Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper Read Online Free PDF Page B

the toilets. He also drove a bus that carried Northwest stewardesses and pilots to Quonset huts, which were used as sleeping quarters.
    Kenny worked on Schmoo for five years. Somehow, he then managed to find even more isolating work. In the summer of 1955, he left for Bikini, a remote island in the South Pacific.
    The government was testing hydrogen bombs on Bikini. Villagers had lost their hair. The radiation caused vomiting, diarrhea. Womencould not get pregnant. Layers of ash covered the houses and turned the drinking water yellow. During testing, villagers saw two suns as bombs exploded in the sky. Debris turned the afternoon black. Kenny worked here as a telephone operator.
    He was then rehired by Northwest as a flight attendant and for the next three decades as a purser. He kept to himself, a ghost in the cabin of Northwest planes.
    Through the union, I found pursers who worked with Kenny. “He was almost invisible,” Harry Honda told me. “If you asked somebody on his plane who was the purser on that flight, they couldn’t tell you, that’s how quiet this guy was.” Lyle Gehring flew with Kenny, too. “You ask people and say ‘Ken Christiansen’ and they’ll say, ‘Who?’?”
    When Kenny was diagnosed with cancer, in 1991, his family suspected the source was the radiation he suffered on Bikini Island. When his condition deteriorated, he retired from Northwest. Kenny was so sick he asked his family to spend his last days with him in Bonney Lake. One day, in the hospital, his eyes weak and his lips dry, Kenny motioned to his young brother.
    Lyle rushed to Kenny’s bedside.
    “There’s something you should know,” Kenny said. “But I can’t tell you!”
    “I don’t care what it is,” Lyle said. “You don’t have to tell me about it. We all love you.”
    Now, almost two decades later, Lyle has been ruminating about what Kenny said on his deathbed. Was he about to confess to the Cooper hijacking? Did Lyle deny his brother a chance to clear his conscience? What was Kenny trying to tell him? What was his secret?

November 24, 1971
Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305
    The jet banks and climbs. In first class, passenger Floyd Kloepfer, an electronics specialist, pushes his nose against the window and looks down at the Columbia River. Explorers Lewis and Clark paddled through here in canoes, marveling in journals about Native American women wading in the waters, wearing only “a truss or pece [sic] of leather tied around them at the hips and drawn tite [sic] between their legs.”
    Across the border into Washington the elevation changes. The sandy river banks of the Columbia turn into a storybook forest with trees as tall as buildings. These forests are where the nation’s logging industry was based, where miners searched for gold, where Bigfoot lives. One remote area is called the Dark Divide. Outside of Alaska, the Dark Divide is the largest stretch of uninhabited land in the country. There are no street signs, no roads. Backpackers and hikers disappear trying to find a way out. The land is so dense and untouched it is said to possess a brain of its own.
    Kloepfer now watches the Columbia River shrink into a stream. He looks at the dark clouds and worries about the weather. Tonight he and his wife are driving to her folks’ place across the border in Canada. In the slushy rain, it will be a long drive in his Plymouth Fury.
    Some Thanksgiving, he thinks.
    The passenger next to him is drunk. The guy’s been drinking whiskey since South Dakota. Kloepfer looks over the seat behind him and finds the sergeant he was talking to earlier. The sergeant is in uniform. He is coming home from Vietnam. He will be spending Thanksgiving with his family, the first time since he shipped out.
    The sergeant is not alone. All throughout the fall, soldiers have been lingering in airports and bus stations. Two weeks ago, President Nixon promised that an additional 45,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam would be coming