Razing Beijing

by Sidney Elston

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Stuart left the Kokkaigijidomae subway entrance, collected his bearings, and began walking up the street toward the hotel. His message for Carolyn Ross to pass to McBurney had been simple: A Chinese satellite might have been involved in the destruction of the George Washington Bridge. Stuart couldn’t know whether the CIA woman’s stunned expression was disbelief or confusion, or, for that matter, some ruse to keep him in the dark. Already he was tired of the games these people played.

  He did, however, take their security precautions seriously. Cracking his window curtain earlier that evening, Stuart had observed a steady flow of limousines and taxicabs returning Chinese guests to the hotel. Presently, he strolled past a Buddhist shrine while backtracking the way he had come on his way to the fish market. Deciding to take Ross’s advice, he bypassed the drive leading up to the main entrance of the Tokyu. Stuart finally walked past a row of dumpsters and into the service entrance at the rear of the building—he nearly stepped into the path of a cart of collapsed cardboard boxes. The wiry young man pushing it paused to let him pass, nodding politely before resuming his task. If the fellow was surprised at seeing a guest step into the service elevator at 1:40 in the morning, he hadn’t shown it, at least not to Stuart’s eye.

  Stepping off the elevator on the fourteenth floor, Stuart was unnerved by activity at the end of the hallway. Two hotel employees collecting room service trays paid him no notice. Great, he thought, now I’m becoming paranoid. Stuart entered his room and locked the door behind him.

  PANFILO CORPUS TOSSED the last of the cardboard into the dumpster and wheeled the empty cart to its place outside the service door. To the young man’s growing list of resentments he decided to add the incredible waste in Japan. In the scatter-site community outside Manila where he had grown up, people yearned for such precious material. That he had lived with his mother and sister in a hutch made of cardboard, and done so contentedly, was a source of private humiliation. By his people’s standards, the ramshackle flat he currently shared with six other Filipinos was extravagant. Nowadays, Panfilo knew better than to trust contentedness as anything more than a childhood illusion.

  He had come to Japan to escape such a past, and being so inclined, he was hard pressed not to latch onto every opportunity to earn a few extra yen. Did the man entering the service entrance look Australian? Actually, Panfilo thought maybe he dressed more like an American. And no Aussie or Britisher would walk past a pile of garbage and smile so friendly, no doubt happy to see a peasant hauling trash for some slave’s wage. His mother and uncles always did say Americans were a peculiar blend of sentiment and arrogance. Americans were easy to read, were they not? No matter. He would make sure to relate what the Anglo was wearing, and to which floor the elevator had gone, just as the Chinese man had instructed. That should earn him the additional tip.

  88

  HEAVY, HOT SMOKE fed by gasoline and asphalt seemed to grow stronger by the minute. Shards of broken taillight dug into Officer Joseph Ciccone’s fingers as he struggled to heave himself up the side of his patrol car, wishing upon wish that he had spent more time in the gym. Defying the force of gravity several hundred feet over the water, he tried reminding himself that rock climbers actually live for this sort of thing...

  Suddenly his shoes slipped out from the police car’s broken rear window. With his toes scuffing frantically in search of a foothold, the synaptic alarm that his knee was scraping something sharp was blotted by the fear of falling backwards through the air. His right foot finally found the edge of the wheel well. He wasted no time before hoisting himself up and over onto the vehicle’s rear bumper.

  Out of breath, silently cursing his Rolling Rock paunch, Ciccone lay on his back, eyes closed, trying to regain his composure. The voice of professional training advised him not to venture beyond his car, to await the professionals just as he had often preached, advice he now realized was easier to prescribe than to follow. Especially now as the thinking part of his brain concluded that help would have trouble finding its way. Any remaining bridge surface on the other side of the tower was probably buckled, fissured, and clogged with vehicle pile-ups. Suspended as his own car was some ten feet from the mammoth tower, and fire blazing nearby, Ciccone knew that a helicopter was going to have difficulty dangling a tether to him or any of the other survivors.

