Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Van Vliet and Cameron chuckled. They had seen neither hide nor hair of a blue Persian but were agreeable to the consensus that one was prowling about; indeed, Van Vliet could almost have sworn that a minute ago he had felt something furry brush past his trouser leg. “She’s holed up somewhere, I’ll be bound,” said the Bishop. “Wonderful how they can make themselves small when they want to. My Rachel had a Maltese, couldn’t abide the sound of a vacuum cleaner—” “Yesterday Sophie found her,” Aileen interrupted. “Sophie! You look! Please!” The urgency in her voice surprised Van Vliet, yet he mentally seconded the motion. The pantry area was hidden from view by a partition, but his ears told him that activity back there had been suspended. Aileen had been right: for some nonsensical reason, no drinks were going to be served while the state of emergency lasted. And he had been looking forward to a glass.

  Ahead of him, Sophie slowly unfastened her seat belt, set down the paper she had been reading, and, half bent over, her narrow shoulders hunched, went creeping along the aisle. “You! Back in your seat!” a male voice shouted, in a harsh, heavy accent. Van Vliet’s head turned with a jerk. At the rear of the cabin stood the pair of dark men who had been sitting behind him. The shorter and plumper had a submachine gun which he was aiming on a long diagonal in Sophie’s direction; the taller, with the mustache, had two grenades slung from his belt. Behind them peered two hostesses. They were being hijacked.

  Sophie’s head came up. “Me?” Her bang and forehead appeared, followed by her wondering eyes. Then she must have seen the gun. Ducking for cover, she moved up the aisle, hitching along like a centipede, while the gun kept pace with her. A strangled voice inside Van Vliet pleaded with her to hurry: as in a nightmare or at a film, he could only watch—no sound came from his throat, merely a series of swallows. Across the aisle from him, Aileen had her hands to her ears, and her eyes were closed. It occurred to Van Vliet too late, when the poor girl had edged back into her place and was tremulously refastening her seat belt—a strange security measure, surely, to take under the circumstances—that he might have interposed his own body between her and the gun barrel. The realization shook him till a defense lawyer broke in to argue that flinging himself on top of her as she passed would only have succeeded in pinning them both to the floor.

  Nevertheless, that he had failed to have the thought was somewhat humiliating. A sense of slight disappointment in himself merged with a sense of disappointment in the whole event. The hijacker, seeming satisfied, had lowered his gun, and the captain’s voice came soothingly over the loud-speaker: passengers were to remain seated until further instructions; if everyone stayed quiet and obeyed orders, no one would be hurt. On behalf of himself and the crew, he apologized for the inconvenience. Van Vliet smiled to himself at the inadequacy of this formula, yet as he analyzed his reactions, it seemed to him that Air France had found the mot juste. He was conscious chiefly of irritation, as at an untoward interruption, such as might be produced by a power failure or a tiresome visitor. The irruption of these men and their weapons was bound to be time-consuming, and as a busy person he already felt robbed of precious hours, which might turn into days.

  He was also mystified, which added to his vexation. His instincts had been warning him that their committee might be followed, in fact accompanied, by the Shah’s spies—nothing could be more normal. And the event was busy proving him right, so that in some childish way he was pleased. Yet why this farce of a take-over? Perhaps he was still in shock, and his mind was not working well, but to him it made no sense. If SAVAK’s aim was to frighten off the committee, they ought to have waited till Teheran, where with no danger or “inconvenience” to the rest of the passengers he and his companions could be seized and loaded at gun-point onto an outgoing plane. Then, like one coming out of anesthesia, he remembered the Tel Aviv stop. Palestinians, not Iranians? The thought, dawning as a mere notion, brought him sharply to attention. He raised himself slightly in his seat and out of the corner of his eye he took fresh stock of the gunner, who had moved to the center of the cabin.

  Beside him, Cameron spoke up. “Rather a bore, this, don’t you find? One reads about these bloody things but one doesn’t expect them to happen to oneself.” Van Vliet concurred. “Palestinians, do you think?” Cameron supposed so. “One can’t be sure of course till one hears them speak in their own language. Do you know any Arabic?” “No.” “Pity. Neither do I but I can recognize the phonemes—the noises they make, you know.” Van Vliet wondered why it was a pity. “You mean we might learn what they have in mind? But are they likely to talk much in front of us?” “No,” patiently said Cameron, “I was thinking that if we knew their language, we could open a dialogue with them.” The idea of Cameron’s opening a dialogue with anyone should have been funny, but Van Vliet, from the depths of his ignorance, was prepared to be respectful. “No chance that they might be Iranians?” Cameron turned his head. “Hardly. Your Iranian’s facial features and skin color set him off from the Arabs. Although there’s some Semitic admixture in the southeast. Anyhow, the Shah’s opposition doesn’t go in for hijacking. Rather indolent chaps, on the whole.”

  Van Vliet felt relieved that at least he had not voiced his conviction that SAVAK must be at the bottom of this—absurd of him to have held to it with such stubbornness, when other, less egocentric, explanations lay so ready to hand. And he supposed he ought to be grateful to the hijackers for having furnished Cameron, finally, with a congenial subject. No doubt, like so many British academics, he was a reader of thrillers and detective fiction. In a cautious undertone, he speculated on the provenance of the weapons: the gun, he decided, was an American make, and gun and grenades must have been introduced into the cabin—into a lavatory, most likely—through collusion with the cleaning staff. “Mostly North Africans here, as you know, like the dustmen.” He tapped out his pipe. “Where do I think they’re taking us?” He spread out the book of flight maps provided in the pocket of the seat ahead, and his pipestem silently indicated the possibilities: the Libyan desert, Aden, the Syrian desert, Oman. “Depends on whether they’ve received training in terrorism and are executing a mission in complicity with their sponsors. If they’re an As-Saiqa commando squad, for instance, they got their guerrilla training in Syria, and Syria will have to accept them. If they trained in Libya, we can expect a welcoming committee of Khaddafi’s people.”

  In any case, on landing, the pilot would be handed the usual list of demands. “Release of their comrades from Israeli prisons, indemnities, the lot. If our two friends are linked with a serious guerrilla network, we can count on some rough moments.” His burry voice dropped still another register. Van Vliet could barely hear him over the hum of the engines. His ear caught the words “brutes” and “hostages,” and his gaze followed Cameron’s, which was directed meaningfully toward their right. “The Senator?” Cameron nodded, with an air of satisfaction, like one who has brought a seminar to a triumphant conclusion.

  Van Vliet frowned: that implied that the hijackers knew that the Senator would be on the plane. Perfectly possible, Cameron declared. On the other hand, the selection of this particular flight might have been fortuitous. “These bully-boys, like as not, are acting on their own and don’t have the foggiest notion of how to proceed next. Palestinian hotheads deciding to do their wee bit in harassing air traffic to Israel while lining their own pockets. On that assumption, they boarded the first plane for Tel Aviv that their confederates—or confederate—could smuggle arms into. Sunday being Sunday, most of the regular cleaning staff would be having a lie-in this morning, leaving the coast clear. If what we have here is a nasty pair of free lances, the passenger list is of no interest to them. We’re a parcel, to be turned over with the plane on delivery of x thousand pounds.”

  Weighing this second hypothesis, Van Vliet grew more cheerful. Far better to be in the hands of men directed by the profit-motive than in those of idealistic terrorists. He re-examined the machine-gunner, a short, fattish, gloomy young fellow wh
o looked, in fact, more like a clerk or the policeman Van Vliet had first taken him for than like the gaunt Palestinian extremists whose photos appeared from time to time in the press. It seemed encouraging also that there were only two. Guerrillas taking over a giant plane would be more numerous, he reasoned. Ransacking his memory for precedents, he regretted that he had not paid closer attention to the hijacking phenomenon before meeting it in person. He had indistinct but unreassuring recollections of captive planes zigzagging about in the sky at the direction of a lone gunman seeking a host country that would promise him and his booty asylum. There had been an occasion in America when the hijacker had simply bailed out with his packets of dollars and taken to the woods. But that, if memory served, had been mountain country. He doubted that such a solution would be feasible in Arabia Deserta with its parching sands.

  Having stated the problem, Cameron lit a second pipe and disappeared, like a deity, in a cloud of smoke. The machine-gunner, as though restless or bored with his assignment, strolled forward, picking up an illustrated magazine from one of the seats as he went. He stood at the front entry with the magazine in his left hand, leafing through the pages and raising his eyes occasionally. The grenade-carrier was no longer to be seen. Then, as if the plane had re-entered the everyday world, the hostesses appeared with menus and the drinks cart. “Are they on the house?” jested the Senator. His deep easy voice, breaking into the general hush, caused a movement of disapproval, as though he had committed an act of irreverence in church. “I can’t tell you, sir,” said the girl. “Would you like me to ask the steward?” “Never mind. Just give me a split of that champagne.” He laid a hand on his neighbor’s. “What would you like, Aileen?” When his turn came, Van Vliet took a single whiskey. But others were asking for doubles, pointing in dumb show at the miniature bottles of spirits; the Senator’s awful daring had evidently made them tremble lest any convivial noise coming from them be interpreted as disrespect. Cameron, bolder, raised his whiskey glass. “Well, Dutch courage, eh?”

  Van Vliet looked at his watch. If they were on course, they should be crossing the Alps. He was starting to take a serious interest in their destination. But he could not see down from the window without getting up from his seat. The Air France map indicated that the plane should be heading southeast; he tried without success to take his bearings from the sun shadows. It was his impression that they had changed direction slightly. A smell of warm food was coming from the pantries: a choice of chicken chasseur, he had learned from the menu, or boeuf bourguignon.

  The meal, though, was slow in coming. Some passengers were ordering fresh drinks. Half of them would soon be drunk, Van Vliet estimated, which no doubt suited the hijackers’ book. As alcohol did its work in releasing inhibitions, the cabin grew more vocal. They watched a hostess go forward with two trays. “Well, finally!” said Aileen, leaning into the aisle. In front of her stood three empty miniatures of bourbon. “I’m famished, aren’t you, Mynheer?” “When no further trays immediately followed, a grumble of protest became audible. Van Vliet’s stomach, to his shame, was adding its own growl. A hostess came by, collecting glasses. Aileen tapped her sleeve. “Mademoiselle! S’il vous plaît! Can you tell us why a few people up there have been served while the rest of us have to wait?” “Cool it,” advised the Senator, raising a pained eyebrow that sent a message of deepest sympathy—women!—to the also-suffering Van Vliet. Aileen swung about. “I’m not complaining. I just want to know. On a le droit à savoir, je suppose.” “It is a special order, sir,” said the hostess, ignoring Aileen’s upturned face. “When they book, that family have ask for our kosher service.” There was a muffled explosion of laughter. “Kosher, yet!” said a voice. “Fantastic!” murmured Van Vliet. “Fantastic!” He shook his head. The Senator, he observed, was seizing the opportunity to put a low-voiced question to the girl. “May be, sir. I am not permitted to discuss the détournement with passengers. But you will have your luncheons soon. It is just that we serve the kosher diet first, since it is separate.”

  Van Vliet sighed. He would not be sorry if the energy crisis reduced Holland to the bi-plane and the glider. Even in so-called normal circumstances, he disliked being confined in an elephantine flying object while passengers and crew enacted a fantasy of ordinary earth life in its more anodyne aspects, the sole allusion to the un-earthly facts of the case being the life-jacket demonstration, which, he suddenly recognized, had been omitted from today’s program—an oversight attributable to the hijacking, he supposed.

  As he was lifting the foil from his boeuf bourguignon, a note was passed from the Senator. “Will they show us the movie? Your guess.” Van Vliet gave an appreciative laugh and handed the note to Cameron, who frowned and drew out a pencil. “Unlikely,” he wrote back. “If you have in mind that darkening the plane would give us our chance to overpower them, these chaps will see that too. Unless they’re utter fools. Which should not be excluded. We must get word to the personnel to be ready to show the film as usual.” Just then the aircraft veered. There could be no doubt about it. The pilot was banking and turning left. Van Vliet eyed Cameron, whose bushy eyebrows went up. They were heading north.

  Four

  “DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING that might serve as a weapon?” Senator Carey stared at the new message from Cameron. He laughed and wrote out an answer: “Hell, no. I went through Security.” Actually, he had a weapon on him—a multi-bladed Swiss Army pocket knife his wife had given him for his birthday when he was a young first-term Congressman (committees: patents and coins) with half-soled shoes, one suit, and lethargic political expectations. Since she had died, he carried it as a relic of her and of a time of relative innocence—those camping trips they used to take in the August recess instead of touching base with the voters in the district. It had served him mainly to gut fish for the frying pan he had given her, but you could kill a man with it. He felt no urge, however, to encourage Cameron in his fantasies of resistance. The Scot, he reckoned, had had “a good war” and was thrilling to the call of the pibroch again.

  James Augustine Carey had had a moderately good war himself, having enlisted at nineteen in the U.S. Navy’s air corps and seen considerable action as a navigator in the Pacific theatre. In flying school he had failed mysteriously to get his “wings”—the instructor blamed it on lack of ambition—but in fact he was quite capable of piloting a plane and had proved it more than once when the pilot beside him was wounded or hung over. They had made him a lieutenant, j.g., six months before the War ended and sent him back to teach celestial navigation to cadets. “And a star to steer her by!”—he was as out of synch with what a flier had to know nowadays as a rusty car-crank stowed in the trunk of a Mustang. Never mind; he was still able to estimate distances and wind vectors and roughly plot the course the pilot was now on. Should the pilot and the co-pilot be killed or incapacitated during this adventure, he could probably, with God’s help and some coaching, assume the controls and bring the big jet down.

  He trusted it was not going to come to that. This frolic had all the earmarks of a routine hijacking, no more noteworthy than a Georgetown mugging except in the venue and the size of the haul, whose worth to the lawbreakers he estimated at up to half a million dollars—a fair price for the return of the plane and the crew and passengers intact. A low-risk investment of time, nerve, and manpower, if the two could bring it off, and there was no reason visible to him why they should fail to—no sign of a security guard aboard (Air France, he understood, had a policy of not carrying any), which disposed of the possibility of a shoot-out; the crew was being cooperative, and the underwriters, as usual, would pay.

  If no one rocked the boat, the affair should proceed as smoothly as any normal jet flight. He hated these big planes and the whole soft sell of air travel, designed to persuade the passenger that he was not in a thoroughly unnatural position, several thousand leagues above ground with his heart in his mouth, but instead lounging in a dream-like movie auditorium with a drink in his hand and soft
music playing in his ears. He liked a real plane, without amenities, a basic tool of transport that made you conscious of the extraordinary fact of flying, with its peril and discomfort. Hijacking, for a while, had made jet travel a little more suspenseful, but now the reality had pretty well leached out of that, though the journalists still tried to make it sound like a bated-breath business with an open-ended plot. Today’s “ordeal”—as it would be described—ought not to last longer than a few hours, most of which would be spent dully at an airfield, deprived of information, while negotiations went on. Waiting, characteristically, would be the main chore.

  Barring accidents. And among potentials for accident, there was the human factor, represented today by the impetuous Cameron, with his fond daydreams or—more accurately—pipe-dreams of hand-to-hand combat. Responses to seizure had not yet been programmed to the point of total automatized consent, and in any group of passengers you might find individuals, usually of middle age, still programmed to resistance. Such individuals, of course, constituted a menace to the collective.