The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (16 page)

Still, Gina Cutcher promised to bring him a dry cleaning voucher. Holder turned his head to watch her walk back to the aft galley, her comely figure sheathed in Western’s flattering peach uniform. He briefly thought of asking this gorgeous lady to join him and Cathy on their journey, to become part of their happy band of homesteaders in the Australian Outback. But he knew that it would be foolish to
deviate from the plan.

When Holder ran out of cigarettes, he bummed a smoke off the man sitting in 18E, an auto-sales executive from suburban Seattle. The man used this exchange as an excuse to make small talk. He started the conversation by asking Holder how long he had been in the Army. “Oh, since before I was born,” Holder responded with a laugh, before explaining that his father had spent his entire career in the military.

That was the last true thing that Holder told his seatmate. He proceeded to weave a fantastic tale of derring-do, claiming to be a
helicopter pilot who had just emerged from the hospital after suffering grievous wounds in Vietnam. He said he had served in Korea, too, where he had been shot down after flying a secret bombing mission over the 38th parallel. He was heading to Seattle as part of his new gig with Army intelligence, a job he had earned by scoring a genius-level 141 on an IQ test. Once his military career was over, he hoped to train police pilots in the art of
evasive maneuvering.

Four rows behind Holder, Kerkow was telling less outrageous lies to her seatmate, a middle-aged homemaker from Los Angeles. She said that she was traveling to Seattle for her father’s surprise birthday party, and that she worked as a
medical receptionist in San Diego. Soon thereafter the man sitting across the aisle from Kerkow roped her into a game of gin rummy, which she
played quite shrewdly.

As the plane passed over Oregon’s Mount Hood, Holder felt an acute pang of self-doubt. He worried that he had already waited too long to execute the takeover, a concern that sparked misgivings about the thoroughness of his preparations. He began to compose a new note for the captain, scribbling furiously on a sheet of yellow legal paper. But he stopped writing after five garbled paragraphs, unable to string together a coherent message. His thoughts were
slipping away from him.

Holder asked his seatmate for another cigarette and tried to read a
Life
feature about Alabama governor and Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace, who had survived an assassin’s
bullet on May 15. Though he maintained a veneer of cool, he was desperately trying to muster the courage to go through with his plan.

At around 2:25 p.m., the captain’s voice blared over the public address system. He directed the passengers’ attention to snowcapped Mount Rainier, which was coming up on the left side of the aircraft. All was running smoothly, he added, and they would be on the ground in Seattle in twenty-five minutes.

Holder closed his magazine and stubbed out his cigarette.
Now or never
, he thought.
Now or never
.

He removed his Samsonite briefcase from beneath the seat in
front of him and replaced it with his small black valise. He opened the briefcase a crack and removed a travel-size alarm clock. He wound it up and then placed it back inside the briefcase.

“Could you watch my seat?” Holder asked the auto-sales executive in 18E. With that, he rose and walked down the aisle toward the
rear of the plane.

Kerkow watched him pass by. This was it.

Holder pulled back the aft galley’s red curtain to find three stewardesses shoveling beef and broccoli into their mouths. The lovely Gina Cutcher stood closest to him.

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

“I need to show you something,” Holder said to her, placing two sheets of three-by-five notepaper on the galley’s countertop. “
Read these.”

Cutcher did as she was told. The first note began:
Success through Death
…

I
T WAS SUPPOSED
to be a milestone day for Jerome Juergens, the first time he had ever captained a Boeing 727. The former Marine aviator, who had been with Western since 1959, had been flying 737s
for a few years. The older and larger 727, with its unique three-engine design and T-shaped tail, was widely beloved by pilots for its agility and responsiveness; if given a choice of any plane to fly through a thunderstorm, many veteran pilots would
pick the Boeing 727.

Juergens’s co-pilot, Edward Richardson, had logged hundreds of hours on 727s. He was assigned to Flight 701 to observe and grade Juergens’s maiden performance. Rounding out the crew was the flight engineer, Thomas Crawford, a former Air Force pilot who had cut his aviation teeth landing C-130 cargo planes on the Alaskan tundra. He sat directly behind Richardson, facing a massive bank of instruments mounted on the cockpit’s right side.

