The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  The Soviet Union’s Pravda was unusually restrained, merely commenting that it “hopes the American people will remain calm until the unfortunate mystery is solved, not trying to incite harmful suspicion and making wild accusations concerning alleged ‘Red’ plots.” It praised Haines as a “man of good intentions” and expressed hope for his safety.

  In the United States press comment was comparable to the thoughts expressed by Pravda. Thursday’s Washington Star, in an editorial, summed up the general press agreement that public calmness was needed—along with some fast and effective detective work by the FBI and CIA. Said the Star:

  Acting President Madigan’s plea for reserved judgment must be accepted by every thoughtful American. It will take will power and self-discipline, for the very elements of this incredible mystery lend themselves to wild rumors and panicky speculation

  In turn, it is incumbent on the Acting President to keep the public informed of all developments. Mature restraint can be kept alive only by frankness and a willingness to share with the American people the truth as it is pried out of the sun-crusted mud of an Arizona gorge, or perhaps out of a twisted mind that may have forged history’s most fantastic plot.

  The quick, total solution of these twin tragedies of sudden death and mystery is essential, no matter what motives, reasons, explanations or even skeletons are unearthed in the process. Any attempt to hide or evade the truth will merely feed the seeds of unfounded suspicion and fan the flames of hatred in an atmosphere already reeking of a threatened atomic holocaust.

  This must be understood by the leaders of the people as well as the people themselves. The November 22, 1963, tragedy of Dallas at least had the one saving grace of finality, which helped preserve a nation’s unity in a time of sorrow. John Kennedy was dead, and Lyndon Johnson was President. Now there is no finality, merely mystery and uncertainty, and both will test the courage and understanding of citizen and government official alike until the world gets the answer to the question: “Where is Jeremy Haines?”

  The Star’s editorial was read too late by those lawmakers who had insisted on rushing into print with demands for special investigations, probes and, above all, immediate action. Among the measures quickly introduced were: Seven bills calling for special joint Senate-House committees to investigate the entire affair.

  One bill demanding that ultimatums be served on Red China and Russia pledging war “if either or both are proved responsible for this crime.”

  One resolution urging a special congressional investigation of the Amalgamated Condor, and another tossing in the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force along with the Condor.

  Two bills seeking an outright ban on all flight operations “in or near thunderstorms, to include scheduled airline flights as well as military aircraft.”

  Neither the FBI nor CIA had time to ponder any congressional advice. Both were swamped with calls from citizens swearing they had seen President Haines on various occasions after the crash. The locations involved virtually every major city between California and New York. The specific sites varied from a brothel in New Orleans to a Catholic Church in Albuquerque where, the caller assured the FBI, “the President was weeping as he prayed.”

  Haines was reported having been seen registering at a Phoenix motel “with some flashy brunette” and also, on the same day, attending the Chicago Cubs-Los Angeles Dodgers game at Wrigley Field. It would not have surprised the FBI to have someone claim he saw the President playing second base in that game.

  The stock market tobogganed, rallied, then faltered anew into a steady decline.

  An angry audience in a Baltimore night club booed an alleged comedian off the stage when he cracked, “Everyone wants to know where President Haines is—hell, he’s probably off fishing somewhere with Judge Crater.”

  A man jumped out of his room on the forty-eighth floor of a New York hotel. The suicide note he left behind read: “If the President had the courage to leave this sick world, so do I.”

  The television networks resumed their normal schedules for the first time since Air Force One was reported missing. But NBC judiciously canceled a variety show which included a comedy skit about a fictitious bachelor President being harassed by matrimony-bound women.

  The American Committee for Truth about UFOs, duly noting the failure to find the President’s body and the suspicion that he was not aboard Air Force One, issued another statement suggesting that Jeremy Haines was kidnaped by beings from another planet. It described this as “the only logical solution to the mystery,” a claim which won quick acceptance from irreverent IPS deskman Sam Foley. “It figures,” he remarked jauntily to Les Butler. “We should get a ransom message from outer space any time now. I even know what it’ll say.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Butler, “what will the message from Mars say?”

