Skyjack Read online

  “PD 32, PD 32.”

  Dispatch again.

  “On the 164 … we’ve learned the suspect has an explosive device.”

  Himmelsbach leans on the horn. Bastards, let’s move. The guy has a bomb!

  Another one? Was this a copycat? Ten days ago, a Canadian man slipped on a mask, brandished a shotgun, and threatened to blow up an Air Canada flight with forty pounds of plastic explosives. The man, Paul Cini, told the flight crew he was a member of the Irish Republican Army (he wasn’t) and wanted the plane rerouted to Ireland. He also demanded $1.5 million in cash. He couldn’t make up his mind though. He wanted the pilots to refuel in Saskatchewan and then changed the location to Great Falls, Montana, where the governor negotiated a lower ransom of $50,000. On the ground in Great Falls, the hijacker listened to the news of his hijacking on the radio in real time, and in glee, passengers later reported, as if he had achieved his fifteen minutes of fame.

  Cini then demanded the pilots fly him to New York. In the air, Cini then shocked the crew and passengers by stepping into the harness of a parachute. The plane was a DC-8, which like the Boeing 727 had aftstairs that could be opened during flight.

  Cini nearly made it. As he was planning to jump, according to news reports, the Air Canada purser on the flight “let him have it with a fire ax.”

  The story of Cini, who was rushed to the emergency room after the plane landed, was national news. Images of the bloodied hijacker, who was too foolish and deranged to execute his daring escape with $50,000, also ran on the national news.

  Agent Himmelsbach cursed the media outlets for publishing them. Like bank robbers, Cini could inspire others to board planes with bombs and crazy demands, hold the passengers hostage, and attempt to make a getaway via parachute.

  In Seattle, the Bureau field office is located in an old bank downtown, a few blocks from the piers off Alaskan Way. The boss, J. Earl Milnes, steps out of his office.

  The first agent he sees is Bob Fuhrman, a recent transfer. Fuhrman is trained as an accountant. Hoover wants only lawyers and accountants to be G-men.

  Milnes points a finger at Fuhrman. “You,” he says. “Drive me to the airport.”

  Fuhrman follows Milnes out to an ummarked car and turns over the keys. The radio is on. Voices are on the frequency. What is the procedure for hijackings? Should the feds cooperate with the hijacker and give him $200,000 and parachutes? Should they storm the plane, take him out? Is it even their responsibility to make the decision?

  The airlines and agencies are feuding over how to handle skyjackings. Who is in control? At the FAA, officials argue that it is the pilot who is responsible for the plane and its passengers. At the FBI, Hoover argues that once a plane lands, the hijacker has violated federal air piracy laws; therefore, he is within the Bureau’s jurisdiction and should be apprehended immediately. It’s too dangerous to think otherwise. What if the hijacker had a manic episode, killed the pilot, and crashed the plane into downtown Cleveland? Hundreds of bystanders would die in the explosion. Or worse. What if hijackers demanded that pilots fly airplanes into skyscrapers?

  In New York, tenants have already moved into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Construction on the South Tower is almost finished. With a hijacker at the controls, a domestic airplane becomes its own bomb. Thousands could die.

  The jockeying over who controls a hijacked plane unfolded only weeks before on the front pages. A charter jet to the Bahamas was taken over by a man with a gun and a bomb.

  Onboard, the flight crew could see the man was delusional. The captain begged Bureau agents to let them refuel. He felt that if the plane was back in the air, the armed hijacker would relax and nobody would get injured.

  After landing in Florida to refuel, the request was denied. Agents fired gunshots at the plane’s tires. The skyjacker panicked. He fatally shot the captain, his wife, then himself.

  Hoover’s lawyers raced into court to keep the transcriptions between the pilots and Bureau agents sealed. A federal judge tossed out the request. The transcript made national news.

  Pilot: This is fifty-eight November. Uh, this gentleman has about 12.5 pounds of plastic explosives back here and, uh, I got no yen to join it right now so I would please … appreciate it if you would stay away from the airplane.

  Tower: This is the FBI. There will be no fuel. Repeat. There will be no fuel.

