The Intercept (7 page)

Part 4

Chatter

A Few Years Later

Thursday, July 1

Chapter 14

B
oston Center, Scandinavian 903 heavy is with you. We’re out of Atlantic Uniform, flight level three six zero, direct Newark.”

“Scandinavian 903 heavy, Boston Center. Good morning. Maintain three six zero. Expect descent clearance at 1655 UTC.”

“Roger, Boston Center. Maintain three six zero, clearance at 1655. Scandinavian 903 heavy.”

Captain Elof Granberg raised his arms over his head in a groaning stretch, his fingertips pointing to the cabin ceiling. The pressure in his bladder had just reached a level of discomfort, which he knew would intensify once he stood. He reached for the direct passenger cabin intercom on the center console.

“Almost done, Maggie,” he said to the flight attendant who picked up on the other end. “Initial descent in about twenty. Anders and I will pay our visits, then you can let the pax move around a bit before sitting them down for landing. Please let me know when we’re secure.”

Granberg then leaned across the console and tapped his copilot on the shoulder. “You take the first head call, Anders. I have the airplane.”

“You have the airplane,” copilot Anders Bendiksen said. Bendiksen unbuckled his shoulder harness, pushed the straps off his shoulders, and slid his seat back, standing to wait for the flight attendant to confirm that there were no passengers in front of the cockpit door.

The intercom handset buzzed. Bendiksen picked it up.

“All clear for you.”

“Thank you, Maggie,” said Bendiksen. “Coming out now.”

T
he mandatory protocol for cockpit door opening in American airspace had been in place since the attacks on New York and Washington. One flight attendant blocked the aisle leading from the front of the passenger cabin, standing before the drawn privacy curtain. A second flight attendant was a backup, standing on the other side. The armored door to the flight deck could be opened only from the inside, or outside from a keypad. The code was changed for every flight, and was known only to the pilots.

On U.S. domestic flights, a wire screen was unfurled and secured, sealing off the vestibule from the first-class cabin while the pilots moved about, one at a time, outside the cockpit. On an international flight aboard a twin-aisle jet like the Airbus 330, the guard post was a ten-foot-long vestibule in front of the flight deck door. On one side was a bathroom, on the other, a bar and coffee galley.

A half-bulkhead separated the vestibule from the business-class cabin. The aisles began on each side of it, running aft through business, economy extra, and economy-class sections to the rear of the airplane.

As the purser on the SAS nonstop from Stockholm to Newark, Maggie Sullivan took her position as the forward blocker. Maggie was a solid five-four with dark hair in a French plait and a long, angular face bred from centuries of black Irish seafaring stock. She possessed that perfect combination of politeness and firmness common to the best flight attendants and nurses—but as a sentry, she was hardly imposing.

Her colleague that flight, a slight Nordic blonde named Trude Carlson, stood behind her. Seven years before, they had together attended a daylong instructional seminar from a martial arts trainer who taught them incapacitating kicks, chops, and pressure-point gouges. The aim, the trainer told them, was to delay an assailant at least long enough to secure the door to the flight deck, and therefore the controls of the airliner. Self-sacrifice, should it be necessary, was implicitly part of the job.

They had performed the door-opening procedure so many times that it had become a ritual rather than a tactic of true vigilance. So when the cockpit door opened, Maggie and Trude were chatting through the curtain about their plans for the unusually lengthy seventy-two-hour layover. They planned to visit the TKTS discount ticket booth in Times Square and were discussing the current must-see Broadway shows. And Trude had an old flame who lived on the Upper East Side who might have a friend for Maggie.

The cockpit door was thrust open and Anders Bendiksen appeared. “Hej-hej,” he said, with the singsong lilt of the customary Scandinavian greeting.

Trude chirped “Hej-hej” back to him, glancing over her shoulder.

“Good group this flight?”

“Not bad,” said Maggie, still steamed about the man in 11D who had spilled tomato juice on her shoe. Her stocking squished with every step, and she would never get the odor out.

Anders opened the lavatory door and ducked inside, sliding the
OCCUPIED
lock behind him.

The passenger was on Maggie before she even turned her head back toward the seats.

No outcry. No noise from the business-class cabin. No warning.

A blur, his first contact with her. An arm across her chest, crushing her breasts. Lifting her off her feet, startling her painfully. Jerking her inside the privacy curtain.

His other hand was at her throat. She felt something else there: the icy sting of a sharp blade.

Trude froze. She got her hands in the air, but they were empty. She felt powerless and stunned. This was not happening.

“ON YOUR KNEES!” he shrieked, his English heavily accented, and further warped by rage. He pulled Maggie deeper into the vestibule, out of sight of the majority of the passengers. “BOTH OF YOU! NOW!”

Trude looked around for help, for a weapon, for anything. A pitcher of coffee sat in the galley, but it was nowhere near scalding, and anyway out of her reach. She looked at Maggie’s face and saw a long-stare look in her eyes that frightened her as much as the intruder.

“Now!” the man ordered. “She dies now! Obey me!”

Trude fell forward to her knees. The man lowered Maggie, pushing her down to the floor. He thrust out his other hand, showing them a contraption molded out of toy plastic, with wires extending from it into the cuff of his black cotton shirt.

“I have a bomb!” he declared, showing them the detonator trigger. He spoke loudly enough to be heard in the lavatory, and perhaps even inside the flight deck. He pounded once on the lavatory door with his knife hand.

His eyes were wide, his face intense, like a man staring into a blazing fire. He was young, in his very early twenties. Obviously of Arabic descent, though dressed as a Westerner, his skin tan, his face beardless.

Maggie remembered him in a microsecond flash of her brain cells. He had boarded, took the front row aisle seat on the right side in business class, held an open magazine during takeoff, wrapped himself in a blanket, and slept all the way from Stockholm. His seatmate, a woman, was geared up with the expensive kit of a well-off executive road warrior. Loose-fitting designer gym suit, plush eyeshades, Bose headphones, and a neck pillow leaned against the cabin window. She had slept most of the way too, dropping off soon after takeoff. Neither of them took any service at all until water at wake-up before preparing for landing.

“The code!” the man screamed at the door of the lavatory, striking it again with his fist. “I want the cabin code! If you come out, I detonate! Five seconds—or the first woman dies!”

Maggie looked at the man’s shoes, his knees, his crotch. Seeking a weak point.

But she would have to get past his knife first.

The man kicked the lavatory door so hard Maggie thought he might have damaged it. “Answer me!”

Anders said from behind the door, “I hear you.” His voice was loud enough to be heard, but modulated for calmness. “I do not have the code. Only the captain has the code.”

“Liar! You do have it! She dies now!”

He reached down to Maggie, the knife blade pressing against her trachea, the detonator held high. She felt a burn, then warmth running down her neck.

She had been cut. She didn’t know how badly.

Trude screamed. The man kicked at her, striking her shoulder, knocking her onto her side.

Anders was saying from behind the door, “Let me come out! I can talk to the captain!”

“Give me the code now!” yelled the intruder.

“I am coming out!” said Anders.

He was trying to open the door, but it was jammed.

“Give me the code!”

At once the vestibule entrance erupted. The hijacker, who had turned his head toward the lavatory, did not see the onrushing passenger explode through the privacy curtain.

Charging, screaming.

Maggie, more out of self-preservation than foresight, grabbed at the man’s knife hand. Had she not, the momentum of the passenger hitting him would have run the knife blade right across her throat.

The first passenger in, a fit-looking blond male, grabbed the man’s other hand, the one gripping the detonator. He tore it from the bomber’s hand ferociously—and then two more men entered from behind, hitting them, driving the blond and the bomber against a stowed serving cart in the wall compartment, then down to the floor.

Another man dug for the knife. A woman pulled Maggie back to the wall.

Two men pinned the bomber to the floor. He was writhing and growling madly.

The blond rolled over onto his back. He held the detonator, but his other hand held his own crooked wrist, his mouth twisted in pain.

Wires dangled from the detonator. The men on the floor yanked up the bomber’s shirt, tearing the cotton fabric, searching for an explosive device.

There was nothing but hair and belly.

It happened so quickly, it took time to realize that it was already over. The bomber lay with his face mashed into the floor, a knee upon the back of his neck. Everyone was panting, sweating, exuding adrenaline.

Trude began sobbing into her open hand, staring at Maggie. The female passenger who had joined the men in charging the hijacker instinctively pressed her bare hand against Maggie’s bloody throat. Trude pulled down linen tray cloths to stanch the blood flow.

Maggie sat blinking and gasping, allowing them to minister to her. She broke out of her daze when she saw that the hijacker was in reach, extending her leg and heel-kicking the prone bomber.

“You cocksucker!” she screamed. “Evil! Fucking! Cocksucker!”

She looked down and saw her white service blouse soaked red with blood, and she burst into tears. The woman rescuer probed her neck to find the source of the bleeding. The cut was small. The bomber’s knife had nicked a vein, but the flow of blood wasn’t pulsing. The woman stripped off her own zippered warm-up jacket, mashed it into a compress, and pressed it to Maggie’s neck with the towels.

“You’re okay,” she told Maggie. “It looks like he missed the artery. You’re okay.”

Banging on the lavatory door. One of the rescuers, an older man, banged back, yelling, “We are safe out here!” he barked. “Stand back as far as you can!”

The man put his shoulder into the broken door, throwing himself at it, but couldn’t bust through. Trude was on her feet and went around with him and both of them rushed the small door.

It gave inward this time, the lock cracking out of the frame. The door struck Anders, but he was ready for it, having braced himself with his arm and leg.

He stepped out of the tiny bathroom and looked down at the foiled terrorist, who lay immobilized on the floor wearing tan pants and a ripped white shirt.

“Merde,” Anders said.

The enormity of what had just occurred was only now becoming apparent to everyone inside the crowded vestibule. Anders reached past Trude to the intercom on the wall next to the bar and coffee station.

“Captain? This is Anders here. We’ve had an attempted hijacking.”

“I heard it, Anders.”

“Everything is under control at the moment. Maggie is hurt.”

“How badly?”

Anders looked at Maggie. The woman passenger lifted her jacket from the wound. Anders nodded, smiling at Maggie.

“It looks like she is going to be fine,” he said.

“Are you secure?”

Anders looked back at the two men lying on top of the bomber. He saw the blond holding the supposed detonator, and his own crooked wrist.

“He said he had a bomb, but it . . . looks like it was just a hoax. Just a trigger with wires. And a knife.”

For ten seconds, the line was silent.

“Here are my orders,” said Captain Granberg when he came back on. “Move all passengers from business class to the rear of the plane except those controlling the hijacker. Tie him up with lap belt extensions and the plastic slip ties from the emergency electrical repair bin. You know the one.”

Anders said, “Overhead, just forward of the galley.”

“When you have him tied, carry him back to the last row in that cabin, recline the inner middle seat, lash him tightly in it. You supervise at all times. I want him handled humanely, but securely. Be sure he cannot move. Remove his shoes and his pants also. Post at least two guards over him. Do not let him get his hands anywhere near his own mouth or throat. Do you copy?”

“I copy,” Anders Bendiksen said.

“For security reasons, I will not be opening the flight deck door again. You will remain posted at the door in view of the attacker. I have already squawked the hijack code on the transponder. I will now get clearance for an emergency descent and landing.”

T
he captain’s voice came over the Airbus’s cabin loudspeakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Granberg. We have successfully averted a cockpit intrusion in the forward cabin.”

The gasp that went up throughout the length of the aircraft was unlike any human noise the crew had ever heard.

“There is no danger currently. Please remain in your seats unless instructed directly by First Officer Bendiksen, myself, or members of the cabin crew. I repeat—please do remain in your seats. The airplane is still in perfect condition, and we will be diverting for landing with law enforcement members standing by. Please do not be alarmed by the flashing lights after we land, nor the medical support equipment. We have had one minor injury, and I am assured it is not serious or life-threatening. As soon as possible, we will resume our journey to Newark. I would like to apologize for this inconvenience on behalf of the airline, and for your missed connections with ongoing flights. Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding, and flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing.”