The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  Although a desk trainmaster doesn’t monitor every call that comes in to his dispatchers, nevertheless he must possess a sort of psychic divining rod that helps him smell out serious trouble before the dispatcher apprizes him of it. Frank Correll’s sixth sense had cued him in to awareness that there was a bad problem with Pelham One Two Three. After telling Grand Central Tower to get the lead out, he took over from the dispatcher, trying to raise the train from his own console, riding the edge of his chair, his head forward of his body, like a snake in striking position, aimed at the boom mike that curled out of the console.

  But even he was not prepared for the nature of the problem when Pelham One Two Three at last came through, and he lapsed into a short but uncharacteristic silence. Then he let out a roar, and all over the vast area of the Command Center men broke into grins. Even among desk trainmasters—who are traditionally the glamorous, hard-bitten, mercurial stars of the Transit Authority and who act their role to the hilt—Frank Correll was famous. Thin, wiry, impatient, loudmouthed, charged with a superfluity of energy, he was perfectly cast for the part. And so nobody, hearing his outburst, had reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

  Correll calmed down or, at least, banked the fires of his temper and said quietly, or what passed for quietly with him, “I heard what you said. What do you mean taken the train? Explain. No. Wait a second. Also, you cut the power. Why did you cut the power, and why haven’t you reported the reason to Power Central? Come in, and you better make it good.”

  “Do you have a pencil, Desk Trainmaster?”

  “What kind of shithead question is that? Is this the motorman?”

  “It’s not the motorman. Listen to me carefully. Pay attention. Do you have a pencil?”

  “Who the hell is this? Are you authorized to be in the motorman’s cab? Identify yourself.”

  “Listen to me, Desk Trainmaster, I don’t want to repeat myself. Listen. Your train has been taken by a group of heavily armed men. The power has been cut, as you know. So has the train. We are in the first car of the train, and we are holding sixteen passengers and the motorman hostage. We will not hesitate to kill all of them if it becomes necessary. We’re desperate men, Desk Trainmaster. Over.”

  Correll cut out and hit his six button, which, among other things, automatically cut him in to the Transit Police. His hands were shaking with anger.

  CLIVE PRESCOTT

  One of the MTA chairman’s secretaries phoned downstairs to Lieutenant Clive Prescott to inform him that the distinguished visitors from Boston, back from their lunch with the chairman, were at this moment on the elevator, descending from the thirteenth floor to the second, and please to remember that they were personal friends of the chairman and therefore were to receive the highest order of preferential treatment.

  “I’ll have the red carpet out as soon as I finish vacuuming it,” Lieutenant Prescott said. He hung up and went out to the information desk guarding the approaches to Transit Police Headquarters—or the Nerve Center, as the cops themselves liked to call it—and waited for the elevator to discharge its precious cargo.

  It pleased him perversely, watching their reaction as he stepped forward to greet them, that they were not quite able to conceal their surprise at his being something different from what they had expected—a shade different, he thought with delicate irony. But they recovered smoothly (he was forced to admit) and shook his hand without any sign of distaste or restraint. After all, they overlooked no bets, and—who could tell?—someday he might move to Boston, where a black man’s vote, however regretful the fact, counted exactly as much in the ballot box as anyone else’s.

  They were politicians, and Irish—and what else was new?—one guarded, one hearty. Their names were Maloney (hearty) and Casey (guarded). Their almost identical sharp blue eyes took in, not entirely without prejudice, Lieutenant Prescott’s handsome sharkskin suit (slight suppression, high center vent), boldly striped red-white-black shirt, Countess Mara tie, tapered Italian shoes (fifty-five dollars—on sale); and their little snub noses inhaled the fragrance of Canöe. Their handshake was at the same time crisp and warm—the grip of men who shook hands as a way of life.

  “We’re a bit crowded here, you’ll find….” But Prescott let the complaint drop. They would be as bored hearing it as he would be making it. More briskly, he said, “The brass has its offices through there….” A vague gesture. “That one is Chief Costello’s….” The visitors exchanged a swift glance that Prescott read as: Well, praise God for Costello, an honest Irish name; it would be too much if the top man also turned out to be colored. “This way, please, gentlemen.”

