on our hands. There could have been riots, looting, the whole enchilada. Screwballs on rooftops trying to shoot him down with twenty-two rifles. No, there was never any question of informing the public of the danger.
Let’s get back to the chronology of events. Ryterband broke down and begged forgiveness-when, about two thirty?
Roughly, yes.
Then what happened?
As I said, everybody was talking at once. Voices were rising, and so were tempers. Mr. Azzard was buttonholing people, trying to convince us we ought to take a chance and try shooting him down over the East River and hope he’d go down in the drink instead of hitting Brooklyn or one of the bridges. That time of day traffic piles up pretty heavy on those bridges, and some of them carry subway trains. Mr. Toombes and Mr. Rabinowitz were over in a corner arguing with General Adler at the tops of their lungs, trying to talk him out of his idea of shooting the plane down over Harlem.
What were you doing?
Listening to Sergeant O’Brien and Mr. Harris. They were the only ones in that room who were making any sense.
Harris (Cont’d)
If you’re looking to find a hero in this mess, you’d have to pin the medal on Captain Grofeld. He was the only one doing anything constructive.
It was you and Sergeant O’Brien who proposed a plan of action, though, wasn’t it?
Man proposes, the authorities dispose. We could have proposed a dozen ideas. O’Brien’s only a sergeant, and I’m a complete outsider-a civilian carping from the sidelines. Hell, I had no business there. They let me stay, but that was accidental. Nobody was clearly in charge. Nobody had time for details like that. Maybe they were afraid I’d have broadcast the news to the press if I left the room. Maybe I was qualified to stay merely because I’d had a close-up look at the plane. Who knows? Anyway, neither I nor O’Brien had any clout to set things in motion. Grofeld had the clout-and the imagination. I mean it was outrageous, what we suggested. Nobody else would have Could we try to take it in order, Mr. Harris? I think that would make the record easier to follow.
All right, sure. We-O’Brien and I-went over to Captain Grofeld and pried him loose of where he and the banker were listening-angrily-to all the shouting. Most of the shouting was coming from Azzard and General Adler. It was becoming clear to me that it wouldn’t be long before one or the other of them was going to take the bull by the horns. I didn’t know exactly how much authority Adler had, but it was conceivable he had the power to order those jet fighters to attack at any time. It wasn’t until later that we figured out what the chain of command was.
The jet fighters were in the air at the time?
Yes. They’d been scrambled from some National Guard outfit at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
At what time had they been launched?
Evidently they’d been in the air since about one thirty. Keeping tabs on the bomber from about four thousand feet. Craycroft knew they were above him, of course, but I guess he’d anticipated that. They weren’t making any threatening moves.
Do you know by whose authority they had been launched?
Adler had called somebody. Some major general.
Would that be General Hawley?
You got me. All I knew was, there were three F-104 Starfighters zipping around up there. There’d been some pretty heated talk about their armament. They were armed with two kinds of weapons, those planes. They had six-barrel Vulcan guns in the nose-that’s a high-speed twenty-millimeter cannon-but they were also armed with heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles. Air-to-air rockets with high-explosive warheads. They used them in Vietnam against the MIGs. The sensors home in on the target-the heat of the enemy plane’s engines-and they guide themselves to impact. Adler had been saying we ought to use those missiles against Craycroft. O’Brien had been screaming bloody murder about that.
Why?
They’re heat-seeking projectiles. Suppose one of them missed Craycroft’s plane? It’d head for the nearest crosstown bus, or the incinerator-chimney on an apartment house roof. Christ.
I see what you mean.
Anyhow, we didn’t know how soon Adler might break a wire and try to order those fighters in to attack. Actually we didn’t even know whether he had the authority to order an attack, but we had to assume he did. He was talking real loud about dumping the debris all over central Harlem. He seemed to get a big charge out of that idea. His face was getting very red-he’s a classic case of hard-drinking high blood pressure-and there was no way to know he wouldn’t go berserk. So we were contending not only with Craycroft, but with Adler, too. Things didn’t look very bright. I think it was the Adler threat, more than the Craycroft threat, that persuaded O’Brien and me to put that crazy idea to Grofeld.
Go on, please.
Well, it was past two thirty by then. We didn’t have more than maybe twenty-five minutes before Cray-croft’s deadline, and by that point we knew we couldn’t make the deadline. We buttonholed Grofeld. O’Brien asked him if he had permission to speak. Grofeld said what the hell, of course. O’Brien said we’d come up with a cockeyed scheme that just might work.
You told him the nature of the scheme?
Just in outline. We didn’t have time to spell out the details.
How did Captain Grofeld react?
He didn’t screw around with silly questions. He was just as scared of Adler as we were. Maybe more so. He just looked O’Brien in the eye and said, “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard in the past hour.”
What happened next?
Grofeld said, “But that’ll take a lot more than twenty minutes.” We agreed it would. Grofeld said, “All right. Let’s try to buy some time.” That sweet gorgeous son of a bitch. He walked right over to Charles Ryterband. Ryterband had calmed down a little by then. He listened very gravely to Grofeld-like a small kid listening to his father explain about the birds and the bees. Ryterband had an expression on his face as hopeless as I’ve ever seen on a human being, but he turned around and picked up the microphone and made contact with Craycroft. I heard Craycroft’s voice on the speaker, repeating the call letters-they were very formal about that kind of thing-and then Ryterband started talking in a subdued monotone, telling him the money was on its way, it would be a half hour or forty-five minutes late, but it was on the way, and please would he hold off with the bombs until the money was delivered.
But you got the same response as before?
Yeah. Craycroft said three words. He said, “Three o’clock. Out.” That was that. In the meantime Maitland was on the phone with the Federal Reserve, but they weren’t reassuring. The money was being packed up even then, some of it was being carried upstairs to the truck, but it would be a lot more than twenty minutes before it got to us.
That was when Captain Grofeld took action?
Damn right he did. It was beautiful. He grabbed the microphone and spoke the call letters. There wasn’t any answer-Craycroft never acknowledged anybody’s voice but Ryterband’s. But we knew he could hear us. Grofeld said if that was the way he wanted to play it, we’d abide by his rules. But we had a right to expect Craycroft to abide by them, too, he said. He said Ryterband had originally given us until ten minutes after five as the deadline. That had been the first understanding and we expected him to honor it, whether or not the ransom was paid by three.
Did Craycroft reply to that?
No. Grofeld went on, told him the ransom would be delivered in good faith within the next hour and Ryterband would be turned loose with it. Grofeld said this would be done in good faith so long as the bombs weren’t dropped before the ransom was delivered. After that, he said, it would be up to Graycroft to decide whether he had a right to drop his bombs at five o’clock. Ten after five, whatever.
