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?