Rules of Deception

77

El Al Flight 8851, nonstop service from Tel Aviv to Zurich, took off from Ben Gurion International Airport on schedule at 4:12 p.m. local time. The pilot, Captain Eli Zuckerman, a twenty-six-year veteran of the airline and former fighter pilot, with a combined seven thousand hours in command, announced that flying time aboard the Airbus A380 was scheduled to be three hours and fifty-five minutes. Weather en route was slated to be calm with little or no turbulence. The airliner would overfly Cyprus, Athens, Macedonia, and Vienna, before touching down in Zurich at 8:07 p.m. Central European Time. Zuckerman, an armchair historian in his spare time, might have added that these great locales were sites of battles waged by men with names like Alexander, Caesar, Tamerlane, and Napoleon. Battles that had determined the course of civilization for centuries to follow.

The flight that evening was full. Six hundred seventy-three names filled the manifest. Among them was Dahlia Borer of Jerusalem, director of the Israeli Red Cross; Abner Parker of Boca Raton, Florida, an American retiree who had lost both legs in Vietnam to friendly fire; Zane Cassidy of Edmond, Oklahoma, pastor of the Messiah Bible Church and leader of a tour group of seventy-seven Evangelical Christians; Meyer Cohen, leader of the National Religious Party, en route to Washington, D.C., to lobby the American Congress to favor expansion of settlements on the West Bank; and Yasser Mohammed, Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, also en route to Washington, D.C., to lobby the American Congress to forbid any further expansion of settlements on the West Bank.

These last two were seated next to each other. After an exploratory conversation and an exchange of political views, one took out a chessboard. The two men spent the rest of the flight in companionable silence, hunched over their knights and pawns.

Three hundred seventy men, three hundred women, including sixty-four children. Plus a crew of eighteen.

After the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, Zuckerman addressed the passengers a second time, announcing that he was turning off the seat belt sign and that everyone was welcome to stroll about the two-story aircraft, the newest in the El Al fleet. He was pleased to add that they had picked up a considerable tailwind that would trim their flying time. The new arrival time was set at 7:50 p.m. Fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

He wished all aboard a pleasant flight, and in closing, stated that he would speak with the passengers again shortly before landing.