The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking

N
OW THE
H
ELL
W
ILL
S
TART
One Soldier’s Flight from the
Greatest Manhunt of World War II

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

The man in the black sunglasses tells the waitress he’s fine with just coffee. One of his two lunchmates, a dapper Mexican gentleman he knows only as Dave, implores him to eat something—a shrimp cocktail, perhaps, or a half-dozen oysters. But the man insists he has
no interest in food
.

It is a typically gorgeous afternoon along the San Diego Bay. Sunlight filters through palm fronds into the Brigantine Seafood Restaurant’s brick-walled dining room. The sunglassed man and his two companions sit in a semicircular black-leather booth, beneath yellowing nautical charts and kitschy photographs of old yachts. They have come here to discuss a delicate matter
.

It is Dave who breaks the ice. He says that he has reviewed a diagram of the man’s proposed project, which he praises for its sophistication. He is confident that his associates in Tijuana will have no problem supplying the materials necessary to transform the man’s vision into a reality. The only issue to
discuss now is money
.

The sunglassed man is wary of getting fleeced. “I want to look around,” he says as he fiddles with the handle of his coffee mug. “See what else is on the market.”

But Dave is keen to strike a deal. He says that he would be happy to accept a small deposit now, then wait for the balance until after the project is complete. He swears that none of his competitors would ever dream of offering such a
generous payment plan
.

The sunglassed man concurs. He asks Dave if a deposit of $100 will be enough to
get things moving
.

Dave seems pleased. He is curious about just one thing
.

“Now, tell me—what is it that you
want to blow up?”

M
AJESTIC
M
OUNT
R
AINIER
slowly sharpened into view alongside Western Airlines Flight 701, its cratered peak coated with snow and ice that glistened in the strong June sun. Curious passengers craned their necks left to catch a glimpse of the dormant volcano, while the flight’s more nonchalant travelers kept their noses buried in newspapers, reading up on President Richard Nixon’s trip to Moscow and the carpet-bombing of Huê’. Stewardesses clad in peach-hued minidresses roamed the narrow aisle, clearing empty plates and champagne flutes in preparation for landing. They would be on the ground in Seattle
in twenty-five minutes.

Once they finished cleaning up, the three stewardesses assigned to coach class packed into the aft galley, where a few leftover meals awaited. The women had been working nonstop since seven a.m., flying down to Los Angeles before returning to Seattle, so they were plenty famished as Flight 701 neared its end. To preserve the illusion that its stewardesses were paragons of female daintiness, Western forbade its shapely “girls” to let passengers see them eat. The women made sure to shut the galley’s red curtain before tearing into their lunches. Safe from prying eyes, they shoveled forkfuls of sirloin steak and steamed broccoli into their brightly lipsticked mouths, taking care to avoid dripping gravy onto their
polka-dot scarves.

Gina Cutcher stood closest to the galley’s curtain, her back to the cabin as she ate and gabbed with her two colleagues, Carole Clymer and Marla Smith. Midway through their hurried meal, Cutcher was startled to hear the
tchk-tchk-tchk
of sliding curtain rings. She turned and found herself toe to toe with the passenger from seat 18D, the handsome black man in the crisply pressed Army dress uniform bedecked with ribbons. He peered down at her through wire-rimmed glasses fitted with amber lenses.

Oh no
, she thought.
The voucher. I
forgot about his voucher
.

Earlier in the flight, as Cutcher had been serving this man a drink, a bump of turbulence had caused her to spill some bourbon on the lapels of his olive-green jacket. He had been a real sport about the accident, just laughing it off—“Don’t worry about it at all,” he had told her. “No damage done.” But in keeping with Western’s customer service policy, Cutcher had insisted on bringing him a dry cleaning voucher. Now she realized that she had never made good on that promise.

An apology was on the tip of her tongue when the man spoke up. “I need to show you something,” he said politely, placing two sheets of three-by-five notepaper on the galley’s countertop. “
Read these.”

The puzzled Cutcher began to read as Smith and Clymer peered over her shoulder. The first sheet contained a neatly handwritten message, marred by numerous capitalization and spelling quirks. But there was no mistaking its meaning:

The other sheet was filled with a diagram of what appeared to be a briefcase. Several rectangles of varying size, each labeled with a number from one to four, were sketched inside the drawing. A column of text to the left of the diagram explained the briefcase’s contents:

Cutcher turned the note over. There was just one more sentence:

The man raised his left hand so the stewardesses could see that he was holding a black Samsonite briefcase. A thin piece of copper wire snaked from its top, right by the handle. It was connected to a metal ring draped around the man’s left index finger. He made a show of rhythmically tapping the briefcase with his right hand, as if to say,
In here
.

The man elbowed his way past Cutcher and stepped into the galley. He leaned against the countertop, pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, and locked eyes with Cutcher. Every trace of kindness was now gone from his gaze.

“You have two minutes,” he said.

Cutcher did not hesitate to obey the notes’ final instruction: she
headed for the cockpit.

Smith and Clymer stood there, frozen in place, as the man stared at his immaculately shined shoes. The only sound in the galley was the dull buzz of the Boeing 727’s three engines. Smith furtively glanced over at Clymer, who was still holding the bowl of red Jell-O that she had been eating for dessert. Clymer’s mouth was slightly agape, her hands shaking so much that her Jell-O cubes wobbled.

After an eternal thirty seconds, the man broke the silence. “Should’ve blown it up,” he mumbled without looking up from his shoes. “On takeoff, blown it up. We’re all gonna die anyway.”

Clymer’s red Jell-O
wobbled even more.

Cutcher, meanwhile, was racing toward the front of the plane, the two notes flapping in her hand. When she reached the first-class section, she spotted the flight’s lead stewardess, Donna Jones, stowing glasses into a cabinet. “It’s happening to us!” Cutcher exclaimed. “Open the door, open the door! We have two minutes!”

Jones led Cutcher to the cockpit and rang the entrance bell twice—the signal for
an urgent matter. The door opened, and the two
women entered the cramped compartment. Jerome Juergens, Flight 701’s captain, sensed right away that Cutcher was on the verge of panic.

Cutcher thrust the notes forward. “Captain,” she said, “before you go on descending, please, you—you
need to read these!”

Juergens zipped through the poorly spelled list of instructions, but he lingered over the diagram for several moments, looking for some flaw in the bomb’s design. Juergens was a decorated ex-Marine, a man who had learned a thing or two about explosives while flying A-1 Sky-raiders in Korea. He hoped the drawing might betray its artist as a bluffer, someone unfamiliar with the intricacies of detonating C-4. But the diagram was obviously the handiwork of a man who knew
what he was doing.

Juergens passed the notes to his co-pilot, Edward Richardson, and calmly gave Cutcher his orders: “Go back and tell this man we’ll comply with anything
he wants us to do.”

As Cutcher left to fetch the man from the aft galley, Richardson could only marvel at his dreadful luck: this was the second time he had been hijacked in
less than a month.

O
NLY THE MOST
seasoned travelers can recall the days when flying was an ethereal pleasure rather than a grind. Decades have passed since coach-class passengers enjoyed luxuries that have since become inconceivable: lumps of Alaskan crabmeat served atop monogrammed china, generous pours of free liquor, leggy stewardesses who performed their duties with geisha-like courtesy. Even on short-haul flights between minor cities, the customer was truly king.