The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (19 page)

Cutcher thanked Kerkow for her concern and asked her to return to her seat. As she settled back into 22D, she peered out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Angela Davis. But all she saw was a lone Western fuel truck gliding across the tarmac.

U
PON RETURNING TO
the FBI’s command post after arranging for the Boeing 720H, Newell noticed that one of the agents was no longer wearing his dark blue suit. The man had donned the uniform of a Western maintenance worker, complete with a bright orange safety vest. A pair of shiny wingtips peeked out from beneath the frayed cuffs of his borrowed coveralls.

The agents explained that their disguised colleague was planning to sneak aboard the Boeing 727 while pretending to fix an engine. He would assess the situation and then determine whether an assault would be prudent. If anything went awry, or if he glimpsed an opportunity to end the hijacking himself, he would use the pistol tucked inside his sleeve.

There was little time to execute this plan, since the Boeing 727 would be taking off as soon as it refueled. The FBI asked Newell to lend them a Western maintenance truck, a piece of equipment essential to the ruse. But Newell refused to play along.

“Absolutely not,” he fumed. “I don’t want anyone on that plane with a gun.” He had read too many stories about wild shoot-outs between hijackers and the FBI. Newell wasn’t about to permit such violence
aboard a full flight.

The agents pleaded with Newell, assuring him that they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the passengers’ lives. They argued that their gambit might prevent a true catastrophe, since the Weathermen were obviously cavalier about setting off bombs. But Newell could not be budged.

As the frustrated agents huddled to discuss their options, Newell used the FBI’s communications setup to contact Flight 701. He assured the crew that the money and long-range aircraft would be in San Francisco shortly—an hour and a half, tops.

“Roger, but can’t delay any longer,” replied Ed Richardson. “These people are deadly serious.
They mean business.”

F
LIGHT
701
WENT
back in the air at 6:59 p.m., with enough fuel in its tanks to circle the airport for five hours. “Stan, turn to page nineteen, paragraph two,” Holder announced to the imaginary Weathermen as the Boeing 727 soared over the San Francisco Bay. He didn’t want the passengers to forget about the supposed
bomb in their midst.

Kerkow was soothed by the sound of her boyfriend’s voice, which she hadn’t heard in over an hour. She had no idea why they had taken off again with neither the money nor Angela Davis aboard. Nor did she understand why the plane wasn’t venturing out over the Pacific Ocean toward Hawaii. But she still had faith that all would be well. A man of Holder’s brilliance surely knew what he was doing.

Holder, though, was struggling to revamp his busted plan. None of the hijackings he’d studied had involved the transfer of numerous hostages from one plane to another. He would have to concoct a safe method for doing so, and fast: Western dispatch was reporting that the Boeing 720H had left Las Vegas and would land in San Francisco
at 8:05 p.m.

The operational details in Holder’s notebook were providing him with little solace; he needed his astrology charts for peace of mind. He had a stewardess fetch him the black valise stashed beneath 17D, the bag his seatmate had rifled through on the way down from Seattle. He hoped that
Aquarius 1972
would provide him with the guidance
he so desperately craved.

Holder excused himself from the cockpit and took the booklets to the first-class lavatory. He smoked another joint while reacquainting himself with the messages encoded in the stars. The logistics of the plane transfer took shape in his mind.

When he returned to the cockpit, Holder was brimming with meticulous directions for the crew. When they landed again in San Francisco, he wanted the money first, brought to the plane’s front door by a commissary truck equipped with a hydraulic lift. He insisted that the truck approach on the plane’s left-hand side; based on what he had observed about runway 19R, he felt this would give him the best view of the vehicle and its occupants.

Once the money was delivered, Holder wanted the 720H taxied to within two hundred feet of Flight 701. The new crew would stand at the base of the 720H’s stairs, their hands atop their heads like captured soldiers. Half of Flight 701’s passengers would march to the second jet in a single-file line, with Holder at the rear. Once those passengers were settled in, everyone who had remained aboard the first plane
would be free to go.

