Politika pp-1

by Tom Clancy

  Gordian felt an icy finger touch his spine as he suddenly recalled a phrase he hadn’t used, or heard anyone else use, in many years: Spooky’s working. It was yet another special delivery coming to him from the Vietnam of thirty years ago. The Spookies had been AC-47s mounted with 7.62mm machine guns that would stalk enemy positions in the black of night, unleashing sustained curtains of fire at a rate of six thousand rounds a minute, every third or fourth round a tracer. While American ground troops at a distance would find reassurance in the solid red wall of illumination that had poured down from the unseen aircraft, Charlie, huddled in his trenches, had been terrified by those firing missions. For him, it must have felt as if Heaven itself were venting its wrath. As if there were no safety anywhere.

  “… Wait, just a moment,” the anchor was blurting, her hand held to her earpiece. “I hear now that the governor of New York has issued a general curfew in the city and that it will be strictly enforced by police as well as National Guard units. Repeating what I just said, a curfew has gone into effect throughout the five boroughs of New York…”

  Ah God, Gordian thought. Ah, God.

  Tonight, in America, Spooky was working.

  SEVENTEEN

  NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 1, 2000

  Police commissioner Bill Harrison never heard the blast that killed his wife.

  There were, however, many other memories of that terrible event — far too many — that would haunt him as long as he lived.

  He would remember sitting beside Rosetta on the VIP platform, holding her hand, one bemused eye on the folk-singing duo that had joined the mayor center stage, the other having been snagged by a couple of FAA bomb-sniffing dogs making a commotion some yards to his right. He would remember spotting a vender’s stand over there, and thinking wryly that the dogs had caught a whiff of something far less lethal than an explosive, unless they happened to be on diets that prohibited vanilla custard donuts and such. But then he’d noticed the serious look on the K-9 officer’s face, noticed his body language as he spoke to the man in the vender’s smock, and become more concerned. He had been doing police work for a quarter century, and started out his career as a foot patrolman in upper Manhattan, and he knew the cautious, attentive habits cops observed when approaching suspicious persons.

  He’s staying about eight, ten feet in front of the guy so he can watch his movements, watch his hands, making sure they stay in sight, Harrison had thought. And he’s keeping his own hand near his sidearm.

  Harrison would always remember feeling his stomach slip toward the ground when he saw the vender reach into his pocket, then saw the cop reaching for his weapon. Always remember his sudden fear, and the sense that time was accelerating, running much too fast, like a movie video that had been fast-forwarded in the middle of a critical scene. And then his gaze had swung to the Panasonic screen above him, and he’d noted the time display read 11:56, and thought, Four minutes, midnight on the head, that’s when they’d want to do it all right, unless something happens that makes them get to it faster.

  He would always remember whipping his head around toward Rosetta and his daughter, Tasheya, thinking he had to get them off the stage, get them away from there, and then his fingers had tightened around his wife’s hand and he’d risen off his chair, pulling at her arm with wild urgency, and she had given him a surprised, questioning look, she had mouthed the words “What’s wrong?”—but before he could give her an answer everything had dissolved into a blinding flash of nova brilliance, and he’d felt a blast of superheated air smack his body, felt the ground rattle and tremble, felt himself being hurled off his feet, tumbling helplessly in that hellish, searing bright light, and he’d held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand—

  Then suddenly the enveloping brightness peeled apart, and the heat, though high, was no longer a solid thing. Harrison became aware that he was still on the stand, sprawled on his side, his left cheek mashed into a rough, splintery nest of debris. His face felt wet, sticky, and the world seemed to have gone into a sickening tilt. Somehow his feet were higher up than his head.

  There was fire and smoke all around him. Broken glass was hailing down from above. Sirens shrilled into the night and there were people everywhere, many of them bloody and motionless, others running, crawling, screaming, wailing, crying out to one another. Everywhere.

