“I don’t believe it! Repeat that again,” Al Feldman roared at the squawk box on his desk.
“One of the toll-gate attendants at the Thruway entry up here just identified your Arabs,” replied the irritated state trooper up in Spring Valley. “But he said they were heading south toward the city, not north.”
By now a dozen men were around Feldman’s desk, all listening. “You absolutely certain of that? He’s sure it was them? Going south?”
“Of course, damn it. The guy only collects southbound tolls.” The knot of people around the Chief returned his astonished air. “They broke a five-dollar bill, and when he gave them back the change he saw the broad was cog.ţ
“Why?” Dewing demanded. “Why in hell would they be coming back to the city when they know it’s about to be destroyed?”
“Because for some reason they’ve got to get to that bomb,” Feldman replied.
“That’s what it’s got to be. They’re heading for the bomb.”
“Sweet Mother of Christ!” Bannion hammered his forehead with the heel of his hand. “If they left Spring Valley at three-thirty they might be here by now.”
The Police Commissioner almost knocked Dewing over lunging for the squawk box. “Patch me through to SPRINT!” he shouted. “SPRINT” was an acronym for Special Police Radio Inquiry Network, the multi-million-dollar core of the Department’s Communication Division that sprawled over two floors of Police Plaza and processed nineteen thousand calls a day on the 911 police emergency phone number.
“I want every available radio motor patrol unit, detective cruiser and emergency service truck routed to the Sixth Precinct immediately. Set up an airtight cordon. Fourteenth from the Hudson to Broadway, Broadway down to Houston, West Houston back to the river. Block off every street into the area with cars. I want every vehicle and pedestrian trying to enter the area stopped and all identities verified. Two of those three Palestinians we’re looking for are going to try to get in there.” Bannion stopped, flushed with excitement.
“Jim,” he told the captain running the center, “tell the precincts to get every available patrolman onto that cordon right away. Tell the West Side precincts to concentrate their men on Fourteenth Street, East Side and Queens on Broadway, downtown and Brooklyn on Houston. Have the barrier shop break out every sawhorse they’ve got. Move, Jim, move!”
Bannion pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. It didn’t occur to him for the moment to check his decisions with Dewing and the FBI. This was his city. Only speed was going to save it, and he wasn’t going to waste time arguing with anybody.
“Mr. Mayor,” he shouted. By the time Abe Stern was at his side he had the Fire Commissioner on the phone. “Tim,” he ordered, “get all your midtown apparatus onto the line Fourteenth-Broadway-West Houston immediately. Let my people use that equipment to block access to the area.”
There was a pause while the Fire Commissioner protested Bannion’s peremptory order. Even on their level, New York firemen regard their colleagues in the Police Department as warmly as a group of South Bronx juvenile delinquents might look on an assembly of Wall Street stockbrokers.
“Don’t fucking argue!” Bannion roared. “Do it! Here’s the Mayor.” He turned to Abe Stern and pointed at the squawk box. “Tell him!” he commanded his superior.
Stern had barely finished confirming his order when Bannion had cut that call and placed another, this one to his Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. “Patty,” he said, “in about two minutes you’re going to be swamped with calls from the media. Feed them the chlorine-gas cover story.”
Seven floors below the Deputy Commissioner’s offices in Police Plaza, Bannion’s first orders were already being put into effect. The SPRINT
complex was broken up into five radio rooms, one for each of the city’s five boroughs. In each, a dozen radio dispatchers controlled all the police cars in the boroughs from televisionlike computer consoles rigged to a keyboard. Through them, they knew what each of their cars was doing, whether its driver was having a cup of coffee or bringing in a murderer, and by flicking a couple of keys they could call and reassign every car in their command.
