Brian Garfield: Target Manhattan

All right, we’ll accept that as a basis.

The point is I think when Craycroft got him out of bed that morning and sprang it on him, Ryterband must have been excited as hell. It must have got his adrenaline pumping at a hell of a rate. Pure excitement carried him for quite a while. But then, up there in that crowded office with all of us trying to reason with him at once, something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. Maybe remorse. Maybe he realized Craycroft was-loony. Maybe he began to see that his love and loyalty had taken him much too far-and that it was much too late to turn back even if he wanted to. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I just don’t know for sure.

But he broke down, you say. In what way?

A lot of it was incoherent. He burst into tears. A real crying jag.

Did he say anything you could understand?

I honestly can’t remember. Nothing memorable.

But he did go into a form of hysterics? Is that a fair statement?

Yes. Of course, it terrified most of us.

Why?

He was our only contact with the guy in the airplane with the bombs. If Ryterband lost his marbles, that was the end of it.

But in the end he didn’t lose his marbles. Not in an obvious way.

No. He made an extraordinary effort of will. You could see it physically when he made this extreme attempt to pull himself together.

And succeeded.

In a way. It took quite a while. Oh, perhaps not in clock time-maybe not more than three or four minutes. But standing there, it was like watching the restoration of a statue from shattered fragments. He literally put himself back together. I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Finally he did a strange thing. He lifted his head up-he was sitting in an armchair beside the two-way radio set-and he put his hands out, very wide. And he begged our forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what?

He didn’t say.

I see.

He didn’t make any excuses for himself. He didn’t even try.

I see. Wasn’t that an abrupt change of heart?

Yes. Don’t ask me to explain it.

What happened next?

Well, it was then about two thirty. We had no more than half an hour before the money was supposed to appear, according to Craycroft’s schedule. According to ours we had an hour and a quarter, but I don’t think any of us were very sure we’d live that long. He was making a pass directly over the bank every nine minutes. I think most of us assumed he’d use the bank for one of his targets.

Even with Ryterband in the bank?

We didn’t know very much about Harold Craycroft at that juncture, Mr. Skinner. Ryterband had called him “Harold,” but we didn’t even know his last name. But we did know one thing for sure. We knew he was psycho. Moving up on the deadline, that knowledge was getting to all of us.

You mean people were getting rattled.

Getting more rattled. We’d been rattled all day, for God’s sake. (Laughter) Anyhow, by this time everybody was talking at once and nobody much was listening. I remember particularly General Adler was yelling at nobody in particular about a survey he’d worked on. It chilled me right down to my toes.

Yes, that’s right. It was some years ago we did the survey, of course, but I don’t think much has changed since then, for practical purposes.

This was an Air Force survey?

No. It was conducted by the Civil Defense office. I participated in it as liaison from Air Force-I was doing a tour of duty at McGuire, so this must have been nineteen fifty-eight. Back when the cold war was some hotter than it became later on.

What was the nature of the survey, General?

They were drawing up Civil Defense contingency plans. What to do in case of enemy attack. This particular survey was a study on various evacuation plans for New York City.

And the conclusions of the study?

Hell, I told them what the conclusions would be before they even processed the raw data. Anybody with half an eye could see that. Of the five boroughs of New York, the Bronx is the only one that’s not on an island. Evacuate four densely populated island boroughs? Think about it. How many tunnels and bridges between Manhattan and the mainland? Between Brooklyn-Queens and the mainland? Between Staten Island and the Jersey shore? Think about it.

It’s a distressing thought, I admit.

We were supposed to recommend the most efficient plan. The minute I walked in I told them there wouldn’t be enough difference between the most efficient plan and any other plan to fit up a gnat’s ass. Bomb shelters and evacuation routes. For God’s sake. Nuclear war? Christ, you take your losses and you hit back. What else are you going to do? Evacuate? But they had to do their goddamned survey.

And what was the conclusion?

To evacuate New York City and the metropolitan area to a radius consistent with then-existing mega-tonnage? Hell, Mr. Skinner, we figured the best possible time you could do it in. Know what figure we came up with? Care to guess?

No. What was it?

Two weeks.

Two weeks minimum, he was saying. To get people out of New York in case of emergency. And here we had a threat that was measured in minutes!

That was why nobody had suggested trying to clear the streets?

I’d had a brief conversation with Deputy Commissioner Toombes about that earlier. We’d decided against it. Complete news blackout. Of course most of the news agencies around the city had been calling the department, asking what the hell that plane was doing up there. We’d kept a lid on it. Given out vague stories about a publicity stunt, some Hollywood promotion. We couldn’t very well make the truth public, Mr. Skinner. We’d have had a panic on our hands. There could have been riots, looting, the whole enchilada. Screwballs on rooftops trying to shoot him down with twenty-two rifles. No, there was never any question of informing the public of the danger.

Let’s get back to the chronology of events. Ryterband broke down and begged forgiveness-when, about two thirty?

Roughly, yes.

Then what happened?

As I said, everybody was talking at once. Voices were rising, and so were tempers. Mr. Azzard was buttonholing people, trying to convince us we ought to take a chance and try shooting him down over the East River and hope he’d go down in the drink instead of hitting Brooklyn or one of the bridges. That time of day traffic piles up pretty heavy on those bridges, and some of them carry subway trains. Mr. Toombes and Mr. Rabinowitz were over in a corner arguing with General Adler at the tops of their lungs, trying to talk him out of his idea of shooting the plane down over Harlem.

What were you doing?

Listening to Sergeant O’Brien and Mr. Harris. They were the only ones in that room who were making any sense.

If you’re looking to find a hero in this mess, you’d have to pin the medal on Captain Grofeld. He was the only one doing anything constructive.

It was you and Sergeant O’Brien who proposed a plan of action, though, wasn’t it?

Man proposes, the authorities dispose. We could have proposed a dozen ideas. O’Brien’s only a sergeant, and I’m a complete outsider-a civilian carping from the sidelines. Hell, I had no business there. They let me stay, but that was accidental. Nobody was clearly in charge. Nobody had time for details like that. Maybe they were afraid I’d have broadcast the news to the press if I left the room. Maybe I was qualified to stay merely because I’d had a close-up look at the plane. Who knows? Anyway, neither I nor O’Brien had any clout to set things in motion. Grofeld had the clout-and the imagination. I mean it was outrageous, what we suggested. Nobody else would have Could we try to take it in order, Mr. Harris? I think that would make the record easier to follow.