“So which half you want?” asked Tom Crawford.

Holder scrunched his brow in puzzlement.

“The passengers. You know, which half of the passengers?”

This was yet another key detail that had somehow slipped Holder’s mind as he was planning Operation Sisyphus: though he had always intended to free half the hostages in San Francisco, he hadn’t devised a method for divvying them up.

“How ’bout one side of the plane?” suggested Crawford. “I’m thinking that would be easiest, don’t you?”

Holder nodded.

“Okay, which one you want, left or the
right?”

Holder spun the question in his mind, straining to remember which side Kerkow was sitting on. He had last seen her nearly five hours earlier, while marching up the aisle with Gina Cutcher.

“Right.”

F
LANKED BY BLUE-AND-WHITE
police cars with blaring sirens, the armored truck containing the ransom reached the airport at 7:30 p.m. Bank of America had finally managed to amass the requested sum by
scraping together $10,000 worth of fivers. The total amount, consisting of 12,500 bills of varying denominations, was transferred to a large canvas sack marked
STEREO HEADSETS: PROPERTY OF WESTERN AIRLINES
. The filled bag weighed
more than thirty pounds.

Bill Newell, meanwhile, was making final preparations to command the Boeing 720H. Dick Luker and Don Thompson, his hand-picked crew members, had been apprised of the situation, and neither one had expressed any qualms about flying to Hanoi. Newell had all the charts he needed to get the 720H as far as Honolulu, a daily Western destination; they would have to figure out how to get from there to North Vietnam once they reached Hawaii.

All was going smoothly until Newell overheard Tom Crawford transmit the hijacker’s latest demand: all the passengers on Flight 701’s right-hand side would be coming aboard the 720H.

Newell had assumed that his only passengers would be the hijacker and his Weathermen associates. Now he had to plan for the needs of Western customers whose routine trip to Seattle could potentially end in the hostile city of Hanoi. Newell paged the senior stewardess on duty, Glenna MacAlpine, who was just about to depart for the weekend. When informed that the hijacked flight needed stewardesses, MacAlpine did not hesitate to volunteer; like Newell, she felt obligated to place herself in harm’s way. She made some calls and found three other “girls” willing to assist: Pat Stark, Chris Hagenow, and Deirdre Bowles. All were eating dinner with their husbands when asked to work a hijacked flight; all immediately rushed to the airport, knowing full well that the trip could lead them
into a war zone.

As MacAlpine assembled her crew, Newell was called into a conference with the FBI. The agents again expressed their eagerness to prevent the hijacking from proceeding any further. They said they were sensitive to Newell’s concerns about gunplay, and they would no longer pressure him to help sneak a disguised agent aboard a plane. All they wanted now was his permission to inspect the Boeing 720H when it arrived so they could familiarize themselves with its layout.

Newell was leery of the FBI’s intentions. “You’re putting me in a
hell of a position,” he snapped, pointing out that the hijackers might not react well if they spotted FBI agents prowling about their long-range jet. Newell suspected that the agents still
aimed to use violence.

Shortly before eight p.m., the bickering between the agents and Newell was interrupted by a phone call from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was the office of acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray, passing along some urgent news: a second hijacked plane was on
its way to San Francisco.

G
EYSERS OF FUEL
gushed from the tanks beneath Flight 701’s wings, evaporating into ribbons of white mist as they slammed into the stratosphere. Many passengers who saw the spectacle feared that something had gone terribly wrong in the cockpit, and that they would soon plummet 20,000 feet to their deaths. But Captain Jerry Juergens was dumping fuel for good reason: the $500,000 ransom was ready for pickup, and the plane had to be several thousand pounds lighter
in order to land safely.

Juergens informed the passengers that they would be back on the ground shortly, and he thanked them for their patience. He made no mention of the second plane that was
flying in from Las Vegas.

