Текст книги "Target Manhattan"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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Adler

General, could you identify yourself for our record, please?

Happy to. Adler, Michael Joseph, Junior. Brigadier General, United States Air Force. Currently stationed at the Suffolk County Air Force Base on Old River-head Road near Westhampton, Long Island. My assignment is in aircraft and component procurement. I serve as liaison with Grumman and other supplier firms in the Long Island-New York area. Do you want my serial number and other official designations?

Those won’t be necessary, General. It’s merely a matter of having your identity established, as a witness before this commission.

You’ve referred to “the commission” before, Mr. Skinner, and the Mayor referred to it that way when he asked me to meet you here. But all I see in this room is you and Mrs. Field.

Well, Mrs. Field operates our stenotype machine, of course, although we’re also recording these interviews on tape. I’m conducting the interviews in behalf of the committee. The transcriptions will be read by the entire membership, and recommendations will be made on that basis. You can take it that I’m here as the official representative of the Mayor’s commission.

That’s fine by me. It’ll probably go faster.

I hope so. Now, you were called in by whom-Lieutenant O’Hara of the New York Police?

No, it was Andy Toombes.

You mean the Deputy Police Commissioner?

That’s right.

This was on Wednesday, the twenty-second?

That’s right.

At what time of day?

It was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lockheed has an office on Lexington Avenue. I’d just arrived 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 up.

But?

We’re told he’s got armed bombs inside that open bomb bay. Suppose you blow him up in midair with an air-to-air missile or cannon and machine-gun fire from the air? You’ve got live explosive falling on New York City. Are you prepared to risk that?

Go on, please.

Okay, next. Ground fire. Antiaircraft. SAM missile. Whatever. Same scenario, same risks, same objection.

You proposed more options than those two, didn’t you?

I probably proposed a dozen or more. I don’t know if I can remember them all. Some of them were pretty fanciful.

Such as?

There’s a drag that’s used sometimes in forest fire-fighting operations. Kind of a wide mesh-type fishnet, suspended from two or more airplanes. They use them to smother fires in certain conditions. Anyhow you could hang a mesh between two powerful jet aircraft and simply scoop the guy right up out of the sky and carry him off.

Very ingenious.

Sure. Eat where are you going to find gadgetry like that in New York City when you’ve got barely an hour before the deadline?

Continue, General.

This one wasn’t mine. I think it was the FBI man-Hazard?

Azzard.

Yeah. He suggested using a laser beam. Like James Bond. Cut the bomber in half or something. Same problem there, of course. Where are you going to get a laser gun on short notice? In any case I don’t even know if there’s such a weapon in existence, except on somebody’s drawing board. Well, anyhow. I said they could always just put a radar tail on him-from the air and from the ground-and just go ahead and pay the ransom, and then pick him up when he landed. Sooner or later he was going to land. What goes up must come down. Of course that was the obvious answer. It was too obvious.

Why?

Several things. One, nobody was sure at that point whether they were going to be able to raise the money in time. Two, it was easy enough to put a tail on the plane but it might not be that easy to put a tail on Ryterband and keep it there-and Ryterband was the one who was collecting the money. Three, the whole plan had been worked out in pretty good detail by Craycroft, and it was hard to believe he’d gone to all that trouble without figuring out a pretty good escape trick for himself. He might have anticipated radar surveillance. In fact, he almost certainly had. He was an airman, he wasn’t ignorant.

Nevertheless, he was quite bent, wasn’t he? He might have simply ignored that sort of thing in his plans.

I don’t believe that. There’s a big difference between crazy and stupid. Some of the looniest people I’ve ever known were brilliant. Superbly logical.

Go on with your analysis, General.

There was a Port Authority helicopter flier there, a man named Woods. He’d watched the bomber’s flght pattern. I don’t know if any of them had figured out what Craycroft was doing. So I told them what he was doing.

To wit?

He was confining his circle to a route that kept him constantly above heavily populated land surface.

In other words there was no point at which he could be shot down over water.

Exactly. He crossed the East River twice in his flight path, but he never did it quite the same twice in a row. And the East River’s a narrow channel. He was making it a point to cross it in the area of the three bridges-the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, and the Williamsburg Bridge. A few times he flew out above the Brooklyn-Manhattan bridges-they’re quite close together-and made his U-turn over Brooklyn and came back the same way. Other times he’d make his outward crossing above the Brooklyn Bridge and make the return pass over the Williamsburg Bridge, which is a little way upstream. But if we’d tried to shoot him down there, we faced a pretty good chance he’d crash into one of the bridges if he didn’t hit the populated areas. And those bridges are damned expensive to replace, not to mention the constant traffic on them.

