I think I understand. He had to keep the diameter of his turn well inland from the shore, because otherwise, if he’d dropped his bombs, they’d have been dragged out past the shoreline by centripetal force.
Right. He was making a one hundred eighty-degree turn with a radius of something like three-quarters of a mile—a very tight turn for a big airplane; he wasn’t going very fast, of course, but he still had to bank steeply in those turns. The point is, it was a delicate and precise maneuver. The slightest miscalculation and he goes too far—and we’ve got him.
Then, you decided the thing to do was find a way to make him miscalculate.
Easier said than done, I can assure you. That’s why it would have been beautiful if we’d had low clouds drifting through up there. He flies into a cloud, you deflect his compasses and he wouldn’t know where the hell he was. Hit him at the right moment and even if he panicked and hit the bombs-away button, all he’d do would be to blow a few holes in the Hudson River.
But there weren’t any clouds at that altitude, were there?
Nope. That stumped us.
What about the matter of deflecting his compasses? That’s not easy either, is it?
Not easy, no. But possible.
At what time did you and Sergeant O’Brien propose the idea of the crop duster?
Must have been about two thirty.
Grofeld (Cont’d)
A little while ago you mentioned that the call from the Federal Reserve saying the money would be at least forty-five minutes late arriving came at two seventeen. What was done then?
I reported this information to the room at large. Then I went over to Charles Ryterband and talked to him. I explained, as reasonably as I could under the circumstances, that we were doing our damnedest to comply with his demands—their demands. I said he could see that we had every reason to do so, and no reason not to. I said we were doing everything in our power, and that we were acting in good faith. I told him there would be a delay, but that it was completely beyond our control. The money would be delivered by three forty-five at the very latest, I told him. I went on like that, trying to impress the truth on him, trying to get through to the poor confused bastard. After a while I could see it was sinking in. Mr. Toombes and I—and even Mr. Azzard—all implored him to explain this development to his partner and do everything in his power to persuade his partner to grant us the extra time.
And did Ryterband do as you asked?
Yes. And, believe me, his heart was in it. I have a suspicion that he was overwhelmed, himself, by the magnitude of the crime. That he walked into the damned thing only half-awake, only half-aware of what he was doing, and that he was coming to his senses somehow. Actually it was only a few minutes after that that he broke down completely and wept.
But before that he talked to Craycroft, didn’t he?
Yes.
And got no response?
He got a response. It was negative, like all the previous ones.
Craycroft just wouldn’t budge at all?
Three o’clock was the deadline. That was that, as far as he was concerned.
What happened then?
First there was an interruption. General Adler. He came thundering across the room. He said if the son of a bitch was going to drop his bombs anyway, we might as well go ahead and shoot him down. He said that way at least we could make the choice as to where the bombs would fall.
He said that, did he?
He said we should hit the plane when it was making the turn from Central Park across upper Manhattan. That way, he said, either the bombs would swing out into the river, or if worst came to worst—these are his words—he said, “At least they’ll only hit Harlem.”
That’s verbatim?
He seemed to think some of us are more expendable than others.
I see. Well, let’s get on, shall we, to what happened after General Adler’s interruption.
Well, that was when Ryterband broke down.
Describe that, if you would?
Well, I’ve tried to sort it out in retrospect, with the aid of the backgrounding I’ve done on the two men. I can’t say I can explain it in such a way that it makes complete sense. He seemed to fall apart all of a sudden. He’d been on the verge of hysterics all afternoon, but this was something else, this was different. He was involved in something daring, something of tremendous risk—naturally he’d be nervous and scared and ready to hit the ceiling at the slightest provocation. Anybody would, especially a basically nonviolent type like Ryterband, who had no experience of crime or dealing with people on a basis of threats and extortion. It’s become apparent that Craycroft had only sprung the whole thing on him a few hours earlier that same day.
Well, they’d discussed the plan for months.…
Only in theory. Only as a make-believe fantasy. You’ve talked with Mrs. Ryterband?
Yes.
Then you know Craycroft only revealed that same morning his intention to put the theory into practice. That’s what she claims, anyhow, and I see no compelling reason to disbelieve it. I think the idea must have galvanized Ryterband at first. They’d spent months rationalizing it, of course—the motives, the evil of the New York businessmen villains, the righteousness of their cause, even the peculiarly fitting use of that antique airplane.
All right, we’ll accept that as a basis.
