Cannibals and Missionaries (27 page)

Then all at once the discussion was over. The big hijacker and the co-pilot were underneath the helicopter, looking up at something. The pilots had won their point. Carey said he was not surprised. On balance, he guessed, the hijackers could not have been too eager to see the helicopter take off with the Royal Dutch Air Force at the controls. “Nothing much to prevent them from flying it back to Schiphol, wouldn’t you say, Henk? Then good-bye getaway craft.” “But why do they
need
a getaway craft?” Sophie demanded. “Psychological,” said Carey, and let it go at that. The pilot was now inside the helicopter. From the bottom he was letting out a long cable. “Standard equipment,” said Carey. “A hoist, they call it. Used for making drops and pick-ups normally. He has a winch in there that’s operated by a motor.” He had been a flyer, Sophie remembered, in the Second World War. The cable unwound and lay on the pavement, in coils, like a thin black snake. “But I thought we were going to push,” said Sophie. “They’ll try the hoist for now,” Carey said. “But I expect the time for pushing will come.”

The lazy voice broke off. Suddenly there was a great deal of action. It was as though a whistle had been blown. First, the male hostages were quickly separated from the women and formed into a squad, which was set to work unwinding the cable. Then, from the periphery, four new figures appeared. All were dressed in windbreakers and baggy pants, but one might be a woman—she was too far off still to tell. Two stayed by the cable, watching it play out, and two ran off to a point several yards up the highway. They had brought lanterns with them, and now you could see better. But without Carey to brief her, Sophie felt at a loss. She could not make out what was happening, exactly. The pair up the highway was shouting in rapid German.
“Ja!” “Nein,” “Doch, das stimmt.” “Nein. Es stimmt nicht.”
Eventually it dawned on her: they were looking for a tree to fix the cable to. But the trees along the road were just big saplings—willows, Sophie thought, and she tried to remember from her parents’ property whether willow was a soft wood or a hard wood. There could not be any full-grown trees anywhere here; the polder was too new. In the thicket were only tall bushes. And along the road no telephone poles. Nothing stout and fixed to anchor onto. And no hope of a big jutting rock; the land was perfectly flat—level sea-bottom. She was not surprised that Carey had sounded skeptical. Yet the confederates, apparently, had found a tree, several yards further up the road, that they thought would suit the purpose, for one of them called out “Jeroen!
Ja, ja! Hier!”
and the tall Dutch hijacker—they were big, Henk said, in the fenlands he came from—went up to consult with them. Then an order was given, and the hostages hoisted the cable onto their shoulders and marching in step, spaced out in single file, carried it up the road till the order to halt came. The frieze of toiling figures with the cable stretched between them looked curiously like a chain gang silhouetted against the night sky.

The end of the cable reached, but there could not be much slack, because a wait followed while the men tried to hook it to the tree trunk, cursing in a babel of tongues
(“Merde!”
cried the voice of Henk). Finally the laborers fell back. There was a sound of cranking and groaning as the winch turned and the cable tautened. The helicopter moved. It was proceeding on a diagonal to the highway’s edge. The problem, of course, was the skids. The thin glaze of ice on the highway was uneven, and halfway along the great hulk seemed to balk. You could hear the skids scrape on the pavement. “Halt!” called the co-pilot and went over to inspect.

There was a consultation. No damage seemed to have been done, and the hijackers, apparently, had been prepared for a setback. An emollient of some kind, Sophie guessed, was needed to grease the skids; the ice was too patchy. She thought madly of Dutch butter. But mud, it seemed, was the answer, and there was no shortage of it in the ditch beside the highway. That was where the shovels fitted in.

Now the women were put to work. Pails were produced, and two groups were formed, one to carry the pails, which “Gretel” was rapidly filling, and the other to apply the contents by hand to the stretch of pavement in front of the runners. The new confederate, who was in fact a woman, pale, thin, German, and young, seized the second shovel and followed Gretel’s example. While this was going on, the men took places at the rear of the helicopter, to start pushing when the word came—they would push in concert with the turning winch. Having lost—or wasted—so much time, the hijackers were now in a great hurry. But the pails were small, almost like children’s pails, and the mud was cold; actually there were splinters of ice in it. Sophie’s hands ached, and she looked with pity at the manicured fingernails of Harold’s wife, which showed a blackish red in the lantern light. In Sophie’s view, it would have made sense to let the hostages use a shovel to smooth the mud onto the pavement rather than have them slather it on like cold cream with their bare hands. But the shovels were reserved for the use of Gretel and the other. Rather than trust the captives with them, they leaned on them during pauses to watch contemptuously, like forewomen, while the feeble carriers bore off their dripping loads.

