by Bill Stanton
ESU was the police department’s equivalent of the Special Forces. They handled the most dangerous, difficult assignments. They were the NYPD’s elite—the fighter jocks, the fittest, best-trained cops on the force. They were mostly disdainful of other cops, whom they viewed as poorly trained slackers. They didn’t like bosses either (Zito was the exception), who, in their view, did little except get in the way and suck up the credit. The last thing Zito’s best guys, his number-one A-team, wanted to hear was that they had a new member, even if—especially if—he was the police commissioner.
They had no choice, of course. Brock was the final authority. In addition, he was the one who had received the original tip about the suspects. He’d passed the information to the head of the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau and they were off to the races. That’s how this two-month investigation, which was about to reach its climax, got started. No one was sure how Brock had gotten the information, but it didn’t seem to matter. Good intel was good intel.
With everyone in place, Brock and Pennetta walked briskly together to the scene. They were the entire command structure for the operation. In a typically ballsy maneuver, Brock had shut out the Feds. He’d never notified the Joint Terrorism Task Force—an uneasy alliance of cops and FBI agents—when they started surveillance of the suspected terror cell. And he’d kept a tight lid on while they were planning the operation as well. He had no interest in sharing any credit with another agency.
To prevent information about the raid from getting out now—and attracting half the cops in the city—nobody used the police radio. Everyone was communicating with point-to-point Nextel walkie-talkies. They were also intrinsically safe, which meant they gave off no spark that could, in a small space like the apartment they were about to hit, detonate explosives.
After walking almost an entire block in silence, Brock finally spoke. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong,” he said as they headed toward Fourth Avenue. “I’m ready.”
“You have no idea what I’m thinking,” Pennetta said as they turned onto Fourth Avenue, which looked like an armed camp. “Two things are lighting up the nerve endings in my head—getting the job done and getting my men out safely. I wasn’t worried about you screwing up; you’re not even on the radar screen. That said, with all due respect, sir, this is still the dumbest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen anyone in this department do. With all the shit that’s being thrown at us, the last thing this department needs, this city needs, is another incident for the left-wing cop bashers to grab on to.”
Arrogant, self-righteous prick, Brock thought. Fuck you. This is my department, not yours. He was so angry now it was an actual physical sensation, as real as stomach cramps or a bad headache. He wanted to let it out, to explode, but he knew he couldn’t, not now. Neither man said anything else, and in a few moments they were in front of the target.
It was a plain, unremarkable white-brick building, just like hundreds of others built in Brooklyn and Queens after World War II. There were double glass doors that led to a small alcove with mailboxes and doorbells on one wall. Through another set of glass doors were a long hallway, an elevator, and a staircase. The ground floor once had several apartments and a large restaurant with a separate entrance. All of that space was now occupied by al-Noor Mosque.
The mosque had been around for about ten years and had grown so steadily that it had expanded twice, each time taking over adjacent storefronts and knocking down the walls. But even with the additional space, accommodating the surging Muslim community in Bay Ridge was difficult. Al-Noor served as a community center and offered day care, a K–12 school, and adult classes on the Koran.
Politics at the mosque mostly revolved around local issues. There were passionate discussions, of course, about the problems facing Muslims in various parts of the world, but al-Noor was not known as a hothouse for radical Islam. On Friday afternoons, the focus was on handling the crowds, not, as it was at some of the city’s other mosques, on the imam delivering a fiery postprayer diatribe.
Loudspeakers had to be placed out on the street so that the hundreds of Muslim men who couldn’t get inside to pray—and who filled Fourth Avenue, kneeling and touching their foreheads to the ground—could participate in the service. This was the mosque where the five suspects worshipped. And one of them, the American, worked part-time at an Islamic bookstore just down the street.
Pennetta briefly huddled with an ESU captain. Everyone was in position and ready to go when Brock and Pennetta walked into the building. The A-team was on the stairs and lined up in its stack—the neat, single-file formation they’d use to enter the apartment. The first two cops in the stack carried the heavy ram to boom the door. Cops called it the key to the city. The next two cops, one carrying a bulletproof, Plexiglas shield and the other armed with an MP5 fully automatic, recoilless submachine gun, would be the first inside.
