Skyjack Read online

  Cops are getting killed. In Syracuse, the police chief complained that black teenagers were using cars to conduct “guerrilla-type warfare” against his officers via “hit and run.” During the first nine months of the year, ninety-one cops were reported to have been killed on the job.

  The war—cultural, political, generational—is raging. Throughout the year, the authorities reported 771 bomb threats in federal buildings. Over the summer, 200,000 protestors descended on the capital. In one day, 12,000 people were arrested. In Miami, anti-pollution activists shuttered a Pepsi bottling plant by pouring cement over a drainage pipe. In Chicago, college students and members of an activist group were arrested for plotting to poison the city’s drinking water. Their plan: inoculate themselves, and create a superior race.

  Prisons are overcrowded. Riots break out. In early September, in the upstate New York prison of Attica, inmates armed themselves with shanks, chains, broomsticks, baseball bats, and hammers. They seized the exercise yard. They burned the schoolhouse and chapel. They gagged prison guards at knifepoint, ordered them to strip naked and navigate a club-swinging gauntlet. Gas was released. Shots were fired. Inmates were stripped naked and beaten.

  “The Attica tragedy is more stark proof that something is terribly wrong with America,” said Maine senator Edward Muskie, who’s campaigning for president. “We have reached the point where men would rather die than live another day in America.”

  To combat violent hippies and homegrown terrorists, a new conservatism has been born. Just this past September, a twelve-year-old boy called the police to turn in his own father for smoking pot.

  “There is such a feeling of powerlessness in this country,” said John Gardner, who resigned as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “We all have the feeling that we want to complain to the manager, but the manager is invisible. Nobody knows who he is and where to find him.”

  The manager is President Nixon, who sounds most powerless of all. Over the summer he made a speech referring to the ornate federal buildings in Washington. He forecasted a gloomy future. “Sometimes when I see those columns I think of seeing Greece and Rome,” he said. “And I think of what happened to Greece and Rome, and you see only what is left of great civilizations of the past—as they have become wealthy, as they lost their will to live, to improve, they became subject to the decadence that destroys the civilization. The United States is reaching that period.”

  The words. To her. Pay attention, Flo. Pay attention. The words glare at her as bright as lightbulbs.

  I have a bomb. Sit by me.

  He’s kidding, right?

  “No, miss. This is for real.”

  She gets up and sits in 18D next to him. She drops the note. It flutters to the floor.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, miss.”

  He reaches over to the window seat and puts his fingers on his attaché case. He opens the mouth. She peers inside.

  The sticks are red, about eight inches long. She sees a battery. It is bigger than a battery you might put in a flashlight.

  He’s teasing Flo now, holding in his fingers the naked copper tip of a wire in front of her. This is for real. She turns.

  There’s Tina.

  Tina can see Flo’s lips moving but the words are not coming out of her mouth. Flo gasps.

  “Tina. Tina.”

  Tina picks up the note near Flo’s feet. She reads it. It’s too late to turn back. The wheels are up. Flight 305 is already in the air.

  Tina reaches for the interphone hanging outside the lavatory. The interphone is her direct line to the cockpit. She speaks into the receiver.

  “We’re being hijacked,” she says. “He’s got a bomb and this is no joke.”

  May 27, 1969

  University Hospital, University of Washington, Seattle

  “Nothing I do is phony,” Bobby Dayton would say.

  It was true. When he wanted to go on a hike to clear his mind, he left with his dog, Irish, and came back three weeks later. He prospected for gold in the Yukon and nearly died from starvation. In the Merchant Marines, traveling the world in the hulls of the big ships, he went hunting in the Philippines and lived among the Māori warriors, who were famous for their guerrilla battle tactics. Back on the boat, he was nearly shot for being a deserter. Bobby spent plenty of time in the brig.

  He could be nasty, a savage. He’d punch you in the face if you looked at him wrong. He’d spit on your shoes to get a reaction, then slug you. Bobby talked about robbing banks because there was never any good work around, and he once rode with the Hells Angels as they terrorized the State of California. He never killed anybody, but he could have and almost did several times. Once in Mexico. Once in Seattle, where he lives. A taxicab driver cut him off. In the dispute, Bobby got out of his Dodge, removed a chain from the trunk, and beat the cabbie to within inches of his life.