Almost in synchronization with the flicking of those keys, the undulating wail of police sirens began to rise from every corner of the city as patrol cars wheeled about and started their dash for the Village. Seconds later, their high-pitched chorus was joined by the deep wonk-work of the city’s fire apparatus converging on the police line. Within minutes, all Manhattan Island echoed to those vibrant bellows. The red lights of the oncoming police cars cascaded in the evening darkness down all the great arterial avenues: Ninth, Seventh, Broadway, Fifth. Stunned traffic policemen at the city’s major intersections barely had time to block traffic so that one car could scream past when the next came thundering down on them. From the sidewalks, New Yorkers, usually inured to such spectacles, looked on amazed.
SPRINT’s current-situation desk routed the incoming cars into position as they neared the area, slotting them into it block by block so that it was gradually sealed off like a water tap being twisted shut. Two or four cars were assigned to each intersection depending on its size. They parked abreast of each lane of traffic, lights flashing. One officer leaped out to reroute the traffic. The other rushed to the sidewalks to start checking the pedestrian flow. In commandeered taxicabs and police trucks, other policemen descended on the area from around Manhattan. Ten minutes after Bannion’s orders had been issued Police Department trucks were dropping off at each intersection the gray wooden sawhorses marked “POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS” that the NYPD used for traffic control.
The resulting traffic jams were monstrous; so, too, were the outraged protests of people being screened before they were allowed into their neighborhood. And, at 5:17, for the first time, the story went public.
WABC-TV interrupted a rerun of Batman with a flash from its newsroom.
Unmade-up and clearly rushed before the cameras, Bill Beutel, the anchorman of the station’s Eyewitness News Team, told his city, “A police emergency is in progress in the Greenwich Village area, where,” he reported, “Palestinian terrorists are alleged to have hidden a barrel of deadly chlorine gas.”
Ten minutes later, Patricia McGuire appeared before the media’s cameras at Police Plaza, announcing the cordon in the Village area and the hunt for the gas, and assuring the public that the city’s police authorities had the matter well in hand.
* * *
Arthur Sulzbetger, the publisher of The New York Times, stood by the window of his office on the fourteenth floor of the Times Building and pondered, horrified, the President’s words. From the canyon of Forty-third Street below came the snarl of traffic, tailgates clanging shut, the rasp of impatient taxis’ horns, a few distant roars of anger; the vibrant cacophony of the city, his city, the city that his family and his family’s paper had served for over a century.
He ran a nervous hand through his curly black hair, as closely cut almost as it had been when he served in the Marine Corps. There was an awesome responsibility to his office as publisher of the paper that considered itself the conscience of America: a responsibility Sulzberger felt every bit as intensely as the President of the United States felt the burden of his office. What were his responsibilities now, he asked himself, what were the obligations of the Times to the city, to the nation now?
He turned from the window back to his massive walnut desk and his surprisingly modest office, its walls decorated with Times artifacts, historic front pages and stern and sober oils of the father and grandfather who had preceded him in this room.
The door opened. “They’re here, Mr. Sulzberger,” his secretary announced, and she showed Abe Rosenthal, Art Gelb, Grace Knowland and Myron Pick, an assistant managing editor, into the room.
Rosenthal was still seething with anger at the Police Commissioner for having dared to lie to The New York Times, for concealing from the citizens of the city the terrible threat that menaced them
.
“Can you imagine, Punch,” he said, referring to the publisher by the nickname that had followed him from childhood, “an atomic bomb in this city that could kill ten, twenty thousand people and they don’t say a word to anybody?”
Sulzberger was seated now, his hands folded before him as though in prayer, his lips pressed against the knuckle of his left index finger. His head moved slowly back and forth as he listened to his senior editor. “It’s not an atomic bomb, Abe. And it’s not ten thousand people. It’s the whole city.”
As they listened in growing horror, he recounted the details of the pleading telephone call he had just received from the President. “Needless to say, he begged us not to use this information.”
He looked at each of his employees. Despite the vastness of his enterprise, he knew them all personally. “That’s not all he asked us, I’m afraid.” His remote, melancholy eyes looked at each face in turn. “He’s also asked us to restrict this information to those of us who already know about it. To tell absolutely no one else. No one.”
