The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (21 page)

D
OZENS OF REPORTERS
and cameramen swarmed the various airports involved in the day’s two skyjackings. In Reno, the media throng watched from behind a chain-link fence as a United Airlines ticket agent drove the $200,000 ransom out to the hijacked Boeing 727. She was met on the tarmac by a strange sight: three individuals standing in a tight huddle with a blanket flung over their heads. The concealed trio consisted of two flight attendants and the hijacker, who had his
.357 Magnum cocked. The blanket trick frustrated an FBI sniper who had hoped to end the hijacking with a single bullet.

The United jet finally took off for San Francisco around 11:30 p.m., heading south toward Washoe Lake. Just twenty miles into the journey, the hijacker parachuted out of the rear exit, taking along the cash that United had borrowed from two Reno casinos. He landed safely on the highway that ran along the lake’s west side, then vanished
into the scrub.

At the San Francisco airport, meanwhile, the passengers and crew from Flight 701 were sequestered in a hallway cordoned off from the media. They snacked on roast beef sandwiches as they waited
for their FBI debriefings. One of those interviews proved extraordinarily useful to investigators: the passenger from seat 18E stated that he had rifled through the hijacker’s valise, which had contained Army discharge papers for a private
named Willie Roger Holder.

For the most part, though, the FBI debriefings were worthless. To the agents’ chagrin, a number of the liberated passengers were too intoxicated to recall any useful details from the hijacking; many others, presumably wary of incurring the Weathermen’s wrath, claimed they had never gotten a good look at the black man
in the Army dress uniform. The press was stymied in its efforts to make sense of the story, too; the initial wire-service reports had described Flight 701’s hijackers
as four black radicals.

Though the police prevented reporters from interviewing many passengers in San Francisco, there was no such security at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where concerned families had remained after Flight 701’s brief stop for fuel. The passengers’ loved ones gave voice to the growing popular discontent over the government’s inability to halt the skyjacking epidemic. “I hope the FBI has a real welcome waiting for [the hijackers], a real warm welcome,” snarled the elderly husband of one hostage. “I think we should give them the same thing they’re putting our people in danger of getting. We need fewer lawyers and more executioners.”

A
Seattle Times
reporter confronted a five-year-old boy whose
great-grandmother was aboard Flight 701. He asked the child if he knew why the plane had been delayed. “They got hijacked,” the boy replied. “The men wanted money. I think in the hundreds of dollars.”

“A commentary on modern society,” the reporter lamented. “ ‘Hijacking’ part of
a five-year-old’s vocabulary.”

H
OLDER STUBBED OUT
his third joint of Flight 364 and returned to the cockpit, where Newell had several matters to discuss. The captain first tried to sell Holder on the idea of flying to Havana instead of Algiers, stressing that the Cuban government was a safer bet to greet him
with open arms. When Holder declined, Newell raised the possibility of going somewhere in Canada, where Western had some experience taking hijackers: in February 1971 the airline had deposited a nineteen-year-old Army draftee in Vancouver, after he commandeered a Seattle-bound flight in order
to avoid basic training.

But the more Newell tried to negotiate the flight’s final destination, the more dead set Holder became on
the idea of Algiers. He had picked the city on impulse over the likes of Peking and Moscow, trusting his gut to decipher the esoteric messages conveyed by the stars. The captain’s protests now made Holder feel that The System was truly unsettled by how Operation Sisyphus was unfolding—confirmation, he believed, that his instincts were correct.

“Algiers,” Holder insisted. “That’s what
they want me to do.”

With his cajoling getting nowhere, Newell shifted gears. “But how do they feel about you maybe letting the passengers go in New York? They can’t help you anymore. Maybe even be a threat to you if they find out you want to take them all the way to Algiers.”

Holder said he had no problem with that. He had always planned to release the remaining hostages before heading overseas, albeit in Honolulu
rather than New York.

Newell woke up half the plane with his ensuing announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think I have some very good news for you. I have been negotiating with our passenger up here, and he has agreed
to let you off in New York. If anything further develops,
I’ll let you know.”

Kerkow was among those awakened by Newell’s address and the cheers that followed. Her aspiring suitor across the aisle noticed that, unlike the rest of the passengers, she expressed no joy at hearing that her freedom was imminent. She just sat there glumly with a blanket tucked around her neck, staring out at
the pitch-black sky.

As the plane passed over southern Illinois, Newell walked back to the main cabin—partly to stretch his legs but also to see if he could identify any of the hijackers’ accomplices. He discovered that he knew one of the passengers quite well: Bud Brown, a Seattle-based Western pilot who had been deadheading
^*
on Flight 701. Newell asked Brown if he would come along to Algiers, to serve as a relief pilot in case the crew became too exhausted to fly.
Brown readily agreed.

When Flight 364 began its descent toward Kennedy Airport at 4:49 a.m. on June 3, Holder gave specific instructions for how the plane would refuel and how the navigator would join the crew. The demand he stressed most was that the nose of the plane should face away from the fence around runway 22R. Holder hadn’t forgotten that this was the airport where an FBI sniper had
killed Richard Obergfell.

