El Al 318 Part II

[Silktie]

PART II

Monday 23 August
The Grid, Meeting Room

Harry stops breathing for a moment, and all sound in the room is sucked from it. All he can hear is his own heart hammering in his ears. He squeezes his eyes shut, but when he opens them again the message is still the same. He lowers the phone, gently laying it on the table with the utmost care. The movement draws Beth’s attention, and one look at Harry makes her grab Lucas’ arm to shut him up. All eyes turn to Harry. He is grasping the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles have turned white.
“Harry?” Beth ventures carefully.
He turns his head to her, his movements jerky. It takes him a few attempts to find his voice.
“Ruth’s plane has been hijacked.”

Ruth scans the cabin again as they near the end of the farthest runway, whilst frantically going through the items in her hand luggage in her mind to make sure there is nothing that will identify her as a member of the Security Services. She hopes to God Harry is not in some meeting with his phone turned off, as she has suddenly become very afraid, but the thought that he is at the other end of the line gives her strength. Please, she thinks, Harry will know what to do…

Harry’s statement is met with stunned silence. They watch as he picks up the phone and types a short message. Everyone sees the tremor in his hands.

When Ruth glances at her mobile again, she has a message, a glorious message from Harry:

I’m here. Do not be afraid.

She calls his number, and watches the call connect. Her almost-sob of relief is drowned out by a sudden burst of machine-gun fire as the two men burst through the curtain at the back, firing in the air and shouting.
“This is a hijacking! Don’t move! Stay in your seats!”

On the Grid, they can clearly hear the gunfire, the shouting and the bedlam that follows through the phone. Harry has turned very pale, and has to violently fight the urge to pick up the phone and yell Ruth’s name into it. Please let her be all right, he begs silently instead, to whom or what he isn’t quite sure. Please…

Ruth grabs the woman next to her and shoves her down as soon as the shooting starts, at the same time deftly wedging the mobile into the webbing below the seat. At least that will allow Harry and the team to hear what’s happening as long as the battery lasts. After about thirty seconds, the shooting stops and an eerie calm descends, the silence only disturbed by the sound of crying. Ruth carefully lifts her head and peers over the seat in front of her. There are now four young men spread along the aisle, each holding an AK-47. Towards the front she notices the air hostess that helped the men in discussion with a slightly older man. Ruth guesses his age as mid-thirties. His appearance marks him down as of Arab descent, but when he turns to the passengers and begins to address them, his accent is very British.

“Ladies and gentlemen, pay attention please. My friends and I have taken over this plane. Do not think of being heroes, it will only get you killed. We are wiring the whole plane with explosives, and should you try to rush us, I will detonate it.” He waves a trigger device in the air.
“I am willing to die in the cause of Allah, as are all my brothers, so do not test us on this.”
As he’s speaking two of the men are moving through the cabin, attaching explosives at intervals.
“No-one is allowed to get out of their seat without permission. No-one is allowed to talk. If you do so, you will be punished.” He turns away, but changes his mind and addresses the terrified passengers once again.
“You should be proud. Even though many of you are most undeserving of this honour, you are about to play a glorious role in the fight for a free Palestine.” With that, he ducks through the curtain towards the cockpit.

The old woman next to Ruth begins to keen softly. Instinctively Ruth puts an arm around her.
“Just try to stay calm. It’ll be all right.”

At the sound of Ruth’s voice, relief floods through the meeting room. Harry has never been so moved in his life to hear the voice of another human being. He briefly covers his eyes with his hand, and takes a few deep breaths, all too aware that anyone looking into his eyes at that moment would plainly see his love for Ruth displayed there. He allows himself only those few seconds, before letting instinct and years of experience take over.

