“My name is Grayden,” he said to the dark eyed man.
“Malik,” the man said extending his right hand.
Gray shook his hand and said, “Malik, I am thinking the plane will make a turn when it has reached near sea level. I believe the co-pilot is trying to disguise his destination. Could the flight attendant dim the cabin lights so we can see outside better?”
Malik shrugged and spoke in English to one of the flight attendants.
Gray was asking another question when the lights were dimmed to the level where someone could just move around without tripping. “Do you have any knowledge of the man in the cockpit?”
Malik shook his head. “Amir,” he said to the man that had been pacing but had finally taken a seat nearby and was studying the screen of an iPad. He and Amir briefly conversed in a guttural language and then he turned back to Gray. “The co-pilot’s name is Isagani and Amir thinks he is Fillipino.”
“Do you have a way into the cockpit?” Gray asked.
Malik now turned to the representative that Gray had first approached and asked him something, starting the question with “Sani,” which Gray assumed was the man’s name. Sani nodded and Malik said, “We have a code that can unlock the door to the flight deck. But the man is armed. What could we do?”
“We will talk about that later. Could somebody get this Isagani on the intercom and see if he will reveal his intentions?”
Before Malik could reply, the engine note rose to that of full cruise and the aircraft banked. Gray watched out a right hand window as faint stars in the early dawn sky appeared to fall past the window. “We are banking to the east,” Gray said. “We may have some idea of his destination in a moment.”
The aircraft was in a wing high position for at least thirty seconds before it leveled out. By the steep angle of bank Gray guessed they had turned more than a hundred degrees. Through the right hand window the sun, still below the horizon, was lighting the sky just off the aircraft’s nose.
Malik smiled at Gray, nodding. “Just as you predicted.” He gave some instructions to Amir and the man went to the intercom and talked into it in a normal tone of voice in English. Malik settled into a nearby seat with a heavy sigh and Gray squat in the aisle beside him.
After speaking into the intercom Amir stood in silence for half a minute and then appeared to carry on a conversation with the co-pilot. He sounded sympathetic at times, pleading and cajoling at others. When he hung up the intercom he seemed to deflate. Shaking his head he stepped back to where Gray was squatting in the aisle beside Malik. A group had formed around them as most of the passengers had moved closer in an effort to learn more about their situation.
Amir asked Malik a question in the guttural language they had used earlier. Malik nodded and said, “Go ahead and speak English. That will save repeating it.”
In English Amir said, “Bayani Isagani is the co-pilot’s full name. He says Abu Sayyaf has kidnapped several members of his family, wife, children, mother, sister, and will kill them if he does not deliver the airplane to an island in the Timor Sea. He says there is some kind of runway there.”
The information brought murmurs and some groans from the passengers who had overheard. Amir went on. “Bayani says the pilot is still alive but bleeding badly. If we will not attack him he will allow us to pull the man out here for first aid.”
“Do you believe him?” Gray asked, and glanced about. Many of the passengers had migrated closer to hear the conversation.
Amir spread his arms, palms up. “He sounded… distressed. But what difference does it make? What can we do?”
“The difference,” Gray said as he came to his feet, “is that if it is true, we may be taken hostage and hopefully ransomed. If it is not true, and he intends to crash the plane into a city or ship or whatever; I strongly suggest we attack him when he opens the door. We may save hundreds or thousands of lives and some of us may even survive.”
That brought murmurs and grunts that sounded like concurrence. “I agree with that bloke!” a voice with an Australian accent hollered over the clamor.
Gray turned and in the dim light made out Lleyton Parker, one of the Australian tennis players he had recognized when they boarded. The man had his fist in the air and looked aggressive enough to lead the attack at that moment. Gray grinned and gave him a thumbs up although Gray was not yet taking a stance on what they should do.
He turned back to Malik. “I am not advocating any particular action right now but I think we have to decide soon. I’m thinking this hijacking was planned and timed so the plane will be flying for a minimum time during daylight before it reaches its destination. Malik, is it possible the delays for this flight could have been intentional, caused by an accomplice or accomplices at KUA?”
Malik turned to Sani in the next seat and spoke the guttural language he had used earlier when talking to the other representatives. When Malik had his answer he said, “The first two delays were suspect but because of a formal write up, we could not countermand them and had to go through the lengthy checks. The mechanics went through the checks and found nothing wrong. The last short delay was real but it was soon fixed.”
“So we may be behind the perpetrators schedule a bit and the co-pilot will have to fly in daylight for a short time. Hopefully a ship will think a wave hugging airliner odd and report it.”
That brought a few chuckles. Gray asked, “Malik, is there any way we can disable the plane and force it into the water?”
The dark eyed man turned again to Sani. When the discussion was over, Malik said, “There is access to wiring below the floor but the aircraft’s controls are all electrically actuated. Without tools, time and a blueprint we might send the aircraft completely out of control.”
Gray asked Malik, “Can the co-pilot hear us from the cockpit?”
Sani shook his head in answer. “There is much insulation between the flight deck and the cabin and much white noise from the slipstream.”
