Sam 7, p.26
SAM 7, page 26
‘It is worse than I could have imagined. To obtain information by telephone is impossible. The special inquiry lines are occupied all the time. It is the same with the hospitals. Every hospital had its own casualty unit and their telephone exchanges are all engaged. Only with the aid of a police officer did I find out two things. First, no one is a hundred per cent certain which of the critically injured are from the trains and which from the plane. Of about 1150 casualties, 420 are seriously hurt.’
Following Judith’s hospitality, Connie was composed again after the stress of the trip. Calmly, she put into words what Jakov had hesitated to say himself.
‘Ben has to be among the seriously hurt. The human body just can’t absorb that kind of impact and escape with cuts and bruises – at least only by a miracle.’
‘You are a brave girl. I am glad you understand.’ Allom paused. ‘I am glad because the second thing I learnt was that so far Ben’s name is not on any list. He may not be dead,’ he added hastily. ‘The dead are included on the police’s coordinated record. But naturally the unidentified survivors are all among the badly injured, the ones who are unconscious or cannot talk.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Five different hospitals.’ The emotional endurance test ahead of them made Allom’s deep voice depressed. ‘That is, the unidentified men are distributed between five. There are unidentified women and children in many more. The nearest to here is St Stephen’s in Chelsea.’
Connie was already on her feet.
‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go. Excuse me, Judith. You’ve been very kind. But we can’t lose any time.’
St Stephen’s hospital appears deceptively small when seen from the Fulham Road. Its modern low-built Accident and Emergency Department distracts the eye both from the new six-storey block beyond it and from the drab Victorian brick structures that house the old wards. Jakov Allom hesitated at the ‘No Parking’ sign as he drove through the gates by the A and E Departure reception.
‘Take a doctor’s space,’ commanded Connie. ‘After all, I am one.’
Back in a world she understood, from that moment she took control. She led the way in through the glass doors, past a cluster of people sitting in the vinyl-floored accident waiting area and spoke briskly to the receptionist. ‘My name is Dr Maier. I come from Bellevue Hospital in New York. Could I speak to the doctor in charge?’
To back up the request she extracted a visiting card from her handbag. The girl gave it to a nurse, who walked round to an office off the waiting area. A moment later the nurse beckoned Connie and Jakov in.
The room was tiny. Standing by the document-littered desk were two doctors, a man and a woman, both in long white coats. The man, who looked worn out, stepped forward and shook hands, more clinically than warmly.
‘I’m the consultant in charge. This is the registrar on duty, Dr Morton. What can we do for you?’
Connie explained her mission, concluding. ‘I know you’re being pestered by relatives. Nonetheless, I hope you can help me. It concerns my husband.’
‘The Health Service has its faults.’ The consultant smiled briefly. ‘Happily, failing to assist doctors from overseas isn’t one of them. Anything we can do, we will. The snag is that being a general hospital, we usually pass specialist cases on to others. We still have about thirty casualties from the air crash, but we’ve already transferred the head injuries to the Atkinson Morley, the chest injuries to the Brompton and the burns to Roehampton. Quite a number were very badly burnt.’
‘Our search is widening,’ remarked Allom glumly.
‘Unfortunately most of the staff who were on duty yesterday are off now,’ continued the consultant. ‘We had a mobile team in action at Victoria twenty-seven minutes after the crash and we were still doing emergency theatre work here at three o’clock this morning. So I’ve sent them all home. However, Dr Morton can take you round the wards.’
The woman doctor, a fair-haired girl of about Connie’s own age, moved towards the door.
‘I’ll be glad. The police and ambulance control officers are still here; it won’t take long to check any possibilities.’
She led Connie and Jakov across the waiting area. ‘We had to spill over into accommodation we don’t normally use. We’ve got tea and sandwiches going for relatives in the nursing school. The police are in the medical records office.’ She ushered Connie into a small room where an inspector and a sergeant were seated at a table with a stack of record forms, compiling an index. At Dr Morton’s request the sergeant flipped through it.
‘No one with the name of Maier, I’m afraid, doctor.’
