Give Us This Day

by Tom Avitabile

  “Fellas, what are we not seeing? What are we not considering? These ISIS guys so far have been smart. They are striking a blow for something they believe in. They want it big, bigger, I believe, than anything we’ve come up with so far.”

  Remo spoke for them. “Brooke, in this post-9/11 city, there isn’t much room for them to operate on such a grand scale; again, if you exclude nukes.”

  “Okay, how about outside the city? How about a multi-pronged attack? Where the actions combine into the kind of devastation we think is at hand.” Brooke leaned in. “Guys, the president only gave us a twenty-four-hour window on Posse Comitatus, but I figure the press is about three hours away from blowing this whole op wide open. Let’s try putting your groups together. Let’s see if there’s any combination of things that can add up to the big event the bad guys are planning on. Think fast and think correctly!”

  Chapter 44

  One, If By Land

  4 hours until the attack

  The Rip Van Winkle Bridge, 122 miles up the Hudson, was the perfect spot for Dequa and his men to cross the Hudson. True to its fairy tale name, it was a sleepy little bridge where there was very little in the way of vehicle inspections. So both tour busses rolled right through the tollbooths just like many bands that played the casinos in western New York State and Canada. The glossy black trailers hitched to the backs of the busses didn’t raise so much as an eyebrow since they weren’t the orange and silver of a rented U-Haul. The Yeshiva bus was a regular site at this bridge to the Hasidic communities nestled in Liberty and Fleishman’s New York. And although the red Con Ed gas repair trucks were a little out of their natural environs, the two hardhat-clad workers in the front of each truck had valid Con Ed IDs, so the trucks were given a pass. The two private cars just passed through normally. The entire assault team had just crossed their most critical hurdle, traversing the Hudson without exposure by police who were vehicle checking each truck and large vehicle that tried to cross the George Washington or Tappan Zee Bridges, or the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels. They were now on New York State terra firma with no interstate checkpoints that could foil their mission.

  They stuck to the truck routes that had no tolls or police scrutiny. They drove exceedingly safely at just under every speed limit, lest they attract any attention. In three hours and thirty-five minutes, they would be at their appointed positions to initiate the attack.

  .G.

  The large conference room was packed as all three groups now worked on combinations of scary scenarios that might cripple a city. Advocates and naysayers quickly formed within the group, as the room polarized over intramural agency turf. Many times the suggestions were taken as some sort of slight against the other agencies’ perceived deficiencies in their defensive posture. A couple of times Remo had to place his thumb and middle finger in his mouth and let out an ear-piercing, Bronx schoolyard whistle, which quieted the warring parties down.

  Kronos then asked a simple question. “Okay, what’s outside the city that can hurt us, besides the reservoir contamination?”

  “There really isn’t anything,” the head of DPW said.

  “How about denial of service?” Kronos said.

  “Denial of water service?” the head of the department of Water and Power said with a scrunch of his brow. “Isn’t that a computer thing?”

  “Well, is your supply chain run by computers?”

  That perked Remo up. “Yes, like a few years back, manipulating computers can cause all kinds of havoc,” he said, referring to the Eighth Day affair, which he had not been a part of but had had heard a lot about—mostly from Kronos, one of the heroes who’d thwarted that cyber-attack.

  “No, no, no. Every important step in the system is manual. Computers are only used for monitoring and analysis. At the end of the control chain, a man turns a wheel or throws a switch.”

  Kronos picked up on the word switch. “Bingo, could those switches be overridden in any scenario?”

  The man from DPW was stymied. “I . . . I . . . don’t think so. I mean that’s possible, but there are, to the best of my knowledge, no computer-controlled switches, relays, or water gates anywhere in the system; I’ll run it by my engineering department right now.”

  Kronos turned to one of the agents manning the computer. “Gus, can you put the water system up on the big screen.” Kronos got up and walked over to the map on the monitor. He crossed his arms as everyone in the room waited for him to say something. He got real close, then walked back to the other side of the big table as far as he could get from the screen. Then walked up again real close.

  Some of the men in the room exchanged looks and even rolled their eyes.

  They all turned with a snap when Kronos blurted out, “What’s this?!” He had his finger on a point where water tunnels number one and two seemed to almost come together.

  The man from the DPW had to move over in his seat to see around Kronos to what he was pointing at. “Why, that’s the Yonkers’ reservoir.”

  “Got it, but what’s these two lines mean?”

  “That’s just where water tunnels one and two are near to one another?”

  “How near?”

  “I dunno, twenty, thirty feet. Why?”

  Kronos turned to Remo. “Fucking Yonkers, man!”

  Remo turned to the man. “Is there a water tunnel number three yet?”

  “No. Still under construction.”

  “So those two tunnels are the only way the entire city of New York gets its water?”

  “Yes . . . it’s . . .” The man’s face suddenly drained of all color.

  .G.

  In Somers, New York, fifteen miles north of the reservoir, the two buses passed a diner. Coming out of the diner, Somers Patrolman Eugene Bristol had just gotten his coffee and was getting in his cruiser when he noticed a tow chain dragging along the ground and sparking behind the big black bus that was towing a small trailer behind it. Although it wasn’t any kind of moving violation, it could get snagged on something and ruin the under carriage of the bus or cause the trailer to come loose. So he figured he’d alert the driver.

