“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 head. “Oh. Oh Jesus.”