Politika pp-1

by Tom Clancy

  “Taylor, the mayor really seems to be—”

  “I’m sorry, Jessica, could you repeat that? As you can probably hear, people already have their noisemakers out, and it’s getting a little hard to hear you…”

  “I was just saying that the mayor appears to be playing the part of master of ceremonies to the hilt.”

  “That’s right. He’s been saying a few words to the crowd before leading them in the final New Year’s countdown of the century, and just moments ago put on a red-and-gold foil top hat with crepe paper streamers. The word is, incidentally, that he’s going to be joined onstage by the legendary musician and songwriter Rob Zyman, whose song ‘The World’s A’ Gonna Change’ became the anthem of an entire generation, and who, as you may know, rose to stardom in the streets of New York’s own Greenwich Village. Also expected is a reunion between Zyman and his occasional collaborator Joleen Reese. This promises to be amazing!”

  “It sure does, Taylor. Thanks for your report. We’re going to cut away for a brief commercial break, but will be back to resume our live coverage of New Year’s 2000 in just sixty seconds…”

  11:50 P.M.

  Sadov reached the end of the tiled corridor in the IND station at Fiftieth Street and Rockefeller Center, then climbed the stairs leading up to the sidewalk, taking his time, in no rush to arrive at his destination. He had gotten off an uptown B train fifteen minutes earlier and lingered on a bench on the subway platform, pretending to wait for a connecting train until he felt it was time to move. If he had chosen to, he could have come by one of the lines that ran closer to Times Square — but Gilea had pointed out that security would be tighter in and around those stations, and there was no sense taking unnecessary chances.

  He saw a strip of night sky between the crenellated rooftops beyond the stairwell exit, and then cold air came sweeping over him and he was out on the street.

  Even here, two long avenues west of the square, he could hear shouts of excitement and whoops of laughter bubbling up above muddier layers of sound, a dense torrent of human voices rushing between the high office towers on either side of him.

  He turned north on Sixth Avenue, then continued at an unhurried pace, his leather jacket creaking a little as he adjusted the shoulder strap of his athletic bag. The bag was dark blue nylon, very inconspicuous. Still, the police had set up sawhorses at the intersections, and it was likely they would conduct spot inspections of carry bags and packages. The plan, therefore, was for Sadov to wait outside the checkpoint at the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street until the primary explosion drew their attention elsewhere. Only then would he briefly join the surging press of bodies and drop his bag. At the same time, Gilea’s man Korut, along with two of Nick Roma’s soldiers, would do the same at the other three corners of the square. Each of their satchel charges was on a ten-minute time-delay fuse and would detonate at the height of the crowd’s confusion.

  Those within the kill zones would be ripped to shreds. Hundreds, possibly thousands, more would be injured during the pandemonium, trampled by the stampeding herd of humanity. And the screams of the dead and the dying would echo over streets awash in blood.

  Sadov swung west on Fifty-third and looked up ahead, where a blue-and-white police barricade stood crosswise in the middle of the street, a huddle of uniformed officers around it, laughing, talking, standing with their arms crossed over their chests and very little to do but collect their overtime pay.

  Slowing in the long shadow of an office building, Sadov checked his watch. In mere minutes, he thought, the policemen would have their hands full of things to do. Whatever the final number of casualties in the bombings, this night would be remembered ten centuries later, as the world turned toward yet another new millennium, and common minds filled with dread of things to come, and the leaders of nations yet unborn wondered what sins might have inspired such awesome rage.

  11:51 P.M.

  On loan from the FAA at the police commissioner’s personal request, the bomb detection team had brought two of their best dogs to the scene. Fay, whose name was an obvious homage to her organizational keepers, was a five-year-old black Labrador that had sniffed out suitcase bombs at Kennedy International Airport four times in the past two years. Hershey, a Doberman retriever, had used his phenomenally sensitive nose to set off a red light at the Republican Convention the previous summer, preventing a catastrophic explosion by alerting security personnel to a chunk of A-3 plastic that had been concealed in a vase of flowers on the speaker’s platform. Though generally regarded as the smartest dog on the team, Hershey’s greatest weakness was a tendency to be sidetracked by the smell of chocolate… hence, the origin of his name.

  Agent Mark Gilmore had been with the FAA’s civil security branch for a dozen years, and had been a canine handler almost half that long. He loved the dogs and knew their outstanding capabilities, but was also highly sensitive to their limitations. And from the outset, he had been concerned that his current assignment just wasn’t doable.

  The bomb dogs were most effective at searching relatively closed-in areas, or at least areas in which distractions could be kept to a minimum, such as jetliner cabins, airport baggage holds, hotel rooms, and, as in the case of the Republican convention, empty auditoriums. The more sensory input they were hit with, the greater the chance they would be fooled or simply wander off track. Large spaces with open access and lots of hubbub diminished their ability to fix on the minute olfactory traces of explosive chemicals. Times Square on a normal night would be tricky; tonight, when it seemed like a cross between a mosh pit and the Mardi gras, it would be overwhelming — a hectic, blaring jumble of sights, sounds, and odors.