The Boeing 720H touched down at 5:12 a.m. and refueling went off without a hitch. Newell assumed a truck would soon arrive with a set of stairs, so the navigator could come aboard and the passengers could depart. But fifteen minutes passed with no sign of activity. Newell asked the air traffic control tower for an explanation. The response he received was the last thing he wanted to hear:

It was the first time the FBI had asked to speak directly with Holder. At this late stage in the hijacking, though, he was in no mood for diplomacy:

Newell looked back and noticed Holder tugging on the copper wire attached to the briefcase—a warning, perhaps, that he had been pushed to the brink. “He doesn’t want to talk anymore!” Newell barked at the FBI agent. “He wants action.
Let’s go!”

But a certain degree of procrastination was integral to the FBI’s plan. The Bureau was going to try its maintenance-worker ruse once more, sending a disguised agent to the plane along with the boarding stairs. The agent needed just a few more minutes to don a uniform from American Airlines, which was lending its
equipment for the operation.

Minutes passed. Holder started to talk to himself, uttering things
of a most disturbing nature. “It doesn’t matter to me whether I die right here now, or a little bit later,” he mumbled. The increasingly nervous Newell demanded the stairs and navigator again,
to no avail. At 5:48 a.m. Holder decided to take matters into his own hands:

The stairs came into view thirty seconds later, pulled by a yellow truck containing three men. One was the navigator, Ira McMullen, an FAA official who had worked for TWA prior to entering public service. One was a genuine American Airlines maintenance worker. And one was
the disguised FBI agent.

Holder came to the door of the cockpit and peeked out the plane’s open hatch, where the stairs were being moved into place. He couldn’t see who was inside the truck, since its cab was wedged beneath the fuselage. This made him livid.

“Where the fuck are they? Put them where I can see them!” he yelled. “Why aren’t you following my instructions? Get them away, get them away!” Holder turned back toward the cockpit and warned Luker that he would set off his bomb in ten minutes if his
orders weren’t obeyed.

Holder’s commotion was audible throughout the plane. Kerkow went to a left-side window and looked out. She saw a man dressed as a maintenance worker walking alongside the plane. He seemed to be
moving carefully, almost sneakily, as he glanced up at the passengers’ faces in the windows.

Kerkow suddenly realized: she had forgotten to do her job. “I hope they don’t do anything foolish!” she shrieked as she bolted down the aisle. She frantically looked for the rear exit door, praying all the while that the FBI hadn’t already launched its raid. A stewardess grabbed her by the arm and told her to pipe down and return to her seat. Kerkow complied, though not before assuring herself that the rear
exit was still sealed.

McMullen finally came up the steps. Holder waved him toward a seat in first class, satisfied that the FAA employee looked like a genuine navigator. Then he returned to the cockpit and told Newell it was time for the passengers and the stewardesses to leave. Only the Western flight crew, augmented by McMullen and Bud Brown, would accompany him to Algiers.

On Newell’s instructions, everyone in the cabin quietly gathered in the aisle as two buses were parked on the tarmac, about three hundred feet from the plane. Once the buses’ doors swung open, the passengers began to file toward the exit.

Doubt overwhelmed Kerkow as the line of soon-to-be-free hostages passed by her seat. No one suspected that she knew Holder; she could walk right off the plane without causing a stir. Maybe the FBI would never figure out her connection to the hijacking. But even if they did, she could always lie and claim that she had been forced to tag along, or that Holder had never told her of his plans. She was confident she could dupe any FBI agent by flashing her coquettish smile.

Kerkow slowly stood and glanced about. Holder was nowhere to be seen. The other passengers were giving her curious looks, wondering when she planned on cutting into the swiftly moving line. She looked down at her purse, which was resting on the adjacent seat; it would only take a moment to sling the bag over her shoulder and join the stream of hostages heading for the exit.

Then, all of a sudden, Holder’s voice boomed over the public address system: “Cathy, you stay here.”

Kerkow slid back down and pulled her hair over her cheeks and mouth so that the other passengers couldn’t see her face.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” asked Glenna MacAlpine, the flight’s lead stewardess, as she passed by Kerkow’s row.

Kerkow shook her head. She had
made her choice.

O
NCE THE PASSENGERS
and stewardesses were safely aboard the buses, the American Airlines maintenance worker and the disguised FBI agent came to the foot of the stairs. They were going to board on the pretext of performing a preflight inspection. It would be the FBI’s last chance to stop the plane from leaving the United States.

The two men had barely started their ascent when they heard Newell yelling at them from the cockpit window: “Get back! Get back! Don’t come up here!” At the same time Newell motioned for Luker to shut the hatch. The veteran pilot had gotten his flight this far without any bloodshed, simply by working with Holder; he saw no reason to antagonize an armed man who had just
released thirty hostages.

Their plan foiled, the maintenance worker and the FBI agent carted away the boarding stairs. Back in the airport’s control tower, the agent in charge of the FBI’s operation made special note of Newell’s intransigence. When his superiors inevitably berated him for failing to stop the hijacking, he intended to place the blame on
Flight 364’s captain.

The Boeing 720H took off at 6:25 a.m., heading slightly southeast
toward Jones Beach. Holder once again moved to a seat in first class, where he lit yet another joint as the brilliant postdawn light filtered through the jet’s windows.

Luker noticed that Holder had left two pieces of paper on the ground beneath the jump seat. They were handwritten notes, evidently scribbled in New York. The first was rather heartening: “Assure safety of aircraft at dis
[sic]
of Captain.”