FIVE DAYS TO NOON

1973

From front flap:

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Two a.m. on board the British Inter-Continental Airways VC10 en route to London from Sydney; Zurich next stop. Visibility good; engines running smoothly; a routine flight. And then, from behind the pilot, an unknown voice says 'Reduce height, Captain, and prepare to land.' Hijacked! The thing that happens to other people but never to you. Yet now it was happening -- and within a few hours the Jewish and Muslim passengers had been spirited away, the children evacuated, and a little group of six crew and eleven passengers were left as hostages aboard a plane stranded among the desert dunes. If certain Arab prisoners were not first released, their captors told them, then at noon on the fifth day the plane with all its occupants would be blown up. Five Days Till Noon. But this is more than a dramatic story; it is a study of how human beings react in crisis. With all the skill which she showed in her best-selling earlier novel, A Log Across the Road, Sheila Ross makes her characters come vividly alive so that one lives through these traumatic hours with Bob Schwartz of the Australian Army and his pregnant wife; Max Faber the drunken journalist; the cool, incisive Mother Superior from a Convent School; the homosexual bank-assistant; the retired building contractor with a chip on his shoulder. Passions run high on this strange, secluded, forcing ground; tempers flare; alliances are made and broken. And always over them broods the terrible threat of annihilation, the clock which ticks away the moments to zero hour, to noon on the fifth day.

From rear cover of The Foam on the River:

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Five Days Till Noon tells the story of a VC10 hijacked by Arab terrorists and the fearful tensions among the crew and the passengers as they await the moment at which the deadline will expire and they will either be released or blown up with the aircraft. "Taut passions, suspense, in a drama of our time, vividly characterized," wrote Books and Bookmen of this thrilling and only too topical story.

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