by Jon Land
“I’ll see what I can do,” Johnny promised.
Blaine saw the pilot look down after the craft’s nose responded sluggishly to his commands. He imagined the man’s eyes bulging at the sight of him strung beneath the chopper and strained to reach the pistol holstered around his ankle.
No matter how much Blaine stretched, though, he couldn’t grasp it. He noted the pilot was coming around again, slipping into a rise, and realized he intended to slam him against the structure of the upper deck or, perhaps, snare him in the suspension bridge’s guy wires.
Blaine saw the upper deck coming up fast, in his mind’s eye saw himself crushed against it. Two hundred feet before impact, he dropped all his weight downward to stretch the bungee cord taut. Then he let it snap back upward like a rubber band and follow the course of its momentum to spirit him up and over the span, even briefly with the chopper.
The chopper listed, then shot away, angling toward Manhattan as the gunman wielding the M-203 poked his head out again in search of a shot.
“If it isn’t the mayor this time, you’re fired, stupid,” Don Imus snapped at his producer, who poked his head into the studio again.
“Better.”
“Better than the mayor?”
“The bomber.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious.”
“What line?”
“Seven.”
Imus reached over and hit the button. The whole studio lapsed into an eerie silence after twenty harried minutes of juggling calls coming in from all over the city.
“What do you want?” Imus snapped into his headset.
“That’s no way to greet a fan,” said Jackie Terror.
“Must be a towelhead,” interjected Bernard McGuirk, one of Imus’ sidekicks.
“Shut up, Bernard. I want to talk to this moron,” said Imus. “So you blow up our city and expect Welcome Wagon? Why don’t you go somewhere else, like Baghdad?”
Jack Tyrell’s laughter filled the studio through all the speakers. “Man, they told me you were good.”
“They told you? What, you don’t listen for yourself?”
“I’ve been indisposed for a while.”
“Killing innocent people somewhere else, of course, you son of a—”
“Are we on the air?”
“Sure. And the sponsors are loving it.”
“Really?”
“If you blow your own brains out while we’re on, I’ll pick up another ten cities by tomorrow. Providing you haven’t blown them all up by then too, of course.”
“Don’t you want to know why I called?”
“I don’t care. Do I sound like I care?”
“You’re back on top.”
“Have you been talking to my wife?”
“I’m being serious here. You were up, down, and now you’re up again. Same thing with me. I figured that made you deserve getting an exclusive on my announcement.”
“This go under the category of public service?”
“Does it ever! See, I want you to give Mayor Corrente a message for me. Tell Her Honor that I have taken all the people in this city hostage, and all five million will die when I destroy the city unless my terms are met.”
“I can’t wait to hear this … .”
“Sorry, that’s for the mayor’s ears only. I’ll be calling her directly by eleven o’clock.”
“Is that A.M. or P.M.?”
“If my terms aren’t met, there won’t be anybody left to take the call by P.M.”
“Why don’t I give you my shrink’s number? You can tell him I referred you.”
“Maybe tomorrow. I’m planning to have a lot of time on my hands.”
Liz used a collection of shirts from equally concerned bystanders to wrap the boy’s wound, pinning the shard of metal in place. She knew from experience that removing it would result in catastrophic blood loss and almost instant death. This was the best chance the boy had, but he had no chance unless Johnny Wareagle figured out a way to get him to a hospital within the next few minutes.
There was a time after she learned how to shoot when Liz sneaked out hunting with some local boys. Her father had found the two rabbits she’d shot hidden in the barn. She had never seen Buck more angry, so dismayed was he that she had not heeded his lessons about the value and sanctity of life. Liz figured that was as near as he ever came to striking her. Instead Buck had hung up the carcasses in her room, leaving them there long after they began to decompose and stink. She thought about life and death differently after that, unable to kill anything that wasn’t trying to do likewise to her.
With all the carnage and horror around her, the boy was all that mattered right now to Liz. She looked at him and saw Justin, remembering how close she had been to losing him at his school a month before and how much she hated losing him to his father. Looked at the boy and saw Buck, so angry he had tears in his eyes upon finding the dead rabbits hidden in the barn. After he finally pulled their carcasses out of her room, he yanked the bullets from her .22 and left them on her dresser.
Maybe all the years since had been about making up for that one mistake. Proving that she was worthy of his training. Save this boy today and make her father proud.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clip …
Liz knew that sound, but it made no sense to her here and now on the bridge. She gazed ahead through the clutter of twisted, smoking vehicles and actually blinked to make sure it wasn’t a concussion-induced illusion.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” she heard Sal Belamo mutter at her side, himself bleeding from a deep scalp wound that he’d wrapped tightly in a borrowed scarf.
Johnny Wareagle was adroitly leading a pair of black horses, salvaged from a dented horse trailer, through the sea of wrecks.
Blaine’s wild ride on the bungee cord continued without pause over the remaining stretch of the Hudson River toward midtown Manhattan. He quickly learned how to control his sway through the air by angling his body in various directions. Almost as quickly, the gunman inside the rear of the chopper gave up wasting bullets. Blaine felt triumphant only until it became clear what fate the pilot had in mind for him.