Flight 701 landed at 8:09 p.m. and once again taxied to a stop at the north end of runway 19R. Roger Holder leaned forward in his jump seat and peered out the cockpit’s left-hand side. A commissary truck was approaching the plane, just
as he had instructed.

“I want a girl in the cockpit,” Holder announced over the public address system. He needed someone to reach out and grab the money from the truck; doing so himself would make him vulnerable to snipers.

Donna Jones, the lead stewardess, responded to Holder’s call for help. But she was rather petite, just five foot two, and Juergens thought
she wouldn’t be able to lift the money herself. He suggested that Tom Crawford do the job instead.
Holder agreed.

Jones opened the aircraft’s front door for Crawford. The stereo headsets bag was sitting on the truck’s hydraulic lift, all by itself. Crawford hopped onto the lift, picked up the sack, and heaved it back into the plane. It landed with a loud thud in the aisle, attracting
the whole plane’s attention.

The passengers’ hearts lifted in unison. The money had arrived. Surely their freedom was at hand.

T
HE
FBI
AGENTS
were scrambling to learn all they could about the second hijacking, but details were scarce. All they could gather was that a disheveled young man had forced his way onto a United Airlines Boeing 727 as it was boarding passengers in Reno. The man, armed with a .357 Magnum, was demanding $200,000 and passage to San Francisco. Since the banks were already closed for the weekend, United was trying to obtain the cash from local casinos; the Harrah’s on Virginia Street promised to front the airline
three-quarters of the ransom.

The Reno hijacker had made no mention of any political motives, but the FBI couldn’t write off his desire to reach San Francisco as mere coincidence. The agents fretted that he might be in cahoots with the hijackers of Flight 701, part of a massive conspiracy to free Angela Davis that was just beginning to take shape. If the United hijacker found out that the Weathermen aboard the Western aircraft had been gunned down, would he retaliate by executing his hostages? Or was storming Flight 701 the only way to save lives? The FBI would have to proceed with great caution in determining its next move.

As the agents struggled to gather intelligence about the situation in Reno, the long-range Boeing 720H landed and taxied to a hangar near runway 19R. Seeing that the FBI was momentarily distracted, Newell quietly beckoned his two crew members, Dick Luker and Don
Thompson, to accompany him to the newly arrived jet. There was no time for the men to change into their uniforms; Newell wanted to get out to the 720H right away so he could prevent any FBI agents from sneaking aboard.

The three men got to the hangar at 8:23 p.m. From the cockpit window, they could see the Western commissary truck heading back to the terminal, its delivery mission complete. It was time
to make the switch.

H
OLDER DIDN
’
T BOTHER
to unzip the canvas bag that contained the half-million dollars. He was too focused on getting to the next plane. But where was it? Darkness had fallen outside, yet the only lights he could see were those that lined the runway or illuminated the distant terminal. No other aircraft was approaching.

“They’re going to kill us all if they don’t get the plane,” Holder told Crawford. “They reset the timer. Now
it’s almost run out.”

Crawford passed along the message to the airport’s air traffic control tower:

When the FBI agents heard this ominous communiqué, they looked around for Newell, only to realize that the chief pilot and his crew had given them the slip. One of the agents sprinted toward the hangar where the 720H was refueling. He got there a little after 8:30 p.m., just as Glenna MacAlpine and her stewardesses were arriving.

The agent begged Newell to keep the plane in the hangar. The
FBI still wanted to inspect the 720H and perhaps get a closer look at the area surrounding runway 19R, too. Things were hectic at the moment, with the agents still trying to gauge events in Reno, but they would be ready to conduct their inspection soon. How long was Newell willing to wait?

“I won’t taxi out for fifteen minutes,” promised Newell. The agent said that was acceptable, and that he would soon return
with two colleagues.

As soon as the agent departed, Newell radioed Juergens and told him to get ready—they were heading out to
runway 19R immediately. He wasn’t going to give the FBI time to cook up some harebrained scheme that might
endanger his passengers’ lives.