  Pilot: Uh, (gasp) look, I don’t think this fellow’s kiddin’—I wish you’d get that fuel truck out here.

  Tower: Fifty-eight November. There will be no fuel. I repeat. There will be no fuel.

  Pilot: This is fifty-eight November. You are endangering lives by doing this, and for the sake of some lives we request some fuel out here, please.

  Skyjacking had a twisted history. Early on, passengers who hijacked planes wanted to flee Communist countries and come to America. The skyjack was a means of escape, and the United States welcomed political dissidents from Eastern Europe and later Cuba. By the late 1960s, the direction had turned.

  Since the United States cut off ties with Fidel Castro and banished travel to Cuba in 1961, eighty airplanes had been successfully hijacked to Cuba. The frequency of hijackings to the island was so high, airline pilots began to carry approach maps for the Havana airport. “Take me to Cuba” became a catchphase. One government plan was to build a replica of the Havana airport near Miami as a decoy to hijackers.

  Around the world, an airplane was taken over once every week. In newspapers and on television, passengers reported live from the new war zone: airplane cabins. “We had no control,” one passenger said after a grenade went off on an Ethiopian Air flight. “We were weaving all over. When that bomb took off I thought, This is it.” On a flight out of Sacramento: “I counted twenty-two shots. There was a pause and a man shouted, ‘I’m shot.’ The bullet went through the back of his seat and out his chest. The wound—it was as big as a fist. He said good-bye to his wife. She embraced him and said, ‘God have mercy on him.’ ”

  Struggling to keep their companies afloat during the recession, airline presidents don’t want to spend millions to install magnetometers, or metal detectors, in airport terminals. Won’t the devices be an inconvenience to their customers, most of whom are businessmen? Executives would cringe at having to walk through the detectors and have each bag checked for weapons and explosives. President Nixon, who counts several airline presidents among his supporters and contributors, does not want to force the airlines to comply with costly security mandates. Nixon prefers a voluntary approach, and has introduced the sky marshals, a new breed of armed undercover agents who travel on airplanes to deter hijackers. At the Federal Aviation Administration, officials have also developed a secret psychological profile of hijackers, and brief airport officials on what types of passengers to look for. As effective as the program is, it is left up to airline officials to screen passengers. Security is now a judgment call, and somewhere along the flight path of Northwest 305, a hijacker was allowed to board.

  At Northwest Orient, the decisions on how to handle the hijacker—comply with his requests, or turn him down—go to the airline’s president, Don Nyrop.

  Nyrop. A bit to the left of Genghis Khan, one executive calls him. Nyrop is stubborn, abrasive, unpredictable, cheap, a brilliant administrator.

  According to company legend, Nyrop popped into a hangar one afternoon to check on Northwest’s mechanics. After inspecting the work, Nyrop used the hangar bathroom and heard the rustling of paper in the stall next to him. Reading a newspaper on company time! All men’s bathroom doors in Northwest buildings were removed henceforth.

  In turn, the thousands of Northwest stewardesses, pursers, mechanics, pilots, and ground crewmembers rob his planes blind. After flights, they steal toilet paper, booze, pillows, blankets, silverware. They went on strike last year over pay and working conditions. Picket lines formed. Nyrop wouldn’t budge. President Nixon had to help negotiate a settlement. Nyrop’s stinginess made him a hero to Northwest man
agement and the company’s stockholders. During the recession, other airlines tanked. Northwest Orient posted profits.

  Nyrop’s decision is swift. At the airport in Minnesota, Nyrop tells the feds he wants to comply with the hijacker. The airline has insurance. They will cover the $200,000 ransom. Now the feds in Seattle need to find parachutes.

  Throughout Northwest’s facilities, officials listen to the radio. In the hangar, mechanic John Rataczak, father of copilot Bill Rataczak, can hear his son’s voice on the frequency. Who is the man in the back with a bomb? What if it detonates?

  In the cockpit, the phone is ringing. It is Tina.

  The hijacker is getting nervous, she says.

  About what?

  About the radio currents on the plane.