Whilst the others are still digesting the developments, Harry is suddenly on his feet, the meeting room phone pressed to his ear.
“This is Harry Pearce. Invoke Protocol 10 immediately. We have a hijacking situation at Heathrow.”
As he waits for a response, he looks at Tariq.
“Reroute Ruth’s call to that laptop you showed me the other day, the one that records and transcribes conversations.” As Tariq jumps to his feet and almost sprints from the room, Harry grasps his arm as he passes him.
“Gather everything you’ll need. You’re coming with me in five minutes.”
His attention turns to the phone again.
“Good. I want a helicopter here now… Yes. I’ll be on the roof in five minutes.”
“Harry!” Beth beckons him over to the mobile urgently.
“Ruth’s talking.”

Ruth has taken a few minutes to calm herself, and to clarify and prioritise what she knows. In her mind’s eye she can see every step Harry and the team will take in the next few minutes, and she knows that the more information they have, the more effective those steps will be. Turning to the woman next to her, she starts talking as if she’s trying to calm the old lady down.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure they won’t hurt us. There are seven of them; six men and one woman. One in cockpit, six in cabin with passengers armed with AK-47s. One air hostess helping them; Arab man with British accent mid-thirties the leader.”
The old woman next to her looks at her quizzically, then demands loudly: “What are you mumbling about?!”

Her outburst draws the attention of one of their captors, who moves over to them. Ruth grabs the old woman’s arm and squeezes hard, willing her to keep her mouth shut long enough for Ruth to get the information out.
“I recognise the air hostess from somewhere. If they planned on flying to another destination, they wouldn’t have shot the plane full of holes…”
The young captor looms over them suddenly, then swings the butt of his gun into Ruth’s face, hard.
“Shut up, bitch!”

Her agonised cry cuts through the meeting room. Harry takes a step towards the phone, his hands balled into fists by his side.
“No!! Bastard! I’ll kill him!”
Beth lays a restraining hand on his arm, but he shakes it off, rounding on her. The look on his face makes her take a step back, as she sees in that split-second the darkest part of Harry Pearce, and she knows for certain that he will literally kill that man if he should get his hands on him. She can hear Ruth’s moans of pain in the background as she stands rooted to the spot, pinned there by Harry’s murderous eyes. In that moment, so many things become suddenly clear to her about Harry’s feelings for Ruth.

The spell is broken by Tariq bursting back into the room, grabbing Harry’s mobile off the table, and attaching it to the laptop he’s brought with him. When he looks up, he’s just in time to see Harry’s retreating back disappearing through the door. He gathers up the equipment hastily and scurries after his boss, leaving a very shaken Beth still standing in the room.

Ruth cannot remember ever feeling such intense pain. It reverberates around her skull – a sharp, shooting pain that makes tears flow down her cheeks, mingling with blood from her nose and split lip. She is powerless to stop them, in the same way that she is unable to muffle her agonised moans. Dimly, she is aware that the old woman’s keening is rising in volume and becoming full-pitched wailing, and the sound ratchets up the pain in her head another notch. She tries to focus on something else, something positive, and Harry’s image fills her mind, unbidden. Ruth wonders, rather absurdly, whether he’ll be disappointed in her for breaking a cardinal rule. One is not supposed to focus attention on oneself in a hostage situation, she remembers from her course. But she could see no other way of getting the information across, and needs must, as Harry is so fond of saying.

Harry…

Stripped of all her defences, facing an uncertain future, Ruth is surprised by the strength of her feelings for him. She realises, with a pang, that should she die here in this plane, he will be the last person she will think of; that her mind will seek comfort in her memories of him. And she knows that her biggest regret will be that Harry will never know how deeply she loves him.

When the pain finally subsides enough for her to become aware of her surroundings again, she realises that the Arab looking leader is standing in the aisle next to them. He waits patiently until she manages to focus on his face before speaking.
“The two of you disobeyed my instructions. I was very clear that there was to be no talking. For that you must be punished.”
He moves his right arm slightly, and for the first time Ruth becomes aware that he is holding something in his hand. For a moment her brain refuses to compute what it is seeing, refuses to accept the horror of it. But when he lifts it up and holds it at chest level, the full implications sink in with terrifying clarity.
A suicide vest.
“One of you will wear this, and deliver our message to the world. The question is: which one?”

tbc