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The procedure was noisy. It was barely fifty degrees in Tehran that night, far below what the monkeys were accustomed to, and that didn’t help their collective mood any more than anything else that had happened to them over the past few days. They responded to the newest trauma with screeches and howls that echoed across the ramp. Even people who’d never heard monkeys before would not mistake it for anything else, but that could not be helped. Finally it was done. The cabin door opened, and the crew had a chance to look at what had become of their once-spotless aircraft. It would be weeks before they got the smell out, they were sure, and just scrubbing it down would be an onerous task best not considered at the moment. Together they walked aft, then down the stairs and off to where their cars were parked.
The monkeys headed north in what for them was their third or fourth–and last–journey by truck. It was a short one, up a divided highway, over a cloverleaf interchange built under the reign of the Shah, then west to Hasanabad. Here there was a farm, long since set aside for the same purpose which had occasioned the transport of the monkeys from Africa to Asia. The farm was state-owned, used as an experimental station to test new crops and fertilizers, and it had been hoped that the produce grown here would feed the new arrivals, but it was still winter and nothing was growing at the moment. Instead, several truckloads of dates from the southeastern region of the country had just arrived. The monkeys smelled them as their transport pulled up to the new three-story concrete building that would be their final home. It only agitated them all the more, since they’d had neither food nor water since leaving the continent of their birth, but at least it gave them the hope of a meal, and a tasty one at that, as a last meal is supposed to be.
THE GULFSTREAM G-IV touched down at Benghazi exactly on its flight plan. It had actually been as pleasant a journey as was possible under the circumstances. Even the normally roiled air over the central Sahara had been calm, making for a smooth ride. Sister Jean Baptiste had re-
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mained unconscious for most of the flight, drifting into semi-awareness only a few times, and soon drifting back out again, actually more comfortable than the other four people aboard, whose protective garb prevented even a sip of water.
The doors never opened on the aircraft. Instead fuel trucks pulled up and their drivers dismounted to attach hoses to the caps in the long white wings. Dr. Moudi was still tensely awake. Sister Maria Magdalena was dozing. She was as old as the patient, and had scarcely slept in days, devoted as she was to her colleague. It was too bad, Moudi thought, frowning as he looked out the window. It was unjust. He didn’t have it in his heart to hate these people anymore. He’d felt that way once. He’d thought all Westerners were enemies of his country, but these two were not. Their home country was essentially neutral toward his. They were not the animistic pagans of Africa, ignorant and uncaring of the true God. They’d devoted their lives to service in His name, and both had surprised him by showing respect for his personal prayers and devotions. More than anything, he respected their belief that faith was a path to progress rather than acceptance of preordained destiny, an idea not totally congruent with his Islamic beliefs, but not exactly contrary to them either. Maria Magdalena had a rosary in her hands–disinfected–which she used to organize her prayers to Mary, mother of Jesus the prophet, venerated as thoroughly in the Koran as in her own abbreviated scriptures, and as fine a model for women to follow as any woman who had ever lived . . .
Moudi snapped his head away from them to look outside. He couldn’t allow such thoughts. He had a task, and here were the instruments of that task, one’s fate assigned by Allah, and the other’s chosen by herself–and that was that. The task was without, not within, not one of his making, a fact made clear when the fuel trucks pulled away and the engines started up again. The flight crew was in a hurry, and so was he, the better to get the troublesome part of his mission behind, and the mechanical part begun. There was reason to rejoice. All those years among pagans, living in tropical heat, not a mosque within miles of
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his abode. Miserable, often tainted food, always wondering if it was clean or unclean, and never really being sure. That was behind him. What lay before was service to his God and his country.
Two aircraft, not one, taxied off to the main north-south runway, jostling as they did so on concrete slabs made uneven by the murderous desert heat of summer and the surprising cold of winter nights. The first of them was not Moudi’s. That G-IV, outwardly identical in every way but a single digit’s difference on the tail code, streaked down the runway and lifted off due north. His aircraft duplicated the takeoff roll, but as soon as the wheels were up, this G-IV turned right for a southeasterly heading toward Sudan, a lonely aircraft in a lonely desert night.
The first turned slightly west, and entered the normal international air corridor for the French coast. In due course, it would pass near the island of Malta, where a radar station existed to serve the needs of the airport at Valetta and also to perform traffic-control duties for the central Mediterranean. The crew of this aircraft were all air force types who customarily flew political and business luminaries from point to point, which was safe, well paid, and boring. Tonight would be different. The co-pilot had his eyes fixed jointly on his knee chart and the GPS navigation system. Two hundred miles short of Malta, at a cruising altitude of 39,000 feet, he took the nod from the pilot and flipped the radar transponder setting to 7711.
“VALETTA APPROACH, VALETTA Approach, this is November-Juliet-Alpha, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
The controller at Valetta immediately noted the triple-bogie signature on his scope. It was a quiet watch at the traffic-control center, the normally sparse air traffic to monitor, and this night was as routine as any other–he keyed his microphone at once as his other hand waved for his supervisor.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, are you declaring an emergency, sir?”
“Valetta, Juliet-Alpha, affirmative. We are medical
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evacuation flight inbound Paris from Zaire. We just lost number-two engine and we have electrical problems, stand by–”
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, standing by, sir.” The scope showed the aircraft’s altitude as 390, then 380, then 370. “Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, I show you losing altitude.”
The voice in his headphones changed. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Both engines out, both engines out. Attempting restart. This is Juliet-Alpha.”
“Your direct penetration course Valetta is three-four-three, say again, direct vector Valetta three-four-three. We are standing by, sir.”
A terse, clipped,”Roger” was all the controller got back. The altitude readout was 330 now.
“What’s happening?” the supervisor asked.
“He says both engines out, he’s dropping rapidly.” A computer screen showed the aircraft to be a Gulfstream, and the flight plan was confirmed.
“It glides well,” the supervisor offered optimistically; 310, they both saw. The G-IV didn’t glide all that well, however.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta.”
Nothing.
“Juliet-Alpha, this is Valetta Approach.”
“What else is–” The supervisor checked the screen himself. No other aircraft in the area, and all one could do was watch anyway.
THE BETTER TO simulate the in-flight emergency, the pilot throttled his engines back to idle. The tendency was to ham things up, but they wouldn’t. In fact, they’d say nothing else at all. He pushed the yoke farther forward to increase his rate of descent, then turned to port as though angling toward Malta. That should make the tower people feel good, he thought, passing through 25,000 feet. It actually felt good. He’d been a fighter pilot for his country once, and missed the delightful feelings you got from yanking and banking an airplane around the sky. A descent of this speed would have his passengers white-faced
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and panicking. For the pilot it just felt like what flying was supposed to be.
“HE MUST BE very heavy,” the supervisor said.
“Cleared into Paris De Gaulle.” The controller shrugged and grimaced. “Just topped off in Benghazi.”
“Bad fuel?” The answer was merely another shrug.
It was like watching death on television, all the more horrible that the alpha-numeric blip’s altitude digits were clicking down like the symbols on a slot machine.
The supervisor lifted a phone. “Call the Libyans. Ask if they can get a rescue aircraft up. We have an aircraft about to go down in the Gulf of Sidra.”
“Valetta Approach, this is USS Radford, do you copy, over.”