Sam 7, p.7
SAM 7, page 7
‘It is all here. Recently the authorities made a change which will help you. All aircraft coming from the south-east call on the same channel.’
‘Channel?’ queried Mohammed, who was finding this difficult to follow.
‘Radio frequency. You will need an aircraft-type radio to be certain of tuning to the correct channel. But do not worry, the air traffic controller always states the frequency clearly when he tells the aircraft to change on to another one.’
Kamal looked at the pilot and the Libyan diplomat.
‘My brothers,’ he said gravely, ‘this is a technical business. I am an engineer. If you want to blow up a bridge or a building, I can tell you where to place the charge. Mohammed and I are both trained in firing missiles. We can do that. But for this operation we also need an airline technician. We need a pilot or a navigator.’
‘It would be an honour,’ said the pilot quickly. ‘Alas, I am scheduled to take a 727 to Paris and Casablanca tomorrow morning.’
‘Passengers can wait,’ said Kamal brutally.
‘I am sure a relief pilot can be found,’ interjected the diplomat suavely, ‘and it is always an honour for any Arab to serve the cause of the oppressed Palestinians.’
The pilot saw he was trapped. The idea of shooting down an aircraft full of passengers appalled him. It was even worse than the possibility of being caught and spending years in a British jail. But the immediate reality consisted of these two determined killers.
Kamal, watching him closely, read his thoughts. ‘May I remind you,’ he said, ‘that armed violence must destroy the military, political, economic and financial institutions of the occupying Zionist society. That is our mission.’ Then, softening his voice, he added, ‘In any case the British are weak. When we put pressure on them they released Leila Khaled. You have nothing to fear.’
The pilot remembered the woman hijacker Leila, a heroine to all Arabs. He smiled tightly at Ahmed.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘First, find a suitable radio receiver. Then plot the probable course of the aircraft on a map of London. Meet us this evening in Earls Court. Longridge Gardens is a street near the underground station.’
The pilot wasted more than an hour searching hi-fi shops in the Tottenham Court Road for an airband receiver. None that were on sale could be tuned to a preselected frequency. Then it occurred to him that aircraft radios might be advertised in aviation magazines. He walked to a newsagent’s, bought three current issues and studied them on the spot. In Flight he found what he was hoping for. The short advertisement read, ‘360 channel portable VHF transceiver for hire.’ The address and telephone number of a firm dealing in aircraft spares followed. The pilot went to a telephone box and rang the number.
‘Yes,’ said a cultured English voice, ‘the set is available. It’s a Dynair Sky 515A. It works off its own battery and weighs nine pounds.’
‘What is the cost?’
‘Twenty pounds a week. The battery is a rechargeable Nikad, by the way, and we can loan you the battery charger.’
‘I will come at once,’ said the pilot. ‘I will need the set today for one week.’
He reached the firm’s office in Chiswick just before they closed. The young manager eyed him curiously, but relaxed when it became clear that the pilot knew about radios. The set was ideal. Compact, it had a pair of strong carrying handles on the top, along which were ranged the controls. Two large black knobs operated the crystal-controlled tuning, the left hand one the coarse MHz, the right hand one the fine selectivity down to 50 KHz. In fact it could work 380 channels, from 117.00 to 135.95. The young man slid out the slim black rod aerial, switched on the set and turned the knobs to 128.60. Clear as a bell, although they were indoors, came the monotonous voice of the London Volmet, broadcasting its continuous weather report for aircraft.
‘Excellent,’ said the pilot. ‘May I pay you now?’ He slipped two ten-pound notes from his wallet.
‘Out of curiosity, what are you going to use it for?’ asked the young man.
The pilot had prepared himself for this during the taxi ride to Chiswick. ‘A rich friend of mine is trying a field near his house as an airstrip. I have told him I can take a Cessna into it, but that I must have radio contact with him on the ground.’
The young man seemed satisfied.
‘We hired it out for a month recently for some demonstration flights in the Far East. Same sort of problem. By the way, what’s your address for the receipt?’
