The Terrorist

The morning flight from New York to Los Angeles was having a crash drill.
A crash drill is when the pilot intentionally puts the plane into a nosedive, only pulling up at the last moment. The reason for crash drills is to allow the crew and passengers to practice what to do in case of a real crash. Of course, passengers aren't told ahead of time about it. If they know it's only a drill, it wouldn't be good practice; they might not take it seriously.
One of the passengers on the flight was a 32-year-old office supplies salesman named Gary Moskowitz. When Gary was stressed, he took deep breaths to calm himself. But every breath seemed to swell something inside him. After enough deep breaths, it exploded; he let loose with shouting and sputtering that made him sound like Donald Duck and made everyone around him uncomfortable. This had ruined every romantic attachment he ever had. He tried to avoid situations that caused him to take deep breaths, so when the ticketing staff announced that economy class was now boarding, Gary remained in his seat at the gate terminal, reading a paperback. He didn't want to stand in line, shuffling forward, kicking his carry-on bag, then waiting in the plane aisle for other passengers to stow their carry-on luggage in the overhead compartments. If he waited till everyone else boarded, he could get to his seat with no hassle.
When the line to the ticket counter was finally empty, Gary finished the page he was reading, folded in the corner to mark his place, and leisurely boarded the plane.
He walked through the first class section where the rich people in large seats had already been served champagne. They pretended not to see Gary as he passed. Gary took a deep breath, then stepped back into economy class, where the seats were tiny. He had a middle seat between a fat man at the window and a fat woman with a baby at the aisle. The baby wasn't crying yet, but it looked depressed—it would probably cry soon enough. Gary opened the overhead compartment. It was completely full. He opened other overhead compartments, but none of them had room for his bag.
“Sir, please take your seat,” a flight attendant said. “We're about to start taxiing to the runway.”
She was a blonde woman of about 50. Her face had a thick cake of makeup that cracked along her wrinkles, causing little makeup chips to dangle like old paint.
“I need a place to put my bag,” Gary said.
“All the luggage racks are full,” the flight attendant said. “You'll have to put it under the seat in front of you.”
“I won't be able to move my legs at all. I could get a blood clot in my legs. Then it'll go up to my brain. I'll get a brain aneurysm and die.”
“I'm sorry, sir, but there's no more room.”
Twenty minutes later, when the plane was flying smoothly high above the clouds, Gary's pinned legs tingled painfully, and he was sure that at any moment the blood clot would reach his brain.
Gary tried to concentrate on his paperback, but the person behind him kicked his seat every 20 seconds or so. The baby was crying now—screaming like a banshee actually—but its mother didn't notice. She had headphones on. Her music was loud enough for Gary to hear it but not loud enough for him to make out what the song was—it was fine-tuned to cause the maximum amount of annoyance. Gary tried his own headphones, but they didn't work. Then he stared out the window, straining his neck, hoping the sight of white, puffy clouds would relieve some tension.
“Why are you staring at me?” the man in the window seat asked. He was slightly cross-eyed.
“I'm not staring at you,” Gary said. “I was looking out the window.”
The man slammed down the window panel.
“Now you have no reason to look this way,” he said.
The flight attendant came down the aisle with the drink cart, and Gary asked her for a scotch on the rocks, hoping it would calm his nerves. As soon as she set it down on his tray table, the person in front of Gary violently reclined his seat, splashing the whisky in Gary's lap. Gary took a deep breath, patted his lap dry, and asked the flight attendant for another glass of whisky.
“I'm sorry, sir,” she said. “We're only allowed to serve one alcoholic drink per guest.”
He accepted a glass of cranberry juice instead. He had heard it helped blood circulation, so might lower the chance of an in-flight aneurysm.
He sipped the bitter cranberry juice and tried to relax. At least the baby had stopped screaming. It had fallen asleep, slumped in its mother's arms. But then there was another silence that was disconcerting: the hum of the jet engines faded out and died. The plane jerked down in a series of rapid drops. There was a dinging noise; the fasten seatbelts sign turned on. Then the plane tilted forward and went into a nosedive. Gary's cranberry juice splashed in his lap. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling. Everyone was screaming. Gary's heart pounded; terror swelled his fingertips.
“Assume crash positions,” the captain's voice said over the loudspeaker.
