Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (4 page)

“Hi. Welcome aboard.”

Flo looks at the name on the ticket.

Cooper, Dan. His suit is dark and his raincoat is black. He is holding a dark attaché case. He shuffles into the cabin and sits in the last row, 18, starboard side. The row is empty. He places the attaché case on the seat next to the window. He keeps his raincoat on.

“Hi. Welcome aboard.”

Gregory, Robert. The passenger is out of breath. He ran to catch the flight, almost missed it. He sits across from Cooper in 18C, aisle seat, port side. Gregory is the last passenger to board. He is part owner of a paint company in Seattle.

The engines turn. The captain is speaking over the intercom.

“Uh, ladies and gentlemen …”

Flo pulls the lever, and the aftstairs bend and creak and tuck themselves into the fuselage. Located in the rear of the plane, these stairs are a signature feature on the Stubby, as the Northwest stews call the Boeing 727. Pilots do not require a boarding gate or airway to load passengers. They don’t even need an airport. Passengers can board or deplane directly onto the tarmac. The aftstairs run on a simple hydraulic system. Pull the lever inside the jet, the stairs descend. A pull in the other direction, the aftstairs retract. The engines on the Stubby are so powerful and the design so nimble, stewardesses joke they’ll land behind every tree to pick up passengers.

The model is popular with airlines. The aftstairs allow the 727 to land in small and mid-size cities that have not yet upgraded their airports. Or in jungle fields. In the mid-1960s, the Central Intelligence
Agency relied on Stubbies to conduct secret missions over Laos. Through CIA front groups like Air America Inc., the aftstairs were used by operatives to drop cargo. “Soft rice” was food. “Hard rice” was arms. It wasn’t only gear. The CIA also used the Stubby to deploy American operatives who parachuted off the aftstairs and down into the jungles of Indochina.

He looks at Flo. She is ready to take Dan Cooper’s drink order. What will it be?

“Bourbon and Seven-Up,” he says.

The price is a dollar. He hands her a twenty.

“Anything smaller?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I can’t give you change until I finish,” she says.

She moves up the aisle. In row 12, Pollart, the trucking company owner, is talking with his lawyer, Labissoniere. The trucking business is suffering in the recession. Pollart is now using his refrigerated trucks to ship blood. The samples come from the junkies at the Seattle missions, who sell their blood for drug money.

Pollart feels a lurch. The wheels of Northwest 305 are moving. He hears a stewardess’s voice. It’s Alice Hancock, the flight attendant in first class.

“All carry-on baggage must be stowed under the seat or in the overhead compartments,” she says. “Please check your seatbelts in preparation for takeoff.”

At five two, Alice Hancock barely passed Northwest’s height requirement. Her hair is chestnut and bobbed. You look like Mrs. Spock, her friends tell her. She has soft eyes and speaks in a voice that is playful and light and trails into a honey-dipped giggle.

She recently got engaged. Jim, her husband-to-be, is a Northwest pilot. He is also flying to Seattle, on another flight. Thanksgiving dinner
will be at Jim’s uncle’s house in Seattle. The uncle has a hothouse. He raises orchids. Alice is eager to see them.

She goes through the preflight announcements. Flo is done serving drinks. She stands next to Alice and inhales and exhales into a dummy oxygen mask. The captain is on the intercom again.

“Uh, we’ve been cleared to taxi, so if the cabin attendants will take their seats, we’ll be on our way.”

A front is moving in. The reports are calling for sleet, fog, snow, and rain. Some Thanksgiving, the pilots think. At least for now, the weather is clear. The sun has come out from the clouds and casts a beam of light against the aluminum belly of the jet and N467US, its registration number.

Inside the cockpit, Capt. William Scott and copilot Bill Rataczak go over the takeoff checklist once again.

“Window heat?”

“High.”

“Pitot heat?”

“On, checked.”

Flight 305 is a milk run. The route made Northwest Orient. When the airlines were controlled by the post office, the route across the empty northern lands of the country was barren and dangerous. Planes just disappeared. Flying through mountain crevices, with gusts of freezing wind sweeping down off the plains of Canada, Northwest pilots proved (with the navigational help of a sheep herder and Amelia Earhart) that a direct route from Minneapolis to the Pacific Northwest was safe. Now, decades later, the airline flies to Seattle across the northern Midwest each day.

This morning, the first stop was Great Falls, South Dakota, then Missoula, Montana, then Spokane, in eastern Washington, then over the Cascades to Portland. The last leg is Portland to Seattle.

Harold Anderson, flight engineer, monitors the wall of instruments behind the pilots as they prepare for their final takeoff. Other than talking about sports, the custom of most airline pilots is to stash a
Playboy
magazine in the cockpit. Miss October 1971 has filled her cleavage with beads and draped her torso in a tasseled buckskin bikini. Miss November 1971 is kneeling on a bear rug, her skin as white as the snow piled up in the ski cabin window behind her. She has doll lashes, and between her legs, draped from her belly just so, dangles a red scarf.

NAME:
Danielle De Vabre, 36,25,34, Montreal, Quebec.

AMBITIONS:
To become an airline stewardess.

IDEAL MAN:
Age does not matter, as long as he has character.