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., as Juergens was easing the plane down toward Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the cockpit’s entrance bell
rang twice. In stepped Gina Cutcher and Donna Jones, the flight’s lead stewardess. Cutcher thrust forward two sheets of paper. “Captain,” she said, “before you go on descending, please, you—you
need to read these!”

Though rife with poor spelling, the notes’ message was crystal clear: four men, three guns, two bombs. And the briefcase diagram proved that, at the very least, the notes’ author was familiar with military explosives.

Juergens had always boasted that he would never relinquish control of one of his planes to a skyjacker. As a proud Marine, he thought he could subdue anyone foolish enough to challenge his command—with
bare fists, if necessary. But now faced with the very real possibility of losing all ninety passengers on board, Juergens kept his bravado in check. “Go back and tell this man we’ll comply with anything he wants to do,” he told Cutcher.

Juergens made a mental checklist of Western’s hijacking procedures, which were detailed in a ten-page section of the airline’s pilot’s manual. There was a special transponder code that had to be sent to air traffic control in Seattle—“7500” meant a hijacking was in progress, “7700” that lives were in imminent danger. The code word “TRIP” had to be relayed to Seattle, too, along with pertinent information regarding the passengers: whether there were any infants on board, any children traveling alone, any celebrities or politicians. There were even special instructions for travel to such hostile countries as the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam, which included specifications for airspeed (400 knots) and the appropriate frequency on which to broadcast distress signals (
121.5 megahertz).

Ed Richardson knew these procedures better than any other Western pilot, for he had firsthand hijacking experience. Less than a month earlier, on May 5, he had been part of the crew that had flown a rogue Army draftee down to Havana. That hijacker had been armed with a revolver that he had stashed inside a hollowed-out book; he had also claimed to be part of a paramilitary movement opposed to American imperialism. Richardson had dismissed the doughy youth
as a “momma’s boy” who was merely afraid to fight in Vietnam. His most vivid memory of the hijacker was the self-proclaimed revolutionary’s first utterance to the Cuban soldiers who boarded the aircraft: “Can you have
someone get my luggage?”
^*

C
UTCHER ASKED THE
Lord for strength as she returned to the aft galley. She’d had a bad feeling about this stewardess job ever since her initial interview, when Western officials had spent more time measuring her bust and thighs than inquiring about her qualifications. How she now wished that she had followed her dream and gone to
nursing school instead.

She found Holder leaning against the galley’s countertop, staring at his immaculately shined shoes. She haltingly relayed Juergens’s words: “The captain says he’ll … he’ll comply with anything you want to do.”

“Good, take me to the cockpit now,” Holder replied. “You have two minutes to get me up there.” The other two stewardesses in the galley, Marla Smith and Carole Clymer, were relieved to be rid of the hijacker; he had frightened them with his mumbled regrets about having failed to
destroy the plane.

Few passengers noticed Holder and Cutcher as they marched up the aisle. One who did, a nineteen-year-old woman traveling with her baby, did a double take because of Holder’s unusual height. When Holder caught this young lady staring, he flashed back a smile and said, “
Peace.”

Holder ducked through the open cockpit door and stood over the three-person flight crew. He took a moment to savor the feeling of accomplishment; for the first time in ages, he felt wholly in tune with the universe’s intentions for his life. But after that surge of satisfaction ebbed, he struggled to remember what, exactly, he was supposed to do
next. At the very moment of his greatest triumph, all of Roger Holder’s convoluted plans began to mash together in his head.

“My name is Richard Bradley Williams,” said Holder, a trace of anxiety audible in his wavering voice. “I trained as a helicopter pilot at Fort Rucker. Flew Huey Cobras in Vietnam. Been back thirty-six days now, working with Army intelligence. My home’s in Oakland.
I’m divorced.”