  Ciccone opened his eyes to the gray, cloudy sky. Twenty feet over his head, a slanted section of upper deck roadway was supported on one end by the remaining pair of catenary cables, and on the other end by only a mangled maintenance catwalk—the section of asphalt roadway was sloped directly toward him like a giant ramp. The bad thing about it was that wedged between the roadway and the tower, several crushed and broken automobiles threatened to avalanche at any moment and crush him on their way to the Hudson. The pit of his stomach turned as several motorists attempted to gingerly vacate the wreckage. Meanwhile, another metallic shriek emanated from under his car.

  “Hey!” A voice muffled within the wreckage overpowered the din of sirens and a helicopter hovering nearby. Ciccone realized the shouts were directed at him.

  “Hey! Somebody’s gotta tell ’em we’re alive out here!”

  Ciccone gave a small wave of his hand. He pointed at the helicopter circling overhead. “They know we’re alive. Are you hurt?” he asked the disconnected voice.

  “I can’t move my legs!”

  Ciccone slowly sat upright, his heart still pounding in his chest, and was again reminded how he hated heights. He shouted, “Try not to move any more than you have to.” Very cautiously, he poked his head beyond the bumper enough to look down at the police car’s undercarriage. The source of his luck was even more precarious than he had feared. The rear axle had come to rest on the broken end of a girder, an I-beam extending out with the other end embedded in the masonry base of the tower—he could feel through the bumper the faint, telltale grinding of metal-on-metal as the car oscillated back and forth.

  There were several twisted beams anchored in the base of the tower, jutting out like broken teeth from the gums of a prizefighter who had met his match. The obvious thing to do was climb down from atop the bumper to the girder lodged under the car’s axle. He could then make his way along any one of the beams to the relative stability of the tower.

  A high shriek and scraping sound shot him with adrenaline. In an instant he became weightless when his car slid off the girder and out from under him. Ciccone lunged—

  —his arms snared the end of the girder, his feet kicking air as the car slid soundlessly away. “Mother-FUCK!” he shouted. Seconds later he heard the watery KA-CHUMP as his car crashed into the river.

  Several hundred feet above, the sequence was captured by a WABC-TV cameraman aboard the hovering Sikorsky, refueled and returned to continue covering the event now four hours old.

  Ten minutes later, Ciccone sat straddling the girder, gripping an insulated wire cable in hands that refused to stop shaking. His eyes were watering badly from the smoke. He had done nothing to escape the danger of the avalanche of cars poised to drag him and everything else in its path to the river.

  Down beyond the woman’s battered Hyundai, gentle eddies swirled through the water from the masonry base of the tower.

  “Lady, can you hear me?” Ciccone shouted at the dangling car.

  Sobbing inside the Hyundai that tapered off and stopped suggested she might be ready to communicate.

  “Listen to me. I’m going to try to climb down to help you from your vehicle.”

  The woman whimpered. “No...”

  “If we stay here, we might be in danger.” It would be counterproductive to describe the impending avalanche, likewise whatever invisible thread of luck kept her car’s rear wheel attached to some sort of tensioning cable. The braided wire was as big around as his forearm. He considered trying to reach it and shinny down. He was afraid he might accidentally shake her car loose.

  Jutting beside the girder Ciccone sat straddling was another ma
ngled I-beam. He took the telephone cable in his hands and made several loops around it. He paid out more than enough cable to reach the dangling Hyundai, and then tied it off. Rising slowly to his feet atop the girder, he placed his foot beside the wire knot and tugged as hard as he could. Satisfied that it was secure, he had an additional idea. He pulled the wire back up and tied the free end tightly around his leather belt. A free fall of any significant height would probably snap his spine, but he figured it was probably better than nothing. Oh, how I just love heights...

  He let the loop of wire out to hang free and sat, feet dangling, on the edge of the girder. Gripping the wire between his hands, he took a deep breath and slowly lowered himself over the side, paying out wire to control his descent. After descending a few feet, he wrapped the wire around his ankle as he had been taught in Army Basic Training.

  A swirl of fresh air swept away some of the smoke. Fighting a sense of vertigo, he looked up at the face of a man peering down from beside the cameraman aboard the hovering chopper. The whole event was being recorded.