Yes, quite.

You see, they’d called me in because they thought there had to be some simple way to neutralize that bomber. That’s what the Air Force is for-to solve aerial problems. There was one thing they forgot.

What’s that?

We weren’t at war. Look, in wartime you shoot the enemy down and you don’t give a damn where they fall. The Battle of Britain-I hate to think of the number of Luftwaffe Heinkels that got shot down over London by the RAF and crashed into somebody’s house-sometimes with armed bombs aboard. Some of the worst damage of the blitz was done by crashing planes. But in wartime you accept those casualties. You have to. Here, on the other hand, that risk was unacceptable. Because we weren’t at war. Peace is hell, isn’t it?

Ryterband (E. M.)

Mrs. Ryterband, could you give us your full name, please?

My name is Ellen Marie Ryterband.

And your maiden name was Craycroft, is that right?

Yes, that’s correct, sir.

You married Charles Ryterband in March, nineteen forty-four?

In Cincinnati, yes, sir.

Now, your brother, Harold, had been in partnership with Charles Ryterband for some years before your marriage, isn’t that correct?

Yes, sir.

Can you tell us how the two men first met and became partners?

Yes, sir. My husband-Charles, that is; he wasn’t rny husband then, of course-Charles had been working for the Ryan company in San Diego, and in nineteen thirty-eight he took a new job with the Ford company, and they moved him to Michigan, and that’s how he met my brother.

Your brother and Charles Ryterband were both employed by Ford in the manufacture of Trimotor aircraft at the plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Can you tell me the circumstances of the first partnership between Mr. Ryterband and Mr. Craycroft?

Well, Charles and Harold became very friendly right away. They had very similar ideas, you see, about airplanes and engines and that sort of thing. Charles had been working at the Ryan company previously-I think I mentioned that, didn’t I?

Yes, you did.

Ryan was the company that built Lindbergh’s plane, you know. They were a small company, but they were very advanced. Charles always regretted having left them, you know. He had accepted the job offer at Ford because he felt that a larger company would offer greater facilities and opportunities for him to develop his ideas, which were rather revolutionary at the time. But he had a sad reawakening in Dearborn. He found Ford to be very stuffy, not at all interested in experimentation.

And your brother felt the same way?

Oh, my, yes. I remember very vividly the first time I ever met Charles. My brother brought him down to Cincinnati-it was one of the long weekends, Easter weekend…

This was in nineteen thirty-eight?

Yes, sir, nineteen thirty-eight. My sister Alice and her husband were still living near us in Cincinnati then. And our mother was still alive-she died in December that year. I was looking after her. I was twenty-four years old, and I suppose everyone assumed I’d grow old as a spinster lady. I taught school part time, and Saturday mornings I helped do the cataloguing at the Carnegie Library. But then Charles Ryterband came into my life. It was still the Depression then, you know. We had very little. Mostly we lived on the money Harold sent us. I had the two part-time jobs but I only earned about thirty-five dollars a week. Still, in those days you could make a dollar stretch a long way, couldn’t you?

Mrs. Ryterband, I wonder if we could jump ahead to the subject of the partnership between your brother and your husband-to-be?

I’m sorry, Mr. Skinner. I’m sixty years old and I do tend to ramble on. You’ll have to help keep me on the strait and narrow.

(Laughter) Yes, ma’am.

Well, they had been working together in the designing department at Dearborn. Charles had come to Ford in February, so they had been getting to know each other for about two months then. I’d had three or four letters from Harold, mentioning his new friend. Harold wasn’t a demonstrative person at all, you know, but he did write terribly good letters. Actually they were addressed to our mother, in those days, but of course my sister and I were always expected to read them, too.

Yes. Go on, please.

I’m sorry. To make a long story short, Mr. Skinner, the two of them had agreed very quickly that they were fed up with the restrictions under which they had to work. They had resolved together to quit their jobs at Ford. That was the main reason why Charles traveled down to Cincinnati on the train with my brother that weekend-they wanted to hatch their plans.

And what were those plans?

They wanted to go into business for themselves. They were brimming over with ideas for new airplanes and new engines.

They formed Crayband Motors then. Where did they raise the capital to start their company?

That was Charles’ doing. My brother was a shy man but Charles was very outgoing. He went out to California the very next week on the train, after he had quit his job at Ford. He visited his old friends at Ryan Aviation, and he went to see some of the other manufacturers out there as well. He had some of the drawings that he and my brother had been working on in Dearborn in the evenings and on the weekends. Some of the people he saw in California were very excited by their designs-as well they ought to be. When Charles returned from California he had orders in his pocket for three prototype engines. Then he and Harold were able to go to the bank and raise money on the strength of those commitments.