The point is I think when Craycroft got him out of bed that morning and sprang it on him, Ryterband must have been excited as hell. It must have got his adrenaline pumping at a hell of a rate. Pure excitement carried him for quite a while. But then, up there in that crowded office with all of us trying to reason with him at once, something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. Maybe remorse. Maybe he realized Craycroft was-loony. Maybe he began to see that his love and loyalty had taken him much too far—and that it was much too late to turn back even if he wanted to. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I just don’t know for sure.
But he broke down, you say. In what way?
A lot of it was incoherent. He burst into tears. A real crying jag.
Did he say anything you could understand?
I honestly can’t remember. Nothing memorable.
But he did go into a form of hysterics? Is that a fair statement?
Yes. Of course, it terrified most of us.
Why?
He was our only contact with the guy in the airplane with the bombs. If Ryterband lost his marbles, that was the end of it.
But in the end he didn’t lose his marbles. Not in an obvious way.
No. He made an extraordinary effort of will. You could see it physically when he made this extreme attempt to pull himself together.
And succeeded.
In a way. It took quite a while. Oh, perhaps not in clock time—maybe not more than three or four minutes. But standing there, it was like watching the restoration of a statue from shattered fragments. He literally put himself back together. I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Finally he did a strange thing. He lifted his head up—he was sitting in an armchair beside the two-way radio set—and he put his hands out, very wide. And he begged our forgiveness.
Forgiveness for what?
He didn’t say.
I see.
He didn’t make any excuses for himself. He didn’t even try.
I see. Wasn’t that an abrupt change of heart?
Yes. Don’t ask me to explain it.
What happened next?
Well, it was then about two thirty. We had no more than half an hour before the money was supposed to appear, according to Craycroft’s schedule. According to ours we had an hour and a quarter, but I don’t think any of us were very sure we’d live that long. He was making a pass directly over the bank every nine minutes. I think most of us assumed he’d use the bank for one of his targets.
Even with Ryterband in the bank?
We didn’t know very much about Harold Craycroft at that juncture, Mr. Skinner. Ryterband had called him “Harold,” but we didn’t even know his last name. Bu
t we did know one thing for sure. We knew he was psycho. Moving up on the deadline, that knowledge was getting to all of us.
You mean people were getting rattled.
Getting more rattled. We’d been rattled all day, for God’s sake. (Laughter) Anyhow, by this time everybody was talking at once and nobody much was listening. I remember particularly General Adler was yelling at nobody in particular about a survey he’d worked on. It chilled me right down to my toes.
Adler (Cont’d)
Yes, that’s right. It was some years ago we did the survey, of course, but I don’t think much has changed since then, for practical purposes.
This was an Air Force survey?
No. It was conducted by the Civil Defense office. I participated in it as liaison from Air Force—I was doing a tour of duty at McGuire, so this must have been nineteen fifty-eight. Back when the cold war was some hotter than it became later on.
What was the nature of the survey, General?
They were drawing up Civil Defense contingency plans. What to do in case of enemy attack. This particular survey was a study on various evacuation plans for New York City.
And the conclusions of the study?
Hell, I told them what the conclusions would be before they even processed the raw data. Anybody with half an eye could see that. Of the five boroughs of New York, the Bronx is the only one that’s not on an island. Evacuate four densely populated island boroughs? Think about it. How many tunnels and bridges between Manhattan and the mainland? Between Brooklyn-Queens and the mainland? Between Staten Island and the Jersey shore? Think about it.
It’s a distressing thought, I admit.
We were supposed to recommend the most efficient plan. The minute I walked in I told them there wouldn’t be enough difference between the most efficient plan and any other plan to fit up a gnat’s ass. Bomb shelters and evacuation routes. For God’s sake. Nuclear war? Christ, you take your losses and you hit back. What else are you going to do? Evacuate? But they had to do their goddamned survey.
And what was the conclusion?
To evacuate New York City and the metropolitan area to a radius consistent with then-existing mega-tonnage? Hell, Mr. Skinner, we figured the best possible time you could do it in. Know what figure we came up with? Care to guess?
No. What was it?
Two weeks.
Grofeld (Cont’d)
Two weeks minimum, he was saying. To get people out of New York in case of emergency. And here we had a threat that was measured in minutes!
That was why nobody had suggested trying to clear the streets?
I’d had a brief conversation with Deputy Commissioner Toombes about that earlier. We’d decided against it. Complete news blackout. Of course most of the news agencies around the city had been calling the department, asking what the hell that plane was doing up there. We’d kept a lid on it. Given out vague stories about a publicity stunt, some Hollywood promotion. We couldn’t very well make the truth public, Mr. Skinner. We’d have had a panic 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.
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