Scimitar SL-2

by Patrick Robinson

  Whether the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan would still be standing after the opening surge was a subject currently being assessed by a team of eighteen scientists working everywhere, from basements to the city’s skies. Opinion ranged high and the only thing they could agree on was that none of them thought more than a half-dozen buildings at best could survive in any shape whatsoever.

  Midtown, with its close, tight grid of towers, stretching high into the sky, was an even worse prospect. The breakwater of Wall Street would have reduced the first two waves significantly, but nonetheless, like a house of cards, Midtown would fall. Several of the scientists believed that if two or three high-rises crumbled before the onslaught of the ocean, they would cause a chain reaction and bring down others until the city was leveled.

  The most dangerous part was the two wide rivers that flowed past, east and west of Manhattan—the Hudson and the East River. The tsunami would have lost none of its power when it rampaged up these ship-going seaways, and both rivers could rise, initially, by around 100 feet, with millions of tons of ocean water crashing through the city’s cross streets. The tides of east and west would probably collide somewhere in the middle, around Park Avenue, moments before the main surge smashed with mind-blowing force into the old Pan-American building, somewhere around the 15th floor.

  New York City was no place to be these two weeks. And the same went for Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The flatlands of New Jersey were even more exposed, and places like Bayonne, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Union City were utterly defenseless. So was Newark, with its flat, wide sea-level airport, right where the Passaic River widens into Newark Bay. That was tsunami country, with a vengeance.

  New York City’s evacuation operation had begun the previous Wednesday, but the city’s biggest problem wasn’t so much historic documents, books, and artifacts. It was people. New York City received more visitors every day than the combined permanent population of Washington, D.C., and its environs. In addition to its eight million residents, who lived and worked in the crowded urban sprawl of New York and its greater area, 800,000 visitors took in the sights below the world’s most famous skyline every day.

  It was a colorful, vibrant melee of races, religions, and nationalities, a voliatile mix in a time of crisis. Immigrants from the Far East, India, and Mexico had been pouring in for years, and most of them had few contacts outside their ethnic neighborhoods. Now they had no way of moving themselves, their families, and their few possessions out of the city to higher ground. A couple of days after the President’s TV address, Tammany Hall had accepted the responsibility of evacuating two million residents of New York City, providing food and shelter for those who had nothing and those who would most likely have nothing to go back to.

  The exodus from New York had already begun, and thus far there had been monumental problems, due to the sheer volume of people who had to be moved westward. Most of them were terrified, panicked, and shocked. Rumors coursed wildly; crowds were alternately lining up for cars and gas masks or hitting the highway in a rush, sitting for hours on congested roads. Everyone was up in arms, and the Army and National Guard could just barely control the mobbed streets, anxiety and fear flaring on every corner, spreading slowly across the city, simmering. Hundreds of National Guardsmen were drafted in from all over New York State to prevent the breaking out of riots.

  The Police Department had by now issued instructions for the more affluent members of society to drive out of the area. They designated highways as strictly one-way systems, and decreed which roads could be used to get away, no matter who you were. If you lived in Brooklyn or Long Island, the way out was across the Verrazzano Bridge to Staten Island, and then through the Outerbridge toll, wide-open now, crossing onto highways running west and southwest.

  Residents of Queens and Manhattan were ordered to use the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and then pick up the westward highways. The great span of the George Washington Bridge was off-limits both ways, for the use of the Police, Army, and Government Officials only. The great convoys of trucks evacuating the city were nonstop, both ways, twenty-four hours a day.

  During the weekend, a brand-new worry cropped up. Thousands of people, many of whom hardly spoke English, were too afraid to wait for their transportation slots from the Army, the National Guard, or the New York City Police Department. Some were more afraid of those than of the incoming tidal wave. Many took matters into their own hands, buying and temporarily fixing up an entire armada of ancient car wrecks, not only unfit to be on the road but a danger to anyone in or near them.

  This clapped-out procession of backfiring, brakeless rattle-traps was moving like a mobile junkyard out into the mainstream of the traffic, which was now already crowding the roads and highways.

  By Sunday evening, the traffic jams had escalated, the likes of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in the free world. People were sitting on the roadside beside vehicles that were filled to overflowing with humanity and possessions. Cars edged slowly towards the west, coming to a complete standstill as soon as an ordinarily harmless, flat battery felled a vehicle in front of it. On the Triboro Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge, both levels of each were throbbing with cars. Cars jammed the Whitestone, clogged the Throg’s Neck, and brought the West Side Highway to a standstill. The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the Harlem River Drive were simply parking lots.

  By Monday morning, the Mayor had signed an edict giving the New York Police Department emergency powers to sequester every broken-down truck in the city and hand it over to the National Guard. The authorities could designate instant scrap-yards; under raised highways and under bridges, they beat down wire fencing to free up space on outdoor basketball courts. They dragged vehicles off the bridges and out of the tunnels and dumped them in the nearest available space.

  The Mayor had already declared New York City a potential disaster area, and now he had the army move in and take over the subway and all of its trains, as well as Amtrak and the entire Long Island Rail Road.