Gary realized he didn't know how to do the crash position. Although a frequent flyer, he had never paid attention to the pre-flight safety instructions. Now he looked around to see what the other passengers were doing so he could copy them. They muttered prayers and sobbed. Their heads were pressed between their knees, their arms wrapped around their thighs. The woman next to Gary lay the baby flat across her lap and blanketed it with her body. Gary tried to lean forward to put his head between his knees, but he was too tall and the seat in front of him was too far back—he couldn't fit his head down. Gary punched the back of the chair.
“Stop kicking my seat,” the man in front of Gary said.
“I'm not kicking it!” Gary said. “Move your seat up!”
“I only have to move it to its full upright position for takeoffs and landings!”
“We're landing!”
“A crash is not a land!”
Sunlight flickered into the cabin like a strobe light. They were passing through the clouds and would hit the ground soon. The plane spun and tumbled. The drink cart clanged around on the ceiling. Out a window on the other side of the plane, Gary caught glimpses of green earth interspliced with the sky.
Gary arched his neck and tried to squeeze his head down to his knees. His hair caught on the carpet of the seatback. It felt as if he was being scalped. Gary gave up and sat up straight. It didn't matter what position he was in when they hit the ground. He wasn't going to survive anyway.
Suddenly, the engines roared to life. The plane grew steady. The nose turned upward and began to ascend. The passengers wept with joy and hugged one another.
The captain's sturdy voice came over the loudspeaker. “That concludes our crash drill,” he said. “Please remain in your seats until we regain our cruising altitude.”
The passengers looked at each other, and great smiles broke out on their faces. They laughed aloud and joked about how frightened they had been. Gary was shocked.
“What's going on?” Gary asked the woman next to him, who was making goofy faces at her baby. “Are we going to die?”
“Didn't you hear the captain? It was only a crash drill.”
“What's a crash drill?”
“You live in a cave or something?”
She explained what a crash drill was. Gary's fear turned to fury.
“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!” he said.
She shielded her baby from him.
The flight attendant was walking down the aisle, returning oxygen masks to their compartments in the ceiling. Gary was shocked at how sheepish the other passengers appeared. It seemed he was the only one who was angry.
“Excuse me,” Gary said.
The flight attendant frowned at Gary. Small chips of makeup broke off from the corners of her mouth.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
“Why did we just have a crash drill?”
“We have to be prepared in case there's a real crash.”
“No, you don't,” Gary said.
“Yes we do. I saw you, sir. You didn't know what to do. You couldn't even get into a proper crash position.”
“That wasn't my fault. He wouldn't raise his seat up.”
“I don't have to raise my seat,” the man in front of Gary said. “It was a crash, not a landing.”
“You don't even know the crash position,” the flight attendant told Gary.
“Yes I do,” Gary lied.
“Sir, I was watching you when I gave the pre-flight safety instructions, and you weren't paying attention.”
“That's because I've heard them so many times before. I'm a frequent flyer.”
“And yet you didn't get into the crash position.”
Gary felt himself about to explode.
“I want to speak to your supervisor,” he said softly to the flight attendant.
“He's busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Flying the plane.”
Gary unbuckled his seatbelt, struggled past the woman in the aisle seat, and marched toward the front of the plane.
“You can't go up there,” the flight attendant said. “That's first class!”
Gary tore back the curtain separating coach from first class. He pushed past a male flight attendant, who was pouring fresh glasses of champagne.
“If we had crashed, you would have hit first,” Gary told the first-class passengers. “I would have sat back there in coach, laughing at you.”
Gary pounded his fist on the cockpit door and was surprised to see it swing open. He had expected it to be locked.
There were two men in the cockpit—an older man with streaks of gray at his temples and a younger man with shocking bright red hair. Gary supposed the older was the pilot, the younger th copilot.
“You were supposed to lock the door,” the pilot said.
“I thought you locked it,” the copilot said.
“Excuse me,” Gary fumed. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”
“I might ask you the same question,” the pilot said. “How did you get up here?”
“The door was unlocked.”
“Are you a first class passenger?” the pilot asked.
“You don't look first class?” the copilot said.
“What do first class passengers look like?” Gary asked.
“I know 'em when I see 'em,” the copilot said. “Flying a plane, you see a lot of passengers.”
“You want to try explaining this crash drill?” Gary demanded.
“Get out of my cockpit,” the pilot said.
Then, Gary exploded; he went apoplectic, spewing a torrent of foul obscenities and saliva. His voice reached the highest notes on a piano, and he waved his hands frantically.