At length the leadership was satisfied with the slippery state of the pavement, and the pilot resumed his place. The winch turned, the men pushed, but, instead of advancing, the helicopter was sliding backward. The cable was pulling the tree, which slowly rose, turned a sort of somersault, exposing its roots, and was dragged along the road. A sound of clucking came from the women. “Sheer vandalism,” Sophie’s nearest neighbor pronounced. “Don’t you agree? When one thinks of the money this government must have spent planting those trees…” Yet they were going to try again, with another tree—still frailer in appearance, Sophie considered. She rather sympathized with her neighbor: before they were through, they would have ripped up every tree in the area. But at least this next one, unlike its predecessor, had not been weakened by a first assault. And the hijackers this time were trying a new strategy. A rope was brought from the helicopter and tied to the tree trunk. The workers were redistributed. Males, both hostages and hijackers, were assigned to pull on the rope, to hold the tree steady when the winch started its counter-pull, while the women, all of them, were to push the helicopter from the rear. They practiced, then “One, two,
three!”
the fenland giant counted. The cable tightened. The helicopter moved forward. They had done it.

But the job was not yet over. The ditch they had been digging in constituted a new hazard. It was not very wide; nevertheless there was the danger that one of the skids could slip into it and tip the helicopter over on its side. “Jeroen”—at any rate they now knew his name, which rhymed with “shoon”; was it Dutch for “Jerome”?—stood with his hands on his hips, studying the ditch. He measured the skids and shook his head. Then he called to Ahmed, who brought him a small ax, of the kind used for cutting firewood. Seizing it in his huge hands, he set to work to chop branches off the young willows till he had enough to fill in the ditch at the point the helicopter would cross. Here there was no question of using the winch. Again the women got behind to push; in front, the work-gang of men pulled on the cable. Without gloves, their hands slipped; it was hard to get a purchase. But the bed of twigs and branches was wet and slimy; in half a minute the helicopter was across.

Now there was less hurry. Even though the helicopter was still visible, it was not blocking the road to a truck or car that wanted to pass—there must be maintenance men at that pumping-station and if they worked in shifts, some could be arriving or leaving at any hour of the night. This highway must connect with the mainland, where people lived, and to Sophie it was a miracle that no vehicle so far had appeared. And if one had, what would the hijackers have done? Taken whoever was in it prisoner, she supposed. But then the car would have to be hidden too. At any rate it would have had wheels. And if the night-shift worker had had a family, wouldn’t somebody have given the alarm when he failed to come home? All the time they had been pushing and shoving she had been worrying, she realized, that a car would come before they finished, and now that that danger no longer mattered much—in the dark a driver would be concentrating on the road and not looking to see what was beside it—she pushed the damp fringe back from her forehead and breathed easier.

There remained the thick underbrush to be dealt with. A sort of path or track, she noticed, already ran through it, and the vegetation was crushed and trampled in places. But the track was too narrow for the helicopter to pass. It would have to be widened. Otherwise, she guessed, the rotor blades might get tangled in the tall reeds. Or some other damage could befall its vital parts. Fatigue was making her unmechanical brain even more hazy: in Vietnam she had ridden in dozens of helicopters and actually come under fire from the ground once, yet now she could not even remember where their engines were exactly. But she was right about widening the path.

While the teams of hostages rested and the men mopped their brows (“Wonderful exercise!” she heard the minister proclaim), Ahmed busied himself with the ax. His progress along the thicket’s encroaching edges was maddeningly slow, and behind him he left masses of snarled reeds and prickly branches, which the others, following in his wake, had to clear away. Carey, walking beside her and watching the young man’s clumsy efforts, was manifestly losing patience. “Here, let me have that,” he said and proceeded to cut a clean swath, rapidly felling bushes on either side as he went. There came a piercing whistle. “Put that ax down!” It was strange how these people, though they must be even more tired than the hostages, could be so alert. They must have their wits about them to be instantly conscious of the deadly-weapon potential latent in an ax or a mere shovel.

