The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (22 page)

But the second note was menacing: “I still have
two armed bombs aboard.”

As the first-class section filled with marijuana haze, Kerkow came forward and sat next to her boyfriend. Holder draped a blanket over their torsos and passed her the joint. It was the first time they had acknowledged each other since the morning before, when they had split up at the airport bar in Los Angeles. But Holder and Kerkow didn’t say a word as they cuddled beneath their blanket. They just kept passing the joint back and forth, until it was nothing but ash.

Suitably stoned, Kerkow asked Holder the question that had been bugging her for hours: “Where are we going?”

“Algiers.”

The city’s name didn’t ring any bells for her. She stood up and jabbed a finger in Holder’s chest. “You know, I’ll never be able to trust you about anything again,” she said.

Kerkow’s severe expression then melted into a grin. There was something oddly liberating about having no choice but to lose herself in the adventure; perhaps Holder had done her a favor by coaxing her through that brief moment of doubt as the hostages left.

Kerkow leaned down to kiss Holder on the cheek, then beckoned him to follow her back to coach class. “I want to show you something,” she said.

In the rear of the plane, she pulled up the armrests on a row of seats and lay down on her back. She shimmied out of her purple slacks as Holder dropped his Army dress pants to the floor.

Damn, it’s chilly in here
, thought Holder as he exposed his flesh. But once he leaned into Kerkow’s embrace, he stopped
caring about the cold.

“
HI, COULD YOU
please turn up the heat?”

The cockpit crew was startled to hear a female voice make that polite request. They turned to see Cathy Kerkow’s head ducking through
the cockpit door; up until that moment, the pilots had believed that Holder was traveling to Algiers alone. They were flabbergasted to learn that the hijacker had a beautiful female companion who
had escaped their notice.

Luker, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man, was struck by a thunderbolt of envy.
Maybe I can make something happen here
, he thought as he took
stock of Kerkow’s figure. But she had no interest in socializing with the crew.

A short time later Newell went to the first-class section to speak with Holder, who was drinking
Coca-Cola from a can. Holder first offered the captain some marijuana, suggesting that the drug might help “
turn him on.” Newell gruffly declined, then began to try to persuade Holder to pick a less perilous
destination than Algiers.

According to Luker’s calculation, which took into account a stiff tail wind, the Boeing 720H could make it all the way to North Africa without taking on extra fuel. Newell had thus scrapped plans he had made to stop in Shannon, Ireland, a popular refueling spot for American airlines. But he still dreaded the prospect of landing in hostile Algiers; having already spent fourteen months of his life in a Nazi prison camp, he was loath to risk further captivity.

Newell first proposed landing in Madrid, but Holder wouldn’t hear of it; he knew that Spain was run by an aging Fascist dictator who wouldn’t take kindly to a subversive of his ilk. “Well, another possibility we could do would be Switzerland—Geneva,” said Newell. “Would you like to
go to Geneva?”

Holder was intrigued. The word
Switzerland
conjured up images of idyllic chalets and pretty Red Cross nurses. He wondered whether the country had any aerospace industry to speak of, since he would like to someday work as an engineer. “You think they’d
give me amnesty?” he asked hopefully.

Newell promised to see what he could do. Since Flight 364 was now well beyond the range of any Western Airlines facilities, Newell reached out to TWA’s dispatch center at Kennedy Airport, which promised to pass along the request to Western officials. Newell figured
those officials would have to inform the FBI, which could then notify the State Department.

But the chain of communication was actually much shorter than Newell realized, for his transmissions were being intercepted by the military. Flight 364 was being shadowed by a KC-135 Stratotanker, which had been scrambled out of Loring Air Force Base in Maine. The jet was ordinarily used to refuel fighters in midair, but its mission this time was to keep the Pentagon apprised of
Flight 364’s every move. This was highly unusual, but so, too, was the hijacking: no American skyjacker had ever taken a plane to Africa, and there were high-level concerns about how the drama might unfold.