The pilot picked up a speakerphone and pressed a button. “We have an intruder in the cockpit,” he said. “Could I please have the sky marshal up here?” His voice echoed from back in the passenger cabins.
A ray of curiosity peeked through Gary's fury. He would get to see who the sky marshal was. He opened the door a crack and peered back. Apparently everybody on board was a sky marshal: they were all charging the cockpit. Gary worried that everyone rushing to the front would make the plane too top-heavy and send them into another nosedive. Then he realized they weren't sky marshals. They thought he was hijacking the plane; they were coming to stomp him to death. Gary slammed the door shut and pressed his body weight against it.
“Call them off!” he shouted.
The pilot and copilot just stared forward at the puffy clouds.
The door burst open. Hands tore at Gary's face and clothes, trying to tear his limbs apart. Gary pulled away and grabbed onto the pilot's steering controls.
“Sanctuary!” he screamed, as the passengers tried to peel his fingers away.
The plane started to ascend sharply, going almost straight up. The passengers grabbing onto him started to fall backwards, rolling out of the cockpit, through first class, and all the way to the back of the plane, some managing to grab onto seats and stop their fall. Gary realized that the ascension was caused by him pulling down on the steering controls.
His fingers slipped loose, and he tumbled down toward the the back of the plane, where he slammed into a pile of writhing fellow passengers. They didn't stomp him to death. They just stomped him a little.

Gary told his interrogators to listen to the black box, the cockpit voice recorder that could survive anything, even a plane crash. It would prove that he had entered the cockpit not to hijack it, but to lodge a complaint against the crash drill. They refused to listen to the black box recording. They only listened to it if the plane crashed.
“You failed—you didn't bring the plane down,” they told him. “So we don't need to listen to it!”
“Don't I get a phone call?”
“Terrorists don't get phone calls. Not anymore. It's the Patriot Act.”
Gary was fitted in an orange jumpsuit. They tied him up, threw him in the back of a military cargo plane, and brought him to a place that was warm and balmy. When they pulled off the hood, he saw he was in a large compound. Guard towers and barbed wire loomed over him. The colors of the prison were dull and depressing—grays and browns. The place was filled with pink, thick-necked guards. Gary supposed it was Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Throughout it all, Gary proclaimed his innocence.
“I'm an innocent man!” he screamed as they dragged him to the cellblock.
“Sure you are, Mohammad.”
“My name is Gary.”
“Your name is prisoner two-five-nine-seven. Memorize that number. It will not be given again.”
The cells were concrete cubes with walls on three sides and bars on one. The door to Gary's cell had one of those key card slots used for hotel rooms. The guard slid a card through the card reader, and the door slid open. There was a metal cot, a sink, and a toilet.
“Mecca is thataway,” the guard told him, pointing to an arrow made from duct tape on the concrete floor. He handed Gary a Koran with English on one side of the page and what looked like Arabic on the other. The bars slid shut.
Gary noticed that the duct tape arrow in the cell across from his pointed in a different direction than his arrow did. In that opposing cell was another man in an orange jumpsuit. He was tall and broad with a long dark shaggy beard. He introduced himself, speaking in a thick terrorist accent. His name was Abdullah. He was an Afghani shepherd, but after American warplanes blew up his entire flock of goats, he joined the jihad against the Americans. He told Gary that he would take him under his wing.
“You will be my bitch,” he said. “I'm not gay, but in here the pickings are slim. We're in separate cells, so we'll have to talk dirty to each other.”
Gary tried to ignore him. He was glad there were two sets of bars between them.
Abdullah started talking dirty.
“I want to pour oil in your beard and run my fingers through it.”
“I don't have a beard.”
“Not that beard.”
Gary sat on his cot and tried to ignore Abdullah's obscene tongue motions. He wished he had a paperback to distract himself. Having nothing else with which to occupy himself, he flipped open the Koran and started to read. He had never read it before. It was boring, but he supposed that with nothing else to read, it would soon brainwash him into being a Muslim fundamentalist.
A while later, several guards came to Gary's cell. One of them slid a card through the card-reader, and the door slid open.
“Let's go, Muhammad.”
“My name is Gary.”
“Let's go! Now!”
Gary folded in the corner of the page to mark his place, then closed the book. Abdullah let out a furious scream.
