there for a conference with some of their people. Four Oh Five Lexington. There was a message for me to call Andy Toombes-evidently he’d called the base and they’d told him I was on my way into the city. Anyhow, I called him from Lockheed, and he filled me in on what was going on. I went right down to the subway and went downtown. It was faster than surface transit at that time of day.
You went directly to the Merchants Trust Bank?
Yes. It happened Andy was just arriving at the same time. We met at the elevator in the lobby and rode up together.
To Paul Maitland’s office.
Yes. I couldn’t remember Maitland’s first name. It’s Paul, is it?
At what time did you and Commissioner Toombes enter the office?
Must have been one forty, thereabouts.
I take it you and Commissioner Toombes are well acquainted. How is that?
We’re the same age-forty-seven. Our wives were cronies at Barnard twenty-five years ago. When I was transferred up here from Davis Monthan AFB in Arizona last year, Peggy got in touch with Sharon Toombes and we started going out together as a foursome. Andy and I hit it off right away.
But you’d never had any official dealings with him prior to this?
No, it was purely social.
Then I take it the reason Commissioner Toombes called you, rather than some other Air Force officer, was simply the fact that he knew you personally.
That’s right.
Isn’t it possible he might have found some other Air Force officer who could have reached the scene earlier?
He might have, yes. But most of the AF types you’ll find right in Manhattan are recruiting-office people, that sort of thing. I’m a flier. I started out jockeying 29s and 36s. I’m a flight-line officer, not a desk commander. Andy had already talked to the AF people in the Manhattan office, but none of them knows a hell of a lot about real airplanes. They’re a pack of fat-assed politicians. He needed somebody like me. I was the handiest, by coincidence, I guess-it just happened I was in the city that day. If he hadn’t got me, he’d have found somebody else. But I don’t think you can accuse him of wasting time, not on account of our friendship.
I see. Well, in any case you reached Maitland’s suite in the Merchants Trust building at approximately one forty in the afternoon. Had you been fully briefed before you entered that office?
Pretty much, yes. Andy had explained the outlines of it over the phone in about four short sentences. I’d seen the Fort from the street of course. You could hardly miss it. Hell, you could damn near count the bombs through the open bomb-bay doors, it was flying that low. People were gawking at it all over town. And Andy’d given me some of the details while we were in the elevator going up to Maitland’s office.
So you didn’t have to expend much time familiarizing yourself with the situation after you arrived there?
No, I didn’t. Anyhow I wasn’t there to be an audience for people’s explanations of what was happening.
What were you there for?
To help, if I could.
And could you? Did you?
I like to think I did. I tried to, anyhow. You’d probably be better off asking somebody else that question. I’m not the proper person to ask to evaluate my own performance.
I appreciate that, General, but we’re only trying to get the facts. Now, at the time you arrived there was barely more than an hour remaining before the deadline Ryterband had set. Is that right?
We had about eighty minutes, I was told.
At that time, I’m informed, you submitted a rather brilliantly succinct analysis of the situation.
Who the hell told you that?
Toombes.
Son of a bitch. Did he actually use those words?
Yes, he did.
He was overstating it, you know.
Perhaps. In any case I wonder if you could recap for us now what you stated then?
Well, I’d seen what was going on. I mean Andy had told me what was going on, and anybody with two eyes could see how it was shaping up. But a lot of them seemed damn confused about the mechanics of it. I mean, most of them didn’t have any experience dealing with airplanes in a combat situation. All I did was tell them what their options were. I gave them the facts. It wasn’t up to me to make decisions about what to do. I didn’t have the authority to decide whether they should pay the ransom or not, for example. That wasn’t my department. My department was the airplane and the available possible methods of dealing with it.
You mean there were ways to deal with it.
There are ways to deal with any threat. But you have to decide whether they’re worth the risks involved. You can neutralize any kind of guerrilla extortion-hijacking, kidnapping, whatever-but you’ve got to be prepared to accept the possible consequences.
You’re saying, I think, that the people in charge had the option of simply refusing to knuckle under. But you said a moment ago that it wasn’t your department to make that kind of suggestion.
It wasn’t, although if it had been up to me I’d have made that decision. To refuse the demands and tell the son of a bitch to go to hell. I mean, for my money, all they had to do was tell it to him straight. He had his radio wide open, he could hear them when they talked to him. He was in communication with his partner there in the office.
Charles Ryterband.
Yeah. I’d have told him to go to hell. I’d have pointed out the consequences to him. “If you kill one single soul in New York City, you’ll die yourself. You’ll be shot down like a dog.” He’d have backed off. Hell, what choice would he have?
It seems pretty clear he was demented. You can’t depend on a deranged man to act sensibly. A man in normal mental health wouldn’t have tried what Craycroft was trying in the first place.
In my opinion, Mr. Skinner, you have to consider the long-range consequences of any such decision. If you knuckle under to the first Craycroft, then you can be damn sure there’ll be a whole army of imitators who see that Craycroft got away with it, so they’ll decide to try the same thing, or a variation on it. Give in to the first one, and pretty soon you’re going to have a bomb threat every week. That’s what happened all over the world with these guerrilla kidnappings, these airplane hijackings. All it takes is one successful plot, and every half-baked screwball in the world decides to get on the bandwagon. You’ve got to cut these things off at birth, that’s my opinion. But screw it. You and I could sit here for months debating the philosophy behind these decisions. They’re essentially political, not military. They’re out of my bailiwick. I’m not here to testify about that, am I?
Well, I appreciate having your views, General. In any case, according to Mr. Toombes you provided a quick precise analysis. I wonder if you’d recap that analysis for me now?
I’ll try. Look, I was in uniform that day. I must have looked pretty good to those guys right then. Maybe they thought I had some magical solution to offer. How to just reach up and turn that thing off, or something. I mean I was supposed to be The Expert, in caps. I walked in the room and they all looked to me for something. I had to set them straight, and I had to do it fast because they didn’t have time to waste hoping for magical answers from me. You follow?
Yes, I think so. Go on.
As near as I can remember, I told them something like this. You’ve got several options. You can threaten him, you can try to shoot him down, or you can try to deflect him off his course and get him out over open water and then shoot him down. Now, each of these courses is-as they say-fraught with peril.
Yes.
Basically it’s a question of how do you stop a bomber. Well you can’t build a brick wall in front of it. You can’t reach up with a skyhook and pull it out of the way. There are all kinds of things you can’t do. There’s a few things you can do, but you’ve got to weigh the risks of each.
I take it you enumerated those things?
Yes. First, you can send up a plane-an armed Air Force plane, we could get a fighter up there in maybe fifteen minutes if we had to. And shoot him full of holes, maybe get in some cannon fire and blow the son of a bitch