  Basic movement was another difficulty. Earlier in the night, when the crowd was much thinner, the dogs still had had some roving room. Now, however, the crush was all but impenetrable and they were getting stressed. Which meant keeping them on a short leash, and narrowing their range to cordoned-off peripheries, like the restricted zone around the VIP stand.

  A further problem for Gilmore was making sure the excited animals didn’t become dehydrated, a condition that could throw their systems into shock, even kill them, within minutes if it were severe enough. At 150 pounds each, they needed plenty to drink to prevent their revved-up canine metabolisms from overheating. Mindful of this, Gilmore had brought several gallon jugs of water in the bomb-detection van parked outside One Times Square, and the panting dogs had led him in that direction twice in the last hour.

  He had been standing to one side of the stage, watching Rob Zyman and Joleen Reese take their places beside the mayor, when he noticed Fay tugging at the leash again. This had gotten him kind of disappointed. In these last few moments before the countdown, he had wanted to stick close to the worn but not worn-out folkies for a reason that was, he had to admit, not entirely professional. Gilmore had been a Zyman fan since his older brother had come home with his first album, Big City Ramble, back in the late sixties and, Zyman’s public appearances being few and far between nowadays, he’d figured this might be his last chance to see him perform before he slung his battered Gibson guitar over his shoulder and rambled off down the lonesome highway. Even if all he did was sing a verse or two of “Auld Lang Syne” in his famed and often-parodied sandpaper rasp, Gilmore had figured it would be an event worth catching.

  But then Fay had started panting and tugging, signaling him in no uncertain terms that she needed her radiator filled.

  Now he was making for the van with the dogs out ahead of him on about six inches of leash, staying inside the area that had been cleared below the stage, Fay’s tongue hanging halfway to the pavement. Hershey, in this instance, had stayed on the job, his head slouched low, sniffing this way and that, acting as if he’d gone along with his partner just out of canine chivalry.

  Suddenly, thirty feet or so from where the van was parked, Hershey stopped dead in his tracks and turned to the left — toward the crowd — whining and barking, his triangular ear
s angling back against his head. Gilmore looked down at him, puzzled. The dog was frantic. Odder still, Fay was also barking like crazy, facing in the same direction as Hershey, her thirst seemingly forgotten.

  Unease creeping up on him, Gilmore added more slack to the leash. The dogs began pulling to the left, hunting further, almost leading him into a collision with the horizontal plank of a police barricade. He made them heel with a sharp command, then steered them to a gap between two sawhorses, his eyes scanning the crowd.

  All he could see was people. Thousands and thousands of them, crammed so close together they seemed to form a single amorphous organism. Most were looking at the stage or the Panasonic screen in anticipation of the countdown, now less than ten minutes away.

  Then Gilmore spotted the vender’s booth about ten feet up ahead at the corner of Forty-second Street, the words “FRESH DONUTS” emblazoned across its front in big block letters. His gaze might have passed over it except for a couple of curious things: the glass display cases were empty, and the vender was exiting it through a side door in what appeared to be something of a hurry.

  He glanced back down at Fay and Hershey, both of whom had raised their hackles and were staring straight at the donut booth.

  Warning bells went off in Gilmore’s head. Not loud ones, at first — he still thought it very possible that Hershey had picked up the smell of nothing more deadly than a leftover chocolate donut, and that Fay was simply getting swept up in his food fervor — but the ringing was insistent enough to make him want to go investigate.

  He let Fay and Hershey lead him forward again. They went for the booth like homing missiles, growling, the whites of their eyes showing large. Intimidated by their size and agitated behavior, the sea of revelers parted to let them through.

  As they came within a yard of him, the vender halted between the snarling dogs and the booth, his eyes dropping to look at them, then leaping up to Gilmore.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Gilmore said, looking steadily at him. The dogs were yanking at the leash so hard he thought they would wrench his shoulder from its socket. “Would you mind stepping aside a moment? I’d like to have a peek at your booth.”

  The vender stared at him.

  “Why?”

  “Just routine,” Gilmore said.

  The guy stood there, his eyes flicking between Gilmore and the dogs. Gilmore observed that a sheen of perspiration had formed on his cheeks above his beard.

  “I’m busy packing up,” the vender said. Licking his lips. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

  “Sir,” Gilmore said, his internal bells of alarm clanging stridently now, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to move out of my way.”

  The guy stood there.

  Swallowed twice.

  Then he shoved his left hand into his coat pocket.

  “Go fuck yourself, American,” he said.

  And pulled a small cylindrical object from his pocket and gave one end of it a twist with his left hand.

  Gilmore started to reach for his sidearm, but never got the chance to draw it from its holster.

  Insofar as what happened next, however, that really made no difference at all.

  11:55 P.M.

  The cop in the ESU radio surveillance van had enough time to notice a blip in his monitoring equipment, some kind of low-frequency transmission in the thirty-to-fifty-megahertz range — less than you might pick up from a pager or cellular phone, but much more than you’d get out of an electronic car-door opener of the sort drivers carried as key-chain fobs.

  He turned to his partner on the stool beside him, figuring it was sufficiently unusual to be worth mentioning.

  “Gene,” he said, “what do you ma—?”