“You will regret that,” Abdullah said coldly, a look of abject hatred on his face.
“Regret what?”
“What you did to the Koran.”
“Reading it?”
“You desecrated it.”
“I did not.”
“You folded in the corner.”
“I was marking my place.”
“You should use a bookmark.”
“I don't have a bookmark.”
“There is no excuse for desecrating the Holy Koran.”
“Sorry.”
Gary opened the Koran and tried to smoothe out the corner. A thin line stayed where he had folded it. The crease would be in the paper forever.
“Let's go, Mohammad,” the guard said.
Gary set the Koran down on his cot and followed the guard out of his cell. Abdullah's hairy hand reached through the bars and grabbed Gary's ear.
“As you have done to the Koran, so shall it be done to you!” Abdullah screamed, and bent down the ear as far as it could go.
“Yeoww!!!”
Gary wrenched his ear free and rubbed it. It hurt. It would probably flop down now.
“It's just paper!” he screamed. “You nearly tore my ear off!”
“Next time you read the Koran, I hope you'll be more respectful.”
The guards marched Gary through the prison, across the dusty yard flanked with guard towers.
“Where are we going?” Gary asked.
“We'll ask the questions,” the guard said.
“Okay, ask me a question.”
“No. We have a professional to do that.”
They brought Gary into a cube-shaped concrete shed smelling of stale sweat. A single bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. A short bald man leaned against a metal folding table in the middle of the room. He smiled at Gary with crooked, yellow teeth. Then he broke a clove from a bulb of garlic, popped it in his mouth, and chewed. He walked up and breathed his garlicky breath in Gary's face. Gary started to protest his innocence, but the man told him to shut up.
“I'm going to ask you some questions and you're going to tell me the answers,” the bald man said. “Question number one—where is Osama bin Laden?”
“In a cave?” Gary said.
The short bald man smiled. “That's fine,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I prefer if you make it more difficult for me. I got good news and bad news for you. The good news is the United States doesn't use torture, so we won't be yanking out your toenails or attaching electrodes to your genitals. The bad news is that we have other ways of getting information out of you.”
A woman cleared her throat. She sat in a metal folding chair against the wall, scribbling on a clipboard.
The bald man sighed. “Our Red Cross observer,” he said, nodding at the woman with the clipboard. He handed Gary a small white plastic card. “That's a stress card. If at any point, you feel the interrogation is too intense or stressful for you, hold up the stress card, and we'll stop.”
They made Gary stand on one foot as they questioned him. They wanted Osama bin Laden's location. They wanted the names and addresses of other terrorists. He would stay on one foot until he told them what they wanted to know. Gary wasn't allowed to hold his arms out to balance himself, so staying up was difficult.
“Look at you,” the guards mocked. “Standing on one leg like a flamingo. We should get you a pink jumpsuit!”
The woman with the clipboard cleared her throat. “It has to be orange,” she said.
Soon Gary's leg started to ache, so he held up the stress card.
“Dagnabbit!” the bald man said.
Gary set his leg back down.
One of the guards left and then returned with a plastic jug full of water. They lay Gary on his back on the metal table, his head hanging off the side.
“Where is Osama bin Laden?” the bald man asked.
“I don't know,” Gary said.
The bald man poured water over Gary's mouth and up his nose. The cold water was refreshing at first, but then it choked him. His lungs tried to suck in air, but only sucked in water. Gary lifted the stress card and waved it around.
“Dagnabbit!” the bald man said, throwing the half-full water jug against the wall.
Gary sat up and coughed out water. A cigarette taste burned his sinuses.
A guard rushed into the room. “Sir,” he said to the bald man. “They're here.”
The bald man smiled. “All right,” he said. “Were gonna try something new.”
He picked up a steel crowbar and rhythmically tapped its hooked end in the palm of his hand. Guards pushed a large wooden crate into the the room. It was turned on its side, and was about the size and shape of a refrigerator. A humming noise, like fluorescent lights, came from inside the box.
“I have good news for you,” the bald man said, stroking the curved end of the crowbar like a cat's neck. “This crate just arrived, so you get to be the first to try out our new interrogation method. But I should warn you—this is the first time we're attempting this particular method, so there may be a few bugs.”
The guards chuckled and snorted. “A few bugs,” they said.
The bald man smacked the crowbar against the crate. Whatever was inside went crazy. It buzzed and screamed like a swarm of locusts. The bald man popped a fresh clove of garlic in his mouth and got up close in Gary's face.