  Harrison heard loud crashes from somewhere, heard the groan of buckling metal above him. He realized dimly that the platform had collapsed near the middle, its ends pitching downward and inward, accounting for his weird, dizzy angle. It was as if he were lying on a slantboard. Flames were crackling and spitting up through the planks, and the once-neat rows of folding chairs had been thrown about and upended, scattered like the pieces in a game of jacks. Huge blocks of concrete stretched endlessly across a zone of devastation that looked more like a moonscape than Times Square.

  Harrison saw a gigantic toadstool of fire throbbing and churning somewhere off to his right, realized it was swelling out of a huge crater, an actual crater, and instantly decided that must have been where the vender’s booth had been, where that cop and his dogs had been standing, where the detonation had occurred…

  Somehow that thought jerked his mind out of the hazy suspension of shock in which it had drifted for the first seconds after the blast, and an incredible realization descended upon him with anvil force — he had not yet checked on Rosie or Tasheya.

  Until now only half-conscious of the position in which he’d landed, Harrison realized that his left hand was stretched out behind him, and that it was still gripping his wife’s smaller, far softer hand.

  “Rosie?” he groaned weakly.

  There was no answer.

  “Rosie…?”

  Still no answer.

  Harrison forced himself to move. The grate of complaining metal overhead had become louder and more ominous, jolting him with a fresh sense of fear and dismay. He rolled over stiffly toward his wife, groaning her name again, afraid to ask himself why she had not yet answered.

  “Rosie, are you—”

  His sentence broke off as he saw her lying on her back, one eye closed, the other one staring blankly upward from a face that was covered with blood and cement dust, giving it the appearance of a ghastly Kabuki mask. Her hair was in disarray and there was a dark, murky puddle of wetness around the back of her head. Except for the arm he was clinging to, she was buried under a dune of jumbled wreckage from her neck to her waist.

  He couldn’t see her breathing.

  “Honey, please, please, we’ve got to get out of here, find Tasheya. You have to get up…”

  She didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change.

  Frantic, knowing in his heart that she was gone, that any human being would have to be crushed under a pile of rubble that huge, Harrison climbed up on one knee and tugged at her arm, tugged at it almost savagely, tugged at it with sobs choking his throat and tears streaming down his cheeks.

  It came away from her body on the fifth tug, severed above the elbow, leaving a jagged shoot of bone protruding from her buried shoulder.

  Harrison stared down at her, his eyes feverishly wide in their sockets.

  It took a moment for his unwilling mind to fully absorb what had happened.

  And then he began to scream.

  In every explosion, there is a violent outward rush of air, followed by a rapid compression as the hungry vacuum draws the displaced air back toward its center. This is the principle by which demolition experts will set off charges of HMX, TNT, and ammonium nitrate inside buildings to make them collapse upon themselves. The larger the initial release of energy, the more significant this effect can be, and the suction after the Times Square blast was enormous — blowing out windows, tearing doors off their hinges, bringing down steel scaffoldings, toppling walls, lifting motor vehicles off the ground, and pulling human beings into its monstrous throat as if they weighed nothing at all. Eyewitnesses to the catastr
ophe would later compare the sound of the inrushing air to that of a train moving toward them at top speed.

  Above the VIP platform on Forty-second Street, the tortured groan of metal grew louder with each passing moment as the Astrovision display’s structural supports, badly damaged from the force of the detonation, and further weakened by the subsequent vacuum effect, continued to bend and twist past their tolerance.

  Within seconds of the bombing, the giant television had tilted sideways on the uptown face of One Times Square, where it hung like a crooked picture frame, hundreds of pounds of glass spilling from its shattered screen and fluorescent discharge tubes. The broken glass poured down onto the street in a mangling torrent, lacerating flesh, severing veins and arteries, amputating limbs, slicing people open as if with daggers even as they ran to escape it, claiming dozens of victims before the echoes of the blast had died down. In mere minutes the pavement below had become covered with a grisly slick of blood that overspilled the curb and ran tendrils down to the sewers, backing up at the debris-clogged gratings.