Or was it not, rather, dim-witted on their part to be so fiercely suspicious? One thing they were incapable of divining, it seemed, was the impulse to be helpful common to most Americans—other people had it but not to the same degree. In America, if you were not born with it, they taught it to you in school. Carey’s was just a reflex reaction to the sight of incompetence; it hurt the American farm boy in him to watch somebody use an ax that badly. Nor was it only the Senator. Sophie had noticed that the task of moving this oversize helicopter to safety had produced something like a team spirit even in the bystanders. Once indignation over the tree-uprooting had subsided, there had been a quick shower of advice, to which Simmons of course had contributed but also the queenly mammoth they called Margaret: “You will have more traction, I think, Harold, if you shift your position somewhat more to the right.” More remarkable: a pair of pale yellow gloves had been silently tendered to the cable-pullers, relayed—too late, as it happened—from Charles, banished to the shadows but evidently taking an active interest. And now poor Ahmed had managed to cut his thumb; instead of letting it bleed, the Air France stewardess promptly came forward with her first-aid kit. These little occurrences touched Sophie. Of course it was in the stewardess’s training. And of course Ahmed was by way of becoming everybody’s pet hijacker. But something more was at work, Sophie felt—an endearing, irrational, human tendency to make common cause. Nothing could be more foreign to the hostages’ self-interest than the project of hiding this helicopter.

Finally the path was declared to be wide enough. Ahmed’s place had been taken by a gaunt new Palestinian even less adept. “I guess in the desert they don’t get much use for an ax,” summed up Carey. Henk had gone ahead merrily at the wood-chopper’s side, and now he reported what he had been able to see: a typical gabled Dutch farmhouse, two stories high, and near it a barn in construction—it lacked one wall and a roof. The helicopter was ready to move. There was no need for fresh mud; the ground here, being marshy and half-frozen, was naturally slippery—a point the pastor had demonstrated by another sorry tumble. There were also, Henk said, crusted remnants of a snowfall in the open space around the barn, where the helicopter would obviously go. From now on the job would be easy. And in fact that was so. The only difficulties were interposed by the pilots. The track was still on the narrow side—either thanks to Ahmed and his successor or because the hijackers had not wanted to make it too wide, in case it would be noticeable from the air—and to keep the helicopter straight on course, free of interference from protruding briars and branch-ends, seemed to have become a point of honor with the flyers, who from time to time shouted
“Halt!”
and brought everything to a standstill, as though a few scratches on the German paint job would matter. It was their training, Sophie supposed. But the
kapers
were humoring them, and the helicopter made it to the barn.

Urging it in, finally, was the simplest part. It really looked as though Providence were working on the hijackers’ behalf. That the barn lacked a wall and a roof could not have been better for their purposes. If the roof had been on, the helicopter could not possibly have fitted under it, and the open side was a made-to-order portal. The unfinished barn was a perfect berth; you would almost think it had been designed by a builder to function as a hangar. And lying around, as though in readiness, were sheets of builders’ tar paper and a carpenter’s ladder. It was quick work for the more able-bodied hostages, following the northlander’s instructions, to climb up and fit the tar paper loosely over the top, like a tent, resting on the outspread blades. When the job was finished, the lanterns were put away, and everyone stood back to admire. As though at the command of a stage electrician, the moon came out, to provide a ghostly lighting. Standing back, you would never know that a helicopter was garaged here unless you were directly in front, facing the open side. And from the air, that would not matter; from the air, the illusion would be complete. A search plane would see only a typical barn in the process of construction, and the tar paper might have been laid over the top to keep the damp out. No jungle camouflage, Sophie decided, could ever have been so naturalistic. “A light blanket of snow would add a touch,” commented Jim. He himself was a wet blanket, Sophie told him. Her legs had regained feeling, and she momentarily forgot being hungry in a general glow of satisfaction—Veblen’s pride of workmanship, it must be, though her own part had been small.