Skyjack Page 6

  “There you are, Ralph,” Mattson says. “Where you been? We got a hot one going here.”

  “Got here quick as I could. Damn traffic on Sandy was fierce. Dispatch said the guy has a bomb. What else do we know?”

  “Not a lot more,” says Mattson. “He wants money and a parachute. So far that’s about all that we’ve been able to put together.”

  “How much cash?”

  “Two hundred thousand,” says Frank Faist, a Northwest official.

  “Whew. That’s a hell of a hit, Frank. Are you going to make it?”

  “I imagine so. He’s holding all the high cards.”

  “Any idents on the guy with the bomb?”

  “We’ve asked the crew to pass on anything they can, but so far no info.”

  “Have your people found out anything more?”

  “We got the ticket lifts and the flight manifest. We know there are twenty-nine men aboard that aircraft. He could be nine or ninety for all I know now.”

  Over the radio, there is a crackle of sound. It is the Northwest pilots on the frequency. Himmelsbach and Mattson strain their ears.

  “Our future destination not yet advised … Name of man unknown … About six feet one inch, black hair, age about fifty, weight a hundred and seventy-five pounds. Boarded at Portland.”

  Portland! He was here, Himmelsbach thinks. But who was he? How did he get here? Taxi? Car? Did he stay overnight? Walk from a hotel? Take the bus?

  Agents fan out across the terminal, searching for witnesses. The day before Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel days of the year. Agents approach airport officials, security personnel, passengers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, parking lot attendees, rental car agents, gift shop employees, coffee shop employees, bartenders in the cocktail lounge, waiters and waitresses in the restaurants, and salesmen working in the insurance stands.

  See anybody suspicious? About six foot one? Black hair?

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there was a gentleman that looked awfully suspicious,” Hal Williams says.

  Williams is a gate clerk for Northwest. He noticed the gentlemen. He was odd, not like the others. He boarded Flight 305.

  What was so odd about him?

  He was dressed in black, all black, Williams tells the feds.

  Anything else?

  The man was a lone wolf, Williams says. Before the flight, other passengers on the 305 gathered by the terminal window. With the storm coming, they joked about how they would all have to run across the tarmac. Everybody would get drenched in the rain. The man in black was not part of the group. His attitude was different.

  How different? How would he describe the attitude?

  “Blah,” Williams says.

  The agents have the passenger list for Flight 305. Recognize any names?

  Williams looks at the list.

  “No,” he says.

  The feds hunt for more eyewitnesses. To get on the plane, the hijacker must have purchased a ticket. Who sold it to him?

  Dennis Lysne was working the ticket desk that afternoon, agents learn.

  Where is Lysne?

  He’s left for the day, Northwest officials tell the feds.

  In Portland, agents race to Lysne’s home. They find his wife. Where is Lysne?

  The supermarket, she tells them. Doing some Thanksgiving shopping.

  In the supermarket parking lot, Lysne loads up his car with groceries. He gets in the driver’s seat. His engine won’t start. He walks to a pay phone and calls his wife.

  “Better hurry home,” she tells him. “The FBI wants to talk to you.”

  At his house, Lysne is briefed. Flight 305 was hijacked. The man says he has a bomb. Does Lysne remember selling a ticket to anybody suspicious?

  “Yes,” Lysne says. There was one suspicious passenger.

  Does Lysne happen to remember the passenger’s name?

  He does.

  “Cooper. Dan Cooper.”

  Cooper was the last passenger to buy a ticket for Flight 305.

  What did Cooper look like?

  He was wearing dark clothes. Had darkish skin. Olive in color.

  Anything else?

  Lysne remembers snippets of their conversation. The man asked, Can I get on your flight to Seattle? He asked, That’s a 727, isn’t it?

  Does Lysne remember anything else?

  The fare was $20. Cooper paid with cash.

  Did Cooper display any nervous behavior or fidgeting?

  He did not.

  Did Lysne notice what Cooper was keeping his money in?