He was still trying to free his gun from its holster when the helicopter approached the forest of skyscrapers dotting the skyline. The pilot banked sharply to the right, throwing Blaine hard to the left directly in line with a million tons of steel and glass. He avoided the collision by straightening out and twisting his body back into the wind, steering himself close enough to the fiftieth floor to reach out and swipe the glass.
The pilot saw that his first attempt at splattering Blaine across the cityscape had failed, and he veered to try again, squeezing within a narrow space between buildings overlooking Central Park. It seemed impossible for Blaine to adjust his path quickly and frequently enough to miss all the buildings, but he dipped and darted, swerved and swirled, to avoid one after another. Coming close enough on a few occasions to actually push off with his legs.
He felt like a puppet on a string, his toughest trick being to figure a way to free his pistol from its holster. The leather safety strip that restrained it was snapped tightly in place across the trigger guard, and Blaine couldn’t risk keeping still long enough to unsnap it without setting himself up for the gunman inside the chopper’s rear bay.
Added to that was the problem of the buildings the pilot was directing him ever closer to. The next pair was separated by a gap little wider than he was. The chopper pulled its nose just over them, and Blaine actually had to turn sideways, the wind screaming past him as he soared with hands and legs pressed close.
No sooner had he managed that feat than the chopper went into a swoon, significantly reducing his maneuverability before it flitted sharply to the right. The result was to snap him out like a rock from a slingshot, spilled sideways on a direct path with the top floors of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Blaine had actually started unknotting the cord, ready to take his chances with a plunge to
the awnings below, when the chopper banked sharply again. The loosened cord slipped down his legs and reknotted itself around his ankles, redistributing so much of his weight that he missed the Waldorf altogether but got a very good look at himself flying by its shiny windows.
He was soaring upside down. If nothing else, the pistol was now in easier reach, and he imitated the motions of a Roman Chair sit-up to snatch it. He managed to get the holster unsnapped with the first stab, and the gun freed with the second. Then he nearly lost his grip on it, as the chopper soared down a traffic-snarled Park Avenue, with Blaine swaying wildly beneath it.
Blaine first thought that the pilot intended to leave him smeared against any number of stalled trucks and buses in the street below. Instead, though, he slowed his speed considerably and left McCracken dangling almost directly beneath the chopper, a much easier target for the gunman, who immediately opened up with his M-16.
The first barrage missed him, stitching a jagged design across the tops of cars mired in the gridlock below. Blaine curled upward at the waist and steadied his pistol as best he could before clacking off a few rounds to chase the gunman back inside. His bullets clanged off the chopper’s frame, but he managed to pull back up to a standing position, grasping the cord with his free hand.
The gunman lunged into the doorway again and let go a wild spray downward. But McCracken was gone, not even the bungee cord in sight.
The gunman backpedaled in the rear bay, exchanging a fresh clip for a spent one. A metallic scraping sound made him swing to the right, where he saw that Blaine had managed to crack open the other bay door and lean his upper body inside the hold.
McCracken fired before the gunman could get his weapon resteadied. His bullets punched the gunman backwards through the open door on the opposite side, and he dropped downward, to crash spread-eagled atop the roof of a bus.
The pilot pulled the chopper into a climb, angling to catch a glimpse of Blaine. Turning forward once again, he barely avoided the Helmsley building. He straightened the chopper out and, still searching for McCracken, flew over the strip that separates Park Avenue into two distinct halves. Heading south, he climbed when the huge black shape of the Grand Hyatt Hotel rose before him.
The pilot tried to swing from its path, but it was too late. The chopper crashed through a pair of windows twenty stories up from the ground, lodging there, half in and half out of the hotel over Forty-second Street.
Clinging tightly to one of the pods, Blaine had begun considering his options, when he felt the chopper yaw, ready to tumble. There was only one choice:
The bungee cord!
It had become his lifeline now, and without hesitation, he let go of the pod and dropped into the air, straightening his body into a divelike posture, pretending water was beneath him instead of concrete. The bungee cord stretched taut, then slung him back up before letting him settle fifteen feet off the ground.
Just as Blaine was figuring he would have scored a perfect ten had the judges been around, the chopper jerked downward. Its crackling descent through the glass panes forming the Grand Hyatt’s side dropped Blaine before he could unfasten the cord from his ankle. He crunched against the pavement and felt his breath leave him in a rush, as the chopper fell ever faster directly above him. Blaine rolled desperately and thrust himself to one side just before it slammed into the street, scattering debris and breaking up huge slabs of concrete a mere few feet from him.
The chopper caught fire almost instantly and coughed out papers from its corpse. Blaine watched them flutter, the touch of the flames leaving them blackened at the edges. He scampered across the pavement on all fours and managed to snare a single page before the fuel tank blew in a gush of heat that slammed into him and pitched him backwards.
“What do you mean, you can’t reach the chopper?” Jack Tyrell demanded of Marbles.