Within minutes of Newell’s inquiry about Switzerland, word had filtered back to State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. The proposal put the Nixon administration in a tough diplomatic spot: though it was obviously reluctant to argue on behalf of any hijacker, it preferred to have the plane land in Europe rather than Algeria. In Switzerland, at least, the recovery of the plane, its crew, and the ransom would be guaranteed. And the Swiss might even be willing to play a trick on the hijacker by withdrawing their offer of asylum once the public’s interest had waned.

A call was placed to the Swiss ambassador to the United States, a balding patrician named Felix Schnyder. He felt no need to run the State Department’s daft proposal by his bosses in Bern; he flatly rejected the notion of letting the hijacked plane land in Geneva. Switzerland did not wish to become known as the
Cuba of the Alps.

It was now clear that Flight 364 had no choice but to continue on to Algeria. The State Department contacted its lone representative in the country, William Eagleton, who headed the U.S. Interests Section at the Swiss embassy in Algiers. He was instructed to alert the proper Algerian authorities, then head to Maison Blanche
Airport at once.

H
OLDER AND
K
ERKOW
took turns sleeping as the plane crossed the Atlantic. As the flight neared the Iberian coast, Holder ducked into a
lavatory to change into the white shirt and brown bell-bottom trousers that he had brought in his valise. Having burned through as many as a dozen joints since leaving Seattle, his mental faculties were not at their sharpest; he accidentally left the Samsonite briefcase on the seat next to the dozing Kerkow.

When he heard the lavatory door slam shut, Luker leaned back in his chair and peered into the cabin. He noticed the unguarded briefcase right away. If there was ever a moment to do something about the hijacking, this was it.

A whispered debate began in the cockpit. Ira McMullen, the FAA navigator, was gung-ho to lead the assault. He wanted to crouch behind the lavatory door with some sort of blunt instrument and club Holder over the head as he exited. Someone else could then grab the briefcase, thereby neutralizing Kerkow as a threat.

But Newell vetoed that idea. There were just too many things that could go wrong. What if McMullen failed to knock out Holder on the first try? Or if Kerkow awoke and decided to detonate the bomb beside her, or one of the other ones that Holder claimed to have stashed elsewhere on the plane? Though Newell had serious doubts that the hijackers were gutsy enough to kill, he wasn’t willing to risk his aircraft on a hunch.

And so the Western crew did nothing. Holder returned to his seat in civilian clothes, oblivious to how close he had come to
botching Operation Sisyphus.

At 5:20 p.m. local time, as Flight 364 flew through Spanish airspace, an Algerian official contacted the plane. In passable English, he asked to speak to the hijacker.

“Do you have affiliation with any political group?” the official asked Holder.

“No … ah, well, uh, let’s talk about that on the ground. Now I got some questions for you.”

“Yes, please.”

“Can you guarantee my safety?”

“Safety? Yes, safety. This is not a problem.”

“All right, now I’m going to want asylum. You going to give me asylum?”

“Asylum? Yes, okay, I understand. Asylum.”

Holder was getting excited about the new life that lay ahead. He thought the Algerians sounded thrilled about his impending arrival. He was sure that such hospitable folks would have no problem granting his final, most important request.

“And listen, I want you to get Eldridge Cleaver to come meet me at the airport.”

“Again, please?”

“Eldridge Cleaver.
I want Eldridge Cleaver.”

I
N 1968, THE
year Roger Holder spent riding a tank through the jungles of South Vietnam, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver ran for president of the United States. He was only thirty-three years old at the time and thus constitutionally ineligible for the office. But when the 218 delegates of the leftist Peace and Freedom Party gathered for their convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cleaver won the nomination
on the first ballot. In humbly accepting the honor, he vowed to burn down the White House and replace it with a “museum or monument to the decadence of the past” should he miraculously
win the presidency.

Just two years prior to entering the presidential fray, Cleaver had been an inmate at California’s maximum-security Soledad State Prison, serving a fourteen-year sentence for attempted murder. The high school dropout had become an accomplished autodidact while behind bars, devouring the works of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Malcolm X. He was eventually inspired to try his own hand at writing, crafting a series of provocative essays on race, sex, and violence. When those essays began to appear in the quarterly political magazine
Ramparts
, Cleaver became a literary sensation, hailed by critics as a man blessed with an “
innate gift of language” and a “
formidably analytic mind.” Cleaver’s soaring intellectual reputation helped him win parole in December 1966, after having served just over half his term; upon his release from prison, he joined the
Ramparts
staff.