Grace Knowland’s hand went instinctively to her mouth to stifle the gasp forming there. Tommy, she thought, where is he?
“My God, I can’t believe it!” It was Myron Pick. “He expects us to just sit here and wait to be thermonuclearized? Not even to warn our families?”
“Precisely.” Sulzberger, whose own wife and child were only a few blocks away, reiterated Qaddafi’s injunction to secrecy and his warning that he would detonate his device instantly if an evacuation was begun.
“Why the hell should we?” Pick demanded. “Just because the President tells us to? How do we know he’s telling the truth? Presidents have lied to us.
And why the hell should his judgment on what to do in this situation be any better than ours just because seventy million people voted for him in an election?”
“Myron.” The publisher studied his agitated editor. “Forget about the President. Forget about Qaddafi. Forget about everything except one thing: what is the responsibility of The New York Times to the people of this city?”
“Well, I think it’s clear. Publish just as fast as we can. Warn the people that this city is threatened with destruction and tell them to save themselves any way they can.”
“Jesus, Myron, you can’t possibly mean thatt” Grace Knowland said.
“I certainly do. We’ve got it. Our obligation is to publish it. Doesn’t experience teach us that nothing is gained when we hold back the truth?
Look at the Bay of Pigs.”
The Times had had the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA’s involvement in it but had effectively squelched it on the urging of President Kennedy. Later, both the paper and the President regretted the decision, realizing that the story’s publication might have prevented a national disaster.
“For Christ’s sake, Myron, this isn’t the Bay of Pigs. We’re talking about doing something that might cost millions of lives. Yours and mine included.”
Both Grace and Pick were on their feet shouting furiously at each other.
“We’re talking about the rights and obligations of this paper,” Pick roared. “I say it’s our right and duty to warn the people of this city what’s about to happen to them.”
“Who the bell do you think you are to put yourself over the President? Why do you have some God-given right to do whatever you see fit just because you’re a newspaper editor? To risk people’s lives for some principle?”
Grace was beginning to sob in anguish and concern. “Like those horrible people out there in Wisconsin who published the secret of the hydrogen bomb. Now a million people in this city, including my son, may die just because they had to make a point about their goddamn freedom of the press.”
“We have no proof Qaddafi got his hydrogen-bomb secrets from those papers,”
Pick shouted back at her.
“Well, he damn well didn’t get it sitting out in the desert meditatingl”
“Quiet, both of you. Sit down.” Sulzberger was on his feet. Usually his voice retained, despite the authority that was his, a kind of youthful timidity, but there were no traces of it present at the moment. “Neither one of you is addressing the problem. Art,” he said, turning to Gelb, “what do you think?”
“It seems to me that the U.S. government has no convincing plan that can save this city beyond some vague hope for a miracle of some sort. I mean the only response the government seems to have been able to put together is flooding the Village with FBI agents and detectives.”
Abe Rosenthal looked morosely at his friend and associate. “Maybe the problem, Art, is there isn’t any other response.”
“Then,” Gelb said, “maybe our obligation is to say to the people, `Get out of the city any way you can.’ So there’d be chaos in the street, but maybe a couple of million people would make it. At least the Times would have saved them.”
“And killed how many others?” Rosenthal peered at Gelb through his outsized dark-framed glasses. “Let’s get a couple of points straight here. First, if we feel our responsibility to the people of this city is to warn them about what might happen so they can run for the hills, then there is absolutely no question of holding it to publish an extra of the Times. Punch”-he turned to the publisher”has got to pick up the phone right now and give it to the television networks.
“That would mean we’re voting to shout ‘Fire!’ in the crowded theater, because to let the news out like that, with no warning or preparation, will start a panic that is surely going to kill a million people, bomb or no bomb.”