  He did not.

  Could he recognize Cooper again if he saw him?

  Lysne isn’t sure.

  It is raining. It is unclear how powerful the storm will be. On the ground in Seattle, homicide detective Owen McKenna gets a call from Seattle’s chief of detectives. McKenna is briefed on the hijacking. The chief wants McKenna to fetch the $200,000 ransom for the hijacker and bring it to SEA-TAC airport.

  In his unmarked car, McKenna races to the Seattle First National Bank downtown. Two employees from the bank’s security department are waiting for him. They have a leather satchel. Inside is a canvas bag that contains $200,000, all in twenty-dollar bills.

  The money is not coated with powders or rigged with exploding packs of dye. But the bills are marked. To prepare for a robbery, Seattle First National has set aside a cache of bills, and each serial number of each bill has been recorded on microfiche. They count out a hundred stacks of twenty-dollar bills, each stack worth $2,000. The load must weigh twenty pounds, maybe more.

  McKenna drives the bank officials and the satchel to SEA-TAC. He thinks about the man with the bomb on the hijacked plane circling above them.

  As a detective, McKenna has little respect for the airlines. One cold case haunts him. He found her body on a houseboat near the University of Washington. She had been beaten, strangled, raped. She was a stewardess, and he suspects the killer was a passenger she met. The airlines are selling sex in their stewardesses, but what are they doing to protect them? So many of the stews tell the same story: small-town girls, left home to see the world before they got married. What about the creeps? The killers? And now parachuting hijackers?

  On the police radio, there are more voices on the frequency. The feds want to know where the parachutes are.

  With sirens flashing, state troopers descend on Issaquah Skyport, a parachute jump center twenty miles east of SEA-TAC airport. Inside, proprietor Linn Emrich hands the troopers two front or reserve chutes. These front chutes will clip onto the harness of the rear or main parachutes. A trooper puts them in the trunk of his car and speeds off to SEA-TAC.

  The rear parachutes are already at the airport. Norman Hayden, a local pilot, sent them in a taxicab. Hayden recently purchased the chutes from Earl Cossey, a local parachute rigger.

  Inside the airport, the bank officials from Seattle First National lug the ransom into the Northwest flight operations office. The bank officials cut open a seal of the leather satchel and hand FBI boss J. Earl Milnes the canvas bag inside. Its dimensions are roughly a foot by a foot, and eight or nine inches tall. Milnes looks at the money. He does not count it. He hands the bag to Al Lee, Northwest’s director of flying. Lee lugs the sack of cash into the trunk of McKenna’s unmarked car, along with the rear parachutes, eight meals for the crew, and instructions on how to use a parachute.

  Thousands of feet above them, in the cockpit of the Northwest jet, Scotty worries about the passengers. Won’t they get edgy when the plane doesn’t land? Won’t they start asking questions? Should he tell them the flight has been hijacked?

  “You know, Scotty, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Rataczak says. “I know we picked up some good old Montana mountain boys and they’re pretty good sized, and they’re sitting up in first class and they’re on their second and third martinis. We don’t need them to look at each other and say, ‘Hey, let’s go back and get a hijacker.’ ”

  The pilots have an idea. Why
not ask him what he wants to do?

  They call back to Tina. She asks the hijacker if he wants the passengers alerted.

  “No,” he says.

  She relays the message back. Now the crew needs a ruse to explain the delay. Rataczak switches on the in-flight intercom system.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “there’s been a slight mechanical problem. We’ve been asked to circle Seattle, to burn off excess fuel.”

  A clap of thunder. The storm has hit. In the jet windows there are flashes of lightning against the dark sky. In the bulkhead row, prosecutor Larry Finegold can see them. He tries to make sense of what the pilot had just said. It doesn’t make sense. How could any mechanical problem on a jet be slight?

