The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 388
She did not like the way he worried about his work at night—that was in the early days, of course, when he spent most of his spare time at home. She was also fond of telling him that he did not have to be successful at everything to be happy, that she had stopped being taken in by his sales pitch shortly after his tenth birthday and that if his father had been alive he would have told him to change his job.
Talk about his father always made him uncomfortable because her voice reminded him, just a little, of the tone he used while referring to his merchandise. When his father had died he had been too young to feel any sense of loss or grief, and the pictures he had seen of his parent had shown a pretty average person—the kind who could be talked into buying anything.
But somehow this colorless individual had sold himself to his mother so successfully that, even twenty years after his death, she remained faithful to the original product to such an extent that talking about him made her almost happy. He had never been able to understand how his father had been able to achieve this effect, but the reason was probably that he himself had been unwilling to spend the time and effort necessary for such a long-term sales project as marriage.
But then a good salesman did not need to be married to get a girl.
Nowadays he could not get girls so easily and sometimes not at all. His boyish enthusiasm did not sit well on a face whose red-veined nose and deep etched wrinkles were anything but boyish. He had almost lost today's client despite the half bottle he had killed at breakfast to fortify himself for the fray.
It has been a tough fight at that, lasting most of the morning and through a three-hour working lunch, and he had won it by sheer, dogged persistence that had been close to desperation. Having won he had celebrated, mostly because he liked celebrating and to dismiss any lingering self-doubts troubling him. His desperation had not, he was sure, been apparent to the client, and the sale had not been won because the client had felt sorry for him. He would continue the celebration as soon as he got back to his hotel.
He was into the parked truck with its muddied rear lights so suddenly that he had only time to desperately swerve his steering.
A fast, relaxed and accurate driver, he was fond of telling people, had no need of a safety belt. Instead of burrowing under the truck's overhang and hitting the differential he ran into the tires of the enormous double wheels, and he did not bounce because he was stuck fast on the steering column ...
And another familiar card came up!
The large, cold drops of rain slapped at the canvas cover with a sound like distant gunfire and the vehicle's slow lurching progress along the dark street made his head roll from side to side and allowed the droplets running down his face to collect inside his collar. Facing forward, his elbows hooked over the support rail and, his weapon at the ready, all he could see was a stretch of shining black road surface pitted and wrinkled by past petrol bombs and carpeted with half-bricks, broken bottles and pieces of smashed pavement. The houses on each side of him moved past, their downstairs windows glowing or flickering as interior lights or a TV screen's glow tried to fight its way through the heavy drapes, while the dripping hedges and front garden, some shaggy and some neat, could have been hiding anything.
He felt too cold and wet and miserable, he realized suddenly, to have any room left for fear. No terrorist, he was sure, would risk pneumonia by setting up an ambush under these conditions. They would probably be watching television like normal people—especially the news coverage of their shootings and bombings or the mournings of the pundits discussing the possible political ramifications of the latest blast. Or they might be plotting around the fireside or up in a bedroom with their wives or girl friends, engaged in seduction rather than sedition. Which made him wonder if the women concerned were bothered by the fact that the hands caressing them had, a few hours or days earlier, been responsible for killing one of his mates or an uncommitted civilian with a bomb or a rifle or a rocket launcher. He wondered if—sometime during this tour of duty—he killed someone he would be foolish enough to tell her about it. The circumstances were completely different, of course, but when he got on to this particularly uncomfortable line of thought he sometimes wondered if he had the wrong job.
Tonight he was so cold and miserable he knew he was in the wrong job.
The unlighted or heavily curtained windows paraded past. Sometimes he imagined that the curtains moved or that the Venetian blinds twitched. Possibly there was a gunman drawing a bead on him, or a terrorist sympathizer keeping him under observation—or he was being watched by a curious youngster who couldn't sleep. The rain was beginning to trickle down his back.
He was rounding a curve in the street and passing under a lamppost when the firing started—a couple of rifles, it sounded like, and a Thompson to make him keep his head down while the sharpshooters tried to pick him off. He was out of the vehicle and flat on the ground with the others before he actually thought about doing anything—a reaction, the corporal was fond of saying, that demonstrated the trained reflexes of the professional soldier—while the bullets whanged off the bodywork or punched holes through it. He rolled through a shallow puddle until he was partly under a garden hedge. The noise made it hard to think. Despite the heavy terrorist fire he could not spot any of the flashes from his position. Suddenly his foot was gripped and shaken roughly.
"Get that damned light!" said the corporal. "We'll cover you."
He rolled away from the hedge and onto his back, took careful aim at the center of the fluorescent lamp and did as he had been told, losing what remained of his night vision in the process. He blinked rain out of his eyes and returned to the shelter of the hedge again as the shooting became less accurate and began to die away. He could hear the whine of a couple of heavy APCs tearing along the street which paralleled this one, trying to cut off the gunmen's retreat. Beside him someone loosed off a shot, but all he could see were the floating green blotches left by the street lamp.
The hedge was not an effective shelter. Not only did it allow bullets to whip past unimpeded, its leaves saved up the rain and dropped it on him in small, irregular torrents. But the dripping hedge reminded him of another wet evening many years ago and he decided that he could tell Jean about this evening because she would enjoy the joke.
Long before they had been married there had been another hedge in a very secluded spot near the road where Jean lived. The first couple of times he had been out with her they had not stopped at the place, but on the third occasion it had been Jean's birthday and he had put a lot of thought and effort into showing her a good time and they had stopped. A few minutes later the great granddaddy of all cloudbursts not only dampened their ardor but washed out his main plan of attack.
There had been other secluded spots and hedges when his strategy had gone very well and the final assaults had met only token resistance. And after every one of them they had always remembered and laughed over that first wet hedge. Now David was four years old and there was a boy or a girl at minus two months, and they could not make up their minds which they really wanted. It was a very permissive society, these days, and it seemed to be getting sick and violent with its freedoms. He had enjoyed the permissiveness, but for a girl-child growing up his world might not be so good. Parents of girls had a lot to worry about.
The bullet ricocheted off the curb and tore a large uneven hole through his neck, rupturing the left carotid and opening a passage into the trachea. The sudden, burning pain made him want to scream, but when he drew in his breath a thick, bloody froth flooded into his lungs, strangling him. He grabbed at his throat with both hands, coughing to clear the obstruction, and felt air and warm bubbles squeezing between his fingers from the entrance and exit wounds, but when he tried to breathe in there was no air, only the warm spurting wetness.
Very soon he was dead. But not nearly soon enough ...
Another life card.
"Airfield Two. This is Golf Alpha November Mike Zulu," he said in quiet fury. "I am approaching the coast on a bearing of two-eight-seven at flight level seven-five-zero. Landing instructions, please."
"Mike Zulu, Airfield Two. Remain on present heading. Reduce to flight level six zero. You have twenty-eight miles to run to touchdown. Visibility is ten miles. Wind gusting to twenty knots. Request aircraft type and passenger details."
The voice was devoid of emotion, the diction was good and there was no indication that the man was gloating.
"Nimbus Five Transonic," he said. "Seventy-Five per cent load. Six hundred and twelve adults, fifteen children plus crew."
A Nimbus yet! The only suitable runway is zero four. It is barely long enough and a bit rough and you will have an eighty degree cross wind port side. We suggest you divert."
Before he could reply the edge of a very hard hand was rubbed painfully along the side of his neck, and the man standing behind him said, "No."
"I have been requested to land at Two," he said.
"Understood. But remind your friends that we have a profit-sharing arrangement with the other two airfields, and if you crash that aircraft there will be nothing or nobody to ransom."
The hand rubbed his neck even harder.
"My friends are impatient as well as greedy," he said. "A diversion is not possible."
"Your funeral. Reduce flight level to five zero. Maintain present heading."
"Five zero on present heading," he said, then furiously to the man behind him: "I don't give a damn if you commit suicide, but there are others involved."
The man behind him laughed softly, then asked, "Can your copilot land this thing?"
He wanted to say, No, because it was the truth and his second officer knew that as well as he did—but being young and inexperienced was something that happened to everyone at some stage. Instead he said quietly, "In these conditions we will both be required to land this thing. You must understand that these supersonic jobs have to put down an awful lot of flap to slow us sufficiently for a landing. And during the last half-minute we will be holding on to the sky with our fingernails in an attitude that is dangerous if the wind velocity and direction are not right. With gusting conditions and maximum flap we could fall out of the sky or the ground effect could—"
The edge of the hijacker's hand struck the side of his head just above the ear. It was not a hard blow, not painful, but it was a conversation stopper.
For the next few minutes he maintained an angry and helpless silence. This had been no ordinary hijack operation or the security guards—traveling incognito even to the crew, and numbering one to every fifty passengers—would have been able to stamp on it. The disguised guards had picked up their weapons inside the aircraft and the loading tube detection system would have ensured that nobody else carried a weapon on board. He was still not sure of what had happened exactly, but his senior hostess had been able to reach the flight deck and tell him something about it during the minute or so before the man behind him had arrived and broken her back.
Apparently the hijackers had staged an incident during which one of their number caused a near-panic in his immediate area by producing a shaver with a black plastic casing that looked like a weapon. This has caused two of the guards in the vicinity to break cover and several others to tense up sufficiently for them, also, to be spotted. During the milling around that followed, hijackers had disarmed these guards using killer-karate. Not all of them had been successful, but enough of them had been able to get weapons to shoot it out with the remaining guards who had, of course, been hampered through trying to avoid hitting innocent passengers.
During the ten-minute gun battle the great tubular barn that was the main passenger cabin had suffered a sharp pressure drop. But as all of the guards, four hijackers and seventeen others had died the remaining passengers thought themselves lucky to have only bleeding noses and earache. He still did not know why his senior hostess had had to die simply for giving him a situation report.
He liked to understand people even if he did not agree with their point of view, and he knew some of the reasons why this intelligent, highly-trained and resourceful team of hijackers had taken his aircraft. But the senseless display of violence in killing Nancy, a completely unnecessary murder performed with an utter lack of feeling, made him so angry that he felt physically ill.
"Maintain present heading, Mike Zulu. Reduce to flight level four five zero. Twenty-three miles to run."
"Mike Zulu," he acknowledged, then tried again.
"One of these days," he went on quietly, "the governments are going to stop paying ransom money for hijacked aircraft and passengers and then you will be out of a job. And this green and pleasant land below us, with its thriving pirate economy, will feel the pinch. No government wants to be the first to throw three or four aircraft and a couple of thousand passengers to the wolves, of course, but there are a couple of administrations on the point of doing just that. It will take just one to make the decision and the rest will follow.
"When that happens you, and the people below, will not have the benefit of consumer goods smuggled in at top prices," he continued, "because you will have no money. You will have no money because your currency will be declared valueless and any you may have salted away on the continent will be frozen—the measures are already being planned. You, assuming that you are the brain behind this hijack, should be intelligent enough to realize that you can't possibly continue to—"
He broke off as one of the hostesses, looking pale but with her voice steady enough, excused herself and asked for instructions.
"We shall be landing on a runway that is a rather tight fit," he replied easily and smiled at her. "This means that I shall be making a steep approach, shoving on reverse thrust a few seconds after touchdown and stepping hard on the brakes. Make sure that their straps are tight and check the tables for loose objects. Right?"
"If the runway is short, sir, how will we get off again?"
He smiled reassuringly, thinking that the girl was too intelligent for her own peace of mind, and said, "This has happened to me before. The ransom covers the passengers, aircraft and crew but not the baggage and freight. We will be much lighter at takeoff."
"Yes, indeed," said the man standing behind him. Perhaps he was irritated at being left out of the conversation, in which case he had displayed his first human feeling.
When the girl had gone Devlin's dream identify went on, "I am not probing for information useful to our security people and it doesn't matter to me whether you are free-lance or employed by the government of this country. The people down there do not officially boost their own hijack trade and you would never admit that you had been smuggled out as refugees to set up this operation.
"And you could be telling the truth," he continued, "because if you had come from this country you would do as Airfield Two suggests and divert. So you must be a free-lance group hoping to set yourselves up here with your share of the ransom. Fair enough—but there will be no ransom for anyone if we flop over and burn on Two's runway, will there? And I hate to say anything complimentary about an operation that places so many people in jeopardy, but this job showed planning of a high order and considerable intelligence. Surely the same degree of intelligence and forethought will tell you that—"
"Turn three degrees on to a heading of three-zero-one, Mike Zulu. Descend to flight level three zero. Eight miles to run. Have you the airfield in sight?"
"Mike Zulu. Descend to three zero on three-zero-one. I see you, Two."
Behind him the man changed his captured gun from one hand to the other, but made no attempt to answer any of the questions.
Angrily Devlin's dream identity said, "This is the most beautiful, unpolluted and underpopulated country in the world. It has always been beautiful, of course, and in the past it was very popular with tourists. But it is free of pollution because there is virtually no industry and its technical skills have gone with its people—those who were lucky enough to get away before immigration was forbidden. Now there is no one who wants to come here except people like yourself. The lower orders of farmer and laborer are also trying to leave, many of them dying in the attempt. The country imports everything except a small proportion of its food and exports nothing at all—and this beautiful and dangerously unstable country is where you want to spend the rest of your lives. Can't you see how stupid that is?"
The man sighed faintly but did not speak.
Ahead of the plane the airfield was a tiny, flattened plus sign, pale gray against the hazy green patchwork of the surrounding fields. He made a last desperate appeal to the hijacker's humanity as well as his reason.
"You are not trying to right a political wrong or serving, the cause of any minority group by coming here," the dream-Devlin said. "You come to this place only if you are in this for the money. Fair enough—greed I can understand. But why gamble on losing so much when a twenty-minute diversion would give you a certain win? Or is it a feeling of power you need? The feeling that you are so much more vital and important than the majority of poor, hardworking, dull sheep that their suffering is too small a matter to affect you? Or maybe this time you want to share their feelings! Are you, then, so terribly bored with life that you want to know what it feels like to be broken and torn apart and breathe in the fire of burning fuel—"
He broke off, then added coldly: "I'm going to be very busy for a few minutes. Your answers can wait until after we land."
Two's main runway was opening out below him like a gray isosceles triangle, spotty with clumps of weeds and cow droppings. The grass had not been trimmed for many years and the wind sent broad, green ripples hurrying across it. With maximum flap and barely enough power to stay in the air he aimed at putting down on the runway short of the threshold markings, because for this landing every yard would count.
As well as catching the fully-extended flaps like a sail and pushing up the port wing, the cross-wind necessitated a crabwise approach that would have to be corrected at the latest possible instant before touchdown if he weren't to smash all the tires and probably rip off the undercarriage bogeys. He rounded out over a patch of swamp about a quarter-mile from threshold, with his stall warning having hysterics and his wings dipping first to one side and then the other as he compensated and overcompensated for the gusting. During the last few seconds before touchdown he found that he could anticipate the gust effects by watching approaching wind ripples in the grass and as she began to sink he brought the nose on to the centerline of the runway.