Holder sat down in the jump seat behind Juergens and fell silent. The flight crew was baffled, and not only because Holder seemed more interested in recounting his life’s story than in making demands. One of the hijacking notes had clearly instructed the pilots to leave the cockpit, four paces apart, and “take seats to the rear of the aircraft.” Juergens had been girding himself to argue against that dangerous idea. But Holder appeared to have forgotten all about what he had written.

Holder held up his Samsonite briefcase and wiggled his left index finger, the one with the metal ring around it. The crew could see that the ring was connected to a piece of copper wire that led into the briefcase. “This controls the detonator,” explained Holder. “There is a concussion grenade in here, and
eight slabs of C-4. Now, Captain, what is your name?”

“
Jerry Juergens.”

Holder gave the captain a firm handshake, then did likewise with the other two members of the crew. Tom Crawford noticed that the hijacker’s hand was clammy and that sweat was
trickling down his brow.

“I’m here to tell you that I was visited at my home by the Weathermen,” said Holder. He was referring to a notorious radical group, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, that had orchestrated a series of bombings aimed at ending America’s involvement in Vietnam. Two weeks earlier the Weathermen had managed to bomb a women’s bathroom at the Pentagon.

“They told me they’d taken my children from my wife—kidnapped them,” Holder continued. “That’s how they’re forcing me to do this—they have my girls.
My family
. Four of them are on this plane right now, back there with a bomb. One’s a girl—she’s the leader. And
one’s on LSD. I saw them in Los Angeles, at the airport, waiting. But I don’t know where
they’re sitting at now.”

Holder removed his spiral-bound notebook from a jacket pocket and flipped to page one. “San Francisco,” he said. “They want us to go to San Francisco.”

“Not enough fuel for that,” said Richardson. “We need to land in Seattle first.” Holder objected, saying there was no time for any stops along the way. But Richardson countered that they didn’t have a choice—they could barely make it back to the Washington-Oregon border on the fuel they had left.

Then a spur-of-the-moment idea occurred to Holder—a way to turn Operation Sisyphus into an even more elaborate and personal demonstration.

“I want us to land in Coos Bay,” he said.

Richardson rolled his eyes at the hijacker’s idiocy. He curtly explained that even if they had enough fuel to reach southwestern Oregon, a Boeing 727 could never land at the minuscule airport that served Coos Bay. Either they landed in Seattle at once,
or they all died.

Holder relented, though he stressed that refueling would have to take place far from the terminal on an empty runway—he wanted to make it as difficult as possible for police to reach the plane. Crawford radioed the news to Western’s dispatch center in Los Angeles, which was charged with handling all hijacking-related communications:

The brief Seattle stopover arranged, Holder continued on with the demands he ascribed to his imaginary Weathermen handlers: “Money. You said money. They want three million dollars.”

Crawford swiveled his chair to the right so he could look Holder in the eye. “Listen, whether you choose to believe this or not is up to you,
but my
father is a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland,” he said, speaking the truth. Crawford explained that the only banks with $3 million on hand likely followed the Federal Reserve’s policy of locking their vaults promptly at five p.m. on Fridays—just over two hours hence. Those locks were controlled by timers, so that absolutely no one could open them until eight a.m. on Monday.

“You want three million dollars today, at this hour, you’re not going to find it,” said Crawford. “You’ll be lucky to find half a million.”

“Okay, half a million, then,” said Holder. “And Angela Davis. Have her at the airport in San Francisco, on the runway. Wearing something white—a white dress.” Holder had put considerable thought into that last detail; he wanted to make sure he could spot Davis from afar.

Crawford passed along these demands to Western dispatch, emphasizing that they were being made by a bomb-toting man who claimed to have armed, LSD-taking confederates among the passengers. The moment Crawford ended his transmission, Holder suddenly remembered something else he wanted.

“And five parachutes.
We want five parachutes.”

As Crawford took to the radio once more, Juergens pulled up the nose of the plane and banked left. They would have to enter a holding pattern while a runway was cleared. To prepare the passengers for the unexpected brevity of their stay in Seattle, Juergens decided to level with them. He switched on the public address system and began to speak, choosing his words very carefully.