  The blizzard of shards came on in waves as more of the screen’s fastenings bent and snapped, shifting it farther to one side, then a little farther, and still farther, tilting it nearly ninety degrees from its original position.

  At last, with a final protesting groan, it succumbed to gravity and crashed to the earth.

  In the bright glare of the fires sweeping the streets, the shadow of the descending screen spread over the crowd like a huge mantle of darkness. Trapped by their own numbers, the men, women, and children below could only scream as it came plunging down on their heads, crushing many to death under the sheer weight of its thirty-foot-long metal frame and shattered electronic guts, maiming others with a shrapnel storm of steel, wire, and glass.

  It was eight minutes into the year 2000 when this happened.

  Two minutes later, the first of the satchel charges planted around the square detonated.

  * * *

  “This is the 911 operator, what is the emergency?”

  “Thank God, thank God, the line’s been busy, I’m here at a pay phone and I didn’t think I’d ever get through—”

  “Ma’am, what is the emergency?”

  “My daughter, she’s… her eyes, oh Jesus almighty, her eyes…”

  “Is this a child you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, yes, she’s only twelve. My husband and I, we wanted her to be here tonight… we thought… oh, shit, never mind that, please, you’ve got to help her—”

  “Ma’am, listen to me, you need to calm down. Am I correct that you’re on Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue?”

  “Yes, yes, how did you…?”

  “Your location automatically shows on our computers—”

  “Then get somebody over here, damn it! Get somebody over here now!”

  “Ma’am, it’s very important that you listen to my instructions. We are aware of the situation in Times Square. There are rescue teams arriving as we speak, but it will take them some time to reach everyone, and they are going to have to prioritize. I need to know what condition your daughter is in—”

  “Prioritize? What are you saying?”

  “Ma’am, please try and cooperate with me. A lot of people need assistance—”

  “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I fucking well know? I’m talking about my little girl’s eyes, her eyes, her eyes…”

  * * *

  Sirens lashed the air, shrieky and urgent, throwing an ear-piercing lattice of sound over the city. On the streets and highways, fleets of emergency vehicles rushed toward Times Square with their tires screeching and flashers throbbing on their rooftops.

  Escorted by two police cruisers, the first EMS crew reached the scene at 12:04 A.M. and hastily established a triage on Forty-fourth Street off Broadway. Victims were evaluated according to the seriousness of their injuries and the ability of the paramedics to treat them with the limited resources at their disposal. Ambulatory patients with minor cuts and burns were steered toward an ad hoc first-aid station near the parked medical van. Those in the worst condition were laid out on stretchers, and when no more stretchers were available, on whatever space could be cleared along the pavement. Scores of individuals were intubated with glucose-and-saline IVs. Oxygen was given to many more. Broken bones were splinted. Hemorrhaging wounds were stanched. Painkillers were administered to burn victims with blackened skin and charred clothing. There were nine cardiac cases in the immediate area requiring CPR and electronic defibrillation, two of whom expired before the overwhelmed emergency teams were able to get to them.

  The dead were tagged and lined up on the street in double rows. Workers ran out of body bags within minutes and were forced to leave the corpses uncovered.

  Around the corner on Broadway, a teenage boy and girl lay pinned under a heavy steel beam and scattered debris that had fallen from a construction site in the percussive shock wave of the blast. The young couple had been embracing when the bomb exploded and their bodies were trapped together and still partially entangled. The girl was dead, her chest horribly crushed. The boy had been spared because the beam had landed at a diagonal and come down across his legs rather than his body. Though semi-conscious, he was slipping into shock and losing a tremendous amount of blood from his ruptured femoral artery.