  The trains were for transportation out of Manhattan and Long Island only. But the going was slow. Vast lines of travelers had been formed along Seventh and Eighth Avenues around 33rd Street, waiting for hours to enter Penn Station.

  The trains were efficient and available to move people out of the city on a continuing basis, and the executives of Amtrak and the major New York bus corporations were summoned to City Hall to coordinate and manage the operations.

  A massive complex—a refugee camp of sorts—was set up in the hills of New Jersey, west of the horse country around Far Hills. It was a former Army base and the huts were still waterproof. By Monday evening, 100,000 Guards and Troops were on duty, assisting with the evacuation from New York City.

  The nearest New York came to full-blooded riots was, curiously, at truck hire corporations, which were attempting to quadruple the usual prices. The companies had no way of knowing if they would ever see their trucks or vans again in the face of the oncoming disaster, but locals saw it as naked price-gouging, a cynical exercise in ripping off frightened citizens. Three hooligans actually set fire to one rental operation on the Lower East Side, torching the office and three vans. The fire department didn’t make it in time to salvage them, and the National Guardsmen who arrived quickly on the spot had little sympathy for the owners.

  The Police Chief and the Mayor moved in immediately and made price increases illegal, adding that if van rental corporations no longer wished to conduct business, that was fine too, empowering the National Guard, in the same breath, to sequester all trucks in the city.

  They came a few hours too late for a more serious riot on the lower West Side when hundreds of fleeing people became enraged at the asking price of $1,000 a day for a compact-sized van. They stormed the office, overpowered the four assistants, smashed the windows, seized the keys hanging on a cork board at the rear of the counter, and made off with twenty-six vans.

  Again, there was nothing much the Police could�
��or would—do. They were working in squadrons with the Army, systematically clearing out residential blocks, helping people with their possessions, issuing exit instructions from the city. More and more National Guardsmen were being ferried in from Upstate New York to help with the compulsory evacuation.

  And their task was mammoth, especially in Midtown and the Upper East Side where so many residential apartment blocks were crowded close together, on all streets from 57th Street, north to Sutton Place, First, Second, and Third Avenues. Not so much the more commercial strips of Lexington and Madison, but on the densely residential Park Avenue, and, of course, the east side of Fifth Avenue.

  Almost all visitors to the city were either gone or on their way, having been advised at the end of the previous week to leave without delay. The Mayor ordered the Police and the Army to seize the bus corporations in order to ferry thousands of tourists out to the airports.

  Officials alerted foreign governments to the imminent disaster, and informed every U.S. embassy, worldwide, that all visitors were now banned from flying to any airport on the East Coast. They requested foreign airlines to bring in extra aircraft, empty, to assist with the transportation of tourists out of JFK, Newark, and La Guardia. Inbound aircraft with passengers were diverted to Toronto to refuel and return home.

  The Port of New York was closed, except to outgoing ships, which were redirected south—unless you particularly wanted your big cruise liner or freighter to end up in Times Square.

  All businesses not directly involved in transportation were closed—commercial or retail, the service industry, tourist attractions and places of entertainment. Schools, colleges, and universities.

  The objective was partly to drastically reduce the amount of routine traffic on the streets of the city in order to provide space for the Army and Police, who were dispatching truckloads of important government and commercial documents stored in Manhattan by the big corporations.

  The closing of shops and stores caused another specter to rear its snarling head in the planning offices of Tammany Hall: the chilling recollection of the Big Blackout in the summer of 1977 when a massive power failure plunged the city into almost total darkness. It had taken the criminal element about ten minutes to realize all the lights were out and the burglar alarms silenced, and several thousand looters and rioters went into immediate action. By first light, they had broken into stores citywide and stolen millions of dollars worth of merchandise.

  The situation at hand was not quite that serious. There was plenty of electric power, and many extra thousands of Police and National Guard on duty. And looters themselves had to fear for their lives. Nonetheless, the great empty neighborhoods of New York City and stores full of merchandise would be standing unattended, tempting nefarious characters far and wide.

  The police presence tended to gather in full force in certain areas, moving as one large unit from block to block, leaving desolate areas in their wake. Two serious break-ins along West 34th Street near Macy’s department store alerted the authorities, and the armed National Guard were moved into the silent areas the moment they arrived in the city.

  Police cars drove slowly along the streets, loudly informing anyone who was listening that this was now a designated no-go area, closed to pedestrians and private cars, unless on official business. The cold-blooded warning was loud and clear: LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT. This was as close to martial law as it was possible to get, but the Service Chiefs had been adamant—there is only one way to run an operation like this…rigid rules, and ruthless application of those rules. Citizens must learn to do precisely as they are told. Instantly. And not to step out of line. That’s the only way we can get this done.

  The guidelines on the desk of the New York City Mayor had come directly from the White House, from the all-powerful Adm. Arnold Morgan, and refined by the Chiefs of Army Staff in the Pentagon. There was to be no arguing, no discussion, no interruptions, no alternative plan. This was strictly military. These were orders, not suggestions…DO IT! AND DO IT NOW!