The pilot gave a fictitious hotel in Kensington, shook hands and carried the set and the charger gear out to the waiting taxi. Twenty minutes later he was with Mohammed Khadir in Earls Court.
At much the same moment, though local time was an hour later in Jerusalem, Ben Maier was preparing to leave the Israeli Foreign Ministry, go home to his parents’ house, pack and have an early night before his breakfast-time departure next morning. He was clearing the desk in his borrowed office when the internal phone rang. It was the head of the department that deals with France.
‘The cipher room has just told me there is an urgent telegram in from Paris. You had better stay until they’ve unbuttoned it. Would you come along to my office, please?’
Half an hour later the decoded telegram came through. It said simply that more important information about the Abu Youssouf 73 group had come to light during the day. It would be desirable for Maier to travel via Paris in order to collect it and receive further briefing. To transfer the material to London in the time available was impossible.
‘Decisions and revisions which a moment will reverse,’ commented the head of the department, who was an admirer of T. S. Eliot. ‘You will have to take the 07.10 flight to Paris instead. I think it is 07.10 on Thursday, arriving about midday.’ El Al’s schedules changed often.
He pulled an airline timetable out of his desk drawer and consulted it. ‘Almost right. 12.15 it arrives.’
‘How do I go on from there? Surely there we do not have a Paris-New York flight?’
The head of department perused the folder.
‘Correct. It is essential that the documents are with the delegation by Thursday evening. The Ambassador must have time to study them before the debate on Friday. This is explosive stuff. We don’t want it to misfire. Best we ask the El Al manager in Paris to make the arrangements. There is certainly an Air France flight and the security will be greater if your booking is a last-minute one. We’ll warn New York to expect a message from El Al tomorrow.’
In New York it was early afternoon when the Foreign Ministry telegram from Jerusalem reached the Israeli Delegation. The Counsellor failed to catch Connie at the hospital and finally spoke to her when she was back home in Tudor City.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Connie,’ he assured her. ‘Ben has to visit our Paris Embassy on the way back so he’ll be on a different flight. We shall know which tomorrow and I’ll call you straightaway.’ He should not have told her, but he knew how worried she would be.
Yet when Connie put the phone down she felt a pang of fear that something was going wrong, that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach for which there is no medicine. She told herself not to be a fool, that an educated woman, a qualified doctor like herself, should not succumb to irrational emotions. It was no good. The uneasiness persisted.
News of the changed Israeli plans reached Mohammed Khadir in London at 3.45 a.m. on Thursday morning. The telephone shrilled on the landing outside his two rooms in Longridge Gardens. Khadir slept lightly and was half expecting a communication from Tripoli anyway. He ran out and answered it before the other tenants could wake or complain. Then, knowing he could do nothing until daytime about the problem, he sensibly returned to his bed.
At Cannon Row on Thursday morning, Commander Thompson was discussing the remainder of the week with Sturgess and Chance. So far it had gone smoothly. Sunday afternoon’s demo had attracted huge support – at least forty thousand people – without any worse disturbance than a minor scuffle when counter-demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon. Equally the three-day State visit, one of the major events of the year, had passed without incident. There had been threats but no actual bombs. Not that the hoax demanded less police effort than the real thing, it could easily take more. Any search for explosives in Buckingham Palace had to be exhaustive since the Queen resolutely refused to leave the building merely on account of a threat. She would only leave if a bomb had been positively identified. Nonetheless, a hoax could still cause a disturbance to exactingly timed schedules. If the price of liberty was eternal vigilance, it was the police who paid the price on these public occasions. Cumulatively Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday had been exhausting days. Thompson was keeping his fingers crossed that he would not need many constables to control the Palestinian demo on Saturday.
‘How many marchers are you expecting?’ he asked.
‘They’re hoping for fifteen hundred. I reckon if half that show up they’ll be lucky,’ said Sturgess. ‘We’ll just have one control van at King Charles’s Island.’
At the top of Whitehall, in the centre of the road, stands an equestrian statue of King Charles I, gazing proudly down the wide street towards the Banqueting Hall outside which the ‘Royal Martyr’ was executed on 30 January 1649. Each anniversary costumed ‘Royalists’ lay wreaths there in his memory. More prosaically it is a favourite spot for the police to park their vans during meetings in Trafalgar Square.
Thompson indicated approval. ‘How many Serials?’ he asked.
‘Seven,’ said Sturgess.
A Serial was a busload of police comprising one inspector, three sergeants and twenty-one constables. They would arrive in the bus, then walk as escorts to the marchers.
‘Have another two in reserve down here. I want a tight rein kept on this demo, Colin. Now, what about the Jews?’
‘I’ve persuaded the Zionist organizations to meet at Hyde Park Corner. It should be no sweat keeping the two demos separate.’
Thompson nodded. Hyde Park Corner and Trafalgar Square are a full mile apart. Things could only go wrong if the young Jewish right-wingers of the Heerut were allowed in sight of the Palestinians. That was unlikely.
‘Any more Interpol messages?’ he asked Chance.
The burly CID chief superintendent consulted a notebook. ‘No. But the Special Branch report that a suspected Black September leader flew in from Algiers last night. His name is Kamal al-Khulaifi. He gave the immigration officer a non-existent hotel in Kensington as his address.’
‘No grounds for stopping him?’
‘He had a valid visa,’ said Chance. ‘He’s not a known terrorist. His kind are too smart to carry arms on an aircraft unless they’re actually hijacking it.’
‘They’ll pick up weapons here though,’ Sturgess commented.
‘Let’s stick to the point.’ Thompson’s rebuke was mild. ‘And the point is, has he come for the demo, or just for the beer, or what?’
‘The demo’s the only reason we can think of,’ commented Chance.
‘That is exactly what puzzles me,’ said Thompson reflectively. ‘It’s not in their interest to turn the demo into a riot. Not when they are trying to present themselves at the United Nations as responsible Arab politicians, or at least the PLO are. And talking of politicians any news of Empson?’
‘As far as we know, he’s still encouraging the organizers to believe the Prime Minister will be thrilled to receive their petition.’
‘He’s a cunning so-and-so, that. I wish I knew what he was really up to.’
Had either the police or his fellow Members of Parliament known what Andrew Empson, the Member for Strathclyde North, was doing on this fine morning of Thursday 9 May, they would have been deeply surprised. Even the rest of the thirty or so MPs reckoned by the security services to be in the pocket of one foreign power or another might have wondered at the way Empson was earning his retainer from the Arabs. At 10.45- a.m. he was leaning on the counter of the El Al office in Regent Street, talking with earnest sincerity to one of the ticket sales girls. She was obviously English, and he had taken care to join the short queue of inquirers at her position. She would be more likely to give information away than an Israeli would.
‘I have an old friend passing through London on your flight today,’ he was saying in his Lowland burr, ‘and I particularly wanted to see him while he’s in transit.’ He made a show of consulting a notebook.
‘It’s your Flight 255 from Tel Aviv and his name is Maier.’
‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to give details of passenger lists,’ said the girl firmly, and then to soften her refusal to this enquirer’s problem, she added, ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to meet him when he’s in transit. They don’t come through Customs.’
‘As a matter of fact, that’s where you’re wrong, lassie,’ he declared unhurriedly. ‘I have the happy privilege of being a Member of Parliament and arrangements will be made for us to use one of the VIP rooms at the airport.’ Less pompously he explained, ‘But I dinna want to go all that way if for some reason he’s no’ on the flight at all. Luckily I was passing so I came in.’
The girl hesitated. She realized she had seen the name Maier somewhere today. Perhaps she ought to be more helpful to an MP.
‘Can you identify yourself, please?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Indeed I can that,’ said Empson unhesitatingly and drew a House of Commons pass from his wallet. She examined it and then asked, ‘What did you say your Mr Maier’s initial was?’
‘B. B for Benjamin.’
‘Would you mind waiting a moment?’
She disappeared into the office behind. Empson stood, hoping she had not merely gone to fetch another official. He had no idea why the Libyan wanted this information. He merely knew from the diplomat’s tone on the telephone at breakfast time that this was not a request he could refuse. One reason was that if he did then his £200 a month cash retainer would cease, a loss that he could ill afford on a parliamentary salary after tax of less than £400 a month. The second was that even then he would remain open to the threat of exposure. They had said as much during a quarrel six months ago. It had not been necessary to repeat the threat this morning. The harsh urgency in the Libyan’s voice was enough. Now he prayed the El Al salesgirl would not ask more questions because he knew instinctively that in performing this service he was sinking a whole stratum lower in the underworld of international politics and it frightened him.
After a very long four minutes the girl returned, smiling.
‘I thought I remembered the name,’ she said, as pleased as a kitten that had found the cream. ‘Your friend isn’t on the 255 after all. We had a telex from our Paris office. He’s booked on Atlantic Airlines Flight 260 from Paris to New York instead. It lands at Heathrow en route at 16.25.’
Andrews thanked her profusely and stepped out into Regent Street. He walked down to Piccadilly Circus and telephoned from one of the callboxes in the underground station. His hand was trembling and the Libyan’s sly congratulations did nothing to lighten his growing depression.
Ben Maier’s sojourn in Paris was brief. During lunch at the Embassy the significance of the new evidence about the Abu Youssouf 73 group’s plans was explained to him, and additional documents handed over. Then he was driven back to Charles de Gaulle just in time for the Atlantic Airlines Flight 260, on which El Al’s Paris manager had booked him in the economy class with no mention of his diplomatic status. He was the last of the 264 passengers to check in and he showed his boarding card at the departure gate only twenty minutes before the ‘Blue Riband’s’ scheduled 13.35 take-off time. Had he arrived two minutes later he would have been left behind.
Few if any of those 264 passengers realized the preparations and effort devoted to making their departure punctual. During its brief stay in Paris the DC-10 had been cleaned, carefully inspected by maintenance engineers and fuelled with thirty tons of aviation kerosene. The galleys had received the appropriate number of meals, plus a few spare, and the holds in the aircraft’s belly had been loaded with twenty-one tons of containerized freight. At 14.00 Bill Curtis and his crew had taken over. Two pilots, a systems engineer, the maître d’hôtel and nine stewardesses. Thirteen in all. The second pilot, Joe Walther, a comparative youngster of twenty-eight, had completed the load sheets, calculating the total weight as 179 tons. As usual the tanks were only partly full, otherwise the landing weight after the short Paris-London hop would be above limits, so the DC-10 was comparatively light. Joe then worked out the exact speeds for lift-off, for climb to the altitude of 27,000 feet which they had been assigned when they filed their flight plan with Air Traffic Control, and for their brief cruise along the Amber Two West airway. Finally the two pilots had made their own external and internal checks of the aircraft. They and the systems engineer were completing the long list as the passengers boarded. The DC-10 was pushed gently back from her dock at the terminal at 15.30. At 15.36 she was airborne. The way she left the ground, you would hardly have thought she weighed so much.
Ben Maier loathed the take-off. He loathed it whatever the aircraft and he loathed it equally at Charles de Gaulle, Heathrow, Kennedy or anywhere else. The thudding, roaring rush along the tarmac and then the sudden steep angle of the climb always alarmed him. If he had known what pilots think about the dangers of the noise abatement procedures that demand this climb, plus an early reduction of power, he would probably have refused to fly again. As it was he gripped the armrests of his seat and tried not to look out of the window beside him. He hated the way the whole world tilted crazily when the aircraft was turning. This time they passed quickly above the few clouds and continued ascending straight.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may now smoke if you wish and unfasten your seat belts, though we recommend you keep them loosely fastened when seated. In a moment we shall be serving drinks from the bar.’ The familiar stewardess’s announcement over the loudspeaker eased Maier’s tension a little. Even as the voice clicked off a blonde in a crisp green and gold uniform was asking him what he would like.