  .G.

  Dequa saw the cop car pull behind the first bus then turn on its lights. He spoke into his phone.

  The bus pulled over. The older cop got out of his car and walked over to the driver’s side. The window slid open. “What is the problem, Officer?”

  “You got a loose chain back there; it could be a real problem.”

  “Thank you. Can you show me?”

  “Sure.” As the town policeman walked to the back of the bus, the second bus pulled up right alongside but behind the stopped one. Eugene waved his hand as he spoke. “You can’t block the road. Pull up ahead if you guys are traveling together. This will only take a minute, you can’t block the . . .”

  Four bullets from an MP5 in short burst perforated his windpipe, carotid artery, and lungs; the cop was dead before he hit the floor. With the second bus giving cover, two men came out of it and dragged the body into the bus. Then one of them took the officer’s hat off the ground and got in the patrol car. He fumbled with switches until he killed the flashing lights and then pulled out with the busses. Twenty miles outside of town, they left the car and Eugene’s body down a small dirt country road, out of the main road’s line of sight.

  .G.

  Harris ran into Brooke’s office after she called out to him.

  “Harris, the quarry explosion upstate, how big?” Brooke said standing next to Kronos, who had the reservoir maps spread out on the table in the corner.

  “We found the wreckage fifty-five feet down. They said it was like an ice cream scoop of earth fifty-five feet around.”

  Kronos had the detailed layout of the water tunnels under the Yonkers reservoir. “I make the pipes to be forty-five feet apart.”

  The DPW man was there with his engine
er, Reilly, on the phone. “Yes, 46.4 at the nearest.”

  “And from this plot it looks like they cross this access road, at the north end of the reservoir, at a thirty degree angle.” Kronos traced the path with his finger.

  “That’s right,” Reilly said over the phone.

  “How deep are the pipes, er . . . tunnels at that point, Reilly?” Remo asked.

  “At that point it’s a twelve-foot circumference with the bottom at around fifty-five feet under the grade of the roadway.”

  “And we have three students who have previous water authority experience in foreign countries,” Brooke added.

  “Don’t forget the dead guy. He was a surveyor.”

  “And the clincher is that the bomb factory house was right across the thruway and, as I remember, with a clear view of the race track and of that northern gate of the reservoir,” Harris said.

  “Okay, I am going to call it for the reservoir. But here’s my question: we think they have two U-Hauls, right? Where’s the second one going?” Brooke asked.

  “That’s easy. Given the spacing, they need two bombs to knock out both tunnels. Based on the way the pipes are positioned at an angle under the access road, you’ll need both; one about . . . seventy feet behind the other,” Kronos said, checking the distance on the ruler that helped him with the two-hundred-feet-per-inch scale of the plan’s inset of the roadway.

  “Get me Bridge on the command chopper on the double,” Brooke said to the military aide now assigned to her by the Pentagon.

  .G.

  Dequa was annoyed as the first bus raced up to his car and flagged him down. Stopping the convoy was not wise. Amad ran from the bus to Dequa’s car’s window.

  “Dequa, there is news of troops on the way to the city. It’s all over my Twitter, and I checked Facebook.”

  Dequa was about to pull out his gun and shoot this young idiot who intentionally risked operational security to do his BookFacing and twittering. His face grew angry and red.

  “I am sorry. I know you forbade this, but it is a valuable source of information.”

  Dequa softened. “Are there any units in the city?”

  “Not that I have seen pictures of, although there are tweets. But here is an image of a convoy.”

  He reached out his hand and looked at Amad’s iPad. The picture was of army trucks on the New York State Thruway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge. The old mujahedeen warrior was relieved to see that there were no tanks and no personnel carriers in the picture. They would have been a problem.

  He handed back the device. “It makes no difference. That bridge is almost an hour away from the city. We are committed. And, if they are just mobilizing now, it’s too late for them. Get back to your bus.” He closed the window and waved his hand for the driver to go.

  His driver turned and said, “You believed the press when they said they are only practicing preparedness?”

  “It is better for us. They will not be armed during a practice session on American soil. They have laws against it. But we are well prepared for any token resistance or police actions they can marshal.”

  .G.

  On the quiet residential street in Yonkers, a local police cruiser was stationed outside the “Bomb Factory” house. Although the authorities tried not to cause panic, the story of the discovery of the house and its volatile contents had leaked out to the press, eventually forcing the revelation that the alleged Fifth Avenue accident, with the truck full of fertilizer from the chicken farm, was in fact an attempted suicide bombing. Not that anyone in Yonkers government expected the bomb makers of the Fifth Avenue truck bomb to come back, but the cop car was there so the neighbors, like Jim Aponte, slept better knowing that they were being watched over.