These two-man units were referred to as bunker teams, and there were three of them in the stack. If the suspects were armed and ready, the first bunker team would take the big hit for everyone else. Brock was the shooter in the second bunker team. The last guy in the stack, called the doorman, was responsible for covering the apartment with an M4, a long, penetrating rifle, to make sure no one got in or out. Pennetta would handle overall command from the hallway, out of the line of fire, where he’d be ready to deal with any contingency and call for backup, the bomb squad, or the EMTs.
Pennetta took a last hard look at Brock, who had moved into position in the stack. The commissioner, psyched and energized again, couldn’t read his stare. He assumed it was expressing anger and left it at that. He didn’t want any distractions. After a few moments, Pennetta motioned to everyone to turn off their walkie-talkies. All communication from this point forward would be hand signals until they were inside the apartment. Then he gave the sign that it was showtime.
The cops moved quietly up the stairs to the fourth floor. The stack formed on the hinge side of the doorway to apartment 4C. Brock licked his lips a few times and tried to keep his breathing slow and even. All of the training, the months of surveillance, the hours of planning and preparation, would now come down to a precious few minutes. Pennetta winked at the doorman, who then tapped the guy in front of him on the shoulder. Each cop in succession then tapped the next guy until it reached the first man in the stack. It was like lighting a human fuse.
THWACK. The night’s silence was quickly, jarringly broken as the heavy apartment door was rammed and knocked to the floor. The bunker teams moved in rapidly.
“Police, get down. Police, get the fuck down,” the first cop inside screamed. “Two perps right, doorway straight ahead. Two perps on the right, doorway straight ahead.” The suspects were moving around, one behind an open sofa bed and the other across the living room by a big easy chair and a television. The apartment was dark and messy. There were clothes and papers on the floor; takeout containers were strewn all over a table in the living room.
“Stay the fuck down, you hear me? I said don’t move. Not a fuckin’ whisker,” the cop barked as he and his partner moved deeper into the apartment. There was a kitchen on the left that was empty. As the cops inched their way past, they could see a small table with three chairs and a pile of dishes in the sink.
When Brock crossed the threshold and moved inside, the warm, stale air hit him immediately. He had his MP5 locked on the two men in the living room as he scanned the surroundings. The third bunker team was now also in the living room. Just as the cops reached one of the bedrooms in the back, where three more suspects were holed up, the words rang out like a piercing siren.
“Gun! Gun! I got a fuckin’ gun!” Everything suddenly moved at hyperspeed, like a souped-up video game. The deafening bursts of MP5 gunfire filled the small space with as much noise as a jet engine. Flashes of flame-hot blue and red from the gun barrels lit up the dark space like strobe lights. As Brock pointed his weapon and squeezed his trigger, he saw one of the young Muslims reflexively lift u
p his empty right hand like he was trying to stop the bullets. Almost instantly his hand seemed to explode in midair—bits of bone and flesh and a quick spray of red in every direction.
The two bedroom doors in the back were kicked in and there was more gunfire. Then, suddenly, it all just stopped. The apartment was smoky now and Brock could taste the gunpowder. The blood was pounding in his ears and he was breathing too fast. He could feel the sweat under his Kevlar helmet. “Living room and kitchen secure,” he yelled, catching his breath.
“Bedrooms and bathroom secure,” came the response.
“Give me a count. Everybody up front’s okay. I got two suspects down. Neither’s breathing.”
“Thumbs-up here too. Three perps down, one of the motherfuckers’s still breathing. I need a bus. Now. Get ’em up here.”
Pennetta came into the apartment, followed by the EMTs, who were directed straight to one of the back bedrooms. The commander scanned the carnage in the living room. It was a mess. “The hell happened?” he asked no one in particular.
“They were supposed to be sleeping, Captain,” one of Pennetta’s guys said to him. “But these bastards were up. I don’t know, maybe they heard us coming.”
