Politika (1997)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 01

  The guy stood there.

  Swallowed twice.

  Then he shoved his left hand into his coat pocket.

  “Go fuck yourself, American,” he said.

  And pulled a small cylindrical object from his pocket and gave one end of it a twist with his left hand.

  Gilmore started to reach for his sidearm, but never got the chance to draw it from its holster.

  Insofar as what happened next, however, that really made no difference at all.

  11:55 P.M.

  The cop in the ESU radio surveillance van had enough time to notice a blip in his monitoring equipment, some kind of low-frequency transmission in the thirty-to-fifty-megahertz range—less than you might pick up from a pager or cellular phone, but much more than you’d get out of an electronic car-door opener of the sort drivers carried as key-chain fobs.

  He turned to his partner on the stool beside him, figuring it was sufficiently unusual to be worth mentioning.

  “Gene,” he said, “what do you ma—?”

  The roar of the blast sucked the words out of his mouth as the van, its crew, and everything else in it were vaporized by a sweeping wave of fire.

  11:55 P.M.

  On the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, Gilea had been waiting for midnight, her detonator tucked in her palm, when the explosion filled the sky with unimaginable brilliance. The sound of it came next, rolling over her with physical force, hammering her eardrums, sending tremors through her bones, shaking the ground under her feet. Car and burglar alarms began howling everywhere around her. Windows shattered in office buildings up and down the avenue.

  Akhad, she thought, her heart racing, the metallic taste of adrenaline flooding her mouth.

  Breathless with exhilaration, Gilea reached out to steady herself against a wall, facing west toward Times Square, her eyes reflecting jags of light from the red-orange mountain of flame rising above it.

  “Magnificent,” she muttered. “My God, it is magnificent.”

  SIXTEEN

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 31, 1999

  IT WAS FIVE MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT IN NEW YORK.

  Where the television cameras had been quick-cutting between scenes of raucous celebration in Times Square, they now showed a mass of orange flame, shot with glare, bulging upward within a spray of smaller blazes that, viewed from above, resembled glowing matches scattered across a dark tabletop.

  Matches, Roger Gordian thought. If that were only the case.

  His face ashen, horror and disbelief slapping through his brain, he gripped the armrest of his sofa with a hand that would not stop trembling. The glass of Courvoisier that had slipped from his fingers lay overturned on the floor, a wet purple splotch soaking into the carpet around it. He was oblivious to the spreading stain, oblivious to the fact that he had dropped the glass, oblivious to everything but the unfolding tragedy on the screen.

  Five past midnight.

  Ten minutes ago, the people of the world had been about to greet the new century as if they were gathered at the railroad station to watch the circus roll into town—but instead something that looked much more like the Apocalypse had come thundering down the track. And strangely, in those first numbing instants after the blast, Gordian had tried to resist the truth of what had happened, pushing back against its intrusion, trying to make himself believe it was all a mistake, that some technician at the television station had hit the wrong switch, run some god-awful disaster film instead of the Times Square broadcast.

  But he’d never been one to duck reality for very long, especially when it was coming on broadside.

  Now, a pulverized expression on his features, he stood motionless, holding onto the couch for support, holding on as though the floor had tilted sharply underneath him. Yet as he stared at the television, largely overcome with shock, a small part of his mind continued to function on an analytical level, automatically interpreting the images in front of him, adjusting for scale, calculating the extent of the destruction. It was an ability—some might have called it a curse—he had brought home from Vietnam and, like a black-box flight recorder aboard an aircraft, that embedded observational mechanism would keep working even if the rest of him were emotionally totaled.

  The fire at the bottom left looks like it could be a building. A large one. And above it, the bright teardrop-shaped spot there, that’s an extremely hot flame, reflecting a lot of light. Probably ignited gasoline and metal... a burning vehicle of some kind, then. Not a car, but more likely a truck or a van. Maybe even a bus.

  Gordian drew in a long, shaky breath, but still didn’t think he could move without tripping over his own feet. Standing there with the television flashing its nightmarish overhead view of Times Square, and the news anchor stammering off disconnected snippets of information about what had happened, he remembered Vietnam, remembered the bombing runs, remembered the flames dotting the jungle like angry red boils. Whether playing tag with a Russian surface-to-air missile or looking down at a VC bunker that had just become the recipient of a five-hundred-pound bomb, he had known how to read the fiery dots and dashes of aerial warfare as signs of success, failure, or danger. He supposed he’d never expected that skill would be of use to him in civilian life, and right now would have given anything not to have found out he was wrong.

  The strew of tiny dots, they’re bits and pieces of mixed debris. And that mottled black-and-red area where smoke is roiling up the thickest, that’s got to be ground zero.

