Miles To Go Before I Sleep

by Jackie Nink Pflug

  After I gasped for breath in the van, and the van reversed course for St. Luke’s, the medics immediately began cutting off my blood-stained blue jeans and T-shirt. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but I heard the sound of ripping fabric.

  Darn, there go my favorite blue jeans! was the last thought I had before everything went blank. I must have passed out, because I don’t remember riding to the hospital.

  When I came to again, in the emergency room at St. Luke’s, I was lying on a metal hospital bed. I was dressed in a hospital gown. Medical technicians were sticking needles in my arm.

  I closed my eyes briefly and, when I opened them again, I was staring into a pair of soft brown eyes.

  A young man, about my age, hovered over me, wielding an electric razor. “I’ve got to shave your hair,” he said, simply.

  He pressed the buzzing instrument to my head and started shearing my dark brown curls. The sound was almost soothing until, suddenly, I jumped.

  “Ow! That hurts!” I winced. I was really out of it—just barely able to hold a conversation. He’d run the rotating blades over my bullet wound. “You have to be careful.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go over it. I have to get the hair around it,” he said, apologetically. “I’ll try to go easier. You’re going into surgery, and we need to shave your head to reduce the chance of infection.”

  Every few seconds, he’d stop shaving and let me take a breath. Then he’d announce, “Okay, I’m going back over it again.”

  My muscles tightened as I braced myself for more pain.

  After the young man finished, another medical aide came in to finish the job with a smaller razor. He also gave me some shots to calm me down and reduce my pain.

  A serious man with glasses who looked like a doctor walked over to my bedside. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m Dr. Lawrence Zrinzo. You’re going to be all right. We just need you to sign something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a release giving your consent to the operation, relieving the hospital of liability.”

  I felt dazed and out of it, but the humor of the situation didn’t escape me. “Here I am with a bullet in my head and you want me to sign something?” I laughed.

  He nodded.

  “Well, I can’t see well,” I informed him.

  “That’s okay. We’ll just hold it for you.”

  The doctor put a pen in my hand, and I asked him to steer my hand to the spot where he wanted me to sign. My pen contacted the hard surface of a clipboard and I moved it in broad strokes through the air, like I used to write my name with sparklers on the Fourth of July.

  I could only see pieces of the doctor’s face, but I felt his reassuring hand on my shoulder. I sensed his positive energy and could tell he was a very sweet, caring man.

  I had lost some blood, Dr. Zrinzo reported, but not enough to require a transfusion. He assured me that I was going to be okay. In a few minutes, I started feeling the effects of the anesthesia I’d been given.

  The doctor and nurse walked on opposite sides of my bed as they wheeled me into surgery.

  “And to think, we just got our equipment last week!” the nurse said, laughing.

  What does she mean by that? I wondered, just before passing out.

  The doctors at St. Luke’s didn’t know my medical history. They didn’t know that I had a rare allergic reaction to succinylcholine chloride—a muscle relaxant commonly used along with surgical anesthesia. When I had my appendix out as a little girl, the doctors had given me succinylcholine and I had stopped breathing. If they gave it to me again, I could die.

  My mom knew my medical history. When she heard that I’d been shot, she immediately thought about the danger of an allergic reaction. She asked my sister Mary to call Pasadena Bayshore Medical Center and tell them to forward my medical records to Malta.

  Thanks to Mom and Mary, doctors in Malta used the right anesthesia.

  On Monday morning, November 25, Scott was still in Athens waiting to fly to Malta. Embassy officials were in constant contact with ground observers and officials in Malta who would be able to report exactly when Egypt’s crack team of “Thunderbolt” commandos stormed the plane.

  At about 8 P.M. Sunday night, the commandos were ordered to strike. Less than an hour later, the hijacking was over. The personal ordeal for survivors and family members who had lost loved ones, however, was just beginning.

  Some time after the storming of the plane, the U.S. military attaché in Greece was cleared to fly Scott to Malta. Capt. William Nordeen, the U.S. naval and defense attaché at the embassy, drove Scott in a sleek, black bulletproof limousine to the Athens airport, where the U.S. ambassador’s twelve-passenger jet was ready and waiting.

  A former navy pilot who had just begun his assignment in Athens that August, Captain Nordeen, like Scott, was from Minnesota. Nordeen and the other crew member were like big brothers to Scott, as they helped calm his nerves with some small talk.

  On the way to Malta, Scott rode up near the cockpit.

  It was a dangerous mission. There was no time to submit a flight plan for approval, so the pilots risked colliding with scheduled air traffic. To lower the odds of a midair crash, they skimmed the ground—over the water, but under the radar—all the way to Malta.

  There wasn’t a lot of talking during the flight. Most of the time, Scott sat quietly, wondering what he should be getting ready for. The details on my situation were still sketchy.

  “I didn’t know if Jackie was alive or dead, whether she’d been shot in the face or had broken bones in her face. I didn’t know what to expect,” Scott said.

  By the time Scott landed in Valletta late Monday morning, I was in surgery at St. Luke’s. Scott was cleared by Maltese authorities and assigned a local official to escort him to the hospital. By this time, the atmosphere at the airport had calmed down. It wasn’t a three-ring circus.

  Officials from the U.S. embassy in Malta and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later debriefed us on what happened during the hijacking and rescue effort.

  Malta had refused to let the U.S counter-terrorist experts land at Luqa airport. Delta Force, the military’s crack antiterrorist commando team, never made it to Malta, either; three of its planes broke down on the way.

  The hijackers had agreed to let medics pick up my body (they presumed I was dead) in exchange for food.

  The final minutes of the drama unfolded while I was on my way to the hospital and in surgery. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered twenty-five Egyptian commandos to storm the aircraft. The U.S.-trained team used grenades to blow a hole in the rear of the plane, where the hijackers put most of the Arab passengers, touching off a fierce gun battle. The spray of bullets struck one of the plane s fuel tanks, causing it to explode. This sent a fireball blazing through the cabin, which was still filled with hostages.

  While surgeons hovered over my body, doing their best to remove the bullet in my head and skull fragments from my brain, smoke and flames engulfed the runway in a dark, brooding cloud of human misery.

  Fifty-eight people perished in the smoke and flames, including eight Palestinian children and their parents, and the hijacker who wore glasses. Everyone at the front of the plane, where I had been seated, died in the fire. The huge death toll made ours the deadliest hijacking and rescue in aviation history. The prevailing opinion was that the commandos used too much force in storming the plane. Not so many people needed to die.

  By a strange quirk of fate, only two of the five passengers shot in the head actually died from their wounds. Patrick Baker, Tamar Artzi (the Israeli woman who didn’t play dead), and I all lived, while Nitzan Mendelson and Scarlett Rogencamp died. It didn’t make any sense. We were all shot in the head at point-blank range. How could anyone have lived through that?

  “What kind of bullets were these?” Scott asked a U.S. embassy official in Malta.

  “The bullets were homemade; the hijackers packed their own rounds,” the
official said. “They were regular bullets, but they packed their own gunpowder in them. Some were stronger and better packed than others. Nitzan and Scarlett got good ones.” The bullet I got was strong enough to do damage, but not strong enough to kill me.

  The hijackers had also been poor shots. The bullet they fired at Patrick only grazed the top of his head. The same happened with Tamar, who had a lot of hair at the time.

  Yet Tamar had been shot several times. How did she escape death? Tamar received only flesh wounds from the hijacker’s bullets. After being shot several times, she managed to roll underneath the plane. A few minutes later, she got up and ran to safety.

  Three Maltese secret service agents greeted Scott at the hospital. They ushered him to the front desk where a nurse briefly explained that I’d been in surgery and would be unconscious for a while—but that he could come in and see me.

  The hospital staff was on overload, struggling to deal with the massive number of dead and injured passengers from the plane. St. Luke’s was not equipped to handle that many people. Doctors set up makeshift intensive care units in the hallways to take care of survivors.

  Secret service agents directed Scott into the regular intensive care unit at St. Luke’s, past a line of hospital carts with the sheet-covered bodies of those who died in the failed rescue effort. Intensive care was a small room with only eleven or twelve beds. Most of them were filled with other hijacking survivors.

  Scott was in for several shocks. I was laid out on a bed with my head shaved and swathed in bandages; tubes were running in and out of my body. He expected to see my face all bruised up and was pleasantly surprised to see that I looked basically okay.

  Scott looked back at the Maltese agents still standing behind him. One of the agents pointed to the adjacent bed and said, “That’s the guy who shot your wife. He’s the only hijacker who made it out alive.”

  The straight-haired hijacker who shot each of us was lying in the bed next to me. His chest was bandaged and he was on a respirator. Capt. Hani Galal, our pilot, had hit him with a fire ax when the Egyptian commandos began their assault, and he was further wounded by bullets in the chest.

  Malta is a small country with only one hospital near the main airport. All survivors of the hijacking, including the terrorist who murdered Scarlett Rogencamp and Nitzan Mendelson, had to be brought to St. Luke’s.

  The Maltese official raised his eyebrow and, together with the other agents, left the room. Standing alone in the intensive care unit with me and the hijacker, Scott knew what the official had meant. To emphasize the point, they all bolted from the room at the same time and said, “If there’s anything you need—anything—just let us know.”

  “In my mind, he was saying it was okay for me to kill the guy,” Scott later recalled. “I hadn’t even thought of that when I walked into the room. I had been so focused on Jackie’s condition that I wasn’t even mad that the hijacker was in the same room with Jackie. But when he gave me that weird look, he planted the thought in my mind.

  “I knew Malta didn’t want him to live. They didn’t want to have to deal with the political pressures of jailing a worldwide terrorist and the hassle of making a prisoner exchange.

  “I made a decision. If Jackie woke up as a vegetable, he was going to die. I was going to kill him. I had a plan. I was going to go over to him and rip the bandages off his chest and take out his heart. That was my plan. There was no doubt in my mind that that’s what I would have done too.”

  These thoughts were troubling to Scott. He’d never hit anyone in his life, and now he was preparing to commit a cold-blooded, premeditated murder. It weighed heavily on him. “I felt almost pressured to do it if Jackie didn’t come through okay,” he said. “I couldn’t let anybody get away with that.”

  That same Monday morning, the media descended on my parents’ house in suburban Houston. Reporters from CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN clamored for my parents’ reaction to the hijacking. It was a circus in the front yard as reporters shoved microphones in my parents’ faces and fired questions. News producers from New York wanted to bring Dan Rather’s news team in the house to film. But it was so crowded with reporters that my mom said no.

  She remembered what had happened that previous summer when TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome was hijacked. Allyn Conwell, a businessman from Houston and one of the passengers, gained worldwide notoriety as a spokesperson for the hostages during that ordeal. His parents’ house in Houston was trashed by reporters covering the story. (Coincidentally, I had taught Allyn and his wife country western dancing when they lived in Cairo.) My mom didn’t want that to happen to her home.

  She warned any reporters who did come inside to watch themselves. “I don’t want anything disturbed in here or moved around or anything,” she said.

  There was no letup in media interest. Since the hijacking took place on Thanksgiving weekend, my story was especially poignant to the press. That same weekend, terrorists detonated a bomb that wounded thirty-four people just outside a crowded U.S. military complex in northern Frankfurt, Germany. It was the latest in a string of attacks against American military installations around the world.

  The media was intrigued by another angle. It turned out that our red, white, and yellow EgyptAir jetliner with the call letters SU-AYK was the same plane that U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats had intercepted two months earlier when it was carrying the four terrorists responsible for the Achille Lauro hijacking. This plane was also hijacked in August 1976 by gunmen believed to be Libyan agents en route from Cairo to Luxor, Egypt. The plane was stormed by Egyptian “Leatherneck” commandos who rescued the passengers.

  When I woke up after seven hours in surgery, Scott was standing by my bed in the intensive care unit, holding my hand.

  “Hi, babe. Can you believe this happened?” I whispered.

  He smiled and bent down to hug me.

  I passed out again.

  My condition was a big relief to Scott. I wasn’t drooling out of one side of my mouth or in some kind of hallucinogenic fog. And I wasn’t blind, as the doctors expected me to be. I seemed basically normal and alert.

  I can deal with this, Scott thought to himself. He wouldn’t have to kill the hijacker after all.

  Scott’s face was blurry when I looked up at him. But there was more to it; pieces of my visual field were also missing. I could only see straight ahead and to the right. Up, down, and to the left were blank. I figured the vision problem would clear up when my parents sent a new pair of contact lenses to replace those I’d lost in the hijacking. I rested and waited to hear from the doctors about the extent of my brain damage.

  Over the next few days, several doctors came in to check on my progress. It took a while for them to get to me. The small hospital was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the tragedy they were suddenly dealing with. In addition to treating people who survived the storming of the plane, they had to perform autopsies on those who died of smoke inhalation, burns, and bullet wounds caused by the commando assault.

  Eventually, Dr. Zrinzo, the surgeon who operated on me in Malta came in to explain my situation. He said there was an obvious entry wound in the right side of my head, about one-quarter inch in diameter, and the impact had blown a hole in my skull five inches wide. By some miracle he couldn’t explain, however, the bullet that broke through my skull hadn’t penetrated my brain. Instead, it had lodged in the skull and pushed skull fragments into my brain. During surgery, Dr. Zrinzo and the other doctors had cleaned out the wound and removed the bullet, along with skull fragments and brain tissue. Doctors grafted skin tissue from my right thigh to cover the gap in my head.

  They really didn’t know what to expect when I woke up. The bullet destroyed much of the tissue in my brain that controls vision, and doctors thought I might wake up blind. If the bullet had moved a half inch either way in my head, I would have been paralyzed, Dr. Zrinzo said. In the hospital, they gave me a series of eye tests that confirmed what the doctors already suspected: I’d lost my l
eft peripheral vision, my peripheral vision up, and my peripheral vision down in both eyes. If I wanted to see anything in those three places, the doctor said I’d have to look to my left, look up, and look down.

  I also suffered from extremely painful headaches, like migraines, anytime I shifted positions. A neurologist explained that a layer of protective gel inside our heads normally provides a soft cushion, or buffer, between the brain and the skull. In my case, the fluid had drained out the bullet hole in my head. That meant that whenever I moved, my brain pressed directly against my skull, causing the shooting pain.

  As I gained the strength to sit up in bed and walk around, I had problems with my hearing. I was shot by my right ear and the surrounding brain tissue was swollen. Any loud sound, such as the closing of a door or the flushing of a toilet, was extremely painful. I felt a sharp, throbbing ache in both ears. When I flushed the toilet, I had to quickly put my hands over my ears and run out the door—or ask someone to flush for me. I couldn’t stand the noise. I had suffered a concussion to the middle ear, Dr. Zrinzo explained. For about a year, I often had to ask people to speak softly because loud voices hurt too.

  I had other hearing difficulties. Doctors discovered that I’d lost some of my ability to hear high-pitched frequencies. Since speaking voices and most other sounds are transmitted at lower frequencies, it wasn’t a major problem.

  Speaking was hard for me too. My jaw smashed hard against the tarmac when I was thrown from the plane. The force of the impact flowed from my head down into my neck. As a result, my jaw was partially locked. I could open it enough to eat, but not all the way. At first, I mostly drank liquids in the hospital.

  I had torn ligaments in my neck from falling onto the tarmac and some black and blue marks, but no fractured arms or legs.

  The full impact of all these injuries on my life was yet to be known. I felt lucky to be alive, but what kind of life would it be?