Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [129]
Because these attacks were timed to go off together, the police believed the attacks of the morning weren’t over and that there were possibly more to come. Were there terrorists on our Jordanian Airlines plane who had planned to get off when we were supposed to change flights and join the attack, perhaps right here at the gate next to the El Al plane? But they couldn’t because we were twenty fucking minutes late?! Had we been on time, we would have been right inside the terminal where the killing took place. Never had I been happier for my flight being late (and never since then have I complained when a flight is late).
The police weren’t taking any chances. They wanted to see who was on board our jet. And they were prepared to take action.
The “Passport, please” process went quite smoothly. Everyone was on their best behavior, and it was so quiet that even the babies knew to not cry or babble about anything. After about forty-five minutes, without incident, the authorities left the plane. Then it was back to waiting in the black hole of no information.
At some point, perhaps four hours into the ordeal, the pilot came back on the intercom.
“OK,” he said with a sigh. “Here is what we are going to do. The Austrians do not want anyone on this plane to get off and enter Austria. As most of you on this flight were going to transfer anyway to another plane going to Amman, we are just going to refuel this plane and take everyone to Amman. For the few of you who were connecting to another flight in the Middle East, we will rebook you in Amman and fly you there. If you are an Austrian citizen, you may get up now and come forward and we will release you from the plane. The rest of you, sit back and get ready to depart Vienna in twenty minutes.”
Here we were, just feet from our gate, but the Austrians weren’t going to take any chances. Better to just get the whole lot of them outta here as quick as possible and dump them off out there in their own pathetic desert. The fuel trucks appeared, hooked up their hoses of Arab oil, and filled up our wings for our flight to Jordan.
Twenty minutes later, as promised, they moved away the army vehicles and let us go in reverse. We taxied to the runaway and took off. Less than three hours later we were in Amman. The group leaders did their best to put the whole day in context, and there was no one among us who needed any drilling on the wrong-headedness of smearing all Arabs with this paintbrush. We were fine, we were safe, and we still didn’t know the whole story of what had happened. Our driver took us into Amman, and it was a beautiful sight coming in from the hills above the city. I thought, this is perhaps what Rome once looked like before it was modernized. It was dark by the time we got to the hotel and checked in. I went to my room and lay down on the bed, turning on the television. We were in Amman’s finest hotel (wanting to make a good impression!), so they carried the channel known as the “Cable News Network.” As I lay on the bed, I watched in horror. Everything I, we, hadn’t been told about the entire day’s events in Rome and Vienna, I was now learning for the first time—with color footage and color commentary. The forty-two bodies strewn across the terminal floor in Vienna, the 115 in Rome. The work of Abu Nidal. Abu had chosen this day, this moment, for a mass murder. I was merely supposed to be an extra in his snuff film, acted out on the world stage he had commandeered. He didn’t know me or anyone else on that plane or in that terminal. We were each just one of the faceless, nameless dozens who were to be hit by his machine gun fire or by a grenade or both, and then, should luck have it, bleed to death in front of the duty-free shop. Of course, we weren’t nameless, faceless, and landless, because when you’re landless, there’s no duty-free shops in the refugee camps, no Jamba Juice stand next door made with the oranges that were once yours. You were left to a