He was a slim pale man and his corn-coloured hair was tight and curly like a lambswool rug; his eyes were dead, and there was a clean white scar down one cheek that gave his face a stiff lopsided expression. He stepped up behind the Russian pilot and with an effortless movement drew a gun from his camera-case and touched the barrel against the base of the man’s cranium. He spoke in quiet pedantic French: ‘You will change course immediately and proceed north. Our destination is the Finnish coast — the peninsula of Bjornvik, south of the town of Lovisa.’
The communicating door opened again and shut quickly. One of the French photographers stood just behind the blond man, away from the crew. He had the body of a wrestler, and the gun in his hand had an unusually wide blunt barrel.
Capitaine Duhamel looked at them both and repeated the navigational instructions to Captain Prokovsky, speaking calmly in French through the interpreter. When he had finished, the blond man said: ‘No one is to move, except to carry out their duties. Do not attempt to make a mistake. I have a good knowledge of navigation and have studied this area with care.’
The interpreter relayed the message without expression. He was a big middle-aged man in a shapeless suit. Captain Prokovsky leant forward to move the controls, and even in the confined space the interpreter made a swift lunge, one broad hand with the fingers held rigid slicing down at the blond man’s wrist. There was a loud thud above the hum of the engines, and the interpreter’s head flopped back from his shoulders with a curious splashing sound; his knees struck the floor, he rolled over, slid down the back of Captain Prokovsky’s seat, leaving a slimy red smear along the grey covering, thumped down at the navigator’s feet and lay still.
The navigator gave a shout in Russian and came to his feet, as the wide-barrelled gun swung round and aimed at his belly. Both pilots had turned and now recognized, in the French ‘photographer’s’ hand, the still experimental anti-personnel pistol for use against hijackers: the flat plastic bullet, with its lobbing trajectory, has a high velocity but a short range incapable of penetrating the skin of the fuselage, while having the same effect on the human body as the internationally proscribed dum-dum.
The blond man said: ‘Capitaine Duhamel, I am ordering you both again to change direction. If you have not done so within ten seconds, my colleague here will blow off your leg at the knee.’
The French pilot’s cigarette had gone out, and he sat motionless next to Captain Prokovsky. The blond man now turned to the navigator: ‘Understand French?’
It was Captain Prokovsky who replied, without moving his head: ‘We understand. We do as you order.’ His hands moved across the controls, and the blond man had to steady himself with his free hand against the back of the dead interpreter’s seat, as the plane started a sharp whining turn. The blond man leant forward and began studying the bank of flickering luminous needles in front of the pilots; he knew which dials to look for, and checked their readings against the chart on the navigator’s table. When he was satisfied that the new course was correct, he nodded to the French gunman and went back through the communicating door into the passenger-cabin.
The sudden turn of the aircraft had upset most of the glasses of champagne, and the stewardesses were hurrying about the aisle with napkins. The blond man switched on the intercom and began speaking in French: ‘We are altering course. Our destination is temporarily changed. You will fasten your seatbelts and not move.’ His words were the signal for four men, who had all been identified at the airport as accredited French correspondents, to stand up at regular intervals down the cabin and face the passengers, with their dum-dum pistols held loosely at the ready. They were muscular Mediterranean types with that alert yet somehow emotionless look that is common to the rougher kind of policemen, to professional hoodlums, and to the more hardened breed of journalist.
The blond man spoke again over the intercom, this time in English: ‘You will remain calm. The plane has been commandeered, but no harm will come to any of you, providing you behave and obey orders. If anyone leaves his seat or attempts to take a photograph, he will be shot. The guns that my colleagues are holding do not leave clean or superficial wounds.’ While his French had been adequate, his English was perfect, with a flat clipped accent which several British correspondents recognized as South African.
Most of the genuine journalists remained calm, though agreeably shocked; their only real concern was the frustration of having to share such an experience with so many rivals. The Russian contingent looked either angry or glum; but no one appeared particularly worried, except the little Russian girl who now dashed past two of the French gunmen and clutched the arm of the English journalist, Fielding. Her apple cheeks were colourless, her eyes wide and wet, and she began babbling to him, first in Russian, and then, when he cut her short, in a burst of English: ‘Oh no, no, no! They take you! They take you!’
Fielding turned to her with a look of tired resignation, and muttered something, patting her hand. She began again in Russian, and stopped only when one of the gunmen approached; then wiped her eyes, turned and walked bravely back up the gangway to her seat next to the two air hostesses, who sat mute and nervous, like waitresses during an
