Max Collins - Fly Paper

“Then what?” Nolan said.

“He says he’ll let the hostages go when the ransom’s delivered. When we take off again, just the pilot and copilot and navigator and yours truly’ll be aboard. And the skyjacker, of course.”

“Has he made any more demands?”

“He wants two parachutes.”

“Why two?” Jon asked.

Nolan grinned. “Because he’s smart. He learned that trick from the best skyjacker of ’em all, of D. B. Cooper. Asking for more than one insures him that the chutes won’t be sabotaged.”

“Why?” Hazel wanted to know.

“Because with two parachutes, he might make somebody else jump along with him.”

Hazel still didn’t understand. “Certainly not the pilot or copilot or navigator,” she said.

Nolan nodded. “Certainly not.”

Hazel swallowed. “Let’s hope the powers that be don’t consider us flight attendants expendable.”

“Any other demands?”

“Just that we aren’t to reveal his identity to the other passengers. As you said, he’s smart. He figures the fewer people that get a good, long look at him, the better. This way, he’ll just blend into the crowd.”

Jon said, “I don’t know, he looks pretty obvious to me, with the wig and sunglasses and everything.”

“Not really,” Nolan said. “Most of the passengers on this plane are businessmen. They just figure him for some hippie kid or something; a fairly likely suspect, maybe, but not much more so than anybody else.”

“D. B. Cooper,” Hazel said, “was dressed like a businessman. Suit and tie, topcoat oxfords. Like most of the people around you.”

Nolan asked, “Has he told you where you’ll be flying yet?”

“No. Mexico, though, don’t you suppose? Parachute out into some flat area, where somebody’ll be waiting to pick him up?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m supposed to be asking for volunteers right now. But I’m not asking you. I don’t want you. Understand? We’ll have plenty of volunteer hostages, and I don’t want you two to be part of them. Especially you, Nolan or Ryan or whoever you are. I get the feeling you’re the hero type, and I don’t want you grandstand-playing me into getting blown to pieces.”

“I’m telling you, Hazel,” Nolan said, “that kid doesn’t have any damn bomb on board. Take it from me, I’m a judge of character if there ever was one. That kid just doesn’t have the balls for it.”

They’d been keeping their voices down anyway, but she leaned over and whispered, so as not to take any chance of ruffling the feathers of the nearby nuns, and said, “It doesn’t take balls to blow up a plane, dummy. Just a little dynamite.” And she headed back up the aisle, skirt flashing over those fine, long legs of hers.

“So what are we going to do, Nolan?”

“I’m glad Hazel gave us an out. A hostage is one thing we don’t want to be. We can’t afford to stay. Or you can’t, anyway. Now, soon as you get off this plane, you get your ass back to Iowa City, got me?”

“You got an idea, Nolan?”

“I might have.”

“What is it?”

“You just let me do the thinking, and do as I say.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, mine is not to reason why. You’re the mastermind and I’m the flunky.”

“Think of yourself as second in command, if it softens the blow.”

Thirty seconds later, the captain’s voice came over the intercom: He instructed all the passengers, except those who had volunteered to stay on board, to come forward and disembark. Everyone but the hostages began to rise from their seats, the businessmen straightening their ties, grabbing their briefcases; women fussing with their hair, tidying themselves in preparation for the photographers who’d be waiting out there; even the three nuns were smoothing out their habits. Everyone but the hostages, and the skyjacker of course, began to move forward.

Except Nolan.

Who slipped into the nearest of the two johns around the corner from their seat and, giving Jon a look that said, “Keep quiet and do as I told you,” sealed himself inside the cubicle.

And now Jon stood alone, at the rear of the aisle, everyone else trailing on up toward the front, excluding the handful staying behind; Jon began up the aisle, hesitantly, wondering what the hell to do.

He could almost identify with the skyjacker; they were about the same age, after all, and had both got in over their heads in daring, potentially violent endeavors in pursuit of riches. And Nolan stowing away like this meant one thing to Jon: the skyjacker was in for it. Nolan was going to do God-knows-what to that poor kid, and Jon didn’t know who to be more worried for, Nolan or that dumb-ass skyjacker.

And then a realization hit Jon, a short, hard jab that almost knocked him down: Nolan was wrong!

Nolan’s assumption that the skyjacker had not planted a bomb on the plane was clearly false. Otherwise, why would the skyjacker take the trouble to let the bulk of the passengers disembark here at the Quad Cities? The kid evidently had a conscience of sorts, and didn’t want to blow any more people to smithereens than he absolutely had to! The stupid fucking hypocrite.

Jon didn’t know what to do. Should he warn Nolan? Go back and tell him, explain the logic of it, pull him out of that damn can and fuck the money, just get the hell out of here? What good was Nolan going to do jumping the kid, anyway? Nolan! he screamed in his brain. There is a bomb on this goddamn plane!

But it was too late to go back. He was passing beside the seat where the young skyjacker was sitting calmly, just another brave volunteer hostage, as far as anyone could tell. A sudden rush of indignation ran through Jon. He wanted to grab that little shit by the shoulders and shake him till his wig fell off. What kind of fucking monster could do a thing like this? Didn’t the bastard have any respect for human life at all? How could the son of a bitch coldly plant a bomb on a plane and treat life and death like some casual goddamn thing?

Jon glared at the skyjacker as he passed him, but in the reflecting mirror-sunglasses, he saw only himself.

He looked out at the airport. It was a modest affair, two creamy-brown brick buildings joining a central tower, some hangars off to the side. You could set this airport down in the lobby at O’Hare and no one would notice. Its relative smallness was one reason he’d picked it. He’d chosen Detroit as takeoff point and the Quad Cities as ransom drop, partially because neither airport had been involved in a skyjacking before; the Quad City Airport was especially poorly equipped for such a contingency. He realized the money would probably have to be flown in from Chicago, but that was just a twenty-minute flight, and since he’d had the pilot call the demand ahead, the money could almost beat them there. Here at the Quad Cities, a skyjacking would be more than the local enforcement agencies could handle, and the people flown in on the spur of the moment from Chicago would be disoriented and, in teaming with local people, disorganized; by the time anyone was at all prepared to deal with him, he would be gone. But had he chosen O’Hare, for example, he’d have had to face a damn anti-skyjack task force.

He was more than aware of the harsh fate dealt out to others who’d engaged in this particular crime: there were so many instances of FBI snipers dropping skyjackers, he couldn’t keep them all straight in his mind, though one recent episode was vividly clear to him: a skyjacker had been cut in half, literally, by the close-range blast of an FBI agent’s shotgun. Consideration of such facts had led him to the choice of a relatively “small-town” airport, but even then, he knew that overconfidence was insanity. For that reason, he had sent the stewardess out to pick up the money. He was not about to stick his head outside the plane and get it blown off his shoulders by an FBI marksman.