  “Evidently, I’m a transsexual problem,” Bobby tells his doctor before the surgery. “My wife tells me I’m two people. She tells me when I’m Bob I seem bitter, but when I’m Barbara I’m a much nicer person.”

  He is in the hospital for a psychological evaluation, which is necessary before sex change operations. He is wearing a long-sleeved blouse (to cover his tattoos) and high heels. There is lipstick on his cigarette.

  The doctor studies his appearance and mannerisms. His teeth are in poor shape. His hands are rough. His speech is quiet and soft, and his gestures and hand movements are mildly effeminate.

  The doctor asks what Bobby does for a living.

  Until recently, Bobby was working on the Lockheed shipping yards, as an electrician. He was foreman to twenty men. It was uncomfortable for him to be in charge; men shouldn’t take orders from women, he thought, and so he quit.

  “I feel better away from people,” Bobby says. “I feel they can see through me for what I am. I don’t feel like the other men. I feel if I was a woman I could let myself go.”

  The doctor has a test for him, a game really. Free association, no wrong answers. The way it works is the doctor starts a sentence and Bobby finishes it.

  The doctor starts.

  “If I had ten thousand dollars …”

  “I would buy myself an operation,” Bobby says.

  “If I were invisible …”

  “I wouldn’t do anything.”

  “If I were an animal I’d be …”

  “Bird. I like birds and flying.”

  One early memory. Bobby is five. He wants to be Tinkerbell, from Peter Pan. She is trailed by magic dust. She can always fly away.

  Even as a boy, looking in the mirror at his legs, which he thought were too shapely, Bobby thought he could see the woman inside him. He snuck into his mother’s dresser and placed his hands among her bras and panties to feel the fabric. Alone in a room he tried them on. Later, he slept in them.

  His dreams were of men on top of him, pushing themselves into him. Sometimes Bobby put the family dog on top of his groin. He told the dog to sit and imagined the weight of the dog was the weight of another man.

  Another early memory. He can see the airfield in Long Beach. The planes have propellers, fins, and wings—just like birds. He can see them coming in for landings and can hear the scream of their engines. He watches them scurry around the taxiway. How can these aluminum contraptions manage to fly?

  Bobby looks through the airport fence. An older man is cleaning his plane. Bobby shouts to the man through the fence.

  “How about a ride?”

  The man shakes his head.

  The next day Bobby comes back. The next day too.

  Finally the old man hands Bobby a rag and Bobby wipes down his plane. In exchange, Bobby gets his ride and discovers a purpose in life: to fly.

  “I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” Bobby says years later. “In my plane, I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”

  During his psychiatric evaluation, the doctor asks Bobby to describe
his employment history.

  “I’m a job jumper,” Bobby says.

  He dropped out of high school and picked lemons with migrant workers for a quarter a day. He drove to Oregon to pick tomatoes and then found higher pay in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. When he was old enough he enrolled in the Air Force. He wanted to learn how to fly for free. But the exams required a background in mathematics. Doctors also noticed a problem with his eye. He didn’t qualify for flight school.

  He vowed revenge. He would not give the military the satisfaction of good service. He would be a terrible, incorrigible soldier. He joined the Merchant Marines.

  On Merchant ships, Bobby wrote home from ports that were hard to pronounce, names he tattooed onto his arms and chest. Eniwetok, Alang Alang, Kara Gara, Barugo, Batangas, Cagayan, Agoo, Tabao. He was in the South Pacific. He was in South America. He swam in shark-infested waters. He hunted with natives.

  He was a violent case. He drank fifths of bourbon in gulps to impress other sailors (then wandered off to vomit). He followed other sailors into brothels and forced himself to have sex with women. Anything to protect his secret. In the dead of night, under the moon and adrift in the ocean, Bobby would crawl out from his bunk and sneak toward the front of the ship, where he would slip on his dress and his heels.

