Текст книги "Target Manhattan"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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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.

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.

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.

Then what?

I told him we needed authorization and equipment. I showed him O’Brien’s list. He just blinked at it. I’m not sure he wasn’t convinced we were crazy, but he probably figured, what the hell. I kept pressing him, telling him we had to try it. It took a little while. I had to explain about the authorizations we’d need, and in circumstances like that you have to explain things several times before anybody understands.

Yes. You have to penetrate past their confusion.

Right. Your brain gets pretty numb, times like that.

What were these authorizations you required?

Well, first, of course, we needed permission from the highest possible authorities to try the stunt at all. City, FBI, and military. Or at least a couple of them. Then we’d need full cooperation from whoever was in command of those jet fighters circling up there. At that point none of us actually knew who was giving them their orders.

You found out, though?

Toombes went over and asked General Adler. Adler told him the planes had been launched by order of Major General Bradford Hawley of the Air National Guard.

Adler had phoned Hawley earlier, I take it?

Yes. Launching the planes had been Adler’s idea, but the authority was Hawley’s. Incidentally, when I called Hawley, the first thing I asked him was whether the fighters were really armed with live ammunition.

And were they?

Yes. Twenty-millimeter cannon and air-to-air missiles.

Sidewinder missiles.

That’s right.

Now, at this time-what was it, about ten past three?

About that, yes.

At this time you began to seek authorization from the various departments?

Yes. Both Mr. Toombes and I spent a lot of time on telephones.

And ultimately you received these authorizations?

Most of them, yes. We figured we could live without the rest of them.

Which were denied you?

The FBI, for one. They’re great buck passers. Azzard didn’t want to take the responsibility, and his next superior is in Washington and was somehow unavailable through all our attempts to reach him.

But you decided to go ahead without FBI permission?

What choice did we have?

I don’t know, Captain. That’s what we’re here to determine.

We got a pretty snappy go-ahead from Mr. Swarthout, the Assistant Deputy Mayor. That covered us with the Mayor’s office. We’d established an open line to General Hawley-he was in a National Guard office at Floyd Bennett Field-we got that line and held it open after about three thirty. Hawley wanted a crack at that bomber any way he could get one, and it looked as if we might give him one, so he seemed willing to play along with us. He’d somehow gotten Pentagon clearance. He had direct radio communication with the three Starfighters. In the meantime Mr. Swarthout, who was still in his office at City Hall, established contact with the headquarters of the Port Authority and began to clear us for the helicopter and the crop duster that O’Brien and Harris had asked for.

How much time did all this take?

It was nearly four o’clock before we had it all nailed down and had the channels of communication open.

Still, under the circumstances that was fast work.

We had a crisis on our hands, Mr. Skinner.

That doesn’t always grease the skids under the bureaucracy.

Well, there’s a certain amount of interaction. I mean, each of us had contacts among people who could help us. I knew Mr. Toombes. He knew Mr. Swarthout. Swarthout knew the people at Port Authority. I mean, relationships like that are inevitable in governmental structures. We were able to get lines of communication opened, and that was the key to it. I don’t think there was anything unusual about that. The apparatus is clumsy, but if you know how to deal with it, you can function pretty fast.

I see. And Mr. Toombes had called in General Adler…

I don’t have much sympathy for General Adler, I admit. But the fact is it’s a good thing he was there. We might have had an easier time with some other Air Force officer, but we had to work with what we had.

I thought you regarded him as a worse threat than Craycroft.

In a way we did. But I’m a cop, and O’Brien’s a cop, and if Adler had really busted a fuse, we had him right there in the room and we could have neutralized him. Put him under arrest, shut him up. No, the real threat was always Craycroft, although I’ve got to admit Adler scared the hell out of us. We had to keep a damn close eye on him-you couldn’t be sure when he might get on the phone and tell General Hawley it was time to go to war.

Now, while you were seeking authorizations and opening channels, what was being done about the requisitions on O’Brien’s list?

Frankly I skipped the chain of command on most of those. I just gave orders to some cops to go get the stuff. The radio transmitters, the paint. Mr. Toombes, through Mr. Swarthout, got us the Port Authority helicopter-the biggest one they had, one of those twin-rotor banana jobs. I sent a squad from the precinct down to one of the construction outfits to requisition one of those big junkpile electromagnets with a battery-pack power supply. And we got the crop duster from the Jersey mosquito-control people, again through the Port Authority by way of a request from the Deputy Mayor’s office.

These items you obtained yourself-the paint, the radios, and the magnet-you did that on your own authority, Captain?

I did: I figured I’d argue later about whether I had the right to do it. If the stunt worked, nobody was going to bitch about a little moonlight requisitioning on my part. If it didn’t work, my head was likely to roll anyway. I didn’t see any point wasting time taking that stuff upstairs.

Now, in the meantime, while all this was going on, the government bankers were trying to expedite the delivery of the ransom money?

Yes.