Isaac walked on till he reached Rebecca. Held out his hand for her to give him the pistol, checked the mechanism, ensured there was a bullet in the breach, that the gun was live. 'The mistake must not be repeated, Rebecca.' He turned on his heel and strode back down the length of the cabin. And the Ilyushin continued its course across the smooth unruffled waters of the North Sea towards the coastline of England and the Kingfisher's landfall.
The news that the Dutch landing conditions had not been accepted was sufficient for the summons to Charlie Webster to attend the Emergency Committee meeting in the offices of the Home Secretary in Whitehall.
The Home Secretary was in the Chair, flanked by one of his junior ministers, two civil servants of the Department both with the grading of Principal Under-Secretaries, a lowly Foreign Office minister in order that the deliberations of the two giant bureaucracies could be dovetailed through liaison, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from Scotland Yard. At the far end of the polished mahogany table was Parker Smith, whose suggestion it had been that they call for the man in his section who specialized in the study of Russian dissident groups. The windows were open because it was a warm and windless evening, and the murmur of the London rush hour traffic came up to them from the courtyard. Coffee cups on the table, and filled ashtrays, and the paraphernalia of the meeting – torn up scraps of paper, others crumpled and discarded, some with the artistic and intricate doodles of the Foreign Office man, briefcases and maps, and telephone on an extended wire at the Home Secretary's elbow.
A messenger in the blue livery of the Home Office had been waiting in the wide and high-roofed lobby for Charlie to arrive. They hadn't bothered with the formality of signing him in, and together they had taken the sweeping staircase two at a time till they were on the first floor and walking briskly along the central corridor flanked by the uncleaned oil portraits of the Minister's predecessors in office. A brief knock and the messenger opened the door. Charlie spluttered involuntarily as the smoke wall hit him, fugging his nostrils and his eyes.
'Mr Charles Webster, gentlemen. 8
The Home Secretary waved him towards a seat, the only one vacant and halfway down the table on the right-hand side. Interest on the faces of all except Parker Smith. Different type of fellow to the ones that the politicians and civil servants of rank were accustomed to doing business with, suit not pressed as keenly, and shirt looking as though it had done service the day before by way of bonus, the shave wearing fine because he had not slipped to the men's room at lunchtime as these more public men were accustomed to do.
Parker Smith, sitting easily in the company, anxious to put Charlie at ease, and overdoing it, sounding patronizing, sort of speak-up-boy-they-won't-bite. 'Charlie, I've told the Minister and his colleagues here of your background. Told them of your experience overseas and in Dublin, and I've sketched through the work you do no w, with emphasis on your predictions of last night.'
The Home Secretary cut him short
'Mr Webster, the Aeroflot flight is perhaps a quarter of an hour off our coastline. We can keep it circling for a bit, but there will not be much opportunity for prevarication. We are advised that it has enough fuel for perhaps a further forty minutes' flying time, three-quarters of an hour at the most. It is our intention to put it down at Stansted in Essex. We do not have the luxury of our European colleagues of being able to pass the buck. The buck stops here; the fuel load of the plane determines that. We will obviously attempt to persuade the hi-jackers to surrender without further recourse to needless and stupid bloodshed, but we have to know from the time that the wheels hit the ground what sort of people we are dealing with. We want you to put some flesh on them, Mr Webster. I don't mind conjecture, provided that it's based on very sound background, but what you tell us may have to be acted upon very quickly so I'd prefer caution in your analysis.'
Civil servants and junior ministers with their sharpened pencils and gold-coated pens poised, only the Home Secretary and Parker Smith looking at him. And what do they want to hear? What can you give them, Charlie? Tell them about the kids who have learned that you don't walk through Hyde Park shouting any more; you get yourself a nice shiny Armalite and shoot a copper in Belfast, you get dished out an AK and blow a Brit squaddie to kingdom come in Crater, you get an RPG and cuddle up to an airport fence to bag yourself an El Al jumbo. They're waiting for you, Charlie, so go slowly, and don't use long words.
'There have been two confirmed hi-jack attempts out of the Soviet Union in the last few years.
A family took a light aircraft to Turkey. Insignificant and a one-off incident.
Then there was the Leningrad plan that aborted and never got off the ground, a group of Jews who wanted to take over a plane, unarmed, and fly it to Finland. It was a short haul flight and the whole thing was a disaster, the group hopelessly infiltrated by KGB. All arrested ait the airport, and some still inside. There is a third incident but it's less hard and we have fewer details, even through "I" channels – Israeli announcement that a hi-jacked internal flight was coming out, and it never came, '74 or '75, I think. From the East bloc there have been a series of chaps jumping a plane and coming over, but not Russians. There hasn't been a major Russian one before, so that's the first bit of new ground. Now the second one: these people up there are apparently Jews. In the past the Jewish dissidents have for the most part contented themselves with media protests, clandestine interviews, press conferences, civil disobedience where they'll be noticed by foreigners and it will get reported, trying to get pressure on the local authorities and most of their efforts beamed at the United States. Chief contention has been emigration either to Israel or to the West generally, followed by complaints of racial discrimination. That's very broad and very brief, but probably sufficient.'
There was the click of a cigarette lighter, the noise of nibs scratching on paper.
'These people however are different. We've had a policeman shot in Kiev, wounded, apparently seriously and nothing in the media. That indicates it was neither criminal nor casual.
The one thing that would really concern the people over there is if they consider this a target shooting, an attempt at a gesture, though a botched one for all that. A gesture they will equate with conspiracy and organization. That would concern them. There have been terror attacks put down to minority nationalist groups but nothing that we have been able to identify as internally aggressive and specifically Jewish. As I said we had the shooting of the policeman. We've also heard of rumours round the university site that a Jewish student was arrested a few days ago, and that militia reinforcements were seen moving into the city. Perhaps he talked, the one they picked up, and the assumption has to be that the security people were on the point of staging a large- scale arrest sweep. And then we have a hi-jack.'
Charlie paused. Not for effect, just to clear his mind again.
He didn't make speeches – not in his line of work. The difficult bit starts now though, he thought, where we lose the facts, where we start jogging along with the theory.
'There are two types of hi-jacking or hostage-taking operations. When the Palestinians do it, along with the people associated with them, it's usually what we call a "leverage operation" – designed to get some of the comrades out of prison, and usually an Israeli prison. Doubled with that is the publicity factor of attention being turned on their operation with all the attendant explanations as to who they are and what their grievance is. That was Dawson's Field in Jordan, OPEC in Vienna, the Air France to Entebbe. All well documented. That's one type, then there's the other sort -what we call a "break-out job", which is what I think this one is. Kids who felt that time was running out back at home and were looking for the fastest and most successful bolt they could manage. Difficult place to go underground, the Soviet Union, especially if it all starts falling round your ears quickly. You'd need months to set an underground situation up, just for the paperwork of changed identity. They didn't reckon they were capable of that, so they've tried the bunk. I doubt if it was planned more than a few hours before takeoff, and their major success was very simply to get the guns on to the aircraft. They're probably young, early twenties at the most, naive politically by the standards that we are familiar with, and by this stage they'll be frightened and dangerous.'