  He thinks, This is the one, oh boy, here we go, get ready to crash. He thinks about his wife. Sharon was in law school at Berkeley when they met. She had such long hair. He was a preppy in jeans and penny loafers. Once they started talking, he didn’t want the conversation to end. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her. After they met, he went with friends on a three-day fishing trip. After the first night, he made his friends dock. He hitchhiked to her dorm room and proposed. Now she’s pregnant with their first child. A boy, they’ve learned. His son.

  The jet is shaking. More lightning. The cabin drops in spasms. His stomach is rolling like a waterbed.

  Across the aisle, passenger Barbara Simmons wakes up from a nap. She looks out the window and sees the lights of the Space Needle. The futuristic structure was the tallest west of the Mississippi when it was built for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. It is located several miles north of SEA-TAC.

  “Oh my gosh,” Simmons says to her husband. “Either we’re on the wrong plane or we’re being hijacked.”

  One passenger gets out of his seat and marches toward the back. Tina gets up and intercepts him at row 14.

  “I’m bored,” he says. “You have any sports magazines to read back there?”

  She escorts him to the rear. She looks for a sports magazine. She can’t find any.

  “How about the New Yorker?” she says.

  In a nearby seat, passenger Labissoniere, the trucking lawyer, gets up to use the lavatory.

  When he comes out, another passenger is blocking the aisle. He’s a cowboy type, wearing a Stetson. He’s furious, demanding that Tina tell him more about this “mechanical difficulty.” Why do they have to burn fuel? When will they be on the ground? Does Tina know anything?

  Labissoniere notices the man in sunglasses sitting next to Tina. He seems amused by the cowboy’s antics. Then he gets annoyed when the man won’t stop. He tells Stetson Man to go back to his seat. The hijacker and Tina are alone again.

  “If that’s a sky marshal, I don’t want any more of that,” he says.

  “There aren’t any sky marshals on the 305 flight,” she says.

  He remembers something: his note. Flo has it. He wants it back.

  Tina picks up the phone and tells the captain. She eases back into her seat. She asks the hijacker if he wants anything to eat or drink.

  “No.”

  She asks him about the passengers. When can they get off?

  He goes over his instructions again. She needs to pay attention.

  First, the fuel truck; he wants it out at SEA-TAC and ready to pump gas when the plane lands.

  Second, the money; he wants the car carrying the ransom parked so he can see it from the windows at all times.

  Third, her; he wants Tina to get out of the plane and fetch the bag of money.

  She worries. The bag may be too heavy for her to carry.

  “You’ll manage,” he says.

  Once the money is on board, the passengers will be released. Then Tina will get the parachutes and meals. He also has Benzedrine pills in his pocket. He doesn’t want the crew to get sleepy.

  The jet banks another wide loop.

  Tina tries to chat him up.

  “So, where you from?” she says.

  He won’t tell her. He’s not that stupid.

  She wants to know his motive. Why hijack this plane?

  “Do you have a grudge against Northwest?” she says.

  He looks at the stewardess, the sunglasses shielding his eyes.

  “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, Miss,” he says. “I just have a grudge.”

  December 7, 1942

  Cove City, North Carolina

  Ever since he was born, the old folks in the tobacco town said there was something about Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. that was not right. He could not speak properly. The cord under his tongue was too taut, so doctors snipped it and left him with a lisp. As a boy he got picked on and was always in fights. One reason for the birth defects, townsfolk surmised, was that the boy’s parents were first cousins.

  The marriage was not stable. In town, it was an open secret that when Richard’s father, who went by the name Floyd, enlisted in the war, the boy’s mother, Myrtle, had an affair with her boss, Richard Edward Holland, who owned a local sawmill. When Richard’s father came home after two years in Belgium, Myrtle was pregnant. They eventually divorced, but there was tension in the house as they tried to raise two boys with different fathers.

  Floyd would spank the younger boy, Russell. Myrtle protested, thinking Floyd was punishing him for her affair.

  “That boy may not be your boy, Floyd McCoy, and you might not like him being around here! But he’s my boy, and from this day forward, you’ll never again lay a hand on my son,” Myrtle would say.

