by Jon Land
Satisfied, Blaine turned and began kicking at the passenger door. When this produced no results, he hammered his elbow against the already spiderwebbed window until it shattered and showered to the roadbed beyond. He cautiously pulled himself outside and couldn’t believe what lay before him.
The force of the blast that had launched their car airborne had carved jagged chasms through both the upper and the lower decks of the bridge. Pockets of flames pooled about the remnants of the structure, licking at the blackened shells of cars, some with the charred remains of the occupants still inside. As Blaine continued to look about, he saw that a school bus had crashed through the guy wires and was resting precariously on the bridge safety rail, starting to list ever so slowly to the front. Inside, children shifted desperately about, all their jostling quickening the inevitable tilt that would take it over the side.
One of the rear doors to their smoking car popped clean off, and Johnny Wareagle emerged to survey the scene. Liz and Sal extricated themselves from the wreck as best they could, emerging at the same time Blaine spied the tow truck they had passed just before the blast. He sprinted toward it.
McCracken tore the tow truck’s door open, singeing his hands on the latch, to find the driver slumped unconscious against the wheel, then rushed to the rear. He grabbed the truck’s winch cable and swung around to find Johnny Wareagle beside him.
“Work the winch on my signal, Indian.”
There was no clear path to the teetering school bus, which meant negotiating an obstacle course of mangled car hulks over stubborn pockets of flames to reach it before it plummeted. So Blaine took the high road, leaping from hood to hood of some cars and hurdling across the roofs of others, the winch cable dragged behind him. He skirted clear of the flaming wrecks, which popped and crackled, coughing glass and steel into the air around him. But he felt the heat of the scorched metal right through his shoes.
Blaine reached the rear of the bus, only to see that gravity had begun pulling it over the top of the safety rail, its nose tilting ever downward. He dove and snared the cable onto the bus’ exhaust manifold. The bus had just started to go over when the cable snapped taut, holding it precariously in place.
Blaine waved back to Johnny, who activated the winch. The cable began to churn, and the bus edged ever so slowly back toward the bridge.
“Oh no,” McCracken muttered, his sense of triumph short-lived when he realized that the exhaust manifold was starting to bend.
“What do you mean, it’s gone, Shirley?” Don Imus asked the woman calling WFAN radio from her cell phone.
“I mean somebody blew the goddamn thing up.”
“You feeling all right this morning, Shirley? Didn’t add a little Kahlúa to your coffee, now did you?”
“It’s a mess down here,” she cried. “People are going to need lots of help!”
Imus cupped his hand over his ear when his producer rushed through the door.
“The switchboard’s jammed. It’s not just the Lincoln; somebody’s blowing up the whole goddamn city!”
“All right,” Imus told him. “Forget the President and get me the mayor.”
Mayor Lucille Corrente’s conference room in City Hall featured a clear view of the Brooklyn Bridge. She had been meeting with her senior staff since eight-thirty sharp, had just initiated a discussion about price fixing in the city’s garbage industry, when City Hall shook and the plate-glass window in the conference room shattered.
“Earthquake!” one of the staff members yelled.
“I don’t think so,” said another, who could see the fireball that had swallowed the Brooklyn Bridge through the spiderweb of cracks in the window.
“All routes confirmed down!” Marbles announced happily, his eyes trained on the electronic wall map, where the red lights denoting bridge and tunnel access to the island of Manhattan were flashing in synchronized fashion.
But Jack Tyrell didn’t respond. His attention was still riveted on the scene unfolding at the George Washington Bridge, now captured on live television by a news traffic chopper.
Barely aware of the helicopter hovering overhead, Blaine looked on helplessly as clamps popped out from the bus’ exhaust manifold like kernels of Jiffy Pop. Half the manifold came free, and the school bus keeled downward again, dragging the tow truck across the bridge.