  “You can’t live if you don’t do it,” Bobby tells his doctors about his cross-dressing. “It’s like medicine.”

  After the Merchant Marines, Bobby changed jobs every month or so. He’s had more than 150 over the years, he tells the doctor. He can fix cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners. He was a mechanic at Ford, Bethlehem Steel, Continental Can. He worked at Yosemite National Park.

  He knows how to plaster and cement too—just like his father, Elmer.

  “I can do anything he can do,” Bobby says about Elmer.

  In the hospital, Cindy Dayton is interviewed about Bobby. Cindy is Bobby’s second wife. If she felt Bobby was a woman, the doctor asks, why did she marry him?

  “I’m not sure why I married him,” Cindy says. “I wanted a husband and he seemed like a good provider. I like him as a person. He doesn’t lie or swear.”

  Recently, Bobby tried to commit suicide, she says. For months they lived in Baltimore because Bobby was on the list for a sex change operation at Johns Hopkins. He was rejected. The doctors in Baltimore felt it would be too much of a challenge for Bobby to adapt in society as a woman. How could he pass with his bad teeth, his chain smoking, and his tattoos covering his body?

  “I say he is a woman,” Cindy says. “He thinks like a woman.… He’s beautiful as a woman. He doesn’t overdress or over-makeup. As a man, he’s sloppy, and it’s a little embarrassing.”

  November 24, 1971

  Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305

  The jet is climbing. Ten thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet. In the cockpit, Scotty and copilot Bill Rataczak aren’t sure how to respond. A bomb? Is it real? Does it matter?

  In total, there are thirty-six passengers in the cabin, six crew members. As captain, Scotty is in charge. What to do?

  Scotty radios Northwest Orient flight operations in Minnesota.

  A man in the back says he has a bomb, Scotty says. He doesn’t know who the man is or what he wants. Not yet.

  “Take this down.”

  Flo Schaffner reaches into her purse and retrieves her pen. She can no longer see the man’s eyes. He’s put on sunglasses. The frames are dark. The lenses are brown.

  “I want two hundred grand by five p.m., in cash,” he says.

  She writes down the words on the envelope he gave her.

  “Put it in a knapsack,” he says.

  The pen scratches paper and the words she writes appear in a messy swirl of cursive. Anything else?

  “I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes.… When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel.”

  Anything else?

  He wants meals for the flight crew, in case anyone gets hungry.

  “No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job.”

  She writes down those words, too.

  “No fuss. After this we’ll take a little trip.”

  “No fuss,” she writes and her mind reels and her chest heaves. No, Flo, no, don’t do this. Do NOT panic. The images of the airplane in the sky are easy to conjure. KABOOM! Smoldering debris bobbing in the water. Charred bodies. She is a corpse. Her pa is getting calls in Fordyce … from the newspapermen … from the morgue. This isn’t happening, Flo, this isn’t happening. Focus on the details. No, no. Details are worse. Parachutes? What did he want parachutes for? Is he taking a hostage? Is that hostage her? A fuel truck? Where are they going? What is this “little trip”?

  The word flashes in her mind. RAPE.

  How would she know how to pull the parachute cord? Would he pull the cord for her? They could parachute into a dark forest. He could steal her uniform and leave her there—with cougars, bears. She would have to run through the woods in bare feet and find a road. A pair of headlights would flash against her naked body, and she would have to scream out into the headlights, Stop, stop. Please stop.

  “I have to go to the cockpit,” she tells him

  He does not want her to leave. That is his rule. Sit by me.

  His rule does not make sense, she says. If he wants his demands met, she has to take the note to the captain, no?

  Kneeling in the aisle, stewardess Tina Mucklow is eavesdropping on the conversation.

  “Do you want me to take the note?” Tina says.

  “No,” he says.

  Flo is pushy.

  “I have to go to the cockpit,” Flo tells him.

  He thinks it over.

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  “Do you want me to stay here?” Tina says.

  He looks her over.

  “Yes,” he says.

