But then those shoulders tightened once more with the plane's sudden
lurch to the left. Bettmann and his silent neighbors, silent save for a little girl
who no longer sang but only whimpered against her mother's bosom,
were further confused by a team of captors who purposefully strode
to the rear of the plane and retrieved several footlockers from spaces
that Bettmann would have assumed were meant for meal trays. As
the four footlockers were carried back up the aisles of the climbing
aircraft by eight men who had changed out of catering uniforms,
Bettmann realized he had been let on board the plane by clones.
Only Bettmann and a few others in the opposing corners of the
rear of the plane could watch the unpacked contents of the
footlockers being put to use in the cabin's midsection. A large steel
ring two meters in diameter was fitted over an emergency door by
means of a rubber suction edge, this after four small bricks of explosive plastic
had been placed on the four corners of the door. Two sheets of
curved, overlapping steel strips were opened and manipulated to form a
flexible tube that looked like a gigantic opaque Slinky from
Bettmann's youth, and this was attached to the steel ring. The plane shook
with the detonation of the explosives, and Bettmann saw the outblown
door streak past the portside windows and past the John Glenn, the
starboard side of which was not more than ten meters from the A-three-eighty's
fuselage.
The steel tube which had acted as a blast container and atmospheric wall
was now elongated with steel rods driven by two
electric motors carried in the footlockers. The tube protruded from
the fuselage of the hijacked plane towards the John Glenn, which
failed to take evasive action despite its superior speed and
maneuverability.
With a peek out the last left-hand passenger window,
Bettmann saw the magnetosail's three tentacles, their ends studded
with steel barbs, dangling from the indingo reaches of the morning
sky. The John Glenn slowly rose up to join its three corners to those
tentacle ends that were moving through the stratosphere with just
enough speed to prevent the John Glenn's jet engines from stalling,
but the hijacked Airbus foiled this planned copulation at the last
moment, inserting a wing between a tentacle and the nearest corner
of the spacecraft. The same movement joined the outbound end of
the hijacker's steel tube to a portal on the John Glenn's dorsal side, and
Bettmann looked away from the window to watch a gasmasked
hijacker clamber into the new tunnel between the two craft.
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