' I sit here and I wait to be asked.'
'Well, you won't be sitting here much longer. They've just dropped a hostage…' He heard the Hebrew obscenity, saw Benitz clench his fist. 'Didn't they tell you? Didn't anyone even tell you that? They dropped one this morning, and there'll be another this afternoon, and then they plan a shooting gallery, with one each hour. We're gearing the heavies up, to go and thump them.'
'You should have gone this morning when the one you call Isaac was asleep."
'Could have had them all then. Looking back on it, that is. With hindsight we could have wrapped it all up. And saved the hostage, and whoever else gets in the way when the military attack.' Charlie had exhausted his politeness, wanted to be on his way. As an afterthought, he added: 'You think you could still talk them down?'
Benitz forward in his seat, tense and trying to hide his elation. Casual. ' I think it would be possible. If I were at the plane and could talk to them.'
'And what would you be telling them?'
'Surrender, unconditional surrender.'
'Before the next deadline, before the military go in.'
'Surrender, unconditional surrender,®
'Could save a deal of mopping up.®
'Could save lives, Charlie.'
Charlie looked behind him, satisfied himself that the staircase was unused, thumb in his mouth, the nail chewed between his teeth. 'I am going to the plane now. Perhaps… if you wanted, you could come with me… The message from your government is that there should be immediate and unconditional surrender?'
'Yes, that is the message,' said Benitz looking hard into Charlie's eyes.
'But if they surrender, then perhaps they go back to Russia.'
If they surrender there will be no more killing. No more of the passengers will be hurt, and they themselves will live. I understand that what happens to them later is not yet decided."
No opportunity for Benitz to use the telephone, to give explanations to London, to ask for fresh guidance. He prided himself that he had covered well on the hammer – blow disappointment of the news that a hostage was already dead, that his last instructions were now invalid, inappropriate. Charlie had taken his arm and was hurrying him down the steps, and seemed to stagger and falter, the mark of a man, Benitz recognized, close to exhaustion.
Too late now, too far gone the opportunity for the young people to barter their freedom with the lives of the passengers. Possible before the captain had died, possible before they had taken their hostage. But the moment now lost. Benitz searched in his mind, among the briefings and the messages he had received in Tel Aviv and from London, as to what solution he might fashion that would most please those that he served.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
David stayed in the dull-lit recess at the back of the aircraft, his body pressed hard against the fastened drinks trolley. Waiting for nothing, passing the minutes away. He had not moved since the Italian had been taken from his seat to the doorway. After the noise of the shot that had sent a shudder through him, involuntary and unsought, barely a muscle or a nerve had functioned. Just stood there, hearing the rhythmic sounds of his wrist watch, willing the progress of its hands. The gun was held loosely across his waist, apparently ready to be fired at a moment of crisis, quickly and expertly, and giving the impression of a man who had found confidence and was his master.
David alone realized the deception.
The exact moment when he knew that all was over, that the struggle was hopeless, was not clear even to him. Perhaps it had been on the pavement in Kiev as Moses had stumbled and shuffled through his pockets in search of the balaclava. Perhaps it had been in the woodman's hut when Isaac had first raised the plan for the break-out and in doing so had usurped his own place as innovator and initiator. Perhaps it had been with the words, flat and unemotional, of ground control over Hanover when they had been ordered to fly on. Perhaps it had been as the dawn had risen lighting the cabin and he had witnessed the fear and hatred that alternated on the faces of those who were guarded by the guns. Perhaps the moment had come, the journey been completed, when he had seen the surprise and terror and comprehension merge on the face of the harmless and inoffensive little Italian. Which moment he did not know, but at one of them had come the knowledge that the game was completed, that he was ready for what Isaac called
'surrender and capitulation'.
They were big and bold words and worthy of a greater occasion. Armies surrendered, governments capitulated. They signified momentous times, nothing as scabrous or as dirty as the collapse in morale of three young Jews far from home. Babi Yar… that had been a great wrong, thousands machine-gunned because they were Jewish, for no other reason. A hundred times a thousand people had died in the ravine of Babi Yar. Jews, and not remembered, and the cheap belated monument made no mention of them. And those who came with flowers on the anniversary, on the day in late September, they were stoned and scourged and imprisoned -or
'detained', as the authorities called it. Babi Yar had been the flint that forged the four of them together, a desire to avenge, to tilt the balance of the wrong… and now the water had come in its torrent and destroyed the flickering of that small flame.
He had liked Moses, known him better than Isaac, because he was younger and less able and more dependent, and because he laughed more. Remembered him now, untidy, confused, willing to try, willing to become a casualty, a statistic. And Moses was already taken, and had bought them time- at what cost David could not know. And for what?
The Italian should not have died for Babi Yar, nor even the schoolmaster who had jumped. It was not their quarrel. They did not wear the uniform of the authorities, did not carry the badge of office presented by the bullies who would not permit prayers to be said by the ditch where the Jews had fallen, that had become a tip for rubbish. Nor was it they who sent the Jews to the camps, arrested those who sought passage to Israel. They had no guilt, yet one had died and it had been intended another should have fallen in his place.
If that was the cost of avenging Babi Yar and all that it had accumulated in shame, then the price was too high, that was the feeling of David as he stood far from the others at the rear of the cabin aisle. How to surrender? How to conclude his part without destroying what Isaac sought, without betraying his friends? He had thought long and hard behind the unmoving eyes, struggling with his tiredness till the solution came reluctantly upon him. A brutal, desperate solution that brought a chill over his body. And then the decision was made and there followed a calm and a clarity of thought that had been denied him for many hours.
Often the American had looked at him, peering and twisting round in his seat, inviting conversation, still crowned with the knotted handkerchief that he wore across his scalp. While David had wrestled with his problem the man had kept his silence, bided his time. Now Edward R. Jones Jr recognized the lightness in the face, appreciated that he could speak.
'How long do you go on like this? You shoot one, you lose one, but the British aren't talking, they aren't moving, not an inch.' The same nagging, grating voice, primed with aggression. David understood not a word, knew only that behind the deference to the gun and his youth the older man sneered at him. He shrugged his shoulders, and looked on down the aisle.
' I said, how much longer do we have to sit on our backsides here, waiting for you to call it quits?' David turned with the tolerance of one who is irritated by a wasp but cannot gather the energy to swat it, a half smile on his mouth.
'Don't you speak English? Don't you understand me? Was it only the girl that went to school?'