Fly Paper

by Collins, Max Allan

  He continued, “Now, I don’t want anyone to panic. Everything is in control.” The captain hesitated. “But I feel you should be aware that we have a man with a bomb aboard . . . and he’s just chartered himself a plane.”

  13

  LIKE ALL FLIGHT attendants, Hazel knew she might one day be involved in a skyjacking, but she wasn’t overwhelmed with fear by the prospect. At one time she would have been: at one time she’d been deathly afraid of flying itself.

  Fifteen years ago, when she’d first applied for a job with the airlines, she’d requested ground duty. Then, when she got into the program, she’d begun a gradual change of mind, even after that grueling week of intensive training under emergency conditions, in which she’d had to overcome some of her fears, anyway, just to live through the damn thing. The advantages a flight attendant had over girls on the ground were many, with fewer hours of work for the same amount of pay perhaps the biggest lure of all, and oh, those gorgeous travel possibilities! Factors like that had whittled away at her flying fears, and the statistics had helped, too. Knowing that a plane was safer than a car, for instance, if for no other reason than that the man behind the controls was a professional, not a sloppy amateur like most motorists. That if an engine went out, there were three more to take its place. That practically every little town in the world had some sort of air strip, so a landing spot was always close at hand.

  Of course, there were accidents, and air accidents have few—if any—survivors. A flight attendant friend of hers (not a close friend, but more than an acquaintance) had been on a plane that was struck by lightning and went crashing to the ground, providing a fiery death for the friend and fifty-some other people aboard. Don’t think Hazel didn’t have a sleepless night or two over that.

  But every profession had its risks, and for a woman, being a flight attendant was pleasant, even glamorous, no matter what Women’s Lib had to say about it. In fact, liberation of the sexes had only gone to show what a good job the flight attendant had: males had begun clamoring for the jobs, and many a tired businessman had recently had the disappointment of looking forward to a bouncy blonde stewardess and getting instead a brawny blonde steward.

  Skyjacking was one risk, however, Hazel hadn’t had to consider fifteen years ago; during the first years of her career the term hadn’t even been coined. The hijacking of a commercial airliner was so infrequent that the industry, from board of directors down to flight attendants, thought of it as some bizarre, freak occurrence, an incomprehensible and frightening crime, but certainly no large-scale threat to air travel itself. The 1968 rash of hijackings—twenty-one in all—changed that attitude quickly enough, and skyjacking became a major worry in the minds of all airlines personnel. Hazel included.

  She’d seen the public’s reaction turn from amusement and titillation to terror and rage. Early on, the skyjackings (usually to Cuba) seemed a free vacation of sorts; even Time magazine urged skyjacked passengers to “enjoy the experience,” and “make the most of your side trip by doing a little shopping,” telling them of the “magnificent” Cuban beach, and noting that “the food is excellent, too.” Was it any wonder she’d overheard a passenger wistfully wishing for a skyjacking experience to brighten the boredom of a business trip? She’d winced as one federal aviation official had gone so far as to announce that skyjacking “sure takes the blahs out of air travel.”

  And then violence had changed the amusement to terror: a pilot shot in the stomach by a skyjacker angry because the ransom money delivered to him was short of what he’d asked; a black militant beating crew members about the head with a revolver, threatening passengers with similar abuse; a prisoner being transported by plane finding a discarded razor in the john and, holding that razor to a flight attendant’s throat, demanding his own Cuban “side trip”; and, of course, the chaotic violence of the Arab-Israeli airline war, the world witnessing the destruction of a $23 million aircraft, a Pan Am 747 melted to junk by exploding dynamite charges.