Inside the bus the screaming kids were rocked forward, pitching into the aisle and sliding toward the front as though they were on ice. The rear tires had actually dropped over the edge when Blaine lunged futilely to grab hold of the cable, as if he could somehow yank the bus back up alone. Before the bus could plummet, the cable lodged firmly under its mangled frame, toppling the tow truck onto its side and leaving Blaine with the brief illusion that he was holding the bus up himself.
Blaine let go of the cable and pressed up against the safety rail, the hot metal burning him through his shirt. The nose of the bus was facing straight down now, the rear emergency exit about a yard away. Still intent on rescue, he climbed down onto the bus. His weight rocked it slightly and drew a chorus of yells from the kids trapped inside. He managed to work the emergency door open, hearing the raspy screech from the alarm as he leaned in toward the terrified faces gazing up at him.
“Come on!” he said. “Climb to me!”
But the sudden shifting of weight as the kids started pulling themselves toward him caused the bus to lurch downward again, the tow truck dragged with it and all of Blaine but his feet ended up inside. He would have fallen in headfirst if Johnny Wareagle hadn’t reached over the rail above and latched onto his ankles. Liz Halprin and Sal Belamo then grabbed hold of Johnny’s legs just in case the bus was rocked again.
But for the moment it seemed stable, and Blaine took advantage of the human chain of survivors who had braved the inferno to raise the kids up and over him so they might reach for the hands of more bystanders who had rushed to the rail to help.
“Hold it!” Blaine ordered, when the children started crowding toward him. “One at a time!”
It was an agonizingly slow process, each kid seeming to take forever. The sixth of ten in the bus had just made it over the rail when the tow truck slipped free of the cars it was wedged between and slid on its side into a toppled eighteen-wheeler. Blaine felt himself torn from Johnny’s grasp, falling all the way inside the bus. Then the winch cable split from the frame, sliding free, and the bus jerked downward, with nothing to hold it.
Robert Corrothers, New York City’s public safety commissioner, had been conducting his own meeting, three floors down from the mayor’s office in City Hall, when the blast shook the walls. He knew instantly it was bad, but how bad would not become clear until he witnessed the bedlam that broke out in the various offices occupied by his personnel in the ensuing moments.
Within seven minutes of the initial series of blasts, he had spoken with the Traffic Control Bureau, Emergency 911 Response, and the City Engineer’s Office in an attempt to get a handle on the scope and magnitude of what had occurred. Corrothers could scarcely believe what he was hearing, and it only got worse with each call.
His chief assistant, Patty Tope, found him in the “bunker” where the public safety team holed up during major storms and other natural disasters.
But there was nothing natural about this, Corrothers knew.
“We just got confirmation on the Willis Avenue Bridge,” Patty Tope reported, reading from a clipboard held shakily in her hand, “the Third Avenue Bridge, the Madison Avenue Bridge, the Macombs Dam Bridge—”
“What about Transit?”
“Power’s still out on all lines. They’re trying to track down the problem now.”
Corrothers continued scanning the various angles of New York City pictured on the screens before him, most coming courtesy of local television stations, which by now had interrupted their regular programming for continuous coverage of the unfolding crisis. Right now that crisis included one monster traffic jam that encompassed every single street in Manhattan. C
orrothers had a dozen major sites that needed emergency response immediately, and he didn’t have a clue as to how it was going to get there. And that, he figured, was exactly what the person or persons behind this wanted.
“The problem,” Corrothers told Patty Tope, “is that somebody blew Transit up too.”
The atmosphere in the Midnight Run command center had become that of a football game, with most of Jack Tyrell’s men crowded around the screen that pictured the dangling school bus. Rousing cheers erupted when it dropped for what seemed like its final plunge, only to be held up yet again when the cable snared on another part of its frame.
“Well, well, well,” Tyrell said, loving the scene as the traffic chopper hovered as low as possible to catch the efforts of bystanders still doing their utmost to save the children. “A bunch of heroes auditioning for the movie of the week.” He yanked his wallet from his pocket. “I got ten bucks here says the kids die.”