I see. So they started Crayband with a bank loan.

Yes, sir. They went right to work in Cincinnati. They hired three young men to help them-you could hire people for eight dollars a day then.

But the company failed, didn’t it?

That wasn’t their fault, Mr. Skinner. The only deliveries they were able to make were the two engines for Ryan. We hear so much about shortages today, but we seem to forget what things were like during the Great Depression. They simply couldn’t get delivery of the materials that they needed. The contracts they’d signed were penalty contracts and when they couldn’t You mean there were penalties if they didn’t deliver the completed engines on time?

Yes, sir. The payments were reduced if they were late. And after the original prototype contracts expired, they were at the mercy of the open-bidding system. To get a contract to supply engines they had to bid against other designers and manufacturers, and they weren’t willing to cut corners and cheapen their designs for the sake of money.

So they didn’t win any bids, is that it?

That’s what happened. They were making the best engines of their kind anywhere in the world. But the big companies didn’t care about that. All they cared about was shaving pennies.

Crayband folded around the end of nineteen thirty-eight, didn’t it?

Yes, sir. That was when our mother died, too. The two things were a great blow to Harold. He felt he had to get away. You could understand that. He was very sensitive. Most people have no idea what a sensitive man he was.

He joined the Balchen Expedition to Alaska and the North Pole, didn’t he?

Yes, but I don’t think his heart was in it. He quit the job before they left Point Barrow. After that he just sort of bummed around, you know. Working on bush planes, getting jobs wherever he could. He didn’t even write letters to me very often. He was quite at loose ends for a while. I don’t think he cared what happened to him.

But then he opened a workshop in Anchorage, didn’t he?

There was a bush pilot who had started a small air service with several planes and pilots. He had taken a liking to Harold, and of course he had recognized what a brilliant man Harold was with airplanes and engines. He lent Harold the money to open his own maintenance hangar there. His name was Chandler Reeves-a very fine man. He died in the war, flying cargo out into the Aleutians.

Mr. Ryterband joined your brother in that enterprise?

At the beginning of nineteen forty, yes, sir.

What had Mr. Ryterband been doing in the interim?

He’d had a job with the Martin Company over in Cleveland-they were developing a new bomber over there.

You saw him fairly regularly during that time?

My, yes. You see, Charles’ family was out in California. We were the only family he had in Ohio, my sister and brother-in-law and I. He’d come down to Cincinnati almost every weekend. He’d bought a secondhand Cord roadster and you used to see him cruising down the street hooting his horn every Saturday afternoon, waving to everybody on our street. He was so proud of that car. He loved to tinker with it.

You were still employed as a teacher and librarian in Cincinnati?

Yes, sir. I’d received a full-time teaching position in the grammar school in the fall of nineteen thirty-nine. I was making one hundred and fifteen dollars a month.

Had you and Mr. Ryterband made plans to marry at that time?

Well, don’t think we hadn’t discussed it, Mr. Skinner. But we weren’t officially engaged, or anything like that. We were both people who liked to take our time about things like that and make sure we were doing the right thing. I get so upset by the way young people today have to rush into Yes, ma’am. Now, in nineteen forty Charles Ryterband joined your brother in Anchorage.

I’m sorry. Yes, we had a letter from Harold telling us about his new business up there, and he invited Charles to come in with him. Charles jumped at the chance, of course. It was less than a week before he’d left his job at Martin and packed his suitcase and was off to wild Alaska-and in those days it was wild, believe you me. I remember Charles couldn’t bear to part with his Cord roadster. He could have sold it, you know, but he left it in my charge instead. I didn’t drive, of course, but we kept it in my yard and the children from the neighbors used to come over and polish it and keep it shiny clean for the day when Charles would come back for it.

The people there generally liked Mr. Ryterband, did they?

Oh, indeed, yes. Charles had a great deal of charm, you know. My sister used to say to him, “Charlie”-she called him that, I never did-”Charlie,” she’d say, “I swear you could charm the quills off a porcupine.” But I don’t mean to suggest for one minute that he was a slicker or anything like that.

No, ma’am. But he was popular and well-liked. I take it.

He certainly was. I counted myself very fortunate to have a beau like Charles. He was in his late twenties then, of course, and he’d come down the street in his open Cord roadster as dashing as you please. The young people admired him tremendously.

He worked in Anchorage with your brother until the beginning of the war, isn’t that right?

Yes. Then naturally the both of them went charging right off to enlist in the Army, right after Pearl Harbor. In Alaska at that time, of course, they weren’t sure but what the Japanese would invade Anchorage at any moment. It was much closer to Tokyo than any other American city, you know.

But Mr. Ryterband was rejected by the Army.

