After that he left them open, didn’t he?
Yes. And that’s quite a feat, you know. The airplane gets harder to control with the doors open like that. You’ve got drafts in the bomb bay.
I see. Now, did anything else happen that struck your attention at that time?
No. He continued on the same circuit he’d been flying before. Up toward the northern end of Central Park, then a tight U-turn over the wide part of Manhattan and back south along the west side. Looking at him from below, he was making a clockwise circle.
How long did you remain hovering there?
Maybe five, six minutes. He hadn’t finished that circuit when we got orders to land and report in. The pilot did, that is. I was just along for the ride, as I said, trying to get news footage of the highway job.
Where did you land, and when?
One o’clock. I made a note of it. I was making a lot of notes. I mean you don’t see a bomber at treetop level opening its bomb-bay doors over Manhattan every day. With bombs in the racks.
You saw the bombs?
They looked like bombs to me. I remember thinking, if it’s a publicity stunt for that movie, it’s a hell of a realistic one. Whatever was happening, it was a news story-and I was right on top of it with teletape close-ups. I figured I had a hell of a beat. Anyway-you asked-we landed at the Wall Street heliport There were two uniformed cops and two plainclothes FBI agents waiting for us. I wanted to get to a phone, but they vetoed that. I got a little angry and they had to convince me.
How did they do that?
They told me those were real bombs he had in that airplane. That’s enough to shut anybody up, wouldn’t you say?
What happened next?
One of the agents asked me if I had film in the camera and I told him it wasn’t film, it was tape. We got it established that I had shots of the plane from close-up. He put in a call from his car radio for a teletape reader. That’s a portable playback machine with a small screen. Like a film editor’s moviola. Only with TV tape you get instant playback, of course, since you don’t have to develop the film.
That was quite a stroke of luck.
Sure. But we couldn’t see any way to take advantage of it. I mean, we had it, but what good was it? So we had close-up pictures of the airplane and the open doors and even a couple of oblique shots of the bombs glistening inside there. But that didn’t change anything.
You accompanied the officers and the helicopter pilot to the Merchants Trust Bank, did you?
Yes. Mostly because they’d ordered the teletape reader sent over there. They figured I could do narration while they were looking at the pictures. I mean, Woods and I were the only ones who’d been up there close to him.
What time did you arrive at the bank?
We got up to Maitland’s office around one fifteen. It took about twenty minutes more before the reader showed up. The place was pretty crowded by then-a lot of official types milling around. They had Ryterband stuck in a corner behind a barricade of chairs. The old guy looked confused but stubborn. He wasn’t giving an inch. In a strange way I got to admire him a little in the next hour or two. He had a lot of balls, you had to give him that.
Who appeared to be in charge?
That’d be a matter of opinion. In Azzard’s opinion-he’s the FBI muckamuck I know.
In Azzard’s opinion he was in charge. There was a police captain, fellow named Grofeld-damn nice guy, incidentally, not your stereotype beefy cop-he was there, too. He wasn’t running around asserting himself the way the FBI clowns were, but I think you could say if anybody in the room had a semblance of real control, it would be Grofeld. Him and a police sergeant named Billy O’Brien. I’ve known O’Brien off and on for three, four years. He’s one of the best. Quick, practical, brainy-a real take-charge guy. Between him and Grofeld the FBI was left standing in the chocks, if you want my honest opinion.
I do, Mr. Harris, very much. I appreciate your candor.
The rest of them have to cover their asses, Mr. Skinner. I’ve got no boss to brownnose. I’m free to speak my piece. The rest of them may not have it that easy. I’m not taking any kudos-it’s just the position I happen to be in. If I was a civil servant like those poor bastards, I might get a little canny and close-mouthed, too. Or try to pass the buck.
Do you think the buck requires passing, Mr. Harris?
Well, there were goof-ups here and there.
Can you name some?
There was one that could have been pretty hairy. One of the FBI boys had a bright idea. He almost talked Azzard into it.
What was that?
Get some artillery up on a roof somewhere and shoot him down.
You’re kidding.
I was standing right there. I remember I just gave Azzard a pained look. But, so help me, he was taking the clown seriously. How could you figure he’d buy that one? We’d all heard Ryterband, over there in the corner muttering about how those bombs were armed. And here Azzard was seriously thinking about shooting him down.
What happened?
I said a few words. I said, “For Christ’s sake he’s got armed bombs in that airplane.” I mean, you shoot him down, he crashes in Manhattan, you lose six or eight city blocks. Eight thousand pounds of high explosive?
I’m not familiar with the expression “armed bombs.” Is there such a thing as an unarmed bomb?
Sure.
Can you clarify it for me?
Well, there are all kinds of high explosives. But most of them are fairly stable chemicals until they’re ignited by a detonation device. You can play baseball with a normal blasting stick. But if you stick a fuse in it and throw an electric charge into the fuse, then it’ll blow up. You follow? Normally a high-explosive compound won’t explode from simple impact. There has to be a detonation device. Electric, heat, or impact. There are various kinds. With old-fashioned aerial bombs, the usual detonator was an impact device-a pin in the nose of the bomb, like a firing pin, designed to explode a capsule of fulminate-of-mercury, which in turn ignites the main explosive. If you block off that firing pin, the bomb is disarmed-it won’t blow up as a result of an impact. You could drop a disarmed bomb from ten thousand feet and all you’d get would be a dull thud and a little dent in the ground, if the detonator wasn’t armed. The point is, nobody in a bomber wants his whole plane to blow sky-high if his bomb bay happens to get hit by a stray machine-gun bullet from an enemy fighter. You follow? So ordinarily you only pull the switch that arms the warheads when you’re ready to drop them out of the plane. That’s normal safety procedure. Usually the disarming device is simply a metal plate wedged between the firing pin and the detonator. Pull that plate out, and it arms the bomb. But as long as the plate remains in place, the bomb won’t explode.
But the bombs in Craycroft’s plane were armed?
Ryterband said they were. If we believed the rest of his story, we sure as hell had to believe that part, didn’t we? That seemed the whole point of Ryterband’s caterwauling-to make damn sure we knew those bombs were armed.
What did Azzard say when you pointed this out to him?
Not much of anything that I can remember. He was a little miffed. I don’t think he wanted to believe me. But there were a couple of guys from the police bomb squad hanging around, and they agreed with what I told him.
To your knowledge, what was being done at this time to meet the demands of Craycroft and Ryterband?
I was just a spectator, of course. I didn’t hear or see a lot of what was going on. I think they had somebody trying to get the money up. Maitland, the banker, kept getting on the phone with his people.
Was anybody speculating as to whether the money could be got up in time?
Sure. Everybody was.
Where was the emphasis, would you say? On trying to stop Craycroft or on raising the money to pay him off?