  Flo steps out of the seat and into the aisle and strains to walk toward the cockpit. The jet is still climbing. The gravitational pull forces her back toward the lavatory. She pushes off the armrests and propels herself forward. In first class she passes Alice. The first-class stew can see the fear on Flo’s face. Alice looks back into the tourist cabin to see the hijacker. Tina, she can see, is sitting next to him. He is wearing sunglasses. Tina was right. This is no joke.

  As the oldest stew, Alice has to do something. She wants Tina away from this man. She walks to her.

  “Tina, can you help me find a deck of playing cards?”

  Tina is not listening. Alice walks away. Is Tina in shock?

  Inside the cockpit, the Northwest pilots hear the door open. Flo slips in. The envelope with the hijacker’s instructions is in her hand.

  “Did you get a good look at the bomb?”

  “What was in the briefcase?”

  “Red sticks,” she says.

  “Dynamite?”

  “They looked like dynamite.”

  “What else?”

  “Lots of wires, a battery.”

  Copilot Rataczak reads the hijacker’s note. He notices the fine lettering, the felt-tip pen. The hijacker could be a master criminal, he thinks. The pilots better play his game. No funny stuff.

  Scotty reaches for his radio. He calls Northwest Flight Operations back in Minnesota. His words are recorded via Teletype.

  PASSENGER HAS ADVISED THIS IS A HIJACKING. EN ROUTE TO SEATTLE. THE STEW HAS BEEN HANDED A NOTE. HE REQUESTS $200,000 IN A KNAPSACK BY 5:00 PM. HE WANTS TWO BACK PARACHUTES, TWO FRONT PARACHUTES. HE WANTS THE MONEY IN NEGOTIABLE AMERICAN CURRENCY. DENOMINATION OF THE BILLS IS NOT IMPORTANT. HAS BOMB IN BRIEFCASE AND WILL USE IT IF ANYTHING IS DONE TO BLOCK HIS REQUEST.

  Dispatch is calling.

  “PD 32, PD 32.”

  PD 32 is the number of Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach’s unmarked ’68 Plymouth. He’s driving back to the field office from Yaw’s Top Notch, a drive-in burger joint on the outskirts of Portland. He had a light lunch—grilled cheese, chased down with a glass of milk—because his wife is c
ooking a pre-Thanksgiving dinner and he needs to be home with a healthy appetite. There is tension in the marriage. Himmelsbach is never around, either working cases or flying his airplane. He suspects she is having an affair with her boss.

  “164 in progress, Portland International.”

  In the Bureau, each crime has a code number. 164 is an airplane hijacking. Is it real or a prank?

  “Verified,” the dispatcher says. “Report to Northwest Airlines Operations Office.”

  Himmelsbach reaches for the radio.

  “PD 32,” he says. “Ten four.”

  He slams the brakes, banks into a U-turn, cuts off traffic, and heads toward the Portland airport. He places the sirens on the car roof. He wants to drive faster. Can’t move. Traffic.

  “Damn, this is a long light,” he says.

  Himmelsbach hates what Portland has become. His city has been sacked! From the East, the liberals have come from New York and Boston, purchasing property and running for office. From the South, the hippies come from Northern California. He can see them in bus stations begging for money or rides. The spoiled kids don’t have the decency to cut their hair. The women don’t shave under their arms. They do drugs and sell drugs. They don’t believe in relationships. Only a short drive from Portland, a group of girls has built the first lesbian commune. The girls have rules. Monogamy is forbidden. Imagine that!

  Ralph Himmelsbach can’t. In the rearview mirror of his Bureau squad car, the agent’s reflection is all straight lines. His jawline is sharp and angular. His Wyatt Earp mustache is full and trimmed. His eyebrows are hawklike, fitting for the hunter he is.

  It is elk season and he could be hunting elk on a day like today. Elk can be invisible creatures. One of the best places to hunt them is in the eastern part of Washington, up in the Blue and Wallowa Mountains. Himmelsbach and his brother, a district attorney there, set up camp in waist-high snow, crouch near the trees, look for tracks, and wait. But in ten years hunting them, Himmelsbach has never taken an elk.