  Generally speaking, it was working. There had been some dissent and attempted robberies at first, but the sight of the perpetrators who were caught, bundled into the back of an Army truck, and driven off to God knows where had a steadying effect on anyone else with similar ambitions.

  The police worked around the clock, aiding, protecting, urging people along the way. On the Upper East Side, elderly former chief executives and various New York dowagers found it was too much to ask to be separated from a precious painting or valuable items of furniture, and refused to leave without them. Most New York cops were understanding, the more so since these people usually had two or three automobiles at their disposal, plus chauffeurs, and were more than happy to make them available to help with the evacuation.

  An acute problem was the number of prisoners and guards under supervision of the New York City Department of Corrections, which was currently holding 19,000 inmates, plus a staff of just over 10,000 uniformed officers, and 1,500 civilians. The City Department ran ten holding facilities on Rikers Island—a building around the size of the Kremlin, which sat in the middle of the East River—including two floating detention centers docked off the northern tip of Rikers in an old converted Staten Island ferry. This was, of course, a site unlikely to have much of a long-term future once Admiral Badr drew a bead on the Cumbre Vieja—it stood an outstanding chance of being flattened and simply swept away by the tidal wave.

  There were six other jails run by the Department, one in Manhattan and one in Queens, two in Brooklyn, and two more in the Bronx, one of which was an 800-bed barge moored on the south side. The New York City Chief of Police had immediately decided on the early release of those detainees that he judged unlikely to represent much of a future danger to the public, and those unable to post bail. The rest were being transferred to jails in Upstate New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, under armed guard, on trains in which security was somehow more manageable than on the open highway.

  Back in Manhattan, the trenches of Wall Street had been in a state of near-pandemonium for five days. After September 11, many corporations—the headquarters of multinationals, general commerce, manufacturing, service industries, and financial institutions—had been jolted into reviewing and updating their crisis-management procedures. They had already put disaster recovery strategies into operation to get the businesses back up and running in the event of a catastrophe, and thought of backup facilities and systems that could be activated fast if the head office were struck or disabled.

  But not many of them had thought it through quite well enough, and many of the same old problems that had haunted so many U.S. corporations in the aftermath of 9/11 were still present.

  Several corporations, devastated by the fall of the twin towers, did have backup systems, but in neighboring streets of Manhattan, which obviously rendered them utterly useless in this case.

  There were other corporations that had tried to save money by sharing facilities through third-party providers, outfits that had reasonable storage for information technology facilities, but almost no desk space for employees, and were trying to salvage the business from calamity.

  The tsunami suddenly brought into prominence the looming potential for a systematic failure that might put several of the world’s largest financial institutions out of operation for a significant time. On this early October Monday, the financial capital of New York City was staring down the gun barrel of the most terrible domino effect that could very easily lead to the total collapse of the world’s financial system.

  A stern warning, in the aftermath of 9/11, had been issued by the regulatory body, the Security and Exchange Commission. In one section of the consultative document, the SEC had imposed specific requirements on major financial institutions, stipulating precisely the acceptable recovery periods and minimum distances between backup facilities.

  Some corporations, like International Business Machines, had put these hugely expensive pl
ans onto a fast track, probably fast enough to stay ahead of the tsunami. IBM had scoured the Kittatinny Mountains area out in western New Jersey, looking for a site to install a complete new complex that would enable them to provide, in corporate parlance, “full IT resilience” plus duplicate live data centers.

  Finally, they had settled on Sterling Hill and invested heavily in setting up their Business and Continuity Recovery Center in a maze of great office complexes 35 miles northwest of Wall Street—some of them underground, in old disused mines, others in the hills and forests. And there, many of their clients had paid a monthly rental for several years, in return for secure office space with computers and desks, plus entire computer backup if ever required.

  IBM’s foresight caused several other Manhattan corporations to head for the New Jersey hills as well. For five days now, there had been a steady stream of executives—bankers, financial officers, and an army of backup operators—moving out to New Jersey. A gigantic electronic surge in the local power stations signaled their arrival, as the alternative offices came on stream, operating parallel to their headquarters in nerve-racked Manhattan.

  Still battling away, in the almost-deserted ops rooms of Wall Street, was a battalion of computer technicians retrieving hardcopy material, main servers, and ancillary equipment, sending truckload after truckload of high-tech data out to the crowded highways towards to the mountain ranges east of the Poconos.

  Morgan Stanley, the securities giant, had been forced to relocate 3,700 employees when the World Trade Center was destroyed. In the ensuing years, that corporation had been committed, more than most, to building a state-of-the-art backup trading facility. They selected their site and were up and running, 18 miles outside of Manhattan, by 2007. The only problem: the complex was located in Harrison, less than two miles from Mamaroneck Harbor, along the flat northern shore of Long Island Sound, where the tidal surge was estimated at about 80 feet. Not ideal for Morgan Stanley.