  Why?

  He thinks the radio currents might be too strong, she says. They could accidentally detonate the device he’s packed in his briefcase.

  Is he sure?

  No.

  On the radio, Scotty and Rataczak hear new voices. It’s the feds.

  “Do you know where he wants to go …?”

  “Negative. Have asked him once and so we don’t want to ask him again.… Would suggest we wait and see where he wants to go.”

  “Can bring out the manuals to Alaska if you think so.”

  Outside the cockpit window, it is getting dark. The weather is changing. The storm should hit any minute.

  “Approach, NW305, ah … a little rain up over here. We’d like to hold it at about … ah … turn back on the radio now and go out to about, oh, thirty would be a little better.”

  On the ground in Seattle, officials are concerned about the radio communications. Can the hijacker hear the conversation between the pilots and the authorities on the frequency?

  “I don’t know. I think it’s free to call us. Nobody’s giving us any trouble up here. He’s in the back.”

  August 25, 1977

  Hilton Airport Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia

  It is her birthday. She sits at the bar alone. She wears a brown jumpsuit and a white handkerchief around her neck, wrapping herself up like a present. She is out of work. She has two children at home, and she has saved all week to splurge on a glass of champagne or two for herself. She thought about going to the Admiral Bimbo, but that airport bar is a meat market and she isn’t with her girlfriend tonight. Besides, she isn’t in the mood to be picked up anyway. So she drove here, to the Hilton. If she’s going to celebrate, she might as well do it classy.

  The bartender places a bucket of ice on a stand beside her. She looks inside the bucket. Inside is a bottle of champagne.

  “From the gentleman,” the bartender says.

  The man is in a suit. He is sitting at the far corner of the bar, nursing his drink. He has dark eyeglasses and dark eyes.

  She nods. She smiles. Wow. Champagne!

  “I think you better look closer,” the bartender says.

  She looks. Wrapped around the neck of the perspiring bottle is a hundred-dollar bill.

  The man in the suit gets up from his seat and walks toward her. She can see his suit is gray and wool, a sophisticated cut, not like the plaid flannel jackets her ex-husband wore. This suit is tailor-made.

  He says his name is Duane, Duane Lorin Weber.

  Her name is Josephine Collins. Call her Jo.

  He is an older man, older than she is used to dating. She would never consider him as a suitor except that she is alone now and the pangs of emptiness have pierced her for months—so alone!—and she has two daughters to support and so what if the man in the nice suit is a little old.

  He asks her what a woman like her is doing here by herself.

  It’s her birthday, she says.

  He is celebrating too, he says.

  She raises her glass of champagne. So, sir, what are you celebrating?

  “Divorce,” he says.

  They talk for most of the night.

  Before she started selling real estate, Jo was a Sunday school teacher. She was raised on the family farm in Kentucky. She learned the verses of the Bible and how to call a pig. She was the only child in her family to smoke and drink, even if it was only a few glasses of light wine.

  He tells her how attractive she is. He walks her to her car, holds the door. He is a gentleman. Of course he can have her number and call her, she says.

  Jo’s parents don’t want her to marry Duane when she brings him home. He is too old, her father says. She has doubts about his age, too. He is sick. A kidney disease, he tells her. He doubts he will live five more years. Still, Duane is fun. He croons to her. She sits on the couch and he stands in front and turns his hand into a microphone. He is a baritone. The songs he sings are etched in her mind.

  If you don’t know me by now,

  You will never never never know me.

  Duane sells insurance. They work on the road together. Jo makes the appointments, he closes the customers, she collects the checks. They sleep in motels in different states and spend hours in the car together. He tells her about his past. Of course he doesn’t tell her much. The rest she will piece together later on.

  He was a bad child. He stole. He hurled rocks at the school windows. He pushed a boulder down a hill. He pushed a grand piano down a flight of stairs. He tells her his mother forged his birth certificate so she could get him into the service and out of her house a year early.