  It was protocol to go first to Operations, where visitors signed the logbook, but Prescott decided to reverse the order. With a little luck, what had been a quiet morning in Operations might turn exciting. Yesterday there had been a bomb scare on an IND station (it had turned out to be a false alarm), and Operations had been steaming with calls to and from patrolmen searching the station and tracks. It would have made a good show for the visitors. He steered them away from Operations toward Teletype and the Roll Call Unit.

  Relaxed, a casual lecturer to an elite class of two, Prescott stood in the teletype area and explained the clattering machines. “We’re wired up with the New York Police Department going and coming. We get all their calls on teletype, and they get ours. Two separate machines handle MABSTOA—the city-owned bus lines—and the Service Division.”

  The visitors looked sleepy. Prescott didn’t blame them. An uninterested speaker makes for an uninterested listener. He had done this bit so many times that it sickened him. Being a desk cop, with too many public relations functions, was like being no cop at all. But he was being paid for it. And so, he thought with an inward sigh, let’s trot out the gee whiz facts.

  “Perhaps you’d like to have some background on the department.” He paused, and in the silence the NYPD teletype clicked steadily and placidly. “As you may know, the strength of the TA police force is approximately thirty-two hundred men, or slightly more than ten percent of the strength of the NYPD. That may seem small, but actually we rank among the first twenty-five police forces in the entire country. Our beat is a vast one—two hundred and thirty-seven miles of track, four hundred and seventy-six stations, about sixty percent of it underground. You look surprised?”

  Neither man had looked the least bit surprised, but now, to oblige, they contrived to do so.

  “Actually,” Prescott said, “there are two hundred sixty-five underground stations and one hundred seventy-three elevated….”

  He paused, and Maloney came up with a surprise of his own. In a sharp voice he said, “That only adds up to four hundred thirty-eight. You said there were four hundred seventy-six.”

  Prescott smiled indulgently, as at an apt pupil. “And, as I was about to say, there are thirty-eight stations that are open cut, embankment and surface. I don’t want to inundate you with facts…” But that was exactly what he did want to do, stifle them with facts, bore them as much as he himself was bored. “You may be interested to know that the highest station on the railroad is Smith-Ninth Street in Brooklyn, eighty-seven and a half feet from the street to the base of the track. On the other hand, the deepest underground station is One Hundred and Ninety-first Street at St. Nicholas Avenue, one hundred eighty feet below the street surface at track level.”

  Maloney said, “You don’t say.” Casey covered a yawn.

  “Grand Central,” Prescott said blandly, “is the busiest station, passenger-wise, on the entire road, clocking over forty million fares a year. The busiest station train-wise is West Fourth Street on the IND Line—a hundred trains an hour in each direction during the peak load period.”

  Maloney said again, “You don’t say.” Casey was still yawning.

  Prescott thought vindictively: If he doesn’t shut his mouth, I’m going to tell them how many escalators there are. “There are seven thousand cars in service. Oh, yes, there are ninety-nine escalators.
Well, all of that, including stairways, mezzanines, and so forth, all of that must be covered with thirty-two hundred cops, twenty-four hours a day. As you probably know, there’s a cop on every station and train in the system between the hours of eight at night and four in the morning. Since we instituted this watch, we’ve cut crime about sixty percent.”

  Casey stopped yawning and said defensively, “We have our share of crime in the Boston subway, too.”

  “Not to compare with yours, though,” Maloney said graciously.

  “Thank you,” Prescott said. “Like the city police, we deal with robbery, assault, many kinds of violence, drunkenness, accidents, illness, abusiveness, vandalism, purse snatching, pickpockets, molesters, rowdy youths—in fact, every conceivable kind of crime and disorder. And, if I may say so, we deal with it competently. We carry firearms, of course—off duty as well as on….”