Gray spoke loudly to everyone. “I see three options for us. Speak up if anyone sees more. One, we simply remove the wounded pilot and wait for whatever is our fate. Two, we prepare to attack the co-pilot only if we see the plane is approaching a population center. And three, we attack the co-pilot when he opens the door.”
“Can’t we negotiate with the co-pilot?” a ruddy faced older woman said with an Australian or perhaps British accent.
“I tried,” Amir said. “But I did not offer him a large sum of money.” He rose and went to the intercom. A buzz arose as passengers questioned and debated their options.
Amir’s conversation on the intercom was short. When he stepped back to Malik and Gray, the buzz fell off and he said, “It is too late. Bayani said we are less than fifteen minutes from the island and he will not risk opening the door and will not sacrifice his family for all the money on earth.”
“But we can still get in if we decide to?” Gray asked Malik.
The man rose and leaned close to Gray’s ear and whispered, “Yes. He has a manual latch but keying in a special code will override the latch.”
“I don’t think option two is now relevant because I don’t think we could reach a population center in less than fifteen minutes,” Gray said. He scanned the faces around him and settled on Anna’s for a moment. When he spoke it was aloud to everyone. “It seems our choices are to do nothing and hope we are being taken hostage for ransom, or attack and try to take back control of the aircraft. We have to make a decision in the next few minutes or it will all be moot. The decision is to remain passive or attack.” He turned and whispered to Malik. “Should we do it democratically? You have the code. If we vote to attack will you give us the code?”
The man sighed heavily and said aloud, “Yes, and I hope the majority vote is also yours.”
“Thank you.”
Gray pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Five minutes,” he said loudly. “Take five minutes and we will vote.” He wiped a hand over his face and walked bac
k into business class and went to a right hand window. The sun had pushed halfway above the horizon and turned the sea below to gold. The aircraft was frighteningly close to the ocean’s surface and the waves in the near distance flashed by in a blur. They were going very very fast. In the distance the coming morning still looked so beautiful and peaceful. He plopped down into a seat and leaned his head back.
Anna was standing in the aisle. “May I join you?”
He smiled and held out a hand. She took it in both of hers and sat. She brought her hands and his to her forehead. He felt tears dripping onto his forearm and leaned forward and kissed the top or her head. She stretched closer and laid her head onto his chest.
“If we survive this, I want you to ask me why I was crying,” she said through the tears.
“That is an odd request, Anna. But all right, I promise.”
“Thank you. How will you vote?”
“I don’t have all the information I want to make a vote. I will explain why to the others and then I may abstain.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know if Bayani has the plane on autopilot. If not, we are so close to the water it will only take a slight bump of the control wheel to send us into the ocean. At this speed the plane will disintegrate. I should have explained that earlier.”
Anna sniffled. “People have probably___”
When Haatim first visited the island and the abandoned airstrip, he put his mind to what security was required to keep infidel eyes from seeing the repair work the followers would perform on the runway and especially from seeing the landing, loading and take off of whatever airliner they succeeded in capturing. In addition, if Bayani Isagani betrayed his family and spoke to the authorities, some nation’s naval vessel was bound to arrive at the island. Anti-shipping mines were possibly the answer to both security problems.
According to the man who brought word of the island to Haatim, few fishermen visited the area because it was no better fishing than areas closer to the inhabited islands and it was three hundred kilometers from any major shipping lane, all good news. What the fisherman said that worried Haatim was that an island sixty five kilometers to the south was used by a band of pirates as a base. On the next trip to the island and after the auto cannon was mounted on the Zaafir, Haatim paid a visit to the pirates of the island to the south. Dawoud asked Haatim to raise the flag of the Abu Sayyaf to give his men courage. Haatim refused to fly the flag under normal circumstances as it would draw unwelcome attention and outright hostility from certain nations’ navies. For this mission with the possibility of conflict so high, Haatim approved raising of the flag.
As soon as the Zaafir anchored near the rusty pirate trawler, a motorboat loaded with half a dozen men raced out to the Zaafir from the shore. When Dawoud sent fifteen armed men to the upper decks, and Haatim himself manned the 20mm cannon, the motorboat slowed as if an anchor had dropped overboard. Haatim waved the motorboat closer. Obviously recognizing he and his men could have been wiped from the ocean in seconds, the pirate leader resumed headway and came alongside the Zaafir. Haatim welcomed him aboard and offered tea.
Over tea Haatim asked the pirates to stay clear of the island to the north by a 50 kilometer radius and in return offered them access to weapons and information they would find valuable. Haatim could have killed the pirates and sunk their ship but he actually preferred them there because their presence kept others over whom he might not have control from the area. Before departing, Haatim told the pirate captain that they were soon going to mine the waters around the northern island, not at a shallow depth that might destroy a far wandering fisherman but deeper to damage naval vessels and others of a draft similar to the 60 meter trawler of the pirates.
Haatim wished to lay mines around the entire island but they had neither the resources to acquire that many mines, to transport that many in a reasonable time nor to lay that many. After exploring the island and discussing this conundrum with Fadi they concluded it was unnecessary to mine the entire circumference of the island. Deep marsh made up the shoreline of all but the northwest corner of the island. That corner was the only practical access to the island. Very shallow reefs that extended many kilometers out from the island further reduced the area requiring mining but still left a five kilometer arc across the approach to the shallow bay on the northwest corner that was critical.
Haatim also wished to mine the southern approach from the pirates’ island. At one point reefs narrowed the channel between the two islands to about seven kilometers. Haatim was sure a ship’s captain would stay well away from the reefs so it was not necessary to mine in close to them. Still Haatim believed the number of mines to form an impassable screen was out of their reach. Fadi said he could do it with 80 mines if they used cables and a clever device which the Iranians planned to use if mining the Strait of Hormuz became necessary. The device was inserted between the mines and their anchors and cables running between the mines. Fadi explained that the bow of a large vessel striking the cable will cause the device beneath the mine to release the anchors of the two mines on either side of the ship along with the cables connecting them to other mines. As the ship continues on, the two mines are dragged to the ship’s hull by the cable and explode upon contact. Rather than requiring mines so close together that a ship cannot by chance slip between them, the mines can be placed a hundred meters apart if expecting large vessels.
The same sympathetic supplier from whom Haatim was obtaining explosives to load onto the aircraft, also promised to supply the anti-shipping mines and the cable releases Fadi required. While an underground bunker was cleaned out for storage and repairs were underway on the runway, Haatim sailed the Zaafir to the Iranian port of Chabahar accompanied by a small crew and Fadi Mahmoud. There, Fadi approved the anti-shipping mines and explosives for which Haatim had made arrangements. When the Zaafir weighed anchor for the return, the yacht rode very low in the water and its speed was cut by a third but still completed the round trip in 15 days. Haatim made one more trip to Chabahar and returned with a similar load to the island which they had taken to calling pulau harapan, or island of hope.
The repairs to the runway were completed and the mines, explosives and thirty five thousand kilograms of jet-A fuel were stored safely on the island. A rolling, adjustable height scaffold was welded from steel tubing. They planned to use the scaffold and a small generator powered pump to refuel the aircraft. They expected the process to be excruciatingly slow compared to the high pressure/high volume single point method used at airports but it only had to be done once. In late September, Dawoud called Haatim with the news that the Emirates pilot from Manila was chosen to fly as co-pilot on the inaugural flight of the Emirates Boeing 797 out of Kuala Lumpur where by Allah’s grace true believers were employed in the Emirates maintenance section.
Only days after the euphoria induced by the thought of capturing the latest aircraft with the range to reach the great Satan and the load carrying capability to create a bomb of history making destruction, Dawoud told Haatim the Emirates Boeing 797 is unlikely to have overwing fueling capability. This information came from one of Dawoud’s men, Samir, who worked at Manila International Airport as a fueler. Samir said the earlier 787 did not have the capability as a result of the option being used so rarely on other Boeing aircraft that it was eliminated on the 787 as a cost and weight saving measure. He was not sure but believed it would also be missing from the 797. Immediately upon hearing this, Dawoud contacted the Emirates aircraft maintenance technician at KUL who was sympathetic to the cause. Ikrimah, the technician, had recently returned from a training course provided by Boeing specifically on the 797 and he confirmed Samir’s bad news. They would need a fuel truck with the high pressure pump and special valves and nozzles for single point fueling. It was less than three weeks to the inaugural flight. If they had a year they could not get one of the massive trucks to the island.
Haatim was sick. When he came to understand that Allah was testing him, he prayed and me
ditated. He called Dawoud. Was it possible to use only the pump, hoses, valves and nozzles from one of the trucks? Dawoud, Labeeb, Dawoud’s second in command, and Samir and a second man in maintenance at MNL, met outside Manila. Yes they could refuel using only the pump, hoses, valves and nozzles but removing the necessary parts from a fuel truck at the airport was not possible. The three hour time window when the trucks were not required was simply too short. It was risky but they formed a plan that would give them the time to strip the necessary parts from a truck and these they could transport to the island. The man with Samir had access to the fuel trucks after his shift. The next night the man drained the engine oil from one of the trucks. He ran the engine until it seized and then replaced the oil. The next morning when a fueler came for the truck, it did not start. The trucks are in high demand so in a short time it was towed to a repair shop away from the airport.
At the repair shop the next evening they had twelve hours to remove the parts. That was accomplished without stress. The risk lay in the authorities hearing of the theft of the specific parts which implied someone planned to refuel a modern airliner away from a commercial airport. Haatim wanted no speculation among Satan’s intelligence agencies about where or when that might occur. He proposed burning down the repair shop to cover the theft but Dawoud said the owner of the shop was a true believer and should not be asked to bare such a burden when there were others ways available. Dawoud arranged with the owner to notify him of completion of the engine repairs a day before notifying the fuel vendor at the airport. One of Dawoud’s men would steal the truck, drive to a remote location and drop a grenade into the fuel tank filled with jet-A fumes. The conflagration would destroy all evidence of theft.
PULAU MATI Page 3