  Ciccone slowly worked himself down to the car; fortunately, all of its windows were missing. The woman trapped inside appeared to be in her mid-twenties, pretty, eyeing him fearfully while sitting facing him from the dashboard of her car.

  He heard the helicopter edging closer overhead, the increased downdraft steadily bathing them in fresh air. It was a double edged sword. Ever so slightly, the wire he was clinging to started to twist. Glancing down he discovered that the car also was beginning to twist and sway in the helicopter’s breeze.

  Ciccone freed his hand and threw a menacing wave at the chopper. “Get out of here, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!” How can they not see what’s happening?

  For whatever reason, the pilot perhaps distracted by drama unfolding elsewhere on the crippled bridge, the chopper held its position.

  Ciccone looked in at the young woman and tried to smile. First things first. “Are you hurt?”

  The woman shook her head. “I lost my shoe and cut my foot. Please don’t try to move me. I saw what almost happened to you.”

  “Thing is, I don’t know how long your car...look, Miss, we’re wasting valuable seconds.”

  The woman closed her eyes, sobbing.

  “I’m a little scared myself. To be honest, I’d like to get back up there, so why not go with me?” He tried to think of another way. Seeing how badly shaken she was, he could hardly ask the woman to climb up by herself, could he? He swallowed hard, but his mouth was dry. “Whadda ya say?”

  The car twisted fractionally in the crosscurrents of air when, for no other apparent reason, a headlight fell out of the car’s grille and drifted downward. Ciccone watched until it hit the water with the expected splash. “Now would be good!”

  His sudden resolve seemed to break the young woman’s fear. She maneuvered herself into the passenger window. Gripping the passenger door handle to steady himself, Ciccone offered his back for the woman to climb onto. She stooped to clear her head of the window frame and put first one leg then the other over the edge—the Hyundai was twisting disturbingly now.

  “That’s it, don’t look down, just wrap your arms around my neck.” With her legs dangling outside over the rear view mirror, Ciccone released the door handle and gently grabbed her forearm to guide it toward his shoulder. “Lady, you’re going to have to help—”

  In the time it took for his mind to register her hand on his shoulder, the Hyundai lunged downward with a loud SNAP! The girl screamed—her full weight tore her forearm free of his grip and she launched herself onto his back. But Ciccone had only one hand gripping the cable...

  The sudden imbalance spun them around on the cable, its friction grip slipping past his ankle. The woman lost her own grip and slid down his back—she latched her hands onto his belt and screamed. Ciccone summoned all of his strength to grip the slender cable. His only real hope was to arrest their slide with his feet.

  “Hold...on...tight!” By the force of her knuckles against the small of his back, he knew their fate was tied. The knot around his belt took in the slack and they slid to a halt.

  “Stop kicking your feet!”

  “I don’t want to die!”

  THE VICE CHAIRMAN OF MILITARY AFFAIRS calmly observed the carnage from the comfort of his study. By 2:37 in the morning, Rong Peng had seen enough of the live CNN coverage. Any more would be to partake in the quintessentially American proclivity for overindulgence. Really, what more could they think of to say? He pressed a button on his remote and the wide-screen television became blank. A low hum accompanied its disappearance into Indonesian mahogany cabinetry.

  While maybe not as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, without any bullets, they were every bit as dead. Satisfied, the aspiring Chinese emperor rose from his chair and walked to his bedroom.

  89

  Late Tuesday, July 7

  THE FBI HAD IMMEDIATELY begun receiving reports through borough police and 9-1-1 operations that an explosion with a bright flash had wrought the bridge’s collapse. There followed the predictable deluge of calls claiming responsibility; the crank, ridiculous, and disjointed were readily dismissed. Certain telephone calls were taken seriously and ignited much freewheeling speculation, such as the many that alleged the complicity of two men, of apparent Middle Eastern extraction, who were observed loitering suspiciously outside their vehicle on the bridge the previous evening. Consistent with the evolving view that a major terrorist attack had in fact occurred, the pressing questions were whether or not the city was under siege and, if so, when would the next hammer fall?