The ruckus picked up again as odds were given excitedly and money changed hands. And this, Tyrell thought, this is only the beginning. The best was yet to come.
The traffic chopper swooped in closer, catching the grimly determined visage of a bystander who had managed to work his way into the bus itself.
Jackie Terror froze, hands dropping to his sides.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. His euphoria vanished as he recognized the bearded face that had been plastered on the screen for one long moment. “All bets are off,” he announced suddenly, and his men went dead quiet. “I’m about to change the odds big-time. Marbles,” he called to the bespectacled man who had not budged from his post at the console.
“Yeah?”
“I want to talk to the people in our chopper. I want to talk to them now.”
The tires! Blaine realized. The cable had snared under the tires.
But that gave little reason for celebration. Holding on to a pair of seats to keep from falling straight through the bus’s windshield, Blaine shifted his frame enough to fix his gaze upward. The bridge was twenty-five feet away now, the human chain that had helped evacuate all but four of the kids rendered useless. Blaine, meanwhile, was in no position any longer to help anyone, not even himself.
From this angle he was afforded an incredible view of the damage done by the blast. Blaine had seen the best in the business work with everything from C-4 to shape charges to fuel-air bombs, but he had never, never, seen anything that could shred layers of steel and asphalt as fast and cleanly as Devil’s Brew.
Above him on the bridge, Johnny Wareagle had organized a group of bystanders to try to lift the tow truck back upright so he could try working the winch again.
Sal Belamo, meanwhile, rushed to the spot on the safety rail where the bungee cord remained fastened in place. He uncoiled it and pushed through the hordes of gawking onlookers directly over the swaying bus.
“Boss!”
Thirty feet below, McCracken heard the call and looked up. Sal knotted the cord onto the section of rail and then dropped it straight toward the open emergency exit. The cord fluttered through on the first try, and Blaine snatched it easily.
He had the cord knotted around his waist in the next instant, the support it provided enough to let him return to the task of getting the kids safely out. Fighting the bus’ slight sway, he grabbed the girl closest to him and raised her through the emergency exit.
“Grab the cable!” he instructed. “Pull yourself up!”
The girl’s feet had barely cleared the door when Blaine called for the next-closest child to climb toward him. He could feel the bus descending slowly, almost imperceptibly, just an inch or so at a time, as the winch cable ate its way through the thick tires. Trying hard not to calculate how much time he had left, Blaine pushed the second-to-last child through and then reached down for the final boy.
“Come on!” He waved.
“My foot,” the boy moaned. “It’s stuck.”
Blaine took all the slack the bungee cord would give him to drop down even with the boy. His sneakered foot was caught in the seat. Blaine jimmied it gently until it came free. He angled himself closer to ease the boy out and saw a shape squeezed beneath the dashboard.
The bus driver! In all the chaos, he had forgotten about the driver!
“Hold on to me,” Blaine ordered the terrified boy, as he began to climb back for the emergency exit. “Don’t let go. Hold on tight and keep your eyes closed!”
The bus rocked harder, making Blaine’s ascent to the exit even more difficult. But he reached the hatch and hoisted the boy through. Above him, a pair of kids were just being lifted over the side, back onto the bridge.
“Climb!” Blaine ordered the boy.
“I can’t!”
“You can!” Then he lowered his voice. “Just a little at a time, until they can reach down for you from the bridge.”
The boy gritted his teeth and began to shimmy himself upward. Blaine turned and slid back through the hatch, holding one hand to the bungee cord as he negotiated his way toward the bus driver, apparently unconscious.
When he reached the dashboard, he saw it was a woman, a blessing since her weight was likely considerably less than a man’s. Blaine hooked a hand under her belt and hoisted her up to the shoulder Buck Torrey had fixed. This left him one arm to help retrace his path up the aisle. He pushed off the seats to quicken his ascent to the emergency exit and grabbed the cable with both hands. Then he hoisted himself and the driver up through the hatch, steadying his feet on the bus’ rear just as the cable cut through what was left of the tires.