“Half a ton of caterpillars,” the bald man said. “Freshly shipped from the Amazon. And you're taking a bath in them.”
Gary's heart pounded and his legs shuddered. He was terrified of insects. When he saw a spider in his kitchen, he called over the neighbor to kill it. Gary pulled the stress card out of his pocket and held it up. It shook in his trembling hand.
“Your card's been canceled,” the bald man said.
The guards laughed.
The card slipped from Gay's shaking fingers and fell to the floor. He looked toward the Red Cross woman.
“Sorry,” she said, scribbling on her clipboard. “He's right. This one is okay, and you can't use the card on it.”
“How is this not torture?” Gary asked.
“I don't make the rules,” she said. “I'm just here to observe and make sure the rules are followed.”
The bald man stuck the flat end of the crowbar in the crack at the top of the crate and pressed. The wood creaked.
“All right! I admit it!” Gary screamed. “I'm Osama bin Laden! Please, I'll tell you whatever you want!”
The guards laughed again. The bald man jumped up and then came down with all his weight on the crowbar. The wood cracked in the corner of the crate. A burst of color shot out—green, blue, purple, red. It kept pouring out, filling the room. The guards screamed and covered their faces to protect themselves from the fluttering wings that filled the room. Gary had never seen so many butterflies; it was a beautiful sight. He covered his mouth to stop anything from flying in. One of the guards opened the heavy door and stumbled out. The swarm of butterflies flew out after him. The bald man grabbed a guard by the collar and pulled him close to his face.
“Butterflies!? Why are there butterflies in there?! There's supposed to be caterpillars!”
“I don't know, sir.”
“What do you mean you don't know!!??”
“I ordered caterpillars, sir. They must have sent the wrong box.”
Gary looked down into the crate. It was empty except for a layer of dead bugs at the bottom.
“Put him in the box,” the bald man said.
The guards grabbed Gary by the arms and dragged him closer to the box. It had a foul smell—a week's worth of their droppings. The larva shells looked crunchy.
“You can't put him in there,” the Red Cross observer said. “You're not allowed to stick a prisoner in an empty box.”
“It's not completely empty,” the bald man said.
“It has to be at least seventy percent filled with caterpillars,” the Red Cross observer said.
“Dagnabbit!” the bald man screamed, spewing a mouthful of chewed garlic bits.
Suddenly there was a loud roar from outside, like cheering at a soccer match. Then a burst of machine gun fire. But the roar didn't subside. It grew louder. A guard burst into the interrogation shed. He was sweating and out of breath.
“The prisoners are rioting!” he gasped.
“What happened?” the bald man demanded.
“It's the butterflies. They saw the butterflies and they started to freak out. They're shouting that the butterflies have made them remember how beautiful life is. Now they want to be free.”
The bald man kicked the empty crate.
“Dagnabbit! I've spent years breaking down their spirits, and now all my hard work is ruined! I'll have to start from scratch!”
Just then, half a dozen bearded men in orange jumpsuits burst into the interrogation shed. They were weeping openly with joy.
“So beautiful!” they screamed.

After locking the interrogator and guards in the crate with dead caterpillar larva, the prisoners took their weapons and fought their way out of there. Down at the beach, they stole a small speedboat and sped away. There were half a dozen men on the boat with Gary. He was glad that Abdullah was not among them.
It was still morning, but the sky darkened. Soon gale force winds and rain hit them. It was a hurricane. Gary wondered what meteorologists would name the hurricane. A hurricane was going to kill him, and he didn't even know its name.
The ship broke apart, and they fell into the water. When the storm finally cleared, Gary was alone—no ship, no shipmates, nothing but water as far as he could see in every direction.
He swam until he was exhausted. Then he just floated. He would let the current carry him to Florida. Then he could try to pass himself off as a Cuban refugee. He would need Spanish in order to pass as a Cuban refugee, so he started conjugating Spanish verbs in his head. He was surprised he still remembered so much from high school.
The sun beat down on him. His lips cracked and his head ached from thirst. He needed water—fresh water. Drinking salt water would dry him out and kill him. Since there was no fresh water, he would have to drink his own urine. But doing this would be difficult while floating in the middle of the ocean. He was up to his neck in water and couldn't exactly pee into a cup.
He did a back float and tried to pee in his mouth. Most missed the target, but some went in and refreshed him.