‘How about unidentified?’ asked Connie. ‘Male.’
‘There’s only one.’ He read from a form. ‘Face – round. Hair – black. Complexion – dark. Nose – straight. Teeth – good. Number MA3.’
‘Let’s go see him.’
After further checking Dr Morton led them down a long corridor and up a wide staircase.
‘Even with 520 beds we seldom have any empty. By transferring patients we managed to clear two wards, one of the old ones and Nell Gwynne here,’ she explained.
They came to a large area divided into small eight-bed wards, supervised from a central ‘station’ of desks and filing cabinets.
‘I believe you have Major Accident Three here?’ inquired Dr Morton.
The ward sister, neat in pale blue dress and white starched cap, glanced dubiously at Connie and Jakov.
‘MA3 is in a critical condition,’ she said hesitantly.
‘It’s all right, I’m a doctor,’ said Connie firmly, then turned to Jakov. ‘You’d better wait.’
Allom looked at her with admiration. She was so calm. The ward sister took Connie and the woman doctor to one of the wards, with its steel framed beds and wide windows.
‘He had to go straight to theatre when they brought him,’ said the sister. ‘He was in a terrible mess. We took out his ruptured spleen, but he also has compound fractures of the tib and fib in both legs, fractured pelvis, and head injuries. Been unconscious throughout, luckily for him. Seems he was in his shirtsleeves, too, as there was no wallet or anything to identify him by. We think he may have been in the plane itself.’
Connie listened, her heart racing. The dreadful injuries were consistent with the violent deceleration of an air crash. Men often took their jackets off during a flight. This was indeed likely to be one of the survivors of the DC-10.
The three women came to the foot of a bed, beside which, on top of a locker, was a grey plastic bag containing MA3 s personal belongings. The bag lay limp, almost empty, seeming to mirror the condition of the pathetic figure between the sheets. His head was encircled with bandages, which obscured most of his face. Connie steeled herself and stepped forward. Only the eyes and nose of the patient were visible in the white cotton cocoon. She bent over for a moment, then stood back.
‘No,’ her voice dead, ‘he’s not Ben.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m glad it isn’t.’
‘He can’t last,’ said the sister quietly. ‘It’ll be better if he never comes to.’
Connie squared her shoulders and went briskly out again to the ‘station’, shaking her head at Jakov. At the door she thanked the sister and turned to Dr Morton.
‘If he was Major Accident Three, there must have been numbers one and two.’
‘Let’s consult the ambulance officer,’ agreed Dr Morton.
She led Connie downstairs again, talking spasmodically to relieve the tension.
‘We’ve had a lot of experience with bombs – we had the victims from nine last year – but a really major incident overstretches everything. We can’t keep fifty beds empty, just in case!’
Connie forced herself to reply sympathetically, but she was thinking that she and Jakov could have a long day ahead of them. The ambulance officer only confirmed the impression that an ordeal lay ahead.
‘That’s right,’ he explained. ‘We transferred MA1 to the Atkinson Morley and MA2 to Roehampton.’ He checked his records. ‘Both last night.’
‘Can you remember them?’ demanded Connie.
‘The one with the head injuries was middle-aged, late middle-aged. We had him on a spinal board. The one with burnt legs was thirtyish.’
‘How far is Roehampton?’
The ambulanceman pursed his lips. ‘Four, five miles. Takes us from ten to fifteen minutes with the bell and lights going.’
‘We can beat that!’ Jakov simulated a cheerfulness he could not feel. ‘If I am to be your chauffeur, I shall earn my keep.’
Connie smiled half-heartedly and turned to shake Dr Morton’s hand warmly.
‘Thank you very much, doctor.’
Outside in the car she said simply, ‘Ben has to be somewhere. If that man could survive, so could he.’
‘We’ll find him, Connie,’ answered Jakov. ‘I promise we will.’
