Target Manhattan

Wasn’t it Mr. Harris who proposed a solution to that?

Yes, sir. We were stumped until he pointed out that we didn’t have to actually fool the instruments with fake beacons. All we really had to do was jam them. Put out any kind of signal at all, so long as it was on the right frequency and would interrupt his reception of signals from ground beacons.

That made it much easier, then.

Yes, sir. It became possible to do the job with three battery transmitters-any kind of transmitters that had variable frequency controls. We sent a cop down to a ham-radio shop and he had them within fifteen minutes.

Grofeld (Cont’d)

Right about then it got to be three o’clock. Everybody stopped talking. In fairness you’d have to call it a hush. Ryterband had got up from his chair and gone over to the window, trying to see the plane, and the rest of us moved that way-we were drawn there. It wasn’t in sight at that point. Somewhere else on its circuit. We stood there waiting for things to start exploding.

You still weren’t sure whether he would hold off?

How could we be sure of anything? We stood there and waited. All of us looking at our watches and then trying to spot him through the window and then looking at our watches again… Nobody moved. It seemed to take forever. Then we heard the drone, and the plane appeared. It circled over us, heading for Brooklyn. The bombs were still in the racks. I guess we stood there for another two or three minutes before we started to breathe again.

What happened then?

Maybe we had a reprieve, but we still didn’t have much time. I’m a police captain, a divisional commander. In terms of real authority-a case like this one-that doesn’t mean beans. I believed in this crackpot scheme of Harris and O’Brien’s, but I had to get authority to try it. I knew it was going to take time to get permission. Too much time, probably, but at least we had to try.

What did you do?

I went over to Deputy Commissioner Toombes. Got him aside and told him about it.

Was he agreeable to the idea?

You have no idea how fast I had to talk. But I sold him. Look, it wasn’t as if we had any reasonable alternatives. Any solution, no matter how wild, was bound to look pretty good to a man in his position right about then.

Then what?

I told him we needed authorization and equipment. I showed him O’Brien’s list. He just blinked at it. I’m not sure he wasn’t convinced we were crazy, but he probably figured, what the hell. I kept pressing him, telling him we had to try it. It took a little while. I had to explain about the authorizations we’d need, and in circumstances like that you have to explain things several times before anybody understands.

Yes. You have to penetrate past their confusion.

Right. Your brain gets pretty numb, times like that.

What were these authorizations you required?

Well, first, of course, we needed permission from the highest possible authorities to try the stunt at all. City, FBI, and military. Or at least a couple of them. Then we’d need full cooperation from whoever was in command of those jet fighters circling up there. At that point none of us actually knew who was giving them their orders.

You found out, though?

Toombes went over and asked General Adler. Adler told him the planes had been launched by order of Major General Bradford Hawley of the Air National Guard.

Adler had phoned Hawley earlier, I take it?

Yes. Launching the planes had been Adler’s idea, but the authority was Hawley’s. Incidentally, when I called Hawley, the first thing I asked him was whether the fighters were really armed with live ammunition.

And were they?

Yes. Twenty-millimeter ca

Sidewinder missiles.

That’s right.

Now, at this time-what was it, about ten past three?

About that, yes.

At this time you began to seek authorization from the various departments?

Yes. Both Mr. Toombes and I spent a lot of time on telephones.

And ultimately you received these authorizations?

Most of them, yes. We figured we could live without the rest of them.

Which were denied you?

The FBI, for one. They’re great buck passers. Azzard didn’t want to take the responsibility, and his next superior is in Washington and was somehow unavailable through all our attempts to reach him.

But you decided to go ahead without FBI permission?

What choice did we have?

I don’t know, Captain. That’s what we’re here to determine.

We got a pretty snappy go-ahead from Mr. Swarthout, the Assistant Deputy Mayor. That covered us with the Mayor’s office. We’d established an open line to General Hawley-he was in a National Guard office at Floyd Be

How much time did all this take?

It was nearly four o’clock before we had it all nailed down and had the cha

Still, under the circumstances that was fast work.

We had a crisis on our hands, Mr. Ski

That doesn’t always grease the skids under the bureaucracy.

Well, there’s a certain amount of interaction. I mean, each of us had contacts among people who could help us. I knew Mr. Toombes. He knew Mr. Swarthout. Swarthout knew the people at Port Authority. I mean, relationships like that are inevitable in governmental structures. We were able to get lines of communication opened, and that was the key to it. I don’t think there was anything unusual about that. The apparatus is clumsy, but if you know how to deal with it, you can function pretty fast.

I see. And Mr. Toombes had called in General Adler…

I don’t have much sympathy for General Adler, I admit. But the fact is it’s a good thing he was there. We might have had an easier time with some other Air Force officer, but we had to work with what we had.

I thought you regarded him as a worse threat than Craycroft.

In a way we did. But I’m a cop, and O’Brien’s a cop, and if Adler had really busted a fuse, we had him right there in the room and we could have neutralized him. Put him under arrest, shut him up. No, the real threat was always Craycroft, although I’ve got to admit Adler scared the hell out of us. We had to keep a damn close eye on him-you couldn’t be sure when he might get on the phone and tell General Hawley it was time to go to war.

Now, while you were seeking authorizations and opening cha

Frankly I skipped the chain of command on most of those. I just gave orders to some cops to go get the stuff. The radio transmitters, the paint. Mr. Toombes, through Mr. Swarthout, got us the Port Authority helicopter-the biggest one they had, one of those twin-rotor banana jobs. I sent a squad from the precinct down to one of the construction outfits to requisition one of those big junkpile electromagnets with a battery-pack power supply. And we got the crop duster from the Jersey mosquito-control people, again through the Port Authority by way of a request from the Deputy Mayor’s office.

These items you obtained yourself-the paint, the radios, and the magnet-you did that on your own authority, Captain?

I did: I figured I’d argue later about whether I had the right to do it. If the stunt worked, nobody was going to bitch about a little moonlight requisitioning on my part. If it didn’t work, my head was likely to roll anyway. I didn’t see any point wasting time taking that stuff upstairs.