  Instead of beating Russell, Floyd beat Richard. He could beat his own son, couldn’t he?

  “During my formative years, it was still the in-thing to serve one’s country so at nineteen I followed my father’s footsteps and enlisted in the army,” Richard McCoy would later write. “After completing parachute school and volunteering for the Green Berets, then came two more years of advanced demolition and guerrilla warfare.”

  When McCoy first arrived in Vietnam, in 1963, the country was already chaotic. In the streets, Buddhist monks were lighting themselves on fire. The Green Berets conducted clandestine missions to stop the North Vietnamese and contain the spread of Communism throughout Indochina. President Kennedy deployed more troops and was assassinated later in the year. In the jungles, McCoy developed an ear fungus. Later, he was nearly killed in combat. Awarded the Purple Heart for his valor, McCoy was sent home to Cove City and spent a year recovering in a wheelchair. The fungus infection in his ear would not heal. Doctors could not figure out how to treat it.

  Richard wanted to work in law enforcement. His family was Mormon, so after his recovery he moved to Utah and enrolled in Brigham Young University, majoring in criminal studies. In school, he met Karen Burns, a pretty blonde who was taken with McCoy’s war hero image and his ruggedly handsome good looks. They married and had two children, Chante and Richard Jr.

  The marriage was tense. Money was tight. Richard was in school. He had National Guard duty. He was a Sunday school teacher on weekends. He didn’t have time for a job. Karen’s younger sister Denise was living with them, too. Richard was frustrated. He needed to escape. He decided to re-enlist on the condition that he be sent back to Vietnam. He missed the adrenaline of combat.

  His first training was in helicopter flight school in Texas. Later, he went through six months of advanced training in Alabama. When he arrived in Vietnam, McCoy was like an aerial Rambo. He earned combat medals for his missions. In the summer of 1967, an American observation helicopter had an engine malfunction and was forced to land in enemy territory. American soldiers were stranded, waiting for the rescue helicopters. From the Army report:

  Suddenly, the rescue aircraft lost power and crashed near the first aircraft, causing them both to erupt in flames. Due to the extreme danger caused by the burning aircraft plus the added danger of enemy intrusion, MCCOY placed his helicopter as near as possible to the downed aircraft. With complete disregard for his own safety, MCCOY leaped from the aircraft and worked his way th
rough the dense jungle to his comrades. He immediately located the two survivors and led them to his waiting helicopter.

  In combat, there was a madness to Richard, who conducted his own bomb runs in his armored chopper. In November of 1967, an American compound had been overtaken by Vietcong. A thick layer of fog covered the ground, and low clouds covered the trees. Visibility was extremely poor, and there were no tactical maps of the area. From another Army report:

  Flying by instrumentation and radio alone, MCCOY located the compound and came under automatic weapons and small arms fire. With the position of the compound marked by a flare and the firefight marked by tracer rounds, MCCOY began a series of firing passes, launching rockets until his ammunition was expended. Due to his courageous flight and highly accurate fire, the enemy was completely routed, leaving twenty bodies behind.

  His head. Back home again at Brigham Young, Richard suffers from migraines. He can’t think. He blacks out. He undergoes a series of medical tests and X-rays. Richard has a possible tumor in his brain, doctors find.

  The prognosis is devastating. After so many years in school, and with his skilled training as a helicopter and fixed-wing pilot, Richard would have been highly employable in the FBI, or another law enforcement agency. Now Richard can never be hired. What if he suffers a blackout at the controls? His helicopter or plane could crash.

  He’s lost everything. His marriage is fragile. His career is ruined. What can he do?

  He considers suicide. Too cowardly, he thinks.

  He becomes absorbed in school work. Better at least get his degree. In one of his classes, Richard has to write a paper on how to deter the increased number of airplane hijackings.

  “In working on the project, it was necessary to play the roles of the people involved,” Richard will later say. “The person I identified most with was the skyjacker.”