As a child he’d had rheumatic fever and very bad asthma. That was why his parents had moved to Southern California-for Charles’ health. By the time he grew up he wasn’t sickly at all, of course, he was the healthiest man I ever knew-never sick a day in his life. But of course he still had scars in him from the rheumatic fever and the Army wouldn’t accept him. Later on of course, in the last years of the war, they were accepting anybody who could walk into the recruiting office under his own power, but by that time Charles was doing very vital war work even though he was a civilian, and both he and the draft board felt the same way-that he was far more useful where he was than he’d have been in a uniform. Charles wasn’t a coward, Mr. Skinner, but he was a sensible man and he knew that foolish masculine pride wasn’t as important as doing your best in the job for which you’re best suited.

Yes, ma’am. Now, in nineteen forty-two Mr. Cray croft went off into the Army, but Mr. Ryterband remained in Anchorage and continued to operate their partnership.

That’s correct. Actually by about the middle of nineteen forty-two the company had become what I called a quasi-military organization. Charles wasn’t in the Army of course, but he was providing all manner of maintenance and invention services for the Air Corps units that were stationed in Alaska. We tend to forget there was a very hard-fought campaign that was waged up there during the war, under appalling conditions. The Japanese had invaded North American soil there, you know, and it was up to our men to throw them back into the sea. And I daresay Yes, quite. Mrs. Ryterband, you understand that the reason for my questions is to try to develop a picture of your brother and your husband-try to compose a sort of psychological portrait which may help us to understand how they came to do the things they did here in New York. Naturally this has to be rather painful for you, and we’re all deeply grateful that you agreed to give us your voluntary testimony in this matter. Now, I’d like to keep moving right ahead, if you don’t mind, and perhaps we could skip over some of the time periods. Your brother served in the Army Air Corps during the war, and I gather you didn’t see much of him…

Well, I saw him in nineteen forty-three, of course.

After the end of the campaign in the Aleutians?

Yes. He was transferred to an air base in Nebraska to train army air mechanics-the ground crews.

You still resided in Cincinnati then?

Yes, sir. My sister had gone to work in a war plant, but I was still teaching. We still had to educate our young people, you know, war or no war.

Do you think any important changes had taken place in your brother’s personality as a result of his experiences in the war in Alaska?

Well, I’d have to think… Yes, I think you could say he’d become more impatient.

In what ways?

Well, you’d have to have known him, really. You’d have to understand the way he was.

That’s what I’m trying to do, Mrs. Ryterband, and perhaps with your help we’ll be able to get closer to it.

Harold was always kind. He was thoughtful toward my sister and me. But he wasn’t the sort of man who ever brought little gifts for you or remembered your birthday. My goodness, he rarely remembered his own birthday. Things like that were of very little importance to him-none at all, in fact. My brother wasn’t given to ceremony. And he didn’t-oh, dear, it’s very difficult to explain just what I mean…

Take your time, Mrs. Ryterband.

Yes, sir, I’m trying my best.

You said he’d become impatient.

With people. He’d always been indifferent to people. Not unkind, you know. Not rude to them. But Harold wasn’t what you could call a social animal. I’d have to admit he was a single-minded man-very wrapped up in his work.

Obsessed with it, would you say?

To a point, yes. But not in a cruel way. I remember more than once in the shop in Cincinnati there’d be one of the young men they’d hired, one of the junior mechanics, who’d make some mistake, and Harold never got snappish with them. He wasn’t impatient with ignorance, you see. He’d explain very carefully to the young man what his mistake was, and why it was a mistake, and how it should have been done, and why. Harold would have made a marvelous shop teacher, I always thought.

Then what was the nature of this “impatience with people”?

I think after he’d been in the Army awhile he developed a great dislike of the men in authority. The brass hats. He resented being placed under the command of people who didn’t know half as much as he knew about airplanes.

That’s hardly an unusual situation in the military.

It isn’t unusual anywhere in life, Mr. Skinner. Harold had experienced similar frustrations when he’d worked at Ford. That was why he’d quit his job there. But during the war it was different, you see. He was trapped. He couldn’t very well quit his job, could he? And he didn’t want to turn his back on the boys who were flying his airplanes. Harold was as dedicated to wiping out tyranny as any American was, in the war. That was why he became so resentful-so impatient. Because we were at war, and he felt that the men in power were fools who were wasting many lives.

By “the men in power” do you mean his immediate superiors or the men who made the important strategic decisions?

His immediate superiors. No, Harold wasn’t an armchair strategist. He didn’t think in those terms, you see. He was a man who’d been given a job to do. What made him angry was that his superiors prevented him from doing that job.

Because of their stupidity.