  Gordian forced himself to concentrate on the CNN report. The anchorwoman’s voice seemed dim and distant, although he knew the volume on his set was turned up high enough to be audible several rooms over. Lonely, missing Ashley, he’d been listening to the New Year’s 2000 coverage from the den, where he’d gone to pour himself a brandy, and had heard what he had heard loud and clear.

  Ashley, he thought. She had phoned at ten to say she was staying with her sister in San Francisco, and he briefly considered calling her there now. But what would he say? That he didn’t want to be alone at a time like this? That he ached for the comforting warmth of someone he loved? Given how he’d been ignoring her almost all the time lately, his need seemed a selfish, unfair thing.

  Focus on the reporter. You don’t want to lose what she’s saying.

  “... again, I want to remind you that what we are seeing is live video from atop the Morgan Stanley Tower at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway. I’m being told the ABC television network, which had been broadcasting from that location, is permitting it to be used as a pool camera by the rest of the news media until other transmissions can be restored in the area. There are no pictures coming out of Times Square at street level ... whatever happened has caused extensive equipment damage ... and while there are unconfirmed reports that the explosion was caused by a bomb, we want to caution you that there is no, I repeat, no evidence at all that it was a nuclear device, as stated by a commentator on one of the other networks. Word from the White House is that the President is expected to make a televised statement within the hour ...”

  Gordian felt an icy finger touch his spine as he suddenly recalled a phrase he hadn’t used, or heard anyone else use, in many years: Spooky’s working. It was yet another special delivery coming to him from the Vietnam of thirty years ago. The Spookies had been AC-47s mounted with 7.62mm machine guns that would stalk enemy positions in the black of night, unleashing sustained curtains of fire at a rate of six thousand rounds a minute, every third or fourth round a tracer. While American ground troops at a distance would find reassurance in the solid red wall of illumination that had poured down from the unseen aircraft, Charlie, huddled in his trenches, had been terrified by those firing missions. For him, it must have felt as if Heaven itself were venting its wrath. As if there were no safety anywhere.

  “... Wait, just a moment,” the anchor was blurting, her hand held to her earpiece. “I hear now that the governor of New York has issued a general curfew in the city and that it will be strictly e
nforced by police as well as National Guard units. Repeating what I just said, a curfew has gone into effect throughout the five boroughs of New York...”

  Ah God, Gordian thought. Ah, God.

  Tonight, in America, Spooky was working.

  SEVENTEEN

  NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 1, 2000

  POLICE COMMISSIONER BILL HARRISON NEVER HEARD the blast that killed his wife.

  There were, however, many other memories of that terrible event—far too many—that would haunt him as long as he lived.

  He would remember sitting beside Rosetta on the VIP platform, holding her hand, one bemused eye on the folk-singing duo that had joined the mayor center stage, the other having been snagged by a couple of FAA bomb-sniffing dogs making a commotion some yards to his right. He would remember spotting a vender’s stand over there, and thinking wryly that the dogs had caught a whiff of something far less lethal than an explosive, unless they happened to be on diets that prohibited vanilla custard donuts and such. But then he’d noticed the serious look on the K-9 officer’s face, noticed his body language as he spoke to the man in the vender’s smock, and become more concerned. He had been doing police work for a quarter century, and started out his career as a foot patrolman in upper Manhattan, and he knew the cautious, attentive habits cops observed when approaching suspicious persons.

  He’s staying about eight, ten feet in front of the guy so he can watch his movements, watch his hands, making sure they stay in sight, Harrison had thought. And he’s keeping his own hand near his sidearm.

  Harrison would always remember feeling his stomach slip toward the ground when he saw the vender reach into his pocket, then saw the cop reaching for his weapon. Always remember his sudden fear, and the sense that time was accelerating, running much too fast, like a movie video that had been fast-forwarded in the middle of a critical scene. And then his gaze had swung to the Panasonic screen above him, and he’d noted the time display read 11:56, and thought, Four minutes, midnight on the head, that’s when they’d want to do it all right, unless something happens that makes them get to it faster.

  He would always remember whipping his head around toward Rosetta and his daughter, Tasheya, thinking he had to get them off the stage, get them away from there, and then his fingers had tightened around his wife’s hand and he’d risen off his chair, pulling at her arm with wild urgency, and she had given him a surprised, questioning look, she had mouthed the words “What’s wrong?”—but before he could give her an answer everything had dissolved into a blinding flash of nova brilliance, and he’d felt a blast of superheated air smack his body, felt the ground rattle and tremble, felt himself being hurled off his feet, tumbling helplessly in that hellish, searing bright light, and he’d held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand—

  Then suddenly the enveloping brightness peeled apart, and the heat, though high, was no longer a solid thing. Harrison became aware that he was still on the stand, sprawled on his side, his left cheek mashed into a rough, splintery nest of debris. His face felt wet, sticky, and the world seemed to have gone into a sickening tilt. Somehow his feet were higher up than his head.