  “ ‘We’ve taken your leader,’ ” said Mr. Foley.

  All the living ex-Presidents wired Madigan their assurances of support. A great many Americans went to church and shared anew their thoughts, their fears and their prayers for Jeremy Haines with the God each worshiped.

  And at the bottom of a metal-littered gorge in the middle of an Arizona desert, the blistered hands of weary men continued to dig for a body they wanted to find, yet a body they were afraid to find, and a body they half suspected was not even there.

  Rod Pitcher obtained clearance into the Andrews control tower Friday morning by the simple process of resorting to an occasionally necessary journalistic vice. He lied.

  The prevarication was committed on the unsuspecting person of Charles Alexander. The FAA public information chief might have given Rod clearance anyway, but Pitcher was taking no chances on handing any government official an inkling that IPS was snooping into the Air Force One mystery.

  “New York’s suggested I do a feature story on the Andrews tower,” he told Alexander on the phone. “Kinda get the feel and spirit of the place. What’s the chances of my getting in there today?”

  “Don’t see why not,” the FAA man said pleasantly. “Dennis Ripps is the tower chief on the day shift. I’ll give him a buzz and tell him you’re coming. What time can you make it?”

  “Let’s see, it’s a quarter to nine now. I’ll leave the office at nine and it’ll take me about thirty minutes to drive out there.”

  “Okay, Pitch. Have fun and say hi to the Ripper for me.”

  “The who?”

  “The Ripper. Ripps hates the name Dennis and everyone calls him Ripper. Personally, I have a strong idea he thinks it makes him sound like a sex fiend.”

  The tower chief turned out to resemble a sex fiend about as closely as Santa Claus. Dennis Ripps was a tall, gray-haired, grandfatherly type with friendly but tired eyes that carried indented circles underneath, so pronounced that they looked like the sun-protection lampblack worn by football players. He had the unruffled calm so emblematic of air traffic control men, with the God-given ability to keep tempers and emotions under a tight rein in the antiseptic pressure cookers where they labored. The Andrews facility was like all others Pitcher had seen, as spotlessly clean as an operating room but with the same quiet, hidden tensions that thicken the atmosphere of life-or-death surgery.

  Ripps welcomed the reporter with such cordiality that Pitcher had a momentary pang of conscience. “Alexander told me you were coming. Glad to see you. This your first time in a control tower?”

  “First time in Andrews. I’ve seen the one at National and I’ve been in the Dulles tower too.”

  “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” Ripps philosophized. “What exactly did you have in mind? Just wanna stand around and observe for a while, or do you have any specific questions?”

  On the way out to the airport, Pitcher had composed what seemed to be a logical reason for examining the tower’s departures logs for that memorable night. He knew he was tiptoeing close to security matters but the Andrews tower was operated by FAA, not the Air Force. He figured a civili
an like Ripps would give him access to the logs with far less suspicion than a military man.

  “Well, I’m interested mostly in doing a mood story . . . re-creating what the tower was like the night the President’s plane disappeared. It’ll be part of a layout we’re doing on the Air Force One business—for example, what went on at the White House that night, what the Vice President was doing, that sort of stuff.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Ripps said. “I don’t know what I can tell you; I wasn’t on duty when the plane took off. It might be better for you to talk to the night tower chief.”

  “I thought I could do that later,” Pitcher explained casually. “Right now, I was wondering what other kind of traffic you were handling before and after the take-off. This would let me do a kind of running play-by-play. Then I’d like to just watch you fellows work for a few minutes and get the feel of the operation . . . some of the dialogue and so forth.”