  Ignoring the threat to their own lives from raging flames and falling, burning debris, TAC-team cops from One-Truck had been laboring to extricate him even before the EMS ambulances arrived, carrying off broken masonry by the armload, and hurrying to deploy Jaws of Life hydraulic spreaders and multi-chamber rescue bags from their vehicle. Only two inches thick when deflated, the neoprene airbags had been easily inserted between the pavement and the beam, then connected by an inlet hose to a compressed air tank and joystick controller. The officer operating the joystick carefully expanded the bag to its maximum height of four feet, keeping a close eye on the pressure gauge centered in his command console. To prevent further injury to the boy, it was vital that the lift be gradual, with no more than fourteen to sixteen inches of inflation at a time.

  By 12:08 the boy had been freed from underneath the beam and wheeled away on a gurney to exultant cheers from rescue workers. But neither they nor their lifesaving equipment were about to gain a respite: someone had been heard screaming for help underneath yet another pile of rubble across the street.

  With the police, medical teams, and firefighters on Forty-fourth Street struggling to their job under these hazardous, chaotic conditions, it was simplicity itself for Nick Roma’s man Bakach to slip past their attention, drop his satchel charge on the ground near the EMS vehicle, and then nudge it under the vehicle’s chassis with the toe of his shoe.

  * * *

  Minutes after the sidewalk triage was set up outside her window, the barmaid on shift at Jason’s Ring, a tavern on Forty-fourth Street, began passing out bottled drinking water to grateful rescue workers and victims. There was a large stock in the basement and her boss had been hauling it up himself by the carton, totally unconcerned with what it was costing him in future profits.

  The barmaid had just gone to the rear of the tavern for a fresh supply when she heard a loud boom behind her on the street, snapped her head around in terror, and saw the EMS vehicle blow apart in a dazzling orange-blue fireball. A millisecond later, smoking hunks of wreckage came streaking through the window of the tavern, smashing it to countless pieces, slamming into walls, breaking bottles, crashing onto the bartop like some bizarre meteor shower. The blast of heat that came scorching through the broken window at the same time rocked her back on her heels as the ambulance and everyone around it — rescue workers, police, patients, everyone—was incinerated.

  Behind her, staring out the shattered window of the bar, her boss stood with his box opener in his hand, scarcely able to credit his eyes, telling himself that what he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, had to be some kind of horrible dream.

  Tragically, this was
n’t the case — although it would be a long, long time before either of them was able to sleep without having the explosion replay itself in their darkest nightmares.

  * * *

  His face smudged with soot and tears, Bill Harrison was digging madly through the remains of the platform, screaming his daughter’s name, bellowing her name over and over, trying to find her, half-crazed with grief, shock, and desperation. His glassy, darting eyes were those of a man who had experienced what he’d thought would be the worst, only to be overtaken by the fear that it was but a prelude to even deeper horror.

  He crawled through the wreckage on his hands and knees, scooping up chunks of concrete, sharp pieces of glass, splintered wooden boards — anything that might be concealing some trace of his youngest child. The tips of his fingers were skinned and blistered from the burning planks and red-hot bits of metal that he had grabbed and then tossed aside in his frantic search.

  Exhausted and winded, he shouted her name again, his voice cracking this time, fresh tears blearing his vision. He felt an unmanageable tide of grief rise in his chest and smashed the piece of debris he was holding against the planks, smashed it down once and then again, smashed it in hopeless rage and loss, and was about to sledge it down a third time when a hand fell on his shoulder.

  He looked up at the face above him.

  Blinked.

  “Baby?” he said, sounding as if he’d been jolted out of a trance. He covered her hand with his own. Needing to touch it, to feel her, before he would let himself believe she was really standing there. “Tasheya? My God, I thought you… your mother…”

  His daughter nodded wordlessly, crying, tightening her grip on his shoulder. Her cheek and forehead were gashed, and the sleeve of her tattered coat was soaked in blood, but she was alive. Sweet mercy, alive. That singer, Zyman, was with her, helping to support her with one arm, though he was also bleeding and nearly as unsteady as she was.