  Patrolman Bob Krantz had been parked here since eight in the morning and was trying to avoid sleeping altogether. Sitting outside an empty house that had been scrubbed clean by the feds and sealed with police tape was the most boring duty any human could pull. But that was the lot in life of probationary policemen just out of the academy; they were the kind of dead-brain jobs rookies like him got assigned to. He depended on coffee and Red Bull to keep him awake in broad daylight!

  He couldn’t imagine what Gene, his academy mate and the cop on the shift before him did in the middle of the night to not go stark raving mad with boredom.

  Bob was just crushing his second Red Bull can when a blue and white Con Ed van pulled up behind him. Since the house was the last on the dead-end block before the Thruway, the Con Ed van couldn’t be there for any other reason.

  .G.

  The man in the Con Ed van watched the cop get out of his cruiser and walk to his driver’s side window.

  “Morning. What’s up?” the young cop said.

  “I have a job order here to disconnect this house from the mains,” he said as he held up the clipboard with the work order on it.

  “Let me see that,” the cop said as he reached in for the paperwork. “Yeah, this is the right address, but this place is a crime scene.”

  “I’m very sorry, Officer. But I have my dispatcher . . . He says the power’s to be cut. There is no one paying the bill . . .” Then he added, “You know.” And gave the common shrug of a worker following the orders of a superior.

  “What do you have to do? Can you do it from outside the house?”

  “I can disable the meter from outside, but I need to throw the main breaker in the basement first, so I don’t get electrocuted. Safety first.”

  “Nobody told me anything about this.”

  The Con Ed guy just shrugged.

  “Krantz portable to Central,” he said into the mic clipped to his shirt.

  “Central to Krantz portable, come in.”

  “Central, be advised I have a guy from the electric company here. Says he’s got to disconnect the house I have under surveillance from the main power. Got a job order and everything.”

  “Krantz portable, stand by.”

  “How long will it take?” Krantz said as he waited for his orders from his superiors.

  “Two seconds, once I open the box in the basement. Just flip the main breaker to off.”

  The radio crackled. “Central to Krantz portable, escort the electric company guy into the house then reseal and secure the premises once he’s done.”

  “Krantz portable to Central, ten-four.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” Officer Krantz said to the Con Ed guy.

  The guy opened the side door of the van and took out a big tool bag.

  “I thought you said you just had to throw a breaker?”

  “Could be an interlock box. Besides, all my screwdrivers are in here too . . . you know.” Fareed had forgotten to say “you know” as often as he had been trained in language lessons to make him sound like a New Yorker. His pulse rose because he promised himself he would not fail . . . er, screw up.

  The cop mumbled as he led the way, “Interlock . . .”

  The policeman broke the yellow police tape across the front door as Fareed carried in his equipment.

  “That’s probably the basement door,” Krantz pointed.

  They found the light switch and headed down the stairs. Fareed walked up to the power box in the corner and squatted down to open his tool kit.

  Krantz looked around. “You know there’s enough room down here to build a great train layout, you know, one of those . . .” The cop’s eyes went wide as the knife went right through his back and into his heart. He fell over dead. Fareed left the knife in him and lugged the tool bag upstairs to the corner bedroom. Using a utility knife, he tore up the corner of a wall-to-wall rug by the window and there, on the floor, were many three-eighth-inch holes drilled onto the wood, which made no pattern and, more importantly, made no sense to any nosy investigators. He took out a folded piece of paper from the bag and laid it out with the marks on
two of the edges against the corner molding of the walls. On the paper there were only three holes, which lined up with the most important ones in the floor, the ones he was here to use.

  He placed one pointed peg of each leg of a surveyor’s tripod in each hole. He used a steel rod bent into an “L” shape and brought the tripod to the exact height under the rod’s extension. Then he locked it down tight. Next, he opened the case and brought out the Topcon DS 203AC Motorized Total Station. The computer-controlled laser transit system had been pre-programmed a month before when they’d occupied the house. He had learned this skill from Shamal, who’d been killed by the woman agent. But now the machine did all the work. Its five-hundred-megabyte memory was more than enough to align itself and find the exact same spot that he and Shamal had triangulated using the other two remote heads. Today they’d only need this one. It would lend an accuracy of plus or minus two inches, and that was well within the “circular error probable” as Waleed the bomb maker had calculated. He looked at his watch: five minutes.

  .G.

  Kronos was in the IT department calculating the impact of losing the water supply system to a city of eight million people with the engineers and planners at the DPW over the GoToMeeting multi-screen conference.

  His smart phone beeped and he looked down. It was an email from Remo with the subject line, “Hey, Brain Boy, why wasn’t this suppressed?” Kronos opened it and saw the attached picture that had been posted on Twitter of an Army truck convoy rolling though the Tappan Zee Bridge tollbooths. He typed out his response with blazing thumb speed, “The Tap bridge is like 60 miles away from New York, well outside the 3 mile radius of each RDF staging area here in the city. What did you want me to do, shut down the entire friggin’ Internet?”

  He tossed the phone down on the table and rejoined the conversation with the city officials. “Okay, so let me recap: 1.2 billion gallons of fresh water a day is consumed by the city. But between the miles of pipe from Yonkers and the water towers atop most buildings in the city, there is a window of four days before . . .”