  The roar of the blast sucked the words out of his mouth as the van, its crew, and everything else in it were vaporized by a sweeping wave of fire.

  11:55 P.M.

  On the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, Gilea had been waiting for midnight, her detonator tucked in her palm, when the explosion filled the sky with unimaginable brilliance. The sound of it came next, rolling over her with physical force, hammering her eardrums, sending tremors through her bones, shaking the ground under her feet. Car and burglar alarms began howling everywhere around her. Windows shattered in office buildings up and down the avenue.

  Akhad, she thought, her heart racing, the metallic taste of adrenaline flooding her mouth.

  Breathless with exhilaration, Gilea reached out to steady herself against a wall, facing west toward Times Square, her eyes reflecting jags of light from the red-orange mountain of flame rising above it.

  “Magnificent,” she muttered. “My God, it is magnificent.”

  SIXTEEN

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 31, 1999

  It was five minutes past midnight in New York.

  Where the television cameras had been quick-cutting between scenes of raucous celebration in Times Square, they now showed a mass of orange flame, shot with glare, bulging upward within a spray of smaller blazes that, viewed from above, resembled glowing matches scattered across a dark tabletop.

  Matches, Roger Gordian thought. If that were only the case.

  His face ashen, horror and disbelief slapping through his brain, he gripped the armrest of his sofa with a hand that would not stop trembling. The glass of Courvoisier that had slipped from his fingers lay overturned on the floor, a wet purple splotch soaking into the carpet around it. He was oblivious to the spreading stain, oblivious to the fact that he had dropped the glass, oblivious to everything but the unfolding tragedy on the screen.

  Five past midnight.

  Ten minutes ago, the people of the world had been about to greet the new century as if they were gathered at the railroad station to watch the circus roll into town — but instead something that looked much more like the Apocalypse had come thundering down the track. And strangely, in those first numbing instants after the blast, Gordian had tried to resist the truth of what had happened, pushing back against its intrusion, trying to make himself believe it was all a mistake, that some technician at the television station had hit the wrong switch, run some god-awful disaster film instead of the Times Square broadcast.

  But he’d never been one to duck reality for very long, especially when it was coming on broadside.

  Now, a pulverized expression on his features, he stood motionless, holding onto the couch for support, holding on as though the floor had tilted sharply underneath him. Yet as he stared at the television, largely overcome with shock, a small part of his mind continued to function on an analytical level, automatically interpreting the images in front of him, adjusting for scale, calculating the extent of the destruction. It was an ability — some might have called it a curse — he had brought home from Vietnam and, like a black-box flight recorder aboard an aircraft, that embedded observational mechanism would keep working even if the rest of him were emotionally totaled.

  The fire at the bottom left looks like it could be a building. A large one. And above it, the bright teardrop-shaped spot there, that’s an extremely hot flame, reflecting a lot of light. Probably ignited gasoline and metal… a burning vehicle of some kind, then. Not a car, but more likely a truck or a van. Maybe even a bus.

  Gordian drew in a long, shaky breath, but still didn’t think he could move without tripping over his own feet. Standing there with the television flashing its nightmarish overhead view of Times Square, and the news anchor stammering off disconnected snippets of information about what had happened, he remembered Vietnam, remembered the bombing runs, remembered the flames dotting the jungle like angry red boils. Whether playing tag with a Russian surface-to-air missile or looking down at a VC bunker that had just become the recipient of a five-hundred-pound bomb, he had known how to read the fiery dots and dashes of aerial warfare as signs of success, failure, or danger. He supposed he’d never expected that skill would be of use to him in civilian life, and right now would have given anything not to have found
out he was wrong.

  The strew of tiny dots, they’re bits and pieces of mixed debris. And that mottled black-and-red area where smoke is roiling up the thickest, that’s got to be ground zero.

  Gordian forced himself to concentrate on the CNN report. The anchorwoman’s voice seemed dim and distant, although he knew the volume on his set was turned up high enough to be audible several rooms over. Lonely, missing Ashley, he’d been listening to the New Year’s 2000 coverage from the den, where he’d gone to pour himself a brandy, and had heard what he had heard loud and clear.

  Ashley, he thought. She had phoned at ten to say she was staying with her sister in San Francisco, and he briefly considered calling her there now. But what would he say? That he didn’t want to be alone at a time like this? That he ached for the comforting warmth of someone he loved? Given how he’d been ignoring her almost all the time lately, his need seemed a selfish, unfair thing.

  Focus on the reporter. You don’t want to lose what she’s saying.

  “… again, I want to remind you that what we are seeing is live video from atop the Morgan Stanley Tower at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway. I’m being told the ABC television network, which had been broadcasting from that location, is permitting it to be used as a pool camera by the rest of the news media until other transmissions can be restored in the area. There are no pictures coming out of Times Square at street level… whatever happened has caused extensive equipment damage… and while there are unconfirmed reports that the explosion was caused by a bomb, we want to caution you that there is no, I repeat, no evidence at all that it was a nuclear device, as stated by a commentator on one of the other networks. Word from the White House is that the President is expected to make a televised statement within the hour…”