“I don’t know. Interference, a bad signal. Give me a little more time.”
In the command center, an additional four television monitors had been switched on and tuned to what CNN was calling “Manhattan Held Hostage.” All four screens broadcast scenes of panic and chaos, hordes of people trying to flee the city of New York, only to realize there was no way to get off the island.
The disabled subways remained packed with people making their way out slowly through the darkness.
The streets had become parking lots.
The sidewalks were jammed with people moving futilely this way and that, because nobody was going anywhere.
Tyrell’s favorite shots were aerial views of the city. He reveled in that sight the way an artist would upon recognizing the creation of his finest masterpiece. It was an even more wondrous picture than he had let himself imagine, one that almost brought tears to his eyes.
“If the media had been this cooperative in the sixties,” he said aloud to no one in particular, “we just mighta won this war back then.”
While he was still crowing, one of the screens cut to the scene of a fiery helicopter crash. There was a disclaimer warning that unedited footage captured by a camcorder was about to air. And there it was.
The collision with the building, the chopper falling, a man dropping ahead of it. The camera’s perspective shifted wildly while its amateur operator must have backed away to safety. Then the lens steadied once more to come in for a close-up of the man who had dropped to the pavement and just managed to lurch away before the explosion ended the shot.
It was a face Jack Tyrell was coming to know all too well. It should have upset him, he knew, pissed him off royally. Instead he smiled in utter admiration.
“Whatever you’re on, I wish I had some.” He looked over at Marbles and Othell Vance. “I want to know who he is, and I want to know now.”
Gus Sabella reached his construction site, only to see the machines abandoned in the middle of their tasks, stilled in various work-related postures. He had been hauling a truckload of pipes to the site when the world shook and New York City ended up isolated from the rest of civilization. With traffic at an absolute standstill, Gus pulled his truck into a convenient loading zone and hoofed it back to the site in a slow trot that left him dripping with sweat. Even that had been a difficult task, what with the entire daytime population of Manhattan spilling into the streets and cluttering the sidewalks. Mobs had poured out of buildings and were gathered around car radios and electronics store windows to follow the unfolding crisis, which seemed almost unreal to them, even though they were caught in the middle of it.
Gus rushed past the abandoned machines toward his trailer, swearing up a storm and cussing out his damn workers, who had apparently fled at the first opportunity. Entering the trailer, though, he found all of them gathered around his thirteen-inch television, watching the first, nearly accurate reports on what was transpiring across the city.
“What the fuck? Who gave you boys the day off?”
The men turned to him.
“Somebody’s blowing up the city,” one of them said, gesturing toward the screen.
“I know. That’s why I came back without any pipes, goddamn it. But it doesn’t mean we’re gonna let it set us further behind.”
“You want us to work through this?” another man asked, disbelievingly.
“Why not? No way you’re gonna be going home anytime soon anyway.”
Johnny rode alone on one of the black horses, leading the way. Liz was on the second horse with Sal Belamo, the boy wedged between them.
“Jeez,” Sal kept muttering.
“You’ve never been on a horse before,” Liz realized as they neared the Manhattan side of the George Washington Bridge.
“You noticed.”
The going became easier the farther they rode from the cluttered mess of traffic near the center of the bridge. Their progress was still challenging, the gaps between vehicles sometimes impossibly narrow or virtually nonexistent. But Johnny always found them a way through, pace held to a walk to keep from jarring the wounded boy too badly.
The
y reached the off-ramp and clip-clopped down it, weaving their way through gridlocked traffic toward Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center a dozen blocks away, as the first rescue vehicles crawled toward the scene.
FIFTY-THREE
I want you to give Mayor Corrente a message for me. Tell Her Honor that I have taken all the people in this city hostage, and all five million will die when I destroy the city unless my terms are met. …”
Mayor Lucille Corrente leaned across the conference table and pressed the Stop button on the tape recorder. “As I’m sure you all know,” she said to those gathered before her, “that tape was made from the Imus program earlier this morning. We haven’t heard from the speaker directly yet, but I expect we will be hearing from him soon.”
It was ten-thirty before the department heads primarily responsible for the welfare of New York City finally gathered in Mayor Lucille Corrente’s conference room. As they settled into their chairs, the shattered bay window formed the perfect backdrop, a constant reminder of what they were facing. Against the far wall adjacent to that window, a number of men with FBI photo IDs hanging from their necks were busy laying cords and wires attached to additional telephones, computers, and fax machines.
“Mr. Kirkland, we’re ready to get started.”
Sam Kirkland picked up his suit jacket and pulled his bulky arms uncomfortably into the sleeves as he headed back to the conference table.
Mayor Corrente, elegantly dressed and coiffed as always, adjusted the speakerphone in front of her. “Can you hear me, Governor?” she said to the state’s chief executive in Albany.
“Loud and clear, Lucille. Are you on-line with Washington?”
Corrente looked at the members of Kirkland’s team still stringing wires and running extension cords from the sockets spaced at regular intervals along the walls.