Mohammed Khadir slept late. He had chosen his flat in Earls Court for the concealment it offered. This rabbit warren of a house, grossly overcrowded with its sixteen ‘flatlets’, set in a road of similar houses, buried in an area teeming with cheap hotels, was next to impossible for London’s understrength police force to monitor effectively. Kamal, the more sophisticated of the two, disliked living even temporarily in such sordid surroundings and had made tentative efforts to clean the place up. Mohammed scorned these. If he had to sleep on stones in the desert during an operation, so be it. And if the cause demanded that he lived for a while as the impoverished English lived, so be it also. He treated his flat exactly as previous tenants had – with uncaring neglect. On the stained carpet lay scattered late editions of the previous evening’s papers, headlines proclaiming the disaster he had caused. On the table, remnants of tandoori chicken, bought ready spiced and cooked from one of the local Pakistani shops, seeped grease into a paper plate. Beside it stood a quarter-full bottle of cheap red wine.
Eventually the light beating through the thin cotton curtains woke Khadir. He rolled over, broke wind, cursed the taste that the cheap wine had left in his mouth, then pulled on his trousers and went to the bathroom on the landing. As he reached it the telephone rang. Cursing again, he came back and lifted the instrument. A cautious voice asked for Kamal.
‘He is asleep.’
‘Is that the friend of Abu Youssouf?’
‘It is Mohammed, fool.’
There was a silence, a click and the Libyan diplomat called Ahmed came on the line. Mohammed recognized his accent. In rapid Arabic he ordered the two terrorists to come at once to the Embassy. As he replaced the receiver Mohammed cursed for a third time. These Libyans assume too much authority. This diplomat was merely a postbox for movements like his own Abu Youssouf 73. Today’s victors were himself and Kamal, achieving real revenge for Israeli aggression. They had consented to remain in England until witnesses confirmed that Maier was dead and the documents destroyed. Now to be roused in this way was intolerable.
At midday the two Arabs arrived at the Embassy in Prince’s Gate. Mohammed was unshaven and rebellious. Kamal, faithful in small ways to his middle-class origins, was more presentable in clean jeans and a flowered shirt. The diplomat welcomed them curtly in the foyer of the Embassy, and set about belabouring them once they had penetrated to the quiet of his back-room office.
‘So you think you are heroes! You are wrong. You have failed! Several passengers survived. Possibly even Maier himself. Much of the baggage is in the hands of the police. Your mission is incomplete.’
Mohammed stared back at the diplomat insolently.
‘Could you have done better yourself? Did we not shoot down the aircraft? Did it not catch fire? I do not believe there can be survivors! We should be claiming the credit for a victory over Israel, not skulking here in a foreign city.’
The diplomat stared at the two terrorists.
‘While you two sleep,’ he said contemptuously, ‘others work.’ He tapped a folder of telegrams on his desk. ‘In New York the Americans have obtained an adjournment of the Security Council meeting until Monday. Why do you suppose they do that? The wife of the Israeli courier Maier has arrived in London. Why? I will tell you why, you boneheads. It must be because the Israelis hope to recover the documents this weekend. It is the only possible reason. You must get them first. These are the orders from your brothers of Abu Youssouf 73.’
‘And your airline pilot who directed us? Will he finish the job also?’
The diplomat raised his hands in protest. It had been impracticable to prevent the pilot from resuming his normal schedule, even though he was employed by their national airline.
‘His further absence would have aroused harmful comment. In any case he aided you, he did not direct you.’
Kamal interrupted. ‘We are wasting time,’ he said brusquely. ‘Revenge is good, Mohammed. If the Jew Maier is dead, we shall have revenged Argenteuil. But that raid should never have been possible. Our brothers in Paris were too lax. That publicity was embarrassing enough. We cannot afford to fail again.’
‘I see you have more understanding,’ commented the diplomat, thinking to himself what amateurs these two were at the game of politics. They would never know that he had drawn the attention of the press to that raid because of the anti-Israeli propaganda it offered. The relationship of breakaway movements such as Abu Youssouf 73 to the governments of the Arab world was always equivocal. Even successful hijackings, which reminded the West of the Palestinian cause more dramatically than any speech or statement, embarrassed the moderates. Catastrophes like the Entebbe affair were intolerable.
‘Listen, my friend,’ he went on, ‘if the cause of this air crash is discovered, the PLO will deny any involvement. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others will deplore the loss of life. It will be the end of financial support for Abu Youssouf 73. Two failures in as many weeks! Pouf.’
Kamal nodded and spoke to Mohammed. ‘He is right.’ He turned back to the diplomat. ‘What do you suggest?’
The diplomat told them.
‘And you will check on the details?’
‘Naturally. I have my informants.’
When Gilly Carslake’s office phone rang, she was making yet another effort to resolve two problems simultaneously. The first centred on writing a caption for a ‘filler’ article about furnishing small bedsitting rooms. A photograph the magazine had bought from abroad showed a room so narrow that it was filled completely by the bed. From the ceiling above hung a thick woven strap. Did you swing yourself into bed by hanging on this strap, or did you pull on it to make the bed itself swing up against the wall to provide more living space, or what? Gilly could hardly write a caption that simply disregarded the thing. It was too prominent, hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the picture. It could not be air-brushed away. What on earth was it for? Her second problem was the constant disturbance to her thoughts caused by Eckhardt. He was using her magazine table to write on, in theory polishing the story he would deliver to the Sunday Post by teatime, in reality pacing up and down, pausing to gaze out of the window at the wreckage in the station roof and the teams of blue boiler-suited men slowly cutting it away, stopping to try dramatic phrases out on her – in short ruining any chance she had of completing her own work. She lifted the phone, answering distractedly:
‘Oh yes, hang on a moment. I’ll fetch him.
Holding one palm over the mouthpiece, she called out to Eckhardt.
‘Hey, genius. It’s your Arab friend again.’
Grumbling, Eckhardt rose from his chair and took the call, leaning on the edge of Gilly’s desk. He listened impatiently for half a minute and then interrupted.
‘Much as I wish you well, Ahmed, I am dreadfully busy at this moment in time. Why don’t you ask one of your tame MPs? There are four or five Parliamentary Questions on the crash down for answer this afternoon.’
A greater degree of irritation crept into his voice as the Libyan pressed him for information.
‘I told you that the operation is now being controlled from Rochester Row and everything is being taken there. Of course, not the bodies. They’re using tents and barrack rooms in Chelsea. Yes, there is a lot of speculation about sabotage.’
Suddenly Eckhardt became exasperated.
‘Ahmed, my friend, I was grateful for the lead you gave me on the Israeli commando story in Paris. Most grateful. I imagine it helped you too. That’s fine. But the paper pays me for writing fact, or as near as I can get to it. Your idea won’t wash. All right, thank you for telling me. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Goodbye.’
He slammed down the instrument.
‘Temper, temper,’ said Gilly reprovingly. ‘You’re not at home, you know. I don’t want my telephone broken, thank you.’
‘Crazy Arabs.’
‘Whatever made me think you liked them?’ Gilly teased him. ‘Could it be something you said?’
Eckhardt disregarded her sarcasm.
‘Trying to persuade me the Israelis sabotaged the aircraft because an important Arab was on board! An American aircraft going to New York, where most of Israel’s support comes from. Crazy.’
Annoyed at the way in which he was disrupting her morning’s work, Gilly could not resist baiting him. He really was unbearably self-important.
‘You mean,’ she exclaimed, her blue eyes wide, accenting her words like an actress, ‘you really mean that your love affair with Islam is over?’
Ridicule was the only weapon guaranteed to injure Eckhardt’s professional vanity. He had never forgiven Private Eye for satirizing his reporting style. But he could give as good as he got. With silky deftness he began gathering up the draft of his article and his notebooks and fitting them into a slim leather briefcase.
‘Time for me to return to Fleet Street,’ he said, ‘especially as my welcome here appears to be running out.’
He eyed the photographs, proofs and layouts on Gilly’s desk.
‘Fortunate for the public that some of us write about the world as it really is,’ he remarked and was gone. Sam Eckhardt was accustomed to having the last word, both in print and in private.