But Cleaver was far too energetic and ambitious to settle for a mere writing gig. He joined the nascent Black Panther Party in February 1967, after watching one of its co-founders, Huey P. Newton, stare down a pack of heavily armed cops outside
Ramparts’
San Francisco office. Cleaver rapidly ascended to the post of Minister of Information, becoming the party’s public face after Newton was arrested for shooting an Oakland police officer in October 1967. His skill at turning the Black Panthers’ antiestablishment ideology into a sort of muscular poetry was a wonder to behold—no one else could make the phrase “racist Gestapo pigs” sound like
something from
King Lear
.

But Cleaver’s zest for verbal combat was also his greatest weakness. “I’m a fat mouth and a fool, you know?” he confessed to one interviewer. “
I talk too much.”

In March 1968
Ramparts’
publishing arm released
Soul on Ice
, a collection of Cleaver’s prison essays. Just two weeks after the instant best seller received a glowing
New York Times
review, Cleaver and several comrades were involved in a ninety-minute shoot-out with Oakland police. The incident resulted in the death of a seventeen-year-old Black Panther named Bobby James Hutton, as well as Cleaver’s arrest for attempted murder.
^*
Though he managed to make bail, Cleaver knew his parole was certain to be revoked. As he hit the campaign trail that summer, he vowed to his wife, Kathleen, that he would never spend
another day in prison.

Three weeks after garnering 0.05 percent
of the presidential vote, Cleaver fled to Montreal. There he caught a freighter to Havana, where the government stashed him in a luxurious apartment with two minders from
the Ministry of Interior. But Cleaver quickly wore out his welcome in Cuba, first by providing sanctuary to two American skyjackers who had escaped from one of Fidel Castro’s sugar-harvesting gulags. Then in May 1969 a Reuters reporter tracked down Cleaver
and published his location in the American press. The resulting uproar, which included loud calls for Cleaver’s extradition to California, convinced the Cubans to eject their troublesome guest: they placed Cleaver on a plane to Algeria, telling him he would spend only a week there “to deflect the publicity” caused by
the Reuters story.

But just as the Cubans had intended, Cleaver ended up staying in Algeria at the invitation of the nation’s dictatorial president, Houari Boumédiène.
^†
An organizational genius known for his asceticism and ruthlessness, Boumédiène had been a top commander for the military wing of the National Liberation Front, the party that had led the independence fight against France. His wartime experiences had turned him into a fierce anticolonialist, committed to supporting revolutions the world over. Algerian oil money flowed to rebel groups in Rhodesia, Eritrea, Portugal, and Palestine, among many other countries. Boumédiène was naturally intrigued by the Black Panther Party, which he viewed as the closest thing America had to a socialist insurgency.

Cleaver proved adept at reading Boumédiène’s expectations, adapting his lingo to give it an even more belligerent edge. Shortly after his arrival in Algiers, he told an American photojournalist that he planned to form an organization called the North American Liberation Front, dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government and the nationalization of Standard Oil. “I plan to shed my blood and to put my life on the line and to seek to take the lives of the pigs of the power structure in Babylon,” he declared, using his favorite
nickname for America.

Boumédiène was impressed enough to let Cleaver operate freely in Algiers, as well as give him a
five-hundred-dollar monthly stipend. Joined by his pregnant wife Kathleen and a few admirers from the United States, Cleaver established an official branch of the Black Panther Party, which he christened the International Section. At first confined to a bungalow by the Mediterranean Sea, the International
Section soon upgraded to a gated villa in the tony El Biar neighborhood. The villa was a gift from its former residents, the official delegation of the Vietcong, who were great
fans of Cleaver’s work. Cleaver repaid their kindness by broadcasting a message on Radio Hanoi, urging African-American soldiers to mutiny: “If you can get up the courage to do it, you should start ripping off those Uncle Toms and those pigs who’re giving you orders to kill the Vietnamese people. You should start blowing them away. Throw those hand grenades at them. And put that dynamite up under their houses, up
under their jeeps.”