Rosenthal got up. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie undone, the untidy roll of fat he never managed to control despite all his sporadic efforts at dieting spilling over the top of his trousers. He seemed to be clawing at the air with his fingertips as he strode nervously about the room. “The second thing is, nobody has elected The New York Times to be the government of the United States. We’re supposed to monitor the government’s decisions, not make them. Okay, Presidents have lied to us, but I don’t think this one is lying, not about this. He’s made a decision, and millions of lives are involved with it, including our own. I think we have to go with him.” He stopped. “Anyhow, it’s your decision, Punch.”
The publisher turned away from his four employees and stepped again to the window. Already the gray pallor of evening hung upon the city. He had made many a hard decision in this room, the decision to defy Richard Nixon and publish the Pentagon Papers, to overrule his editors and hold the secret of the Glomar Explorer at the request of the CIA. None of them had compared even remotely in their importance to this one.
Finally he walked around to the front of his desk. “My dear friends-” he choked as he articulated the words”our responsibility, it seems to me, our ultimate responsibility, is to the people of this city. If breaking the secret is going to put their lives in jeopardy, then it seems to me we must keep the secret and accept all the consequences of our act by ourselves-by ourselves alone.”
Sulzberger thrust his fists into the pockets of his gray flannel suit. “The President says the ultimatum expires at nine o’clock. I intend to stay here in this office until then. I leave it to the rest of you to follow the dictates of your consciences. If you want to leave, go ahead. Just do it quietly. You have my solemn promise the matter will never be mentioned between us again.
“Otherwise, I’m afraid there’s nothing to do except to go on preparing tomorrow’s paper-and pray we’ll be alive to publish it.”
* * *
Kamal had insisted they take a different route into the city in the unlikely event they had been seen on their trip up to Spring Valley, and Laila had chosen to come down the East Side along the FDR Drive after crossing the Third Avenue Bridge to avoid the tolls on the Triboro. Since leaving, they had barely spoken. Fingers clenched to the steering wheel, her eyes full of tears, still in a state of quasi-shock from the horrible scene she had witnessed, Laila drove like a robot. Only fear and the memories of her dead fath
er had prevented her from spinning the car off into the roadside ditch and trying to somehow flee her demented brother.
Exhausted, her nerves shattered, she was resigned to fate, to carrying this enterprise through to the end she had never believed possible.
Kamal sat beside her in silence, listening to the radio.
It said nothing. He studied the flow of traffic moving out of the city, the lights on Roosevelt Island and Queens beyond. Everything seemed perfectly normal. Even the distant wail of the sirens was a part of the city’s daily landscape. His eyes studied the green rectangle of the United Nations Building, the towers of light and glass beyond it, a technological universe that by now should have been reduced to a lifeless slag heap. The people in the buildings above, in the traffic enveloping their car, were alive while at this instant, perhaps, in Libya or Palestine or both, Arabs, his brothers, were dying, helpless once again before their enemies because his brother had been a traitor.
Suddenly, seized by an uncontrollabe rage, he hammered the dashboard with his fist. Failure, failure, failure, he raged; failure eats at us like maggots in a corpse. We are always the joke, the poor fools whose plans go astray.
He tapped the chest of his leather jacket, reassuring himself for the hundredth time that the checklist was there. Introduce the code to reopen the case, he thought. Switch the tapes. Punch 636 to start the right cassette with the firing instruction. One minute, no more. Ahead of them he saw the highway sign “15TH STREET-EXIT FOR 14TH STREET.” He tapped Laila’s arm.
“This is it, remember?”
* * *
“How’s it going?”
Angelo Rocchia didn’t have to look up from the charts on which he was following the progress of the search in the crowded streets around Sheridan Square to recognize the voice. The Mayor’s gruff yet slightly high-pitched way of speaking always reminded Angelo of the time when he was a kid and Fiorello La Guardia used to read the funny papers over the radio on Sunday mornings during the newspaper strike.
“Not good, Your Honor. Too many buildings. Too few guys. Too little time,”
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