  The FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group had sprung into motion even prior to receiving a preliminary assessment from their division in Lower Manhattan. From his office inside the J. Edgar Hoover building, and with concurrence of the Director who then informed the President’s national security advisor, the Assistant Director of Counter-terrorism dispatched his deputy to accompany the CIRG team and a mobile forensics laboratory from Quantico, Virginia. Three-hours and ten minutes after initial reports of the disaster, a Gulfstream jet equipped for such missions completed its thirty-five minute flight from Andrews Air Force Base and touched down at Newark International. Once there, four agents transferred the bulky equipment from the plane into vans for the traffic-snarled drive up I-95. A waiting NYPD helicopter whisked away the others.

  ONE-QUARTER OF A MILE from the New Jersey riverbank and high over the Hudson, Deputy Assistant Director Lance Lee of the FBI’s Counter-terrorism Division stood amid the wet and smoldering remains of an asphalt and gasoline fire. The destruction around him was worse than he had originally envisioned. A stone’s throw away, the entire center span of the famous bridge hung down at a seventy degree angle, its once busy roadbed twisted and buckled, supported only by the intact cable pair on the down-river side of the bridge.

  Both spans that adjoined the bridge’s collapsed center, riverbank on one side and their respective support tower on the other, were nearly impassable. Where Lee stood on the New Jersey span, the asphalt between acres of collided vehicles looked to be either buckled or altogether missing. World’s deepest potholes, Lee privately mused. Some two-hundred-fifty firemen and emergency response personnel were occupied with the gruesome task of searching for survivors among the hundreds of cars, many of them burned-out hulks, haphazardly strewn about by what clearly had been violent undulations of the collapsing bridge. Not unlike the old ‘9/11’ Twin Towers attack, the devastation was reminiscent of a war zone, as if the New York City landmark had been the target of an aerial bombing raid.

  Lee heard two men shouting above the din of pneumatic jackhammers and portable generators as a departing ambulance bounced slowly in and out of potholes through a narrow gap in the wreckage. A hundred feet beyond, the gargantuan Jersey-side support tower straddled the road where a dozen blaze-orange barriers prevented emergency crews from wandering off the edge of the precipice. Twenty feet below was a collapsed section of upper deck roadbed,
where a hard-hat crew worked feverishly to secure a mesh wire net beneath a vehicle pile-up that looked ready to cascade into the Hudson.

  Lee craned his neck to look up. High overhead in the darkness, the unbalanced forces created by the ruptured main catenary cables had been so massive as to twist the top of the structural steel tower into a permanent angle. But Lee’s interest was near the massive tower’s base. Nestled against it and illuminated by floodlights, all manner of remnants from the collapse had been dragged there by the whip-lashing catenaries. Forming a two-story mound of tortured scrap were thick plates of gray metal crumpled and bent beyond recognition amidst thick slabs of asphalt, twisted girders, and a tangled mass of iron railing. Buried within this debris was one severed end of a main catenary cable. It was already generally accepted that the north-side catenary pair had ruptured near the bridge’s mid-span, initiating the collapse. The cables were the real reason why Lee had bothered to come to the scene.

  The first of these was about to be exposed. A burly figure standing midway up the agonized mound of steel, the words NJ TRANSIT AUTHORITY stenciled onto the back of his orange denim coveralls, set aside an oxy-acetylene torch in order to wrestle a pry bar. The man wore an air filtration mask beneath his construction helmet; his heavy gloves were coated with a layer of chemical-resistant plastic. Occasionally he kicked with steel-toed boots, or heaved his weight up and down on shards of metal, in order to clear a path to the prize, the proverbial smoking gun. Lee studied the man’s motions; the deliberate pressure of his shoulder against the bar, knees bent, neck muscles taut, and wondered why the job was taking so long.

  The FBI executive reminded himself he could afford to be patient. To return to the airport with the evidence, he would need to either commandeer one of the vans dispatched from Newark with the laboratory gear, or preferably, his special assistant would arrive with the pick-up. Neither vehicle had arrived, and even when one of them did, sequencing it ahead of ambulance crews onto the remains of the bridge could be problematic.