  Casey was launching another yawn, and Maloney’s gaze was wandering to the clacking NYPD teletype.

  Prescott took his cue from Maloney. He herded his visitors over to the machine. “This gives us a complete record of every single call that goes through the NYPD.”

  Maloney scanned the moving sheet of paper. “There’s nothing but stolen cars.” He took another look. “Nineteen fifty Oldsmobile. Who would want to steal a nineteen fifty Oldsmobile?”

  Prescott decided to skip Roll Call Unit. “And now,” he said, “we’ll go to Operations, which is really the heart of the Nerve Center.”

  The heart was beating very languidly, Prescott observed as they entered the large room, cut up by glass dividers into a maze of squares and rectangles. There was some activity, but it was routine. Prescott leaned against the glass wall that separated Operations from Records and allowed the visitors to take in the scene. Naturally enough, they zeroed in on the huge police map covering the far wall.

  “We call that the Status Board,” Prescott said. “It pinpoints the disposition of all the men in the field. The red lights represent the IRT cops, and the yellow are for the BMT and IND. Operations and the men patrolling are in constant contact with each other. A lot of the patrolmen are equipped with two-way radios, which cost eight hundred dollars each, and all the others report in by phone regularly once each hour. More often, if they have any problem.”

  “It’s pretty,” Maloney said. “All those colors.”

  Maloney had the eye of a poet. The long board was divided into pastel shadings of yellow, red, orange, blue, green, delineating the various areas in the system, and the lights, changing and flickering to show the shifting positions of the patrolmen, added their own touch of color. All in all, Prescott admitted it did make a pretty constellation.

  Garber was the operations lieutenant and, being the key man in the setup, acted like the key man in the setup. Prescott introduced Maloney and Casey, and Garber, swarthy, dark-bearded, shook hands impatiently and brusquely ordered them to sign the register.

  Prescott said, “These gentlemen are friends of the chairman. Dear friends.”

  Garber grunted. He wasn’t giving an inch, Prescott thought. Busy, harried, important cop, the public safety rested squarely on his shoulders, and he didn’t care if the visitors were friends of Jesus H. Christ himself. Oh, well.

  Prescott said to the visitors, “Please step over here, gentlemen.” They followed him obediently, but even Maloney was showing signs of wanting to yawn, and both pairs of guileful blue eyes looked fatigued. “These are the assignment desks, one for each of the three subway divisions. Each is in charge of a sergeant, assisted by a patrolman and a radio operator. You’ll notice that their consoles are very similar to those you saw in the Command Center. When a call comes in, reporting an incident, the deskman scribbles a message on an electrowriter, which registers on the radio man’s desk. He in turn calls the patrolman in the field and directs him to proceed to where the incident is taking place. This is a very busy section, ah, usually.”

  He had never seen it deader. Two of the sergeants were leaning on their elbows and smoking; a couple of the radio operators were chatting with each other.

  “I wish you could have been here yesterday,” Prescott said. “We had a bomb scare, and we were really humming.”

  The IND sergeant, who had been listening, said helpfully, “A week ago, in a single half hour, we had three unrelated knife fights.”

  “It usually hums,” Prescott said.

  “Two dead, three wounded, one critical. The critical is still on the danger list, so we may eventually have a third dead.”

  “Over there,” Prescott said, “behind the glass partition, we have Records. Keeps a record of all the activities of the day—summonses, arrests, injuries, all incidents. They maintain an arrest book, which is similar to the police rap sheet—”

  Behind him, he heard Garber let out a shout, slam his phone down, and yell, “Roberts, wake up. Some gang has hijacked a train on A Division. They say they’re armed with automatic weapons. Bring in all units on Lexington Avenue line in vicinity of Twenty-eighth Street….”

  “Hijacked a subway train?” It was Casey’s voice, suddenly awake, halfway between astonishment and laughter. “What the fuck would anybody want to hijack a subway train for?”

  “Where’d the information come from?” Prescott said to Garber.

  “Desk trainmaster. He’s talking to the hijackers in the cab of the train.”

