eyes of their supporters. This is the biggest and most important target they have ever had. It is now or never for them, isn’t it?”

Burg gave a slight nod. “Yes.” He looked at Dobkin. “You know, when I got out of that meeting before, I was very confident. But human beings are very resourceful and cunning creatures. If they have the will, they will find the way. That much I know, after dealing with the Arabs for all these years. They are not the buffoons the press makes them out to be, as you and I know very well.” He nodded again. “Yes, I’m worried.”

Concorde 01 and Concorde 02 stood in the sunlight with their doors thrown open. Already on board each craft were six men from Hausner’s security squad. Matti Yadin sat with the six men in 01 and briefed them. They each carried a Smith & Wesson .22 caliber automatic pistol The .22 caliber round wasn’t supposed to go completely through a human body and puncture the cabin. In theory, it looked safe, but shooting guns in small pressurized cabins was never a good idea.

The security men also had on board, as standard equipment, an old American M-14 rifle which had been fitted to accept a starlight scope for night shooting and a 10X Crossman sniper scope for day shooting. There was also on board an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun. This was a very small weapon, forty-six centimeters long, and weighing only four kilograms but capable
of firing a magazine of twenty-five 9mm rounds with much effect. The M-14 and the Uzi were to be used only outside the aircraft.