The Zero Hour (49 page)

But it was a beauty. The fuselage was of a unique design, sleekly built and sweeping in appearance. It was jet-black, with titanium and plum striping and a silver lightning bolt down the expanse of fuselage. Its windows were deep-tinted. Its blades were blue, its interior tan. There were even oriental rugs to make the executive passengers feel at home. It seated four passengers, and one pilot, comfortably; it was air-conditioned and equipped with a telephone and a CD player.

The ASTAR was different, too, in that it had a panoramic passenger area, a 180-degree field of view. Your basic American helicopter had club seating, whereas this was like the interior of a luxury car. The pilot and passengers occupied the same cabin space. Also, its cabin was far quieter than those in American choppers, in which you really couldn’t hold a conversation. In the ASTAR you could talk in normal tones.

Altogether, it was a spiffy helicopter, Dan Hammond thought, just the right one for his farewell flight.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, three Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aircraft were landing, bearing multiple cargoes of gear on pallets. There were radios and beepers and cellular phones and PBX telephone equipment; there was every tool and widget detector imaginable, from screwdrivers to Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and Haley & Webber E182 Multi-Burst stun grenades employing high candela and decibel levels: a dazzling array of state-of-the-art weapons, surveillance devices, communications equipment, and radiation-detection equipment for locating clandestine bombs or stolen fissionable material.

Separately, over the course of several hours, more than thirty members of the NEST render-safe team had arrived on commercial flights from around the country.

*   *   *

“All right, I want everything from Broad to Whitehall, and from Water to Pearl, secured and blocked off,” the man in the
BOMB SQUAD
wind-breaker announced to the squad members milling around him.

Sarah marched up to him and flashed her credentials. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI,” she said. “I’m in charge of this operation.”

“Oh, really?” the commanding officer of the Bomb Squad said, giving her a bored glance. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

The New York City Police Department’s Bomb Squad is the largest and oldest full-time bomb unit in the country. Operating out of the Sixth Precinct, at 233 West Tenth Street, between Hudson and Bleecker, it handles some thirteen hundred calls a year to look for and disarm explosives. The squad is made up of six teams of two detectives, labeled A through F; the commanding officer is a lieutenant, and below him are four sergeants.

The Bomb Squad is part of the NYPD’s Scientific Research Division, which is a unit of the Detective Bureau. But to be precise, though squad members wear gold badges, they are not detectives but “Detective-Specialists,” which is something of a slap in the face to this all-volunteer, brave-to-the-point-of-foolhardiness group.

According to the
Patrol Guide
protocol, the Bomb Squad can appear on a scene only when called in by the Emergency Service Unit. They had been summoned on this occasion by ESU after one of the patrolmen searching the area realized there was a serious possibility there was a bomb in the building. The patrolman was simply doing his duty.

Until NEST’s arrival, Sarah didn’t have a card to play: the Bomb Squad was in charge. But once NEST showed up, the unit’s Rules of Engagement—the most sweeping and comprehensive of any U.S. elite force—would place it unquestionably in charge.

There was a squealing of brakes. Sarah saw with enormous relief that NEST had arrived.

*   *   *

A CNN reporter was doing a stand-up in front of the tumultuous crowd surrounding the Network building on Moore Street.

Pappas and Ranahan stared at the television screen.

“… a bomb in this building,” the reporter was saying, “which houses a sensitive and highly secret Wall Street computer facility. In the basement of the building, according to police sources, