ADAM HALL - The Kobra Manifesto

Kuznetski was the quietest: his dossier had mentioned something about scientific training in Prague University and he was probably some type of bent boffin. He'd only spoken twice during the flight out of Belem and now he was sitting alone, preoccupied.

Sassine was across the aisle from us, reeking the place out with pot Zade had told him to shut up a few minutes ago and Sassine had come off his high in a swallow dive. I'd noticed on other occasions that when Zade said anything, people really listened.

'Then you can advise him not to make any trouble for me,' he said, watching me with his sunglasses.

'I don't think he wants to do that' I leaned forward. 'He wants his daughter back with him, and I'm ready to advise him to do precisely what you say. From my personal observation that is the only way he can save her.'

I tried to sound like a smooth Civil Servant, using that bastard Loman for a model, because the showdown might involve a modicum of close combat and I didn't want these people to think I was any good at it. Similarly I was trying to persuade him that me Defence Secretary was also a pushover because a determining factor in any confrontation with an adversary is the degree by which you can get his guard down in the preliminary stages.

'You have had contact with Burdick?.'

'Yes,' I said.

I hadn't.

'So you know what we are demanding from him.'

'Yes.'

I didn't.

He looked away from my face at last, turning his dark head to the window. I could now see part of his left eye, but couldn't judge the expression at this angle: he was just staring into the distant sky.

'We know that Israel has the bomb, and we know that the United Arab Republic is building one. That is the key factor in the imminent Israel-Egypt accord, already outlined by Kissinger.'

I looked beyond him to the pallid face of the Burdick girl.

Dr Costa was sitting alongside her: he was the short man who'd been pushing his way through the crowd at Belem: the "brave humanitarian". I hadn't known, until now, how slight her chances were.

A group like Kobra wouldn't come together from the ends of the earth to acquire a single nuclear bomb. They'd want more than that: fifty or a hundred of them.

'Yasser Arafat published his manifesto in Al Thawra , two months ago, in Beirut.' His head swung back. 'Did you read it?'

'I read the Newsweek interview.'

'Good. That is his manifesto, and it is my manifesto. We may not be able to prevent the proposed Israel-Egypt accord, but we can prevent some of its consequences. Have you met Yasser Arafat?'

'No.'

'If you met him, you would follow him. I can do nothing for Poland, but I can do something for Palestine. You understand?'

'Of course.'

He was on a liberation kick and he was sincere about it and therefore dangerous: the political terrorist is the man who could create new and better worlds if he could express his dreams with intelligence; having none, he can only express his frustration.

I leaned forward again, wanting to know things.

'But you said that the bomb is the key factor. Do you mean — '

'The bomb is always the key factor. In the ultimate show of strength, that is the form of strength that is shown. Surely you know that.'

He looked up as someone came off the flight deck: I heard the sliding door hitting the stops. I turned my head and saw Ventura. They'd been taking it in shifts to mount guard on the flight deck and Ventura had been there for the last twenty minutes. He was a narrow-chested man with a bald head and slow wet eyes: he looked like a disinterested assistant in men's haberdashery but he had killed Hunter in Geneva and he would kill me when the showdown came unless I could preempt him.

'I need you up front,' he said.

Zade moved quickly and I felt the power in him as he swung past me. The sliding door banged shut behind them and I changed my seat so as to face forward. Sassine went nervously for his gun but I didn't take any notice because he was as high as a kite and his reactions were notably slow: I could 'have got his gun and shot Zade or Ventura or possibly both as they came back from the flight deck but Kuznetski and Ramirez were behind me now and so was Shadia.

Sassine seemed ashamed of his show of nerves and crossed his legs and pinched out his reefer and put it in a tin box marked «Aspirin» in Czechoslovakian and began talking rapidly about the paradoxes of political history and the undercurrents of popular thought and their influence on the world revolutionary scene in terms of pseudo-neo-Fascism and its abortive attempts to achieve liberation for the elite. One of the port engines cut out and came back on power while he was talking but he didn't notice it.

Behind him, farther along the aisle, Ramirez was watching me with one hand on a sub-machine-gun, and I saw him glance to the window. Sassine went on talking and I assessed his potential for creating difficulties: I thought Zade would probably have trouble controlling him when it came to the crunch. He was a thin, hollow-eyed man in his twenties, haunted by things he had done or perhaps by things that had been done to him, and I believed he would put a bullet into Pat Burdick's head and my own as well if he thought it would be politically correct.

The engine cut twice more, coming back each time, and five minutes later Zade and Ventura came back from the flight deck and stood talking in urgent whispers in the catering area forward of the passenger section. I couldn't hear anything they said. Sassine was recommending the advantages of what he called 'socialistically-oriented referenda' as a means of 'reaching the proletariat' without disturbing the 'mass-media syndrome' when the port engine cut out and stayed out. The background noise was diminished by one quarter and was noticeable even to Sassine.

Zade and Ventura had stopped talking and were moving forward again when the flight deck door banged back and the pilot stood there, a tall mahogany-faced type with four gold rings on his sleeve and his cap on the back of his head. He spoke directly to Zade.

'Okay, you better get this. I'm the captain of this ship as long as she's in the air and I want to tell you something in case you didn't happen to think of it for yourself. We have one engine out and it can happen again so I'm going to take her into the first place that can give me clearance, and if you don't like it you can shoot me right between the eyes and you've got a hundred and thirty thousand pounds of junk going through the air at thirty thousand feet and it's doing five hundred knots and she's all your baby, know what I mean? You think that guy in there can take her down? He's not a pilot, he's a navigator and he couldn't land a goddam bicycle. I realize you've got the biggest ass in the ball-park so I thought I better just tell you the score.'

He turned and went back to the flight deck and slid the door shut with a bang.

The Boeing was in a wide turn and drifting lower.

My watch read 12:31 and I altered it to 10:31 provisionally: I didn't know which airport we were going into but it wouldn't be far from the time zone for Miami because we'd overflown it.

Zade and Ventura were on the flight deck and the door was open but I couldn't hear any voices. Kuznetski had come forward to ask Sassine what was happening, and Ramirez was squatting on a front-row seat in the coach class section with a sub-machine-gun across his knees and the other on the seat alongside. When Sassine came back to talk to him I moved down me aisle to where Dr Costa was looking after the girl.

Shadia was with them and I couldn't say everything I needed to say but the main thing was to keep Pat Burdick's morale up in case she had to look after herself while I was busy.

'How are you feeling, Pat?'