Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [127]
I flew from Flint to New York’s JFK Airport on the evening of December 26 in order to connect to the Royal Jordanian Airlines flight that would be taking our group to the Middle East. We were all told to meet at check-in, and there I was introduced to the people from D.C. who would be conducting the two-week tour, as well as to the other journalists in the group, about a dozen folks who came mostly from the world of alternative weeklies or left-leaning magazines. There was no one from the mainstream media and no one whose media outlet reached more than a few thousand people. I guess the Arab image burnishing had to start somewhere.
We loaded ourselves on the overnight Royal Jordanian flight from New York to Amman, Jordan. The flight was scheduled to stop in Vienna, where we would change planes to another Royal Jordanian flight that would then take us on to Amman.
I slept most of the way across the Atlantic on the jumbo jet that was filled with mostly Arab passengers. I studied up and read articles I had copied about the countries we would visit: Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia (later dropped from the itinerary). We would also visit the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
As we came across the coast of Europe the sun was up, and within an hour or two we began our descent into Vienna. The pilot informed us that we were about twenty minutes behind schedule.
We landed safely and began taxiing to the gate. As we arrived near the gate I could see an El Al jet parked next to our gate. I unbuckled my seat belt and began to gather my belongings for deplaning when, all of a sudden, the pilot hit the brakes. The force of it was so hard, my head hit the seat in front of me.
We were no more than thirty to forty feet from the gate. I looked out my window, and within seconds there were military vehicles surrounding our plane and the El Al plane. There were a few jeeps with soldiers and riot police and a larger vehicle that I didn’t recognize, but I did understand that that was a huge gun attached to it. This was not the Von Trapp family greeting us in Austria with a rendition of “Edelweiss.” This just looked, at first, downright weird, then Hollywood-like, then eerily frightening.
“Folks,” a voice on the intercom said. “We’re going to be here a little while, so sit back and we’ll keep you posted.”
That is what they did not do. There was silence from the cockpit. An hour’s worth. Nobody said anything—though the collective mind-fuck going on in this Royal Jordanian jet was fierce and full of imagination:
Had we been hijacked? Were there hijackers in the cockpit?
Was there a bomb on board?
Were there terrorists who had been identified as passengers on this plane?
Had the El Al plane been hijacked? Was there a bomb on board their plane?
Was there an incident inside the airport, perhaps at the El Al gate next to us?
Was this a drill? And why were we the guinea pigs?
I did not understand why we weren’t being told anything, and the flight attendants were beginning to feel the same way. I chose a simple method of discovering the truth. I got up out of my seat and went up to the cockpit and knocked on the door. A flight attendant told me to sit down. The cockpit door opened. It was the co-pilot. Cross “hijacking” off the list.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said politely, “but people are getting frightened by all this activity and no one knows what is going on.”
“We’re just about to announce it. There’s been gunfire and grenades launched just inside here, and they think a number of people are dead. They are holding us here. That’s all we know. And I need you to go back to your seat.”
I was speechless. It really wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I was probably hoping that the movable ramp, the jetway, had had a malfunction or something. Of course,