  After he was discharged from the Navy for misconduct, Duane enrolled in the Army. Here, he also found trouble. He was in detention at Camp Sibert, Alabama, where the Army was testing chemical weapons like mustard gas. In one note home, written in 1943, Duane begged his mother to send him his watch. “I sure do need it out in the field as I have a lot of time prevision [sic] and I need something to tell what time it is,” he wrote. “I only have one more week of detention and then I can go anywhere on the base.”

  Duane has had three other wives Jo will come to know about. Edna she cannot escape. Duane tattooed her name onto his arm.

  Mary Jane Ross, Duane’s second wife, is his obsession. He spends so much time talking about Mary Jane that Jo once told him to go see her and resolve any feelings he might have before they got married. Jo rarely hears about Margie, Duane’s third wife. Years later, Jo will call her and ask her what she thought of Duane.

  “He was a bastard,” Margie says.

  Jo loves him anyway. Duane makes her laugh. He’s a jokester. His handle for his CB radio is “World’s Greatest Jock Carrier.” Immature, but he makes her smile. That’s the secret to selling insurance, he tells her. No matter what you tell them, make sure you make them smile.

  Duane’s business stays on the books. He wins free cruises. His name is inked on company plaques. She has the certificates of praise from the companies he’s worked for. In 1973, Duane was first runner-up in selling life insurance policies for American Income Life. In October of 1974, another company he worked for, Life Investors, in Charlotte, North Carolina, made him Agent of the Month. He earned a complimentary dinner. At one meeting for Family Life, about 150 salesmen were asked what they thought of the company’s new plan to ban the use of phones and pursue all leads door-to-door. Duane walked up to the stage to address the crowd. He turned around, bent over, and farted.

  When Duane retires, he and Jo move to Pace, a city in the Florida panhandle near Pensacola. They open an antiques store, the Peddler. Duane runs it for a few years and sells antiques at flea markets on the road until his kidneys stop working. His kidneys are so swollen, his abdomen balloons. At night, he vomits. He is so weak he breaks bones turning over in his sleep.

  Jo drives him to West Florida Regional Medical Center. The dialysis is too much for him. Without the treatments, he will die.

  “Is this a body you would want to live in?” Duane tells his doctor. “I can’t even hold my own cigarette.”

  November 24, 1971

  Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305

  In the back row of the jet, he fishes a pack of cigarettes from his p
ocket.

  “You smoke?”

  Quit, Tina says. The word is out. Smoking kills. This past summer, Congress banned smoking ads from television and radio.

  She offers to light the cig for him. The matchbook he has is blue. The words Sky Chef are on the cover. He leans in close as she flicks the cardboard stick against the strike pad and watches the sulfur fizzle into flame.

  “Want one?”

  He holds out the pack.

  Why not? Tina takes a butt and sticks it in her mouth. She lights it.

  “Where are you from?” he asks.

  She grew up in Trevose, a small city outside of Philadelphia. She now lives with roommates in an apartment near the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. The stew zoo.

  “Minneapolis is very nice country,” says the hijacker.

  Tina takes a drag of her smoke. She knows where they are going: Cuba, where all the other hijackers want to go. She jokes with him.

  “You know Northwest Orient has strict policies against traveling to Cuba. Can’t bring home rum or cigars. Customs confiscate them in the airport.”

  The hijacker laughs.

  “No, we’re not going to Cuba. But you’ll like where we’re going.”

  In the seat across from them, Bill Mitchell, the college sophomore, waits for his chance. What is the young stew doing talking to such an older guy? Mitchell notices that as the man talks to the stew, he spills his drink. What is that stewardess thinking wasting her time on him? When will she get up so he can make his move?

  The jet banks into a turn around Seattle, circling the city twenty miles to the south. The hijacker wants to know the time. His deadline is 5:00 p.m. He peers out the window.

  “We’re over Tacoma now.”

  In Portland. Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach sprints into the terminal. In the doorway, a lady is lugging hat boxes. Himmelsbach nearly knocks her over. He heads for the management office of Northwest Orient. His boss, Julius Mattson, special agent in charge of the Bureau’s field office in Portland, is listening to a panel of radios cued in to the cockpit of the hijacked plane.