CRIME: The Cobra Strikes

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Precisely what the S.L.A. planned to do with Patricia was anything but clear. At week's end the revolutionary group had made no demands. It had announced in its communique only that Patricia, as the daughter of a "corporate enemy of the people," had been "served an arrest warrant" and would be "executed" if anyone tried to rescue her. Hearst, pleading for his daughter's safe return, said of the kidnapers: "I don't want to prosecute them." Under a newly modified California law, the death penalty is mandatory for kidnapers whose victims are slain.

Law-enforcement authorities, Including a team of FBI kidnap-case specialists flown in from round the nation, speculated that the S.L.A. demands would include the release of two men, Joseph Remiro, 27, and Russell Little, 24, who were arrested in January in connection with Foster's murder and are awaiting trial. Though police candidly admit that they still know almost nothing about the S.L.A.'s goals or even its size, the group's propaganda is full of hard-core revolutionary cant. The S.L.A. emblem is a seven-headed cobra.

The Hearst kidnaping stirred panic in Berkeley, a college town that was a seething center of student militancy in the 1960s but has calmed down markedly in recent years. Dozens of students lined up in an administration building to yank their cards from an open central directory of names and addresses. Moreover, the abduction heightened the fear that has gripped the Bay Area since two young blacks gunned down five whites, apparently picked at random, two weeks ago. Despite the biggest manhunt in San Francisco's history, those killers are still at large.