Pennetta was skeptical but kept quiet. No way they heard them coming, he thought. He made a mental note to look into this later. “Start securing the rest of the building,” he told his second in command. “I’m sure we managed to wake up the whole fuckin’ neighborhood. Keep everybody in their apartments, got it? I don’t want this turning into any more of a circus than it already is.”
Then he turned toward the commissioner. “I’m fine,” Brock said, fighting to suppress his excitement. “Thanks for asking. Rest of the guys are okay too.”
“I don’t want anything touched,” Pennetta said tensely. “Not a goddamned dust ball. Everybody got that? I want this done absolutely straight up. No bullshit. Let Crime Scene and Internal Affairs do their job.”
Looking at Brock, Pennetta said, “There’s gonna be a major shitstorm and I don’t want any of it coming back on my guys. You wanted some attention, Commissioner? Well, you’re gonna get it.”
Before Brock could respond, the EMTs came through with the lone survivor on a gurney. “What’s his status?” Brock asked, noticing how young the suspect looked. He guessed he couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two.
“Touch and go,” said a short black woman with a stethoscope around her neck. “He’s pretty torn up. We’ll see if he makes it to the hospital.”
Brock turned his attention back to Pennetta. He was too pumped to let the captain bring him down. “You’re a terrific cop, Zito, but you got no fuckin’ imagination. No creativity. No sense of the big picture.”
Brock took a deep breath and started to smile as he felt the smoke in his nostrils and the back of his throat. He had the look of a man who’d just tasted a fantastic dish in a restaurant. “You’re not gonna get anywhere with that narrow view of the world, Zito,” he said to his commander. “You need to open up your mind, to develop a more global view of things, man. Shitstorm? Are you kidding? They’re gonna throw me a freakin’ ticker-tape parade. I’m gonna be a hero. These dead Muslims are my ticket to paradise.”
2
“DAD. DAAAAAD. TELEPHONE!”
A. J. Ross was in the kitchen working on his third cup of coffee when he heard his fourteen-year-old daughter, Annie, yelling from her bedroom that he had a phone call. For a long moment, A. J. didn’t move. He just sat there, staring blankly at the newspapers and listening to the radio. Actually, he wasn’t really listening. A. J. had kind of zoned out until he was startled by his daughter’s voice. “Believe me,” he now heard morning talk-show jock Don Imus ranting about some poor slob, “that bucktoothed, beady-eyed, rodent-lookin’ little weasel is gonna be sorry . . .” It was seven forty-five a.m. Fuck, A. J. thought, feeling as cranky as Imus sounded, no good ever comes from a phone call before breakfast.
A. J. was having a more or less typical morning. He’d gotten up at six fifteen a.m., showered, shaved, and dressed. Then he’d checked his daughter’s homework and read the news. It was one of those mornings when the big stories were breaking online and the printed editions of the newspapers were irrelevant before they even rolled off the presses. BROCK LEADS RAID ON SUSPECTED TERROR CELL was the headline stretched across the top of the New York Times website. CELL DAMAGE: COMMISH SHOOTS TERRORISTS, screamed the Daily News across its entire online front page. But it was the Post, as usual, that nailed it: BROCK KICKS ASS: COMMISH 4, TERRORISTS 0.
A. J. had more than a passing interest in the morning’s stunning news story. In the media capital of the world, he was a franchise player, one of the best-known, best-connected journalists in the city. In ten years at New York, the thirty-eight-year-old had written seventy-five cover stories, won two National Magazine Awards, and always managed to score the big interview. Even with the decline in print sales in the digital era, his byline could still sell magazines, and it definitely generated page views. Though it was harder for any writer to have real impact, A. J. still produced work people talked about and people in power paid attention to.
“Daaaaaaaad. Daaaaa-aaaaaad!”
“Okay, okay,” A. J. yelled to his daughter as he moved away from the table. “Hey,” he said in a doleful tone of voice when he picked up the cordless.
“Morning, boss. Hope you didn’t pull anything rushing to get the phone. Have you seen the headlines?” his assistant, Lucy, asked in her irresistibly throaty voice.
“I live in the suburbs, not Siberia. Of course I have. What’d you do, sleep in the office?”
