The Lights of Skaro (16 page)

He squeezed by her into the aisle and indicated, with a shamed, humble movement of his head to the
rokos,
that he wanted to go to the washroom. She said it was one of the most degrading things she had ever watched: that battle-scarred old hero begging permission from his guards like a small boy asking to leave the room. He got a careless nod of approval.

It was an outmoded Czech plane, with a single washroom up forward next to the pilot’s compartment. Everyone’s eyes were on Radovič when he got as far as the washroom door. They saw him stop to look at his watch once more, then fumble a spectacle-case out of his pocket and carefully read what was written on a piece of paper he took from the case with his spectacles. He put paper and spectacles back in the case, snapped it shut, replaced it in his pocket and stepped through the door that led not to the washroom but into the pilot’s compartment.

Even after the door closed behind him the
rokos
did nothing. It seems unbelievable that they could be so slow to think, but they made no move until the plane banked sharply, moments later, and came around in a tight turn towards the west.

Cora talked to the pilot and the co-pilot afterwards. The pilot, in particular, was eager to tell his part. He was genuinely glad to be out of the Republic, and proud to have had a hand in Radovič’s escape even though the hand was forced on him. The co-pilot was neutral. In normal circumstances he might have gone back to the Republic, but the circumstances weren’t normal. He stayed out to save his neck. He co-operated with Radovič and the pilot for the same reason.

The roar of the motors prevented them from hearing Radovič when he came into their compartment and locked the steel door behind him. They first realized that they had company when he put the muzzle of his revolver against the pilot’s neck and said – shouted, because of the motors – “Turn left and hold course at 267 degrees. You have forty-five seconds in which to do it. At the end of that time I will pull the trigger.”

He held the old turnip of a watch in his free hand, counting seconds. The pilot twisted his neck against the gun muzzle far enough to see that much.

The carefully calculated time schedule which had been smuggled to Radovič allowed forty-five seconds of continued northward flight for each degree of compass correction that would be necessary to point the plane towards their new destination. He had it all clearly in mind. After he killed the pilot, the new course would be 266, forty-five seconds later 265. His instructions did not contemplate an arrival at course 265. The pilot might die, but the co-pilot had to live.

Radovič’s life and the lives of everybody aboard the plane were staked – parlayed, to use a racetrack term – first on the pilot’s reaction to the pistol muzzle behind his ear, alternatively on the co-pilot’s reaction to the pilot’s immediate death for failure to obey orders.

The pilot’s reaction was a deep conviction that he had no more than the forty-five seconds promised him in which to act. The gun at his neck, the watch he could see from the corner of his eye, the absence of any further threat or bluster from Radovič, combined to make him sure of it. There was no idle bluff in a man who said
Do thus and so in such and such a time or die,
then calmly counted seconds while you made up your mind which it was to be. But he used the time he had.

He shouted back, ‘We all die if you shoot me, comrade. The plane does not fly by itself.”

“Your comrade will fly it.” Radovič pointed the gun briefly at the co-pilot, whose hand was moving towards a microphone. “I will shoot you in the arm if you touch it, comrade. Believe me. I have shot many men.”

The co-pilot believed him. He shouted in complete astonishment, ‘Why, you’re Radovič!”

“Yes. When I kill this man you will have forty-five seconds in which to put the plane on 266 degrees. Be ready to take the controls.”

The pilot, feeling his hair rise at that ‘when’, shouted, “Is he really Radovič?”

“Yes! Bank, you fool! For God’s sake, bank before he shoots!”

The co-pilot was even more frightened than the pilot. The pilot was an older man who had fought in the revolution.Radovič’s name was a symbol he had followed once and could follow again in good conscience, even blindly. Hesaid, “It will not be necessary for you to shoot, Comrade President. What is the new course again?”

“Two hundred and sixty-seven degrees.”

“You said two hundred and sixty-six a moment ago.”

“It would have changed in fifteen seconds.”

