Inside the VIP pod General Akhtar shifts in his seat and tells himself that all his life he has waited for this moment and even now, if he can find a good enough excuse to get off the plane, he can fulfil his destiny. The man who has spent a decade creating epic lies and having a nation of one hundred and thirty million people believe them, the man who has waged epic psychological battles against countries much bigger, the man who credits himself for bringing the Kremlin down on its knees, is stuck for an idea. He knows the air conditioning is off but does anyone really know how an air freshener works?
He thinks hard, raises his hand in the air and says, “I need to go to the loo.” And Bannon, of all people, a lowly lieutenant, puts his hand on his thigh and says, “General, maybe you should wait for this bird to take off.”
Ambassador Raphel thinks that he’ll put in a request for transfer to a South American country and start a family.
One and a half miles away, in a sleepy mango orchard, perched behind the dust-covered dark green leaves, the crow flutters its wings and starts flying towards the roaring noise generated by the four fifteen-hundred horsepower engines of Pak One which is leaving the runway, never to touch down again.
Our Cessna starts to taxi towards the runway as soon as the presidential plane gets airborne. The climb is steep for an aircraft of this size. Pak One seems to struggle against gravity but its four engines roar and it lifts off, like a whale going up for air. It climbs sluggishly but clears the runway and turns right, still climbing.
Our own take-off is noisy but smooth. The Cessna leaves the runway lightly and takes to the air as if it were its natural habitat. General Beg is absorbed in reading his book with his Ray-Bans perched on the tip of his nose. The pilot notices that I am plugging my ears with my fingers and passes me a set of headphones and forgets to unplug them. I can listen in on his conversation with the tower as well as the tower’s calls to Pak One.
“Pak One setting course for Islamabad.”
“Roger,” the air traffic controller says.
“Clearing runway. Turning right.”
“Allah hafiz. Happy landings.”
So absorbed am I in their inane exchange that I get a real jolt when our Cessna drops suddenly. It recovers quickly and starts climbing again. General Beg’s hands are in the air. “A bloody crow. It came at my plane. Did you see it? Can you imagine there are crows flying around when we have cleared the whole area of all possible hazards. Crows in the Code Red Zone. Whoever heard of that? It’s thanks to my pilot here that we are still alive.” The pilot gives us a thumbs-up sign without looking back.
“Bird shooters,” says General Beg as if the apple has just fallen on his head. “This is what this place needs: bird shooters.” He starts scribbling in a file and misses one of the rarest manoeuvres in the history of aviation.
Pak One’s nose dips, it goes into a steep dive, then the nose rises up and the plane starts to climb again. Like an airborne roller coaster, Pak One is treading an invisible wave in the hot August air. Up and down and then up again. The phenomenon is called phugoid.
Flying sluggishly, the crow surfs the hot air currents. Having eaten his own weight in mangoes, the crow can barely move his wings. His beak droops, his eyes half close, his wings flap in slow motion. The crow is wondering why he has left his sanctuary in the mango orchard. He thinks of turning back and spending the rest of the day in the orchard. He tucks his right wing under his body and goes into a lazy circle to turn back. Suddenly the crow finds himself somersaulting through the air, hurtling towards a giant metal whale that is sucking in all the air in the world. The crow has a very lucky escape when he dips below the propeller that is slicing air at a speed of fifteen hundred revolutions per minute. But that will prove to be his last stroke of luck. The crow hurtles through the engine, spins with the intake cycle and is sucked into a side duct; his tiny shriek is drowned out by the roar of the engine.
A pilot on a routine C13O flight would not even give a second glance to a crow in its path and carry on flying. A pilot flying Pak One would try to steer clear of it. When you are flying the President (and the US ambassador) you try to stay away from any hazards even when the risk ratio might be that of an ant and an elephant squaring up to each other. Sweating profusely, the pilot curses the inherent stupidity of the army generals and puts the aircraft into a shallow dive. He knows he has not avoided the bird hit, when the pressure needle monitoring his port engine suddenly dips and the air conditioning is switched on automatically. A refreshing puff of cold air send shivers through his sweat-soaked spine. A whiff of lavender makes him forget his orders to keep the air conditioning off.
General Zia feels the plane going into a dive, unhooks his safety belt and stands up. He is suddenly clear in his head that the time has come to show the buggers who is in charge around here. Eleven years, he thinks. Can you rule Allah’s people for eleven years if Allah is not on your side?
General Zia stands firm, hands on his hips, like a commander on a turbulent sea. His audience slide in their seats and find themselves pinned against each other like people in a nasty turn on a roller coaster.
General Zia flings his right arm backwards and then brings it up slowly, like a baseball pitcher explaining his action to a bunch of children. He raises a fist and out of this fist comes his index finger. “This plane, by the will of Allah, will go up.” He brings his index finger up as if pulling the nose of the plane up with his fingertip. They all watch, first in relief and then in horror, as the plane actually starts to go up again. They slide backwards. Arnold Raphel’s head is on General Akhtar’s shoulder for a moment. He excuses himself and tightens his safety belt.
General Zia sits down, slaps his thighs with both his hands and looks around, expecting applause.
General Akhtar changes his mind and thinks maybe all his life without knowing it he has been serving a saint, a miracle maker. He looks at General Zia with reverence and thinks maybe he should confess to what he has done and General Zia will be able to undo it. Turn the VX gas in the air-freshener tube back into lavender vapours. Then he stops himself and thinks if General Zia really was a saint, he would know that the plane’s pilots are dead by now. VX gas takes two minutes to paralyse, another minute to kill. If you are flying Pak One you can’t really do much in that one minute. If General Zia is really a saint, maybe he can bring the pilots back from the dead.
The air-conditioning ducts hiss into life.
General Akhtar was hoping death to announce itself with a whiff of lavender but what he smells is a dead bird’s smell.
He is still thinking about how to articulate this problem when the plane’s nose dips and it goes down into another dive.
The back door of the VIP pod opens. Loadmaster Fayyaz asks, “Shall I serve the mangoes, sir?”
“What a vulgar word? What the hell is phugoid?” General Beg is suddenly very curious.
“It’s just what an aeroplane does when its controls are neutral. The plane will start going down. But when it goes down beyond a certain angle, its internal axis will correct itself and the plane will start going up again. Then it will go down again. But before that it will go up. Until somebody takes the controls again.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I studied it in my Aerodynamics class.”
“Why are the controls neutral? Why is nobody flying this bloody plane?” he asks me.
Why?
“Pak One. Come in, Pak One. Pak One.” The air traffic controller’s voice is on the verge of tears.
Bannon’s voice tomes over the headphones. “Jesus, fucking Christ. These zoomies are sleeping. No. They are dead. The pilots are dead. We are all fucking dead.” He chokes on his last sentence and the only sound that comes over the headphones is electrical static.