  “Well,” the tower chief mused doubtfully, “I suppose I could show you the logs for that night. Pretty cut and dried, though. We just keep a list of the arrivals and departures. Time, Greenwich clock, of course, type of aircraft, aircraft serial numbers, where the plane’s going or coming from. That what you want?”

  “That’ll be fine for a starter,” Pitcher said, praying he was succeeding in corking up his eagerness.

  “We keep two twenty-four-hour lists,” Ripps said. “One for arrivals and the other for departures. They run from 7 A.M. one day to 7 A.M. the next. Which do you want first?”

  “Oh, I guess the departures,” Pitcher replied, again with a studied effort at assumed indifference.

  The tower chief opened a filing cabinet sandwiched between two steel desks and brought out a folder. “Here’s the date we want. Why don’t you sit at one of these desks and go through this stuff at your leisure? I’ll go back to work while you look it over. If you have any questions, just yell.”

  “Fine,” the reporter said. Ripps walked away. Pitcher opened the folder and began reading the flight departure list. He took out a notebook and occasionally stopped to make an entry, strictly for camouflage purposes. If Ripps or anyone else in the tower should glance over, they would see him ostensibly at work on his “play-by-play.”

  Toward the bottom of the fourth departure sheet, he found a line that shot a chill through his backbone.

  2202 AF-1 CONDOR N-20081 Palm Springs, Cal.

  After that line, he found departure information on only eleven other planes. Five twin-engine Convairs, an Aero Commander, a couple of Constellations, an F-104 fighter and two jet trainers. No long-range jet equipment, Pitcher thought disappointedly. He again went over the departures preceding Air Force One. Nothing had left Andrews that entire day, night or early the following morning that remotely resembled an aircraft capable of a Moscow flight. The only possibility was a Boeing KC-135, a military version of the 707, but the Air Force used this jet as a tanker or a rather spartan transport. Its fuselage, in fact, was windowless and a President was hardly likely to fly all the way to Russia in such uncomfortable accommodations. Besides, Wright Patterson Field near Dayton, Ohio, was listed as the destination for this KC-135.

  Maybe Haines took off for Moscow from some other area airport. Dulles? Baltimore’s Friendship? That was too farfetched. The President wouldn’t use a civil airport if he wanted secrecy. Andrews would provide the maximum security, and it had to be Andrews or nothing. It seemed to be nothing, Pitcher concluded, and Gunther was going to be one disconsolate news superintendent with his Moscow hunch fairly well shattered.

  He removed the arrivals sheets from the folder, more to keep looking busy than in expectation of finding anything. He reflected ruefully that he was still going through the motions of make-believe research when the story he was really after had just gone flat.

  Idly, with no enthusiasm and with a feeling of pointless boredom, he perused the arrivals. He was about to put the sheets back in the folder when his eye caught the final entry on the last sheet.

  05:09 MATS SF 35 BOEING N-26000 Minneapolis

  There was something about that aircraft serial number that rang an alarm bell of familiarity. Something that prodded the reflexes of his memory.

  “Mr. Ripps, could you come over here a second?”

  The tower chief obliged quickly.

  “This line here, Mr. Ripps. N-26000. Why the hell would that number stick in my mind? Does it mean anything to you?”

  Ripps chuckled. “It should. You covered presidential flights before?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “That’s why you remembered that number, Mr. Pitcher. N-26000 was the old Air Force One. Boeing 707. The predecessor of the Condor. It’s still part of the presidential fleet. They use it for VIPs and various bigwigs. I think the Secretary of State flew it to Paris a couple of months ago. Could have been in Minnesota for fifty different reasons. Training flight, probably. That ‘SF’ stands for special flight and special could mean anything, like hauling a few congressmen around on a junket. Or training, like I said.”

  “The departure logs I just finished looking at, Mr. Ripps. Are they complete?”

  “Complete? What do you mean, complete?”

  “Do they list every plane that leaves Andrews? For example, suppose there was some kind of a top-security flight, one the Air Force was trying to keep strictly hush-hush. Would that be included on the list?” Pitcher realized he might be pushing Ripps far enough to make him distrustful, but it was a calculated risk that had to be taken.