  There was fire and smoke all around him. Broken glass was hailing down from above. Sirens shrilled into the night and there were people everywhere, many of them bloody and motionless, others running, crawling, screaming, wailing, crying out to one another. Everywhere.

  Harrison heard loud crashes from somewhere, heard the groan of buckling metal above him. He realized dimly that the platform had collapsed near the middle, its ends pitching downward and inward, accounting for his weird, dizzy angle. It was as if he were lying on a slantboard. Flames were crackling and spitting up through the planks, and the once-neat rows of folding chairs had been thrown about and upended, scattered like the pieces in a game of jacks. Huge blocks of concrete stretched endlessly across a zone of devastation that looked more like a moonscape than Times Square.

  Harrison saw a gigantic toadstool of fire throbbing and churning somewhere off to his right, realized it was swelling out of a huge crater, an actual crater, and instantly decided that must have been where the vender’s booth had been, where that cop and his dogs had been standing, where the detonation had occurred ...

  Somehow that thought jerked his mind out of the hazy suspension of shock in which it had drifted for the first seconds after the blast, and an incredible realization descended upon him with anvil force—he had not yet checked on Rosie or Tasheya.

  Until now only half-conscious of the position in which he’d landed, Harrison realized that his left hand was stretched out behind him, and that it was still gripping his wife’s smaller, far softer hand.

  “Rosie?” he groaned weakly.

  There was no answer.

  “Rosie... ?”

  Still no answer.

  Harrison forced himself to move. The grate of complaining metal overhead had become louder and more ominous, jolting him with a fresh sense of fear and dismay. He rolled over stiffly toward his wife, groaning her name again, afraid to ask himself why she had not yet answered.

  “Rosie, are you—”

  His sentence broke off as he saw her lying on her back, one eye closed, the other one staring blankly upward from a face that was covered with blood and cement dust, giving it the appearance of a ghastly Kabuki mask. Her hair was in disarray and there was a dark, murky puddle of wetness around the back of her head. Except for the arm he was clinging to, she was buried under a dune of jumbled wreckage from her neck to her waist.

  He couldn’t see her breathing.

  “Honey, please, please, we’ve got to get out of here, find Tasheya. You have to get up ...”

  She didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change.

  Frantic, knowing in his heart that she was gone, that any human being would have to be crushed under a pile of rubble that huge, Harrison climbed up on one knee and tugged at her arm, tugged at it almost savagely, tugged at it with sobs choking his throat and tears streaming down his cheeks.

  It came away from her body on the fifth tug, severed above the elbow, leaving a jagged shoot of bone protruding from her buried shoulder.

  Harrison stared down at her, his eyes feverishly wide in their sockets.

  It took a moment for his unwilling mind to fully absorb what had happened.

  And then he began to scream.

  In every explosion, there is a violent outward rush of air, followed by a rapid compression as the hungry vacuum draws the displaced air back toward its center. This is the principle by which demolition experts will set off charges of HMX, TNT, and ammonium nitrate inside buildings to make them collapse upon themselves. The larger the initial release of energy, the more significant this effect can be, and the suction after the Times Square blast was enormous—blowing out windows, tearing doors off their hinges, bringing down steel scaffoldings, toppling walls, lifting motor vehicles off the ground, and pulling human beings into its monstrous throat as if they weighed nothing at all. Eyewitnesses to the catastrophe would later compare the sound of the inrushing air to that of a train moving toward them at top speed.

  Above the VIP platform on Forty-second Street, the tortured groan of metal grew louder with each passing moment as the Astrovision display’s structural supports, badly damaged from the force of the detonation, and further weakened by the subsequent vacuum effect, continued to bend and twist past their tolerance.

  Within seconds of the bombing, the giant television had tilted sideways on the uptown face of One Times Square, where it hung like a crooked picture frame, hundreds of pounds of glass spilling from its shattered screen and fluorescent discharge tubes. The broken glass poured down onto the street in a mangling torrent, lacerating flesh, severing veins and arteries, amputating limbs, slicing people open as if with daggers even as they ran to escape it, claiming dozens of victims before the echoes of the blast had died down. In mere minutes the pavement below had become covered with a grisly slick
of blood that overspilled the curb and ran tendrils down to the sewers, backing up at the debris-clogged gratings.

  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!”