And?
Craycroft still didn’t answer, so Grofeld asked Charles Ryterband to get on the horn and repeat what he’d just said. Ryterband did so. He told Craycroft that we were right-that the bombs shouldn’t be dropped before five ten because those were the terms as he had first stated them. I think Ryterband understood intuitively what Grofeld was trying to do. We had the feeling that Craycroft was using that inflexible rigidity to hang onto what sanity he had left. He must have felt that his plans could work out so long as he didn’t waver-didn’t deviate from the exact plan. He probably felt that if he wavered, everything would fall apart. He clung to that rigidity, and Grofeld was playing on it. Ryterband had originally given us until five ten and Grofeld was asking Craycroft to honor that. Anyhow Ryterband got on the radio and repeated it all, told Craycroft he had to keep to the original bargain and not drop his bombs before five ten.
Craycroft replied?
Craycroft said, “Affirmative.” Christ, didn’t we all start breathing again. Grofeld bought us an extra two hours, maybe.
Maybe?
Well, we didn’t know what was in Craycroft’s mind. Naturally we hoped Craycroft would go away quietly after the ransom was paid, even if the ransom was late. Grofeld said emphatically several times that no overt action should be taken against Craycroft before the money was delivered to Ryterband. Then we’d try to feel out Craycroft’s intentions, and act accordingly. You see, none of us was sure that Craycroft had his plan worked out in absolute detail for what he’d do if we didn’t pay the ransom. I think he’d taken it for granted we would pay. He was right, of course-he just hadn’t taken into account the snail’s pace of bureaucracy. But I had a feeling-I can’t prove it-that he’d never stopped to think about the timing of it if the ransom wasn’t paid. Whether to drop the bombs at one minute past three or at ten minutes past five. He could have gone either way. Maybe Grofeld didn’t buy us any time we hadn’t had anyway. But none of that’s going to convince me that they shouldn’t build a statue to Henry Grofeld in City Hall square.
By then you must have realized the danger that Craycroft might drop the bombs anyway, even after the ransom had been paid.
Of course. We knew he was crazy. We had to include that possibility on the list. That was why Grofeld listened to our crazy scheme.
O’Brien (Cont’d)
I said, “Captain, you’ve got to understand this is a wild-hair idea. I wouldn’t give it more than one chance in fifty.” Captain Grofeld said that was a hell of a lot better odds than anything else we had right then. He said we’d better get on with it.
And then?
I told him what we’d need. Some of it was technical equipment-radio gear-that would take some mighty fast scrounging. The rest of it-the crop duster and all-was probably easier to get. But I scribbled a list for him.
Do you have that list, by any chance?
No, I’m sorry. It got lost in the shuffle somewhere. Probably got thrown out. I could give you a pretty good idea, though. We needed three portable transmitters that could put out taped code signals on the radio-navigation and LORAN bands. We needed a large helicopter-something fast enough to keep up with the bomber. Of course, the bomber wasn’t making much speed. Craycroft was conserving fuel, and in any case he had to keep his speed down to make those tight turns over Manhattan. He wasn’t making more than maybe a hundred and thirty miles an hour- he was throttled right down. We figured a chopper could keep up with that. And a crop duster. Actually my first idea was to use one of those midair-refueling jet tankers the Air Force has. But we’d have played hell trying to find one in time, and Jack Harris pointed out you could do the same job with a little crop duster, and of course he was right.
By crop duster you mean a small, light airplane equipped to spray chemicals on farm fields.
Yes, sir, that’s right. I knew where we could lay our hands on one. The New Jersey Mosquito Control Commission uses them to spray the swamps around Hackensack and Secaucus. They’ve got several planes at the Newark and Teterboro airfields.
So your list included three transmitters, one large helicopter, and a crop-duster plane. Anything else?
Yes, sir. Two things. A large portable electromagnet-the kind they use for picking scrap metal out of dumps- and several barrels of paint. We even suggested a specific brand of paint that we happened to know was thick and had a tendency to adhere to most surfaces instantly on contact. The color was immaterial.
Coming on it cold, Captain Grofeld must have thought that was a rather strange list.
Well, we’d told him what we had in mind, sir. The problem wasn’t in obtaining the things we wanted-they were all fairly common items. The problem was to do it fast and get all of it to the right place at the right time. The biggest headache was the transmitter codes-the tapes that put out the RN and LORAN signals. We had to use battery-powered equipment that put out weak signals, something that wouldn’t foul up all the air traffic in the metropolitan area pattern. Traffic had been diverted and grounded by the Civil Defense and the Port Authority airports, but still there could have been a lot of planes within radio range, using those navigating beacons. It was a headache trying to figure out where we could get low-power transmitters that would put out signals on the right frequencies, and figuring out where we could get RN and LORAN-coded signal tapes to feed into them.
Wasn’t it Mr. Harris who proposed a solution to that?
Yes, sir. We were stumped until he pointed out that we didn’t have to actually fool the instruments with fake beacons. All we really had to do was jam them. Put out any kind of signal at all, so long as it was on the right frequency and would interrupt his reception of signals from ground beacons.
That made it much easier, then.
Yes, sir. It became possible to do the job with three battery transmitters-any kind of transmitters that had variable frequency controls. We sent a cop down to a ham-radio shop and he had them within fifteen minutes.
Grofeld (Cont’d)
Right about then it got to be three o’clock. Everybody stopped talking. In fairness you’d have to call it a hush. Ryterband had got up from his chair and gone over to the window, trying to see the plane, and the rest of us moved that way-we were drawn there. It wasn’t in sight at that point. Somewhere else on its circuit. We stood there waiting for things to start exploding.
You still weren’t sure whether he would hold off?
How could we be sure of anything? We stood there and waited. All of us looking at our watches and then trying to spot him through the window and then looking at our watches again… Nobody moved. It seemed to take forever. Then we heard the drone, and the plane appeared. It circled over us, heading for Brooklyn. The bombs were still in the racks. I guess we stood there for another two or three minutes before we started to breathe again.
What happened then?
Maybe we had a reprieve, but we still didn’t have much time. I’m a police captain, a divisional commander. In terms of real authority-a case like this one-that doesn’t mean beans. I believed in this crackpot scheme of Harris and O’Brien’s, but I had to get authority to try it. I knew it was going to take time to get permission. Too much time, probably, but at least we had to try.
What did you do?
I went over to Deputy Commissioner Toombes. Got him aside and told him about it.
Was he agreeable to the idea?
You have no idea how fast I had to talk. But I sold him. Look, it wasn’t as if we had any reasonable alternatives. Any solution, no matter how wild, was bound to look pretty good to a man in his position right about then.
