Kingfisher

Rating:
Summary: For the victims of Babi Yar
Review: First published in 1977, KINGFISHER is perhaps dated. But it's still surpasses most of the genre.

David, Moses, Rebecca and Isaac are young Jewish activists in Kiev in the former Soviet Union. David, the group's idealistic and charismatic leader, has, since childhood, drummed into the others the lesson of nearby Babi Yar. There, during WWII, the Nazis filled a ravine with the bodies of executed Jews. Now, David says, the Jews must fight their oppressors, including the present-day communist regime. Together they plan and carry out an attack on a local policeman, gravely wounding the officer with his own gun. But the assault is botched, the man lives, and Moses is identified as the shooter and arrested. The others, fearing imminent exposure during the torture Moses is sure to undergo, make a desperate escape to the West by hijacking at gunpoint an internal flight to Tashkent, during which the pilot is accidentally killed. Prevented from landing by West Germany, Holland, and France, the aircraft, flown by the female co-pilot and with 60+ innocent passengers aboard - including a group of school children - finally lands at England's Stansted airport north of London. Bargaining with their hostages' lives, the now desperate hijackers demand fuel to take the plane to Israel.

Moscow demands the return of the trio for trial (and, presumably, execution) in the strongest terms. The Israeli government, mindful of the pilot's murder, tells Her Majesty's Foreign Office that they won't accept the hijackers, but would rather they surrender and face punishment in the UK, which no longer has the death penalty. Whitehall is in a dodgy spot.

As with all of Gerald Seymour's novels, the focus, figuratively speaking, is on the ordinary foot soldier, who suddenly finds himself at the frontline facing an enemy to his front and pressure from high-ranking policy wallahs in the rear. In many of the author's stories, the bloke at the sharp end is a mid-level British civil servant. Thus, in KINGFISHER, it's Charlie Webster, a world-weary, former military counter-terrorist field officer now occupying sub-Desk Dissidents in MI-6's Soviet Desk. As the expert-on-the-spot, Charlie is co-opted by the Home Secretary to serve as communication point man at Stansted with David, Isaac and Rebecca.

At this late date, especially after 9/11, the concept of political dissidents hijacking a commercial airliner simply to get from point A to B is almost quaint. Perhaps when KINGFISHER was originally released, the plot had greater relevance, especially as the dissolution of the USSR and relative freedom for the country's Jews were still many years in the future.

KINGFISHER isn't as polished as some of Seymour's other books. (HOME RUN, perhaps his best, comes to mind.) Interesting characters are introduced, e.g. the co-pilot Anna Tashova and Israeli Defense Force Colonel Arie Benitz, whose involvement with the evolution of events, at least in my mind, fell sadly short of potential. Moreover, the author concludes this story by tying up loose ends. While this might be expected of other writers, it's somewhat atypical of Seymour, whose fictional worlds are usually like your's and mine in that they're neither black-and-white nor tidy. However, KINGFISHER demonstrates the concept that elevates all of Seymour's stories - victory in conflicts in the world's grotty seams is quite often Pyrrhic at the personal level.