“I was restless last night. I don’t know, it was like I just couldn’t get comfortable. So I got out early this morning, went to the gym, had a little breakfast, and got here around seven.”
“I’m starting to worry about you, Luce. You need to have a little fun, relax a little, you know? There’s not much more than headlines right now anyway. Everything happened too late. I haven’t made any calls yet. Whaddaya hear from downtown?” A. J. asked as Annie came into the kitchen, dressed and dragging her school backpack across the floor. She pointed to her watch, indicating she needed to go. A. J. nodded, held up a couple of fingers, and silently mouthed the words “two minutes.”
“So far nothing. There’s a press conference at One Police Plaza at ten. Brock, the mayor, and Pennetta are supposed to be there,” Lucy said.
“Zito? Man, they must’ve held a gun to his head. Well, they can make him show up but they can’t make him talk. Actually, they’d never let him talk even if he suddenly wanted to. They’re not sharing face time with anybody.”
“Are you leaving now?” Lucy gently prodded.
“I’ll get going right after I drive Annie to school. I’ll meet you at One PP. I know it’s early, but start making some phone calls on the suspects. Especially the one that’s still breathing. And we need to find out where the hell the intelligence came from. Who tipped the cops about these guys?”
“I’ll see what I can come up with. Listen, A. J., I don’t want to overstep here, but can’t Nikki drive Annie today?” Lucy asked, referring to his wife. “I mean, even if you leave now, with the traffic, you still probably won’t make it.”
Lucy Chapin had been A. J.’s assistant for about a year and a half. They’d met while she was a grad student at the Columbia School of Journalism. He delivered a guest lecture in one of her classes about how to develop sources. She was already an admirer, but once she heard him speak, she was determined to find a way to work for him. Not only was he enthusiastic, articulate, and smart, he seemed like a really decent guy. Lucy thought he was kind of cute, too, which didn’t hurt.
She talked to him after his lecture, started e-mailing him at the magazine, and by the time she completed her master’s, they’d developed enough of a relationship that it just seemed natural that she’d go to work for him. A. J. joked that Lucy was a good example of how unfair life can be. She was smart, funny, determ
ined, and beautiful enough—five feet eight inches; thick, dark hair; light green eyes—to have paid her way through school by modeling.
Even her attitude was practically perfect. She was cynical and sarcastic—which A. J. loved—but never when it mattered, when there was something important at stake. She didn’t take herself too seriously, but she was almost pathological about the work. You could argue, of course, that it’s easy to be comfortable in your own skin when you’ve won the genetic equivalent of the Powerball lottery. But A. J. was often amazed by how many sore winners he ran into.
“Nikki is gonna drive Jack,” A. J. said, referring to his nine-year-old son. “She also has an important meeting this morning and she can’t be late. I, on the other hand, have no such critical obligation. The earth will not tip on its axis if I miss half an hour of Brock and the mayor blowing smoke up my ass. Besides—”
“A. J.,” Lucy cut him off, “this is like the biggest—”
“Lucy, relax. You’ll be fine and I won’t be late.”
It took A. J. about ten minutes to drive Annie to school. When he got back, he opened the garage, where he parked the minivan next to his three motorcycles. The black BMW R1200RT was the world’s best all-around touring bike, equipped with GPS, stereo, ABS, and heated grips; A. J. only took it out on trips that lasted a week or more. Then there was the graphite-and-red MV Augusta F4, an exotic Italian racing bike he rode every once in a while at the track. Finally, there was the high-gloss midnight-blue Ducati Monster S4R S Testastretta, with a white racing stripe and a visible trellis frame that made A. J. smile every time he looked at it. The Monster was a bike he could ride anywhere, but it was especially ideal for scooting around the city and dealing with heavy traffic. It was light, easy to maneuver (flickable, gearheads called it), and blazingly fast. All of which made it ideal for lane-splitting—riding in between lanes to avoid sitting in stop-and-go traffic. A. J. wasn’t sure if lane-splitting was legal in New York and New Jersey, but he didn’t really care. It saved him too much time to give it up. And if he ever did get stopped, he had buddies in the police department who’d take care of the ticket.