  The tower chief, however, apparently suspected nothing. “No, I’ve been here for thirteen years and I never heard of the Air Force putting any flight under a security wrap. Not even any presidential flight. The same thing’s true of arrivals. When a plane lands or takes off at this base, we log it.”

  Pitcher replaced the arrivals logs in the folder. “I wish the President had been using N-26000 that night,” he said. “Maybe the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. Good plane, that 707.”

  Ripps nodded agreement. “Get what you needed out of the logs?”

  “Well, as you said, they’re pretty routine. Interesting, though. If you don’t mind, I’ll watch your crew operate for a little while.”

  The aviation editor stayed what he trusted was a convincing twenty minutes of observation, then thanked Ripps and left. Strike-out, he meditated. Yet what he had dug up on the Senator Haines angle still looked promising. Enough to earn him mention in the weekly IPS critique written and distributed by the New York bureau. It was a mimeographed competitive report on the previous week’s major stories, praising or criticizing the other bureaus for their performances and tabulating how many newspapers used IPS on the bigger stories compared to UPI and AP.

  The IPS Deskman, the report was called. Most IPS staffers considered it purely subjective, guilty of the worst possible grandstand quarterbacking, hindsight and second-guessing. Particularly when a bureau was being lambasted for losing the play to the opposition. Naturally, when New York was being complimentary, the Deskman assumed all the truthful and lofty aspects of the Bible.

  Even as Rod Pitcher returned to Washington via the Suitland Parkway, he was thinking what the Deskman would say—provided Damon actually used his Haines story. Something along the lines of “Washington came up with the best beat of the week, a bell-ringing exclusive on the possibility that the unidentified body found aboard Air Force One was the President’s brother. Great job of reporting and writing by WA’s aviation expert, Rod Pitcher.”

  He thought about the proud moment when he could take a copy of this as yet unwritten but positive tribute to his journalistic prowess home to show Nancy, and he wallowed in the delicious self-hypnosis of daydreaming all the way downtown.

  Malcolm Jones found himself thinking about the President as he entered the FBI headquarters at Ninth and Pennsylvania for his appointment with Reardon. It was his veneration toward Haines that had prompted his call to the FBI chief and, as he admitted this, he suffered a simultaneous co
nfession of disloyalty to IPS. He hadn’t even told Damon or DeVarian about this visit. He merely informed the switchboard that he had some important personal business to attend to and would be “out of pocket” for about an hour.

  It was one minute before ten when he entered Reardon’s outer office and gave his name to the receptionist.

  It was forty-eight minutes later when he left the FBI Building and hailed a taxi for the White House. A rather harrowing forty-eight minutes, Jones thought. At times he had the impression that Reardon was examining him with the detached absorption of an entomologist peering at an impaled bug. Malcolm Jones was something of a glib talker, but in front of the FBI chief he had groped for words and phrases with all the uneasiness of an inarticulate suitor trying desperately to blurt forth a message of love.

  Reardon had been pleasant enough, but it was a fragile Christmas-ornament kind of pleasantness that Jones knew could have been shattered with his first utterance of an unwisely chosen word or the wrong inflection.

  The cabby wove skillfully through Washington’s late morning traffic and decided to indulge in that form of editorial oratory aimed at captive audiences by such citizenry as taxi drivers, barbers and sports fans. “Look at all these goddamned cars. Everybody in this goddamned town tries to drive to lunch at this time of day. Why the hell can’t they walk to a restaurant—or take a cab?” Malcolm Jones wasn’t listening. He still was mulling over the conclusion of his conference with Paul Reardon.

  “Thank you very much for coming, Mr. Jones. It’s possible we might have to take the course you suggest. By the way, are you married?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I hope you don’t talk in your sleep.”

  CHAPTER TEN