Brian Garfield: Target Manhattan

Go on.

The weather was cloudy that day. Mostly cloudy, a few patches of hazy clear sky here and there. But of course he was well below the clouds. I suppose the clouds were at four or five thousand feet. They weren’t rain clouds.

Did that enter into your calculations?

It entered into our wishes, that’s for sure. But wishes don’t make facts. We saw pretty quickly how it would be easy to outfox him if the clouds were lower.

Oh? How?

Confuse his instruments when he was flying inside a cloud.

What good would that do?

Well, we figured it this way. There was one point where he was vulnerable. It was up at the top of his swing, when he was making that tight turn across the top of Central Park. If he miscalculated just a little bit, he’d be out over the Hudson River.

I see. Continue, please.

At that point the Hudson is more than a mile wide. We figured if you could coax him out over the Hudson, you could shoot him down. The altitude he was flying, he and his bombs would hit the river. They wouldn’t cross over as far as the New Jersey shore. He was only about a quarter of a mile above sea level.

There was no other point in his flight path which coincided with that possibility?

No. At the southern end of the oval-it was an oval, not a circle really-he had that other turn, a ninety-degree turn across the Wall Street district and then his figure eight over Brooklyn-but that took him across the East River, not the Hudson. The East River isn’t a river at all, it’s a saltwater channel between two islands in the Atlantic Ocean: Manhattan and Long Island. It’s very narrow-not even a quarter the width of the Hudson River. If you shot him down over the East River he might crash in Brooklyn.

I see. Go on, then.

Well, a lot of this gets pretty technical. I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can, but you’ve got to remember it took a lot less time than this for O’Brien and me to discuss it, because we used a lot of airman’s shorthand.

I appreciate that. Do try to keep it to layman’s terms if you can.

Right. First, let’s consider the flight path. You draw a half-circle from Ninety-sixth and York Avenue to a Hundred and Tenth Street and Lenox Avenue-the peak of his swing-over to Ninety-sixth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Manhattan is a bit less than two miles wide at that point. But the diameter of his circle was less than that. There’s a lot of centripetal force in a tight turn like that, and he was ending his turn above Amsterdam Avenue-which is four blocks inland from the Hudson River-because if he didn’t he’d be wide open. If his circle had been wider, we’d have been able to shoot him down while he was over West End Avenue, say, or Riverside Drive. The centripetal force would have spun both the airplane and the bombs out into the river.

I think I understand. He had to keep the diameter of his turn well inland from the shore, because otherwise, if he’d dropped his bombs, they’d have been dragged out past the shoreline by centripetal force.

Right. He was making a one hundred eighty-degree turn with a radius of something like three-quarters of a mile-a very tight turn for a big airplane; he wasn’t going very fast, of course, but he still had to bank steeply in those turns. The point is, it was a delicate and precise maneuver. The slightest miscalculation and he goes too far-and we’ve got him.

Then, you decided the thing to do was find a way to make him miscalculate.

Easier said than done, I can assure you. That’s why it would have been beautiful if we’d had low clouds drifting through up there. He flies into a cloud, you deflect his compasses and he wouldn’t know where the hell he was. Hit him at the right moment and even if he panicked and hit the bombs-away button, all he’d do would be to blow a few holes in the Hudson River.

But there weren’t any clouds at that altitude, were there?

Nope. That stumped us.

What about the matter of deflecting his compasses? That’s not easy either, is it?

Not easy, no. But possible.

At what time did you and Sergeant O’Brien propose the idea of the crop duster?

Must have been about two thirty.

A little while ago you mentioned that the call from the Federal Reserve saying the money would be at least forty-five minutes late arriving came at two seventeen. What was done then?

I reported this information to the room at large. Then I went over to Charles Ryterband and talked to him. I explained, as reasonably as I could under the circumstances, that we were doing our damnedest to comply with his demands-their demands. I said he could see that we had every reason to do so, and no reason not to. I said we were doing everything in our power, and that we were acting in good faith. I told him there would be a delay, but that it was completely beyond our control. The money would be delivered by three forty-five at the very latest, I told him. I went on like that, trying to impress the truth on him, trying to get through to the poor confused bastard. After a while I could see it was sinking in. Mr. Toombes and I-and even Mr. Azzard-all implored him to explain this development to his partner and do everything in his power to persuade his partner to grant us the extra time.

And did Ryterband do as you asked?

Yes. And, believe me, his heart was in it. I have a suspicion that he was overwhelmed, himself, by the magnitude of the crime. That he walked into the damned thing only half-awake, only half-aware of what he was doing, and that he was coming to his senses somehow. Actually it was only a few minutes after that that he broke down completely and wept.

But before that he talked to Craycroft, didn’t he?

Yes.

And got no response?

He got a response. It was negative, like all the previous ones.

Craycroft just wouldn’t budge at all?

Three o’clock was the deadline. That was that, as far as he was concerned.

What happened then?

First there was an interruption. General Adler. He came thundering across the room. He said if the son of a bitch was going to drop his bombs anyway, we might as well go ahead and shoot him down. He said that way at least we could make the choice as to where the bombs would fall.

He said that, did he?

He said we should hit the plane when it was making the turn from Central Park across upper Manhattan. That way, he said, either the bombs would swing out into the river, or if worst came to worst-these are his words-he said, “At least they’ll only hit Harlem.”

That’s verbatim?

He seemed to think some of us are more expendable than others.

I see. Well, let’s get on, shall we, to what happened after General Adler’s interruption.

Well, that was when Ryterband broke down.

Describe that, if you would?

Well, I’ve tried to sort it out in retrospect, with the aid of the backgrounding I’ve done on the two men. I can’t say I can explain it in such a way that it makes complete sense. He seemed to fall apart all of a sudden. He’d been on the verge of hysterics all afternoon, but this was something else, this was different. He was involved in something daring, something of tremendous risk-naturally he’d be nervous and scared and ready to hit the ceiling at the slightest provocation. Anybody would, especially a basically nonviolent type like Ryterband, who had no experience of crime or dealing with people on a basis of threats and extortion. It’s become apparent that Craycroft had only sprung the whole thing on him a few hours earlier that same day.

Well, they’d discussed the plan for months…

Only in theory. Only as a make-believe fantasy. You’ve talked with Mrs. Ryterband?

Yes.

Then you know Craycroft only revealed that same morning his intention to put the theory into practice. That’s what she claims, anyhow, and I see no compelling reason to disbelieve it. I think the idea must have galvanized Ryterband at first. They’d spent months rationalizing it, of course-the motives, the evil of the New York businessmen villains, the righteousness of their cause, even the peculiarly fitting use of that antique airplane.