  With a feeling of disappointment verging on despair, Hazel and other flight attendants had watched as the FAA tried desperately to find means of fighting skyjacking, most of those means proving ineffective at best, ludicrous at worst. A bulletproof shield protecting the pilot was one FAA official’s suggestion, as well as barring the cockpit door. Just how this would dissuade a skyjacker, who’d have plenty of unprotected hostages aboard to choose from, was not explained, unless Hazel and her sisters were to wear bulletproof bras and issue bulletproof shields to each passenger. The FAA then distributed to ticket-sales personnel a “psychological profile” of the “typical” skyjacker, but skyjackers seemed able to get past ticket counters without hassle despite the “profile,” which was general to the point of silliness, anyway, the most solid “fact” being that “the average skyjacker is a man between sixteen and thirty- five years of age.” The FAA’s next move was to create a system of armed guards for planes, in response to a request heard repeatedly from the public, and the Sky Marshal Program was the result. This particular concept terrified Hazel from the start: the idea of a shoot-out at 30,000 feet was enough to terrify anybody. The “unwritten directive” of the sky marshal was well-known among flight attendants: “If a skyjacker uses a flight attendant as a hostage, shoot the flight attendant to reach the skyjacker.” Swell. In actual practice, however, the sky marshals were little threat to either skyjackers or flight attendants. Typical of their ineffectiveness was the successful skyjacking of a jumbo jet to Cuba, though three sky marshals were present on the plane, as well as an FBI agent. The Sky Marshal Program was discontinued some time ago, but the recent rash of skyjackings by Cuban refugees and other social outcasts had prompted the FAA to reinstate it. This Hazel saw as more of a gesture than an anti-skyjack measure.

  The only way to effectively deal with a skyjacker was to stop him before he got on a plane. She remembered when the first real step was taken: the search of carry-on luggage before passengers boarded the plane. Suddenly guns and knives were commonly found dumped in waste cans in airport johns. Then metal detectors came into use, and X- ray of carry-on luggage, and skyjacking again became an exception, not a rule. Still, skyjackings had been pulled off by men using “guns” that turned out to be plastic ball-point pens and combs; one skyjacker proclaimed himself a human bomb, while his “explosives” turned out to be rolls of candy mints stripped to his body. The most hair-raising of the boomerang effects caused by the use of metal detectors was the switch skyjackers had made to nonmetallic devices such as homemade bombs. Hazel shuddered at the thought of that. Though neither situation exactly appealed to her, she would much prefer facing a man with a gun than a man with some unstable, patchwork homemade explosive device.

  And now she was doing just that.

  A young man of perhaps twenty years of age was aboard with what appeared to be a pocket calculator in his hand—claiming he was prepared to blow up the plane if his demands were not met.

  JoAnne, the youngest of the other three attendants on board, had come to Hazel with a look of stark panic in her eyes. Hazel was in the galley section, which was between the first-class and tourist cabins, getting drinks ready. JoAnne said, “He says he wants to talk to the head stewardess. That’s you, Hazel.”

  “Who says what?”

  “A kid. He says he’s got a bomb. He wants to talk to you.”

  “All right. Now, JoAnne. Listen to me. Keep your head on. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he? Up forward?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Are you all right, JoAnne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. You stay right here. Don’t say a word to anybody. I see him up there. Green corduroy shirt and jeans? With a beer belly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. You stay here. You might finish getting these drinks ready for me.”

  “Yes.”

  He was just a boy, really. A kid. With damn freckles, yet. He was wearing mirror-type sungla
sses, which she didn’t believe he’d been wearing when he came aboard, and he was wearing a wig. Why hadn’t she noticed that wig before? Damn.

  “Are you the head stewardess?”

  “I’m the senior flight attendant, yes.”

  “Hazel?” he said, reading her name off the badge on her breast pocket. “Your name is Hazel?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Hazel, I have just now pressed some buttons that have armed a bomb that is on this plane, in my suitcase in the cargo hold of the plane. If my fingers touch this—” he indicated the black plastic calculator— “just so, the bomb will explode and all of us won’t be here anymore.”

  “Do you want to see the captain?”

  “Yes. You tell him to come out here.”

  She entered the cockpit the greenish glow of the instrument panel brighter than the overcast sky out the forward windows.

  Captain McIntire, a handsome gray-templed man in his early forties, a married man with two kids, and a confirmed letch who’d tried a hundred times to get in Hazel’s pants (unsuccessfully), turned in the left-hand seat and grinned wolfishly, saying, “How’s tricks, Hazel?”

