Target Manhattan

O’Brien (Cont’d)

I said, “Captain, you’ve got to understand this is a wild-hair idea. I wouldn’t give it more than one chance in fifty.” Captain Grofeld said that was a hell of a lot better odds than anything else we had right then. He said we’d better get on with it.

And then?

I told him what we’d need. Some of it was technical equipment-radio gear-that would take some mighty fast scrounging. The rest of it-the crop duster and all-was probably easier to get. But I scribbled a list for him.

Do you have that list, by any chance?

No, I’m sorry. It got lost in the shuffle somewhere. Probably got thrown out. I could give you a pretty good idea, though. We needed three portable transmitters that could put out taped code signals on the radio-navigation and LORAN bands. We needed a large helicopter-something fast enough to keep up with the bomber. Of course, the bomber wasn’t making much speed. Craycroft was conserving fuel, and in any case he had to keep his speed down to make those tight turns over Manhattan. He wasn’t making more than maybe a hundred and thirty miles an hour-he was throttled right down. We figured a chopper could keep up with that. And a crop duster. Actually my first idea was to use one of those midair-refueling jet tankers the Air Force has. But we’d have played hell trying to find one in time, and Jack Harris pointed out you could do the same job with a little crop duster, and of course he was right.

By crop duster you mean a small, light airplane equipped to spray chemicals on farm fields.

Yes, sir, that’s right. I knew where we could lay our hands on one. The New Jersey Mosquito Control Commission uses them to spray the swamps around Hackensack and Secaucus. They’ve got several planes at the Newark and Teterboro airfields.

So your list included three transmitters, one large helicopter, and a crop-duster plane. Anything else?

Yes, sir. Two things. A large portable electromagnet-the kind they use for picking scrap metal out of dumps-and several barrels of paint. We even suggested a specific brand of paint that we happened to know was thick and had a tendency to adhere to most surfaces instantly on contact. The color was immaterial.

Coming on it cold, Captain Grofeld must have thought that was a rather strange list.

Well, we’d told him what we had in mind, sir. The problem wasn’t in obtaining the things we wanted-they were all fairly common items. The problem was to do it fast and get all of it to the right place at the right time. The biggest headache was the transmitter codes-the tapes that put out the RN and LORAN signals. We had to use battery-powered equipment that put out weak signals, something that wouldn’t foul up all the air traffic in the metropolitan area pattern. Traffic had been diverted and grounded by the Civil Defense and the Port Authority airports, but still there could have been a lot of planes within radio range, using those navigating beacons. It was a headache trying to figure out where we could get low-power transmitters that would put out signals on the right frequencies, and figuring out where we could get RN and LORAN-coded signal tapes to feed into them.

Wasn’t it Mr. Harris who proposed a solution to that?

Yes, sir. We were stumped until he pointed out that we didn’t have to actually fool the instruments with fake beacons. All we really had to do was jam them. Put out any kind of signal at all, so long as it was on the right frequency and would interrupt his reception of signals from ground beacons.

That made it much easier, then.

Yes, sir. It became possible to do the job with three battery transmitters-any kind of transmitters that had variable frequency controls. We sent a cop down to a ham-radio shop and he had them within fifteen minutes.