But the relief was short-lived. He was still extremely thirsty and now what little urine his body produced didn't have the pressure to reach his mouth. It just dribbled onto his belly.
Soon he was greedily quaffing down sea water. It was delicious. He knew this was the end.
Then on the horizon he saw something that looked like a boat. Even if it was people coming to capture him, he didn't care. It kept approaching, and Gary saw that it was enormous. It was at least five storeys high and the length of ten football fields. It looked like a city. And it was coming straight toward him. Gary splashed around in the water and shouted, trying to get its attention. The ship slowed down. Over ledges on the deck, curious faces peered down at him.
An inflatable life raft was lowered down on two cables. There were several men in it. They paddled over to Gary and pulled him out of the sea.
“Water,” Gary gasped. His tongue felt larger than his mouth.
“Don't worry—the water can't hurt you any more.”
The man's voice was American. Hearing it gave Gary a nervous jolt. Gary tried to speak, but his throat was too parched to make a sound.
They rowed back toward the ship, then attached cables to hooks on the boat. They were lifted up toward the deck. Hundreds of curious faces peered over the ledge. It wasn't people looking to capture him—there were men, women, and children. They were fat and pale; many wore bathing suits and straw hats. This was a cruise ship.
When Gary stepped on deck, the passengers crowded close to him, eyeing him like he was a rare fish they had caught. Many held colorful tropical beverages. Gary grabbed a glass out of one man's hand. The drink was red and cold, but he brought it to his mouth too fast. A small umbrella in the drink stabbed him in the eye. He dropped the glass, and it shattered. Gary looked around at the other drinks, but the passengers covered them and held them away.
Gary glanced around the deck. There was an enormous swimming pool in the center of it. Children kicked around on inner tubes. Old women floated on plastic rafts. There was water. Lots of it. Gary dashed for the pool. A lifeguard blew a whistle.
“No running on deck!”
Gary collapsed to his knees and stuck his face in the water. He lapped it up like a dog.
“I peed in the water,” a boy on an inner tube said.
Gary didn't care. The chlorine-flavored water was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.
“Running on deck, eh?” a gruff voice said. Gary looked up. It was a big, bristly man dressed all in white with a white sailor cap. “I can see you're a trouble-maker. You're not on my ship one minute, and you're already breaking rules.”
“You're the captain?” Gary croaked out.
“That's right.”
Gary vomited at the captain's feet. He had drunk too fast.
“Seasick already?” the captain said scornfully. “Well, we don't put into port for another four days, so you're gonna have to get used to it.”
Gary wiped his mouth and stood up.
“I got pulled away from conduction a wedding because of you,” the captain said, “so better have a pretty good explanation for what you were doing out there.”
“I got caught in the hurricane. It destroyed my ship.”
“If you think that hurricane was bad, you haven't seen me when I get angry.”
“What was the hurricane's name?” Gary asked.
“Hurricane Gary.”
“That's my name!”
“Well, whoop-dee-doo,” the captain said. “If it were up to me, I'd let you drown. But there's an international law of the sea. It says I have to carry you to the next port. But this isn't a pleasure cruise. Well, it is a pleasure cruise, but not for you. You're going to work to earn your keep. I hope you can sing and dance, because one of the performers in our musical theater is sick.”
Gary vomited again.
“The show must go on,” the captain said.
“Hey, don't I know you?” shouted a man in a straw hat.
“No,” Gary said.
“Sure I do. I saw you on television.”
They all started to murmur. It was Gary the Terrorist, AKA Mohammad, AKA the Sleek Sheik.
But none of the crew or passengers seemed inclined to rush Gary and stomp him to death, probably because they didn't think he would crash the cruise ship into a tall building. The worst he would do would be to crash it into a wharf or coral reef.
“You don't have a sea marshal on board, do you?” Gary asked the captain.
“You disgust me,” the captain said. “Before you were just a terrorist, but now you're a pirate.”
“I am not.”
“You may consider yourself a freedom fighter, but to me you're just another lowlife rum-soaked pirate, a seajacker. You're just jealous. You can't build your own cruise ships, so you try to destroy ours. You can't even build a swimming pool or a casino and you don't have any musical theater.”
“Look, I'm not a terrorist! I'm not a pirate! I don't know what you're talking about!”
Just then, a military helicopter buzzed low over the deck. Everyone panicked. All around the ship, naval skiffs were approaching. People got out of the pool and started running.