The bus plunged, and Blaine dangled in the air, supported by the bungee cord as he struggled to hold tight to the woman. Below, the school bus hit the Hudson River nose-first, the crushing impact breaking apart its front end before it sank quickly beneath the surface.
Above him, meanwhile, the last two of the kids he had guided out were struggling to climb, losing the battle to both fear and the wind, which played havoc with the cable now that the weight of the bus no longer held it steady. Blaine managed to snare the cable in his free hand and knotted it around the unconscious bus driver’s waist. He looked toward the bridge and flashed a signal to Johnny, then released the cable, as Wareagle began supervising the arduous task of drawing it upward manually.
Blaine dangled from the bungee cord and watched the cable rise gradually above him, the weight of the driver anchoring its end. Blaine would have Johnny pull him up once everyone else was settled safely on the bridge. For now, he was satisfied to feel his heart thump hard every time a child was lifted over the side.
The news helicopter still hovered in camera range, capturing it all. The operator turned the lens briefly on Blaine, who flashed a thumbs-up sign in the moment before a second chopper flitted onto the scene.
FIFTY-TWO
Johnny Wareagle watched the new helicopter speeding toward the bridge’s upper span as though it were angling to attack. There were still two kids dangling beneath the safety rail, being hauled up by more hands than the cable had room for. Still not enough.
Movement flashed inside the chopper as Johnny lent his own strength to the cable. The closest child soared over the safety rail, but the final boy was several yards away.
“Get the children away from here!” he ordered the bystanders, leaving only Liz Halprin leaning over the edge to help the last boy. “Get everyone away from here!”
People scurried past him, to a safer spot near the center of the span. Johnny slid sideways to grab hold of the bungee cord and, with Sal Belamo, began hoisting McCracken up, when a shape leaned out the left-hand side of the chopper’s rear bay.
Blaine saw the M-203 combination M-16 and grenade launcher before he glimpsed the man wielding it.
What was happening?
The gunman pumped a grenade from the launcher slung under his barrel. The grenade hummed out and slammed into the safety rail in the center of the upper deck, sending another shower of rubble spraying through the air and hurling Sal Belamo and Johnny
Wareagle backwards.
Liz Halprin managed to yank the last child over the edge. But the dangling bus driver was lost beneath her when the blast tore the rest of the cable away.
The part of the rail that had been supporting Blaine’s bungee cord was destroyed as well. Severed, the cord dropped, and McCracken dropped with it, almost straight for the chopper as it swooned beneath the bridge’s lower deck. The chopper banked on an angle that allowed one of its pods to snare the falling bungee cord.
Blaine felt a sudden jolt and looked up to see himself attached to the chopper as it banked agilely away.
Blood …
It was the first thing Liz Halprin saw and felt upon her, so much she could smell it. Her ears rang from the percussion of the grenade blast, and her insides felt as though they’d been dumped in a blender.
The blast had thrown her and the boy she had hoisted over the rail onto the hood of a car. A boy not much older than Justin, lying atop her now.
The blood! Was it hers or—
Liz shifted tentatively and saw the jagged shard of shrapnel protruding from the boy’s thigh, the wound pumping blood.
Suddenly bystanders surrounded her, a few reaching for the boy.
“No!” Liz screamed. “Don’t move him!”
She couldn’t do anything for the bus driver or for those who had plunged to their deaths when the two spans of the bridge blew. But she could do something for this boy.
Liz eased him from her gently, as Johnny Wareagle, his coal-black hair sprinkled with chalky dust, approached through the crowd.
“I need something to stanch the—”
Wareagle was already extending his belt to her.
“This is no good,” she said, after turning it into a makeshift tourniquet, the blood loss slowed but not stopped. Liz looked around, fully aware it would be quite some time before rescue personnel and their vehicles could even get close. “He’ll die if we don’t get him to a hospital!”