The seatbelt sign came on again, and people returned to their seats. Leslie tightened her belt again, feeling that familiar tension at the back of her neck. It had been a lousy flight, she thought glumly. That was for sure. She looked up and around the cabin and saw three men standing close to the strained-looking attendant, talking in undertones. She didn’t look any better than before. Another attendant came up to the men and one of them gestured his intention to go to the front of the plane. She shook her head, and then he came very close to her, his larger body blocking Leslie’s view of the smaller woman. They both turned and headed to the front.
Her interest piqued, she sat up straighter, eyes alert. The two had disappeared behind the screen at the front. Then Scott said something in a sharp low tone to Jarred, and she turned to look at him enquiringly. He was sitting up, eyes hard, body taut, one hand going to run through his hair carelessly. “Something’s…going on,” he was saying. Leslie only caught snatches of it. “…don’t like this one damn bit.” His hand went to his seat buckle as he stared at the slight female attendant beside the tall, dark haired man who then turned to survey the cabin of people with hooded eyes. His gaze seemed to halt a moment on Scott, and then move on. He turned and headed quickly up to the front of the plane. Scott said something under his breath that was muffled, and then both he and Jarred were jerking off their seatbelts only to stop stock still when a voice came over the intercom. It was not, Leslie noted, now totally bewildered and sharply alarmed, the voice of the captain. Her eyes slewed back to Jarred and Scott, who were rigid in their seats.
“Ladies and gentleman, we are now about to land in New York for a brief refuelling.” The voice was crisp, slightly accented, business-like, male. “At that time, most of the passengers will be asked to disembark, except for thirty and the flight crew, who will be the hostages of the People’s Revolutionary Republic. Do not get out of your seats. Do not come to the front of the plane or you will be shot. Do not harm or distract the flight attendants as they come around.” Without further ado, the intercom was switched off, and everyone in the cabin was left to look around them in bewilderment, horror and dismay.
Scott swore viciously under his breath. Jarred said to him in an undertone, “There was nothing we could do. We weren’t expecting it to be this way. There are too many people.” Leslie wasn’t sure she had caught the words right, for immediately after the man had finished speaking, an incredible babble of voices arose, agitated, frightened. She saw the mother with her three children hug the smallest one to her convulsively. As for herself, after the first stunned moment when her chest had contracted with the shock, she felt almost abnormally calm. “They have weapons,” she murmured calmly. “How’d they get the guns aboard?”
“At a guess, it was one of the ground crew in O’Hare when they cleaned the plane. The guns could have been hidden then, I think,” Scott murmured quietly. He was relaxed after that first strangely dangerous reaction, she noted. “This has been well planned.”
Well planned. “It’s hard to believe,” she said shakily. The plane began to dip sharply. Leslie studiously kept her eyes away from the window. “I’ve never heard of the People’s—what were they called?”
“The People’s Revolutionary Republic. It’s a small group of rebels located south of Florida, north of Cuba. They are on an island and have a military installation there.” He was well informed.
“What or whom are they revolting against?” she asked, gripping the seat tightly as the plane bumped roughly on to the runway. The landing was badly done; presumably the pilot was a bit unnerved too.
“I’m not really sure,” he said calmly, and then noticed her white face. He took her hand, or rather, prised it from the seat arm that she’d been clenching. “I think it’s a combination of declared hatred for the United States, which is not so unusual these days, along with a rejection of the Cuban regime.” The plane taxied slowly and came to a halt some distance from the airport terminals. At a guess, Leslie would say that the hijackers had been in touch with the airport controllers to demand fuel to be sent out to the plane. She took a deep, shaky breath.
“They aren’t going to send the fuel,” she said shakily. “It’ll be a stand off.”
“Listen to me, Leslie,” Scott said in a low, urgent voice. “We’re to the back of the plane and chances are that we will be the ones chosen to be held as hostages.” She looked up and about sharply. He was right. They were nearly at the back. “I want you to get up and move to the empty seat near the front over there. You’ll probably be let off, if negotiations allow for the release of the passengers as they’d said. Now, get—”
Horrified, she jerked her hand out of his and stared with huge, hard eyes at him. She looked her accusation before she was able to find the words to speak. “I think,” she whispered furiously, “that what you just said is absolutely unspeakable. Look over at the mother with her three children! Count out the seats! Would they all make it off or would one of them have to stay behind? Would the mother stay, or perhaps the twelve year old? Look,” she gritted between her teeth, “at the teenage girls just two aisles ahead. Which would have to stay, if I moved up? No, Scott.” She shook her head, her tone contemptuous, her eyes leaping with fury. “You can move if you like. I’ll sit here and take my chances.”
“There is only one seat,” he said, his inflection totally without emotion. “I had not intended it for myself.” She looked sharply his way, and saw tenseness, the way his eyes burned darkly. He was holding some violent emotion in check.
She asked him shortly, “Did you really think I would move?” His head turned slowly and he just looked at her. That extreme emotion was gone.
“I didn’t know. I’d…hoped.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me,” she returned tightly, and he was suddenly amused.
“Oh, come now, Les. Surely I know a little about you,” he taunted her softly, and her head jerked to the direction of the window.
“How long will it take you to forget what happened that night?” she snapped.
“But, darling, I don’t want to forget it, although you seem strangely urgent about forgetting it, yourself. And that is another apparent contradiction about you. If you were the—whore, I believe was your quaint term—you’d have shrugged it off long ago.”
A mistake, she thought. She’d just made a big one. She made herself turn around to smile at him slowly, mockingly. “Your mistake is thinking I haven’t,” she told him amusedly. It was a big effort. “After all, I’m not the one to keep bringing the subject up.”
It was an accurate thrust and they both knew it. His eyes shuttered. “Perhaps,” was his only response, and he turned to look straight ahead. Leslie felt limp and exhausted, and the remarkable thing about it, she realised, was that it was from their talk and not from the tense and frightening crisis enacted at the moment.
The cabin was getting hot, uncomfortably so, and over to the right a pretty woman was sobbing quietly into her hands while her husband patted her on the shoulder, looking scared half to death himself. Leslie looked ahead restlessly and then out of the window. Nothing was moving on the runway. The sun shone down, pitilessly bright, white hot yellow, and the grass by the pavement looked scorched and dry. Scott touched her on the arm and nodded ahead. “It looks like someone else had the same bright idea that I did,” he said quietly. The empty seat he’d spotted was taken. Leslie looked around her. One of the teenage girls was missing.
She said quite without malice, “I hope she makes it off.” And she was immensely surprised when Scott put his big hand over hers and squeezed briefly before letting go again.
There was a long period of an unusually strange and nerve-racking combination of intense boredom and extreme fear. Leslie could only imagine what kind of negotiations and threats were being issued to the control tower, and her imagination was only too vivid. She’d heard of hijackers threatening to take a passenger each half hour and shooting them until their demands were met. G
od only knew what was happening in the cockpit and outside. The dark haired man came out periodically, with a machine gun slung over one arm, and he would calmly inspect the passengers. Each time he appeared, there was a profound, fear stricken silence, and everyone collectively sighed with relief when he disappeared again.
“What do you think will happen?” she finally asked, the question bursting from her in a welling of frustration and uncertainty. In contrast, Scott looked merely bored, as his head lay against the back of his seat. She found herself running her eyes over his thick, springy mane of light hair in appreciation, and jerked her thoughts away. How could she be thinking of such irrelevancies, when a tense matter of life or death was hanging in the balance? But even as she thought the silent self-rebuke, she knew she couldn’t castigate herself too much. Life or death situations couldn’t seem very real, with boredom beginning to overshadow even the fear.
A flurry of activity appeared outside her window and attracted her attention. Scott looked over her shoulder and remarked, “It looks like something’s about to happen. Their demands are being met. That’s a fuelling truck.” He pointed, and she nodded without surprise. She knew a sinking in her heart. What would happen now?
“Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “Why would they need to refuel? Wasn’t this the flight going on to London?”
Scott looked over his shoulder to Jarred and asked him, “We had a lay-over in New York, didn’t we?” At Jarred’s nod, he continued, “They’d needed to refuel anyway, then.”
Leslie was peering out the window, and she suddenly tensed and pointed. “Look! They’re hooking up an exit ramp.” It was moving to the front of the plane. At the far right corner of her window she saw men run back quite some distance and then remain, watching.
“What do you want to bet that those men aren’t regular ground crew?” Scott said, grimly amused. She flashed him a look but didn’t speak.
Then everything seemed to happen at once, with the dark little attendant opening the hatch and two of the three men coming back with ugly weapons in their hands, bodies tense and eyes alert. “All right!” the taller man called out sharply. “I want the people in the first aisle to get their things and get out! You have five seconds, move it!” And they did move fast, their fear making them clumsy, stumbling out in record time. The first class passengers were streaming out from the front, coming out behind the sectioning screen with their eyes dilated and faces showing strain. The dark man continued on down the aisles in this manner, keeping his back to the empty seats and his eyes constantly roving over the remaining passengers. He was nearly to the back and he appeared to be counting heads.
Scott said calmly, “We aren’t going to make it.” She simply nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak. Her shirt was sticking to her back, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or her fear. Then nearly everyone was off except for the last several rows, and the armed hijacker was motioning curtly to the young woman who had been quietly crying before. She stared at him dumbly for an instant, and then hesitantly stood. Her husband stood also, only to be met by the dark muzzle of the gun that pointed dead into his chest. The woman erupted into hysterical sobs and started to grab for her husband who, looking none too happy himself, was attempting vainly to push her away. The man grabbed her arm and jerked her back, then pushed her ahead of him while keeping his gun trained on the husband and his eyes roaming the rest of the cabin. At the open hatch another gunman waited, keeping watch on the still world outside, gun cocked and manner tense.
Filled with a consuming anger, Leslie found herself saying quite clearly, “Why, that filthy bast—” And suddenly she was grabbed and her face pulled into Scott’s chest so that she could hardly breathe. His hand was twisted into her hair at the back of her head. She had a brief sensation of breathing in a crisp male scent, a scent that was hauntingly familiar, and she thought, I know that scent…
Then Scott was hissing in her ear, furiously, “You fool, keep your mouth shut! Do you want to get yourself or him shot? Can’t you see that he wants her to go, to get off the plane?”
She whispered back, her voice muffled against the warm hardness of Scott’s shoulder as she pushed vainly with her hands to get away. “He could have let the husband off, too! What the hell did it matter, if they had twenty-nine hostages, instead of thirty?”
“Oh, God!” he sighed. His hand loosened in her hair, and to her intense shame, she felt a tear trickle out of her eye, and then another. They soaked immediately into his shirt, and she knew that he must have felt it. She felt his hand cup the back of her skull gently, and stroke comfortingly. “Les, they are setting up a rule of authority. They can’t afford to make threats and not carry through with them.”
“I know, I know. Damn it, anyway.” She pushed against his chest and this time he let her up. Then she stared out the window angrily, knuckling at her eyes. When she turned back a few moments later, her face was grim and set. Scott searched her expression and then nodded encouragingly.
The gunman at the hatch had thrown it shut and locked it. The other man backed up the aisle and disappeared. The plane began to whine again, and this time she was nearly sick to her stomach, as the plane turned on the runway, taxied briefly and took off without any further warning. Everything combined had made her nauseous. She closed her eyes, folded her arms across her chest, and grimly concentrated on keeping controlled. This time Scott must have sensed her need for withdrawal, for he left her alone. She didn’t see the dark eyes watching her constantly.
After a large slanting curve in the sky, the plane levelled off again and she opened her eyes with a sigh that was more of a groan. Wayne and Jarred were very serious and grim. Jarred looked her way and nodded, with a wink. She couldn’t return her usual smile, but she did nod.
Thirty passengers left, a silent, worried group. The young girl had watched her friend disembark and was left alone. There were a few middle-aged couples, the four of them, of course, a few more women and several men, some in their fifties. It was a fairly mixed group. She was glad to see that the mother with her three children had got off safely. Leslie loosened her seatbelt and tried to relax. Everyone on the plane had one thing in common: their lives were being changed by today, perhaps fatally, definitely irrevocably. None of them were ever going to be quite the same again. She had the now very frightening impression that she was being hurtled into a future that she was powerless to prevent.
The flight took forever, it seemed, and yet at the same time, in that queer way when one doesn’t want to experience what is ahead, it took hardly any time at all. By now the sun was sinking towards the western sky, and Leslie guessed that it was early evening. She had eaten nothing that day except for some quickly snatched toast that morning and the late morning snack served on the flight to New York, and she was beginning to feel a bit light in the head. After a little bit, the two flight attendants came out with loaded trolleys to serve the thirty passengers supper. When her meal was set in front of her, she looked at it in resignation and disgust. Though she was lightheaded, her stomach revolted at the sight of food, a sure sign of nervousness. The other passengers were glumly silent, some shovelling the food in, other just picking listlessly.
“Eat it,” Scott advised her, as he started in on his meal. “All of it. There’s no telling when we’ll eat again.”
She hesitated, and then complied, as much as she was able. She’d recognised the wisdom of his advice. She handed him her dessert, though, with a grimace. He took it after a wry glance at her strained face, and demolished it, after eating every scrap on his tray.
After some time, Leslie’s ears popped as the plane began to sink once more, and she tightened her seatbelt. All she could see outside was blue water and a rosy clouded sky. “An island, eh?” she muttered. “I hope the pilot doesn’t miss.”
Their descent became more rapid, and if Leslie thought a normal landing was bad enough, she found the experience of dropping out of the sky to apparently nothing but ocean
, utterly terrifying. She abandoned all pride and burrowed into Scott’s ready shoulder while he held her tightly with one arm, murmuring into her hair. The plane bumped, and when Leslie emerged, she looked out to a small asphalt runway bordered with a green profusion of tangled plant life. Off in the distance she saw several low constructed buildings. A gunman, the one who had kept watch out the hatch while the passengers had disembarked, came down the aisle, flicking his gaze over everyone in the group. She had the impression that he didn't miss much. Then he told everybody to gather their belongings and prepare to exit the plane. While he spoke, the plane eased to a halt and the hatch was opened by the taller gunman.
They motioned and the passengers reluctantly exited, forced to go down a ladder. Leslie, loath to toss her bag to the ground and risk breaking her recorder, slung it on to her shoulder awkwardly and prepared to climb down, but she was stopped by Scott’s hand on the shoulder strap, detaining her.
He looked extremely patient. “I don’t think that any of them would particularly care if you were to break a leg or not. You’d have to fend for yourself, I’d make a bet, and I don’t relish being the one to have to care for you. You’d better give me that.”
Annoyed, she jerked away. “No! I’ll handle it, myself. No one’s asked for your help.” And she turned and would have started down the ladder, but for his adroit plucking away of her bag and slinging it to his shoulder stubbornly. She might have stayed to argue, but one of the hijackers, attracted by the delay, headed their way with a frown so she nimbly slipped down without anything more to say. He was right behind her, and his feet had barely touched the ground before she took her bag again, ignoring his exaggerated, “You’re welcome.”
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