  Beside him, the copilot, Willis, suppressed a groan. He was a thin guy with a pockmarked complexion and short brown hair, in his late thirties. He hated McIntire, and it showed sometimes. Behind McIntire was the navigator, Reed, a balding, fleshy, middle-aged man with no discernible personality, as far as Hazel knew—an invisible man as gray as that sky out there.

  Hazel did not play it cute. No, Captain, tricks are not good, she thought, and said, “We have a skyjacker aboard. He’s just outside the cockpit here.”

  The three men traded expressions of disgust that masked fear.

  McIntire cleared his throat, but his first words came out a squeak, anyway. “Send him in, damn it.”

  “He wants you to come see him.”

  Reed said, “Whoever heard of hijacking a plane out of Detroit?”

  Willis said, “We did. Now.”

  The captain turned over the controls to his co-pilot and rose from his seat. He wasn’t grinning anymore.

  Hazel stood next to the captain while the boy told him about the bomb. He spoke in a voice that was soft and seemingly calm but had a faint tremor in it. Then he made his demands. He said, “Two hundred thousand dollars in cash. This is how I want it: ten thousand twenty-dollar bills. Radio ahead and have the cash delivered to the Quad City Airport at Mo-line. We will, naturally, fly directly to the Quad City Airport. Then we’ll fly somewhere else.”

  The captain stood there for a moment, waiting.

  Then the boy said, “That’s all I want. Go back and fly your plane. Tell your passengers the situation.”

  Which the captain did.

  The skyjacker asked Hazel, “I believe you’re working in the tourist-class section, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “My seat is in tourist. I’ll walk back with you.”

  So now she was serving drinks, the skyjacker sitting among the chattering, fidgeting passengers like just another victim, giving no indication to anyone he was the villain of the piece.

  But when she served Nolan his Scotch, he said, whispering, “It’s the kid in the wig, isn’t it?”

  Surprised, Hazel nodded.

  “What’s the airline’s policy in a skyjacking?”

  “Do what the man says, what else?”

  “How does the kid claim he’ll detonate his bomb?”

  “He’s got a pocket calculator wired to do it, he says.”

  Nolan thought a moment, then said, “I think he’s bluffing. I don’t think he has any bomb on board.”

  “We have to assume otherwise,” Hazel said.

  “You do,” Nolan said. “But I don’t.”

  And a chill ran up her spine. For a moment, for reasons she didn’t wholly understand, she was afraid of her last-afternoon-and-night’s bed partner. For a moment this man calling himself Nolan—though he was flying under the name Ryan, for “business purposes,” he’d told her last night—frightened her far worse than the young skyjacker sitting a few feet away.

  14

  BY THE TIME the plane landed at the Quad City Airport, most of the passengers were smashed. Common practice during a skyjacking was for flight attendants to serve free drinks to anyone who wanted one, and that included just about everybody on board; the exceptions were sitting in front of Jon and Nolan: a trio of nuns, who looked like they could use a good, stiff drink, at that.

  The booze had had its intended calming effect on the passengers, creating an atmosphere not nearly as tense as it might have been. Other factors had also helped lessen the tension, the main one being that the skyjacker had remained anonymous to his fellow travelers, and had not gone about waving a gun and shouting obscenities and generally reminding everybody they were sitting on a flying powder keg. Of course, the tension was there, underneath it all, and if the atmosphere was strangely like a party, it was a less than jolly affair—a going-away party, perhaps, or a bankrupt company’s last Christmas fling.

  Even Jon had fallen prey to the free-flowing liquor; he wasn’t much for hard booze, but the role of skyjacking victim was upsetting enough to his nerves for him to gladly switch from Coke to Bourbon and Coke and its soothing, analgesic powers. Jon had downed only two of them so far, but he was feeling the glow. He and Nolan hadn’t spoken much since the news of the plane’s enforced change of destination, and now he glanced at Nolan and regarded his older friend’s expressionless, tightjawed demeanor. He figured Nolan’s stern countenance meant one of the following: either Nolan was pissed off, or was putting together a scheme of some sort, or both.

  Anyway, Jon thought, something was wrong. Nolan hadn’t had anything to drink since that first Scotch, which he’d barely finished. That wasn’t like Nolan, turning down free drinks. Turning down free anything.

  For some reason, Nolan was taking this skyjack thing very, very hard, and it puzzled Jon.

  “Hey,” Jon said, whispering. “This’ll work out all right. What’s the harm? I mean, it got us home quicker, didn’t it?”

  Nolan said nothing.

  “I agree with you,” Jon continued, “about the kid in the wig. I don’t think he put a bomb on board, either. Or anyway, if he did, I don’t think he’s the type to set it off.”

  Nolan was shaking his head now. He looked disappointed.

  “Nolan, what’s wrong?”

  They were speaking low anyway, because of the holy trio in the seat ahead, but now they lowered their voices to less than whispers, reading each other’s lips, really, a communication just this side of telepathy.

  “Don’t you get it?” Nolan said. “Don’t you see it yet?”

  “Get what? See what?”

  “We’re screwed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your pal in the wig, Jon. He’s screwed us. Shoved it in and broke it off.”

  “What d’you mean? How are we worse off than anybody else on the plane?”

  Nolan took Jon’s almost-empty glass of Bourbon and Coke away from him, set it on the floor, said, “You better stick to straight Coke in the future, kid. You aren’t thinking too clear.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Okay, Jon. We’re on a skyjacked plane. Now, what’s the best we can hope for? What’s the best thing that can happen in this particular situation?”

  “Well, I suppose the best thing that could happen would be for somebody to take that supposedly rewired calculator away from the skyjacker. That would put the plane back in the hands of the good guys, right?”

  “Okay. Then what.”

  “Everybody rides off into the sunset, I guess. Except for the skyjacker. He goes straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred thousand dollars. Right?”

  “Half right. The skyjacker isn’t the only one who goes straight to jail and doesn’t collect two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “What?” The clouds began to lift inside Jon’s hea
d. “Oh. Oh Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Oh Jesus. Even if they could grab this guy before he’s done any damage, the ‘good guys,’ as you call them, would still have to assume there’s a bomb on the plane. Which means the bomb squad’ll be called in and . . .”

  “They’ll fluoroscope all the luggage. Shit. Oh shit. And all our money? All our beautiful money? . . .”

  “We’ll just have to forget it. Best we can hope for is to leave the airport fast as possible, before people start asking embarrassing questions. Hope to Christ they don’t trace the luggage to us. My phony name’ll lead them nowhere, that’s one good thing. You’re using your right name, but your luggage has nothing suspicious in it. I just hope nobody remembers we were traveling together. I hope Hazel’ll cover for us—a little, anyway. I hope a hell of a lot of things, frankly.”

  “Jesus, Nolan. We can’t just let all that money go. . . .”

  “We have to. I been trying to figure a way to save it, but I can’t find one. That money isn’t the only thing in that damn suitcase, don’t forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Nolan. I wish I could, but I haven’t.”

  The guns, Jon thought, the goddamn guns.

  The two .38s they’d used at the Comforts’. The two .38s they’d used to kill the Comforts. Bad enough to have to try and explain two hundred grand in cash, but two hundred grand in cash and two revolvers, both of which might be traceable to a multiple killing and robbery . . .

  Jon didn’t want to think about it.

  “And,” Nolan was saying, “that’s what happens in the best of all possible worlds. The other possibilities are even more depressing. Such as, maybe there is a bomb on board, and the skyjacker gets rattled, and we all get blown to hell, in which case we won’t sweat the money. Or, the guy lets some of us off the plane and keeps some hostages, and then gets rattled, and our money gets blown up. Or the goddamn skyjacking is a success, and the guy gets away, and the bomb squad moves in to work on the plane and . . . well, it goes on like that. No matter how you figure it, Jon . . .”