by Tom Clancy
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 wasn’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.
“Cing’mon, man. We gotta get down off this stage while we can,” he said, reaching out to Harrison. “Ain’t gonna be much longer before it collapses altogether.”
Harrison grabbed hold of his hand, let himself be helped to his feet, and then was crushing Tasheya to him, feeling her chin press into the hollow of his neck, feeling the warm flood of her tears against his face. And for a brief moment, standing there amid the destruction, he understood that, while things might never be okay for him again—no, not even close to okay—there was reason to hope they would eventually get better.
“Our friend’s right,” he said finally, nodding toward Zyman. “We’d better go.”
EIGHTEEN
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK JANUARY 1, 2000
IN HIS OFFICE AT THE PLATINUM CLUB, NICK ROMA sat in pensive silence, his lights out, the dance hall on the floor below him silent. It was two o’clock in the morning. All but a handful of the people who had begun the night shaking their asses off down there had left hours ago, their partying having come to a finish after news of the Times Square explosion infiltrated the room like a plague virus. The few who remained were mostly core members of his crew, men who wouldn’t give a damn about anything except getting drunk at the bar.
Of course, he had known what was going to happen, known that the New Year’s celebration would become a national death rite before it was all over. But somehow, it wasn’t until he had seen the reports on television that he grasped the enormity of the destruction he’d helped bring about.
Nick sat in the darkness, not making a sound, thinking. He’d noticed there was very little sound out on the street, either. Every now and then the lights of a passing car would sweep across the windows overlooking the avenue, throwing a crazy quilt of shadows over his features, but otherwise the people down there had disappeared. They had seen lightning strike suddenly from the sky and burrowed down into their holes like frightened animals.
Could anyone really get away with what he’d been part of? If he was linked to it, the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, on this particular night, in the heart of its largest city ... The country had never taken a hit like this before, and the pressure on law-enforcement agencies to find those behind it would be tremendous.
Roma pondered that for a moment. Could it be they would wind up tripping over each other’s feet? He supposed there was that danger for them. In the horse race to see which agency could make the first arrests, they might conceal leads, refuse to share information. Such things had happened before in investigations that threatened to become trouble for him, and he’d turned the situation to good advantage every time.
Still, he’d always been someone who dealt with expedients. His concerns were with running his business interests, not radical politics. He neither knew nor cared why Vostov had become involved in this affair, and had made it clear to his messengers that, while preferring to avoid a rift with the organizatsiya, he would not be controlled by anyone in Moscow. If Vostov wanted to reach out for assistance in smuggling the C-4 into the U.S., it was going to cost him. And if he wanted him to provide a broader range of support to Gilea and her group, it would cost even more. In money, and in favors owed.
A million-dollar payment from the Russians had settled his misgivings enough to win his participation, but Roma still wondered if he had gotten in over his head. He supposed he would feel less vulnerable when the strike team was out of the country ...
The sound of his doorknob quietly turning pulled him from his thoughts with a start. He leaned forward, his hand dropping into his desk drawer and closing around the grip of his MP5K.
He continued to hold it even after Gilea entered the room, her slender silhouette gliding forward through the dimness.
“You could have knocked,” he said.
“Yes.” She pushed the door shut and he heard the deadbolt click behind her. “I could have.”
Roma regarded her in the scant illumination coming in from the streetlights outside his window.
“There’s a light switch on the wall beside you,” he said.
She nodded but made no move toward the switch.
“We were successful,” she said, coming farther into the room. “But I suppose you already know.”
“I had the television on earlier,” he said, nodding. His hand still on the gun.
She took a step forward, then another, stopping in front of the desk, her fingers going to the collar of her black leather coat, unbuttoning the top button, then the button underneath it.
“Why are you here?” he said. “You know Zachary won’t have your papers ready until tomorrow. And I don’t suppose it’s just to say good night.”
“No, not really,” she said. She put both hands flat on the desktop and leaned forward, her face coming very close to his in the semidarkness.
Gilea finished opening her coat, shrugged out of it, tossed it onto the chair beside her. She was wearing a dark sweater underneath.
He waited.
“I’ve been enjoying this night too much to have it end, Nick,” she said. Leaning closer, her voice almost a whisper. “You don’t have to be holding that gun.”
Roma swallowed. Enjoying this night? What kind of woman was she? Two hours earlier she had been responsible for untold carnage, yet now, out of the blue ... ?
He felt something akin to horror, and yet ...
And yet ...
The thing that horrified him the most was his own unbidden physical response to her nearness.
The attraction she held for him was incredible.
She leaned closer still, putting her face next to his, her lips brushing against his ear.
“You know what I came here for,” she said. “You know what I want.”
Roma’s throat felt dry. His heart was pounding.
He breathed. Breathed again.
He took his hand off his gun and reached out to pull her against him. And as her soft flesh touched him, warm against his skin, he glanced at the mirror and smiled a small, private smile.
NINETEEN
NEW YORK CITY AND SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 1, 2000
6:30 A.M.
THE CITY WAS IN SHOCK.
There was no other word for the malaise that gripped New York. Not even the World Trade Center bombing had so tested the people and resources of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.
Of course, the World Trade Center bombing hadn’t taken out the heart of the city.
Times Square was nearly as packed with people at this moment as it had been when the explosion occurred. The red and blue strobes from the emergency vehicles that ringed the blast site and the arc lights that the rescue workers had brought in were fading, giving way to the slanting rays of dawn.
The day promised to be clear and cold, and the early morning light threw everything into stark relief. Ten-foot-tall temporary chimneys, hastily put in place by city workers to cover broken steam pipes in the streets, spouted clouds of vapor, shielding workers from the hot blasts and directing the flow upward. Wisps of fog from the chimneys flowed around and through the site, wreathing it in clouds and backlit rainbows, giving it an otherworldly appearance. People with acronyms—FBI, NYCFD, ATF, NYPD—silk-scre
ened onto their nylon coats crawled though the wreckage, sifting the debris for the smallest fragments that might lead them to those responsible for the atrocity. Members of the National Guard, hastily mobilized, kept gawkers at bay so that the site would remain undisturbed—if that was a word that could be applied to what was essentially a bomb crater—except by the rescue workers. Everybody, no matter how intent they were on their search, gave way to emergency workers and the teams combing the wreckage with dogs. The dogs were looking for victims. Their handlers were praying for survivors.
The long night had been punctuated by this search. A dog would whine and scratch at the crumpled remains of a massive neon sign, the tangled web of a broken bleacher, the tortured fragments of a skyscraper. An ants’ nest of activity would erupt around the excited dog. Rescue workers would bring an amazing array of instruments to bear on the spot—infrared heat sensors, supersensitive microphones, tiny video cameras on flexible probes, ultrasound machines, metal detectors, motion detectors, X-rays.
If there was even the slightest indication that the person trapped inside was still breathing, no effort was spared to shift the wreckage and get him or her out. Cranes, bags that could be inserted into the smallest crevices and then inflated to lift the obstructions slowly and gently, levers, braces, and plain old manpower were used to get to the people who needed help. But as time dragged on, the desperate effort to extract survivors was giving way to the heartbreaking act of marking remains. Fluorescent orange flags on slender wire stakes fluttered in the breeze, each representing a life lost. Eventually, when it was clear that there were no more survivors, the grim task of retrieving the corpses would begin.