Northwest Capt. William Scott has character. He has brown and gray-flecked hair and combs it full. His cheeks are jowly and smooth. Everyone calls him Scotty, even his kids.

Up close, the captain’s body tells the stories he won’t. He’s missing his ring finger. He was working in his garage when his band saw snagged onto his wedding ring and lopped the finger off. Some muscles and ligaments never healed. His middle finger went so stiff he can’t move it. Even when he’s sleeping, Scotty looks like he’s flipping people off.

Like many of Northwest’s senior airline pilots, Scotty learned to fly during the war. He was assigned the least desirable route. The Hump, historians called his mission. Operation Vomit, the pilots called it.

In Allied freighters, Scotty and other Hump pilots lugged cargo over the Himalayas to the Chinese. In the mountain labyrinths, gusts of wind would blow the freighter planes into rock walls. Temperatures in the cockpit dropped to forty below. The navigation systems on the planes were so poor that pilots drew their own maps. The best way to get to China through the Himalayas, Hump pilots said, was to follow the glimmer of airplane wreckage below. Down in the valleys, the charred parts of Allied planes were used by nomads as shrines.

Coolies, laborers hired by the Chinese army, believed the wind from the propellers of the huge American cargo planes had magical powers. To rid themselves of evil spirits, they planted their faces in front of the giant engines, and many were fatally sucked in.

Scotty’s base was in Assam, India. He slept in a
basha
, or bamboo hut, and kept a panther as a pet.

Supplies ran thin, especially during monsoon season. Electric wires doubled as shoelaces. Shoelaces doubled as hat straps. Pilots hunted for wild pigs and cooked the carcasses on makeshift spits.

Scotty doesn’t talk about India. He is quiet and reserved, rarely speaks at the dinner table. Says what needs to be said. That’s all.

His kids would like him to say more. A few weeks ago, Scotty’s daughter Catherine asked him to come to her high school. Catherine wanted Scotty to talk about what it was like to be a Northwest Orient captain, but she worried. She knew Scotty did not like to speak in public. Would he clam up and bore her friends?

Scotty arrived in his Northwest uniform and cap. He waited for the questions.

“Ever been hijacked?” a student asked him.

“Ah, never,” Scotty said.

The wheels of the jet are moving across the tarmac. In first class, Alice takes her seat near the front door. In the rear, Flo and Tina sit next to each other and wait for a month of flying and living together to finally be over.

The tension started their first night in the hotel room. Flo was getting ready for bed. Tina asked her a question.

“Are you a Christian?”

Flo was taken aback. Where were they, church? Flo also noticed that Tina carried a Bible with her in the hotel and on flights. Tina would say things to her like, “Have you been saved?” Tina also spoke
to passengers about Christianity, Flo noticed. Was Tina some kind of undercover missionary? Was she deployed by the Church to cleanse the airlines of sin?

Twenty-eight minutes to Seattle … Twenty-eight minutes to Thanksgiving vacation. Soon Flo will be in the hotel room, and the hot scalding water of the shower will massage her itchy scalp. By this time tomorrow, Flo will have flown back to Arkansas to reunite with her ma and pa in Fordyce. After Thanksgiving dinner, she will cruise to the Dixie Dog with her old friends.

“Miss?”

A man is talking to her. She looks up. It is the same man who ordered a bourbon and Seven. He is holding a white envelope in his hands. Flo takes the envelope and drops it into the pit of her purse. She’ll look at the love note later. Or never.

The jet moves faster along the runway. The fuselage shudders. Northwest 305 will be in the air any moment.

“Miss?”

Him again. Mr. Bourbon and Seven.

“I think you better have a look at that note.”

She reaches into her purse. She retrieves the envelope.

The Northwest jet barrels down the runway. Seventy knots. Eighty knots.

In the cabin behind the pilots, passengers cross themselves and close their eyes. Some grip the armrests bracing for liftoff, hoping the jet doesn’t explode.

Flo opens the note. She can see the words are written on a thick piece of paper. The ink is black. The words look printed by a felt-tip pen. She can see the curls of the letters—neat, crisp. The words are pretty to look at. Is this man an artist? She looks into his eyes. She reads the words again.

MISS
,

I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me
.

August 25,
2007 New York, New York

His eyes are not dark and demonic. They are soft and compassionate. Sad. No, tragic. They are the eyes of a loner, a man on the lam from his own secrets.

I have compiled my own dossier on Kenny Christiansen. I’ve spoken and written to his brother Lyle every day for the past month or so, and now I have my own collection of Christiansen family photos.

Here Kenny is, maybe eight years old, curling up to a cat and gazing into its eyes and petting its fur. Here in black and white is the family farmhouse outside of Morris where Kenny and Lyle grew up, and around it there is snow and barren flatlands. Here, another black and white: Kenny in his Northwest Orient uniform, wearing a captain’s hat as if he is the pilot. His legs are short and his arms are long and dangle below his waist. Here is his passport photo. He wears a crew-knit sweater like a high school social studies teacher. And here, in color, is the front door of 18406 Old Sumner Buckley Highway. It’s a small house, slightly larger than a trailer. Its country door is painted blood red, and above it is an American eagle clutching a quiver of arrows in its talons. One panel in the front door is missing. In its place is a black, medieval-looking grate. That way, Kenny could see who was at his door without opening it. It’s creepy.