From one of the helicopters, a small object fell out of it. It looked like a bomb or a grenade. Then a parachute opened and it descended slowly, coming to rest on the deck. It was a cell phone and it was ringing. The captain pulled back the parachute fabric and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
He listened. Then he handed the phone to Gary.
“It's for you.”
Gary lifted the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Gary, this is Agent Jones of the Department of Homeland Security. I'm the hostage negotiator.”
“You're the what?”
“Hostage negotiator.”
“There aren't any hostages.”
“Whatever euphemism you pirates use for the. Booty, I suppose.”
“There aren't any hostages! I'm not holding anyone against any will! I don't have a gun, I don't have a bomb, I don't have anything!”
“I just wanted to tell you that we don't negotiate with terrorists.”
“I'm not a terrorist! I'm not a pirate! I didn't do anything wrong!”
“The point is I'm not negotiating with you.”
“Then what kind of hostage negotiator are you? I'm a tax payer. Why am I paying for you to do nothing?”
“It's a new policy. The powers that be haven't got around to firing me yet.”
“I'm not a terrorist. Listen to the black box! Listen to the flight recorder! It proves I was talking to them about the crash drill!”
Suddenly there was a large explosion and the ship keeled to the side, almost falling over. Gary grabbed onto a handrail.
“What was that?!” he shouted into the phone.
“That would be a torpedo,” the hostage negotiator said. “It's our new policy for dealing with terrorists who take hostages. We sink your ship and kill everyone.”
The ship was heavily tilted to one side. Water from the swimming pool cascaded past Gary's legs.
“That's the stupidest policy I've ever heard,” Gary said.
“Next time terrorists will know hostage-taking doesn't work, so they won't do it.”
“Listen to the black box!”
There was a click. The hostage negotiator had hung up.
The passengers ran to the side of the deck to get into lifeboats that inflated and hung along the side. Gary ran after them.
“Women and children first!” the crew members shouted.
Women and children climbed over onto the lifeboat. Gary wished he had had time to release the women and children, but the hostage negotiator hadn't allowed that.
Suddenly, the captain pushed past everyone and climbed into the first lifeboat. This made Gary furious. The other passengers sheepishly made no protest.
“Hey!” Gary shouted at the captain. “What about women and children first?!”
“I'm an exception—I'm the captain.”
“Aren't you supposed to go down with the ship?”
“I've never heard of that before.”
Gary's fury exploded. He leaped into the lifeboat, snatched the captain's white hat, leaped back on the deck, and ran.
“He's got the captain's hat!” passengers screamed.
“He's running on deck!” others screamed.
They ran after him. Gary didn't get far. They tackled him and tried to peel the hat out of his clenched hands. Gary clutched on tight.
“Sanctuary!”

When Gary was returned to the dingy-colored Guantanamo Bay prison, the bald interrogator gave him an evil grin and breathed his garlicky breath on him.
“I got some new interrogation methods approved by the Red Cross. You're just in time to help me try them out.”
A guard led Gary to the detention block.
“We've captured a lot more terrorists, so it's getting a little crowded. You won't have a cell to yourself any more. Now you'll have a cellmate.”
Gary was horrified when he saw the big bearded man who would be his cellmate.
“The bitch is back!” Abdullah shouted as the guards locked Gary in a cell together with him.
“I'm not your bitch,” Gary said.
“We'll see. We'll see if you're my bitch or not.”
Just then an orange and black Monarch butterfly landed on the metal railing of one of the cots. Gary felt a surge of hope.
“It's so beautiful,” Abdullah said. Then he sat down on his cot and began tearing pages out of his Koran.
“What are you doing?!” screamed Gary.
“Origami,” Abdullah said.
“What?!”
“The Japanese art of paper folding!”
“I now what it is! Why are you ripping pages out of the Koran to make origami?”
“I'm making a key. That butterfly made me remember how beautiful life is—too beautiful to sit here in a cell.”
He folded several pages in half, then pushed them through the bars, and slid it through the card reader. It didn't work.
“This is going to be harder than I thought,” he said.
Gary started to take a deep breath, but then he decided not to let his anger bottle up inside. He calmly reached from behind and grabbed Abdullah's ears.
“As you did to the Koran, so shall be done to you!” Gary said, and pulled Abdullah's ears in opposite directions as hard as he could.