They came around in their sharp bank. Before the
rokos
began to beat on the door the pilot said, “At this speed and on this course we will be over the frontier zone in seven minutes. Is that your intention, Comrade President?”

“In eight and one-half minutes we will have crossed the frontier zone and will be above the airport at Runstadt. Land there.”

“They’ll try to shoot us down at the frontier. No plane is permitted to cross in this area.”

“They might miss us. I can’t miss you. Obey your orders.” The pilot shook his head.

“You can put the gun away, Comrade President. I followed you in 1942. I’ll follow you now, although I don’t understand this. But we’re all dead if they hit us with an anti-aircraft shell, and only the captain of a plane can give orders in an emergency. If you want to cross the frontier to Runstadt let me take you across in my own way, without a pistol in my ear and on a straight course that will set us up like a balloon.”

Radovič didn’t answer. The
rokos
were pounding on the door by then, and the co-pilot’s fingers were sneaking again towards the microphone. Radovič jerked the pistol at him warningly.

The pilot said, “That door won’t hold forever. Put a bullet through it. It will be more useful to you there than scrambling my brains. I’m going to climb.” To the co-pilot he said, “Give me all the power we have and keep your hand away from that microphone. I make the decisions on this plane, subject to Comrade President Radovič’s command.” The co-pilot gave up when he found himself opposed by his captain. They climbed to maximum altitude, as steeply as the motors would take them. The pitch of the plane interfered with the
rokos’
efforts to break down the door, as did the narrowness of the passageway in which they were trying to crowd themselves to bring their combined weight to bear. When they began to shoot at the lock, Radovič fired through the steel of the door, wounding one of them in the thigh and driving them back to the tail of the plane. They kept shooting from there, first at the door-lock and then, as the plane approached the frontier, in suicidal stupidity at random into the forward compartment. The pilot was cut by a flying splinter of steel before he could take cover, but the extra thickness of the washroom walls shielded an area around the co-pilot’s seat from the
rokos’
fire. The co-pilot flew the plane during the actual zone crossing, with the pilot crouched beside him calling their maneuvers, andRadovič, jammed with them into the small protected corner, shouting into the microphone of the plane’s radio: “This is Janos Radovič, President of the Republic: Do you hear me, comrades? It is my plane that crosses the border towards Runstadt. Do not fire on me, comrades. Soldiers and citizens, this is Janos Radovič speaking, in the plane which flies across the frontier towards Runstadt. Hear me, comrades. This is Janos Radovič.”

His plea helped. Standing orders for troops manning the fortified border zone were absolute, but the power of the familiar voice they had listened to and obeyed for so many years was almost as strong. Some guns fired, many did not. Orders, counter-orders, demands, warnings, threats, and confusion crackled in the headphones which the pilot and co-pilot wore, while the slow old plane dodged and darted clumsily among blooming bursts of shellfire, the
rokos’
bullets tore ugly holes in the battered door, and Radovič held off one danger with shots from his pistol while he tried to shield them all from the other with the power of his name: “Hear me, comrades. This is Janos Radovič—” A flight of pursuit planes had taken off to intercept them as soon as they were reported at the border zone, but it had a distance to go. By the time it caught up with them they were flying into another rising flight of interceptors on the far side of the frontier. The warning bursts of bullets which forced them down at Runstadt came from the second flight. The first flight turned back without firing a shot.

Cora would not confess, or did not remember, that she was frightened, even when the
rokos
were shooting into the pilot’s compartment from almost directly over her head and the plane bucked and jumped from near misses by the ground gunners. She said she was too busy planning the story in her mind.

She was, technically, on a pool assignment, covering for us all. But a reporter’s personal experiences are his own material, pool or no pool, and none of us could legitimately criticize her for the superb news beat she made out of hers. It was an opportunity that couldn’t happen twice in a lifetime. Everybody aboard the plane was held in isolation for forty-eight hours while they were screened and questioned, and no other reporters could get to Radovič. Only Cora. When the doors opened at last and the other reporters rushed in to find they were too late, she walked out with the story written, ready to file.

There were two stories, actually, although she ran them together. One was her own, of the escape, the other Radovič’s, of his imprisonment. Coming as it did so soon after Djakovo’s story, Radovič’s rocked governments. The entire French cabinet went out of office on the issue of peaceful coexistence. Statesmen all over western Europe took strong public pro- or anti-Radovič stands, mostly pro, and the American press boiled editorially. Djakovo had been a relatively obscure peasant fanatic, but Radovič was a world figure. What he had to say carried weight.

He told, without trying to excuse himself, of his own failures; how, with full power in his hands and the citizens of the newly established Republic solidly behind him, its first elected president, he had let power be stolen from him; how, because of his inexperience, his incapacity, the Party had been able to take gradually increasing control, first of the government, then of him as its figurehead; the methods they had used to break him when he tried, too late, to resist them; finally of his own shabby function as their mouthpiece. It was a naked, bitter confession. For three years he had functioned only as an announcer and salesman of the Party program; reading prepared speeches which were handed him to read, signing papers he was not permitted to examine, making hundreds of recordings on every subject from farm collectivization to international relations, sometimes reading into the recorder a vitriolic attack on the Republic’s foreign enemies within minutes after recording an appeal for friendship, tolerance, and understanding from the same enemies. They would not even let him shave himself or use a sharp knife, so he couldn’t commit suicide. And by the time he was desperate enough to attempt suicide they had so many recordings of his voice that they could have kept him alive for months. Not even his death could cure what he had done to his people. Only confession and explanation.

He asked Cora to quote him directly when he said, “I have been a traitor to my country. I confess it. I was not a willing traitor, only a weak and foolish one, but I was nevertheless a traitor. I do not ask to be excused. I ask only that those who followed me when I was not a traitor think of me as I was then, a man and a patriot, and believe that Janos Radovič died when he became President of the Republic and the tool of its enemies.”

He still had the revolver, and one unspent cartridge. He shot himself before the doors were opened to other reporters.

Cora ended her story with Radovič's self-pronounced epitaph, word for word.

Piotr continued to peer ahead through the windshield, which was blurred with dust and spattered steam from the radiator. He said nothing then, or minutes afterwards when Cora added, ‘So if you have to hate him, hate what they made out of him. Not the man you fought tor. And not yourself for fighting for him, Piotr.”

She couldn’t talk any more after that. She had to stand up and hang on to the body-stakes with the other girls. We were grinding through a boulder-filled creek bed, fording the stream where a bridge had washed away. The old truck bucked and bounced like a bronco.

There was glass or sharp metal in the stream bed. When we pulled back to the road at the far side a front tire was flat, with a clean gash through casing and tube.

Piotr and I got out to look at the flat. I asked him where he kept the spare. He said, “What spare? Four tires are all that are allowed.”

I felt suddenly cold. For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a ten-dollar recapping job we were all dead. But Piotr, although he had never seen a de-mountable rim before in his life, knew how it was that decrepit old trucks managed to keep running on the Republic’s roads. He unlocked a wooden locker on one of the running boards. It was full of rusty tools, cracked spark-plugs, tire-irons, pieces of wire, a patching kit, a jack, a hand-pump, slabs of old casing that could be used to make a boot. He said, “Work another miracle,
gospod.”

It took me over an hour. He helped with the pumping, when I had finished patching the tube and glued a boot into the casing. The girls, after watching us for a while, thought it would be a good time to go for a swim in a pool of the creek.

Piotr saw no objection to it when they asked his permission. They were pretty casual about the location of the pool they picked to paddle in, and where they undressed. I got the impression that when peasant girls emancipated themselves from the
yashmak
and
haremlik
they emancipated right down to the buff. Cora had no choice but to be emancipated with them. But nobody came along the road to gawp, and Piotr and I were too anxious to finish our job and get moving to waste time on peep-shows. He yelled to them to get dressed while he was pumping the tire. I cleaned the windshield and filled the radiator while we waited for stragglers.