  “Gentlemen,” Prescott said to the visitors, “I believe the chairman is expecting you.”

  He hustled them out of the anteroom and pressed the elevator button. As soon as the car arrived and he had put them in it and sent them on their way to the thirteenth floor, he ran for the exit and bounded up the steps to Command Center on the floor above.

  RYDER

  Waiting in the cab for the desk trainmaster to return to the radio, Ryder acknowledged that the greatest hazard of the whole operation—barring uncertainty about whether or not the other side would act rationally—lay in the fact that he would be spending a great deal of time in the cab, which meant that he would not be in personal command of his force for long periods at a stretch.

  It was something less than an ideal army. Longman a coward, Welcome undisciplined, Steever steady but in need of guidance. Two whose courage he could count on (Steever and Welcome), one for intelligence (Longman), one for discipline (Steever, and add Longman unless he collapsed under pressure). It all left a good deal to be desired, but so had all his commands in the past. The strangest of all were a company of Congolese. Utterly without fear, more than willing to die. But they lacked a rationale. You lived or you died, yes, but you didn’t commit suicide. The Congolese struck him as people who were willing to die for the sheer pleasure or excitement of it. Arabs were wild, too, but they had a degree of imagination, and they knew—or thought they did—the stakes they were dying for. The perfect soldier, it occurred to him, would be a combination of Longman’s intelligence, Steever’s discipline, and Welcome’s dash.

  So—depending on how you did your arithmetic—his force consisted either of three flawed soldiers or one complete one.

  “Pelham One Two Three. Come in, Pelham One Two Three.”

  Ryder pressed the transmit button. “Are you ready with a pencil, Desk Trainmaster?”

  “A nice sharp pencil. You going to dictate?”

  “I want you to write down exactly what I tell you. Exactly. Do you read me?”

  “I read you, you crazy bastard. You’re off your goddamn rocker, pulling something like this.”

  Ryder said, “I’m about to give you seven items. The first three are informational; the remainder are specific instructions. They’re quite brief. Take them down precisely as I give them to you. Point One: Pelham One Two Three is completely in our control. We own it. Have you got that?”

  “What are you people, nig—colored guys? Panthers?”

  “Point Two, Desk Trainmaster. We are heavily armed with fully automatic weapons. Check me.”

  “I check you, you madman. You can’t get
away with this shit.”

  “Save the extraneous comment. Point Three: We are serious, desperate men, and we have no scruples about killing. Don’t take us lightly. Check me.”

  “Do you know you’re screwing up the whole goddamn East Side line?”

  “Check me.”

  “Go ahead. Let’s hear the rest of this crap.”

  “Point Four: You will not attempt to restore power until we instruct you to.”

  “Oh, beautiful!”

  “Check me, Desk Trainmaster.”

  “Up your black ass!”

  “If you restore the power,” Ryder said, “we’ll shoot one of the passengers. And we’ll continue to shoot one every minute until the power is pulled again.”

  “Shithead, the cops are going to be all over you.”

  “Point Five,” Ryder said. “If anyone attempts to interfere—police, TA personnel, anyone—we’ll kill the passengers. Do you read me?”

  “You are something else.”

  “Point Six: You will contact the mayor at once. Inform him that we demand a million dollars for the release of the car and the passengers. Check me.”

  “Keep dreaming, criminal.”

  “Point Seven. The time is now two thirteen. The money must be in our hands in one hour. The clock is running as of now. The money will be in our hands no later than three thirteen. If it isn’t, thereafter for every minute past the deadline we’ll kill one hostage. Have you got that, Desk Trainmaster?”

  “I got it all, gangster. But if you expect me to do anything about it, you’re even crazier than I thought.”

  You devised a strategy based on the logical reaction of the other side, Ryder thought, or it was worthless. But rank stupidity could wreck you. “Listen to me, Desk Trainmaster. I want you to patch me in to the Transit Police. I repeat: Patch me in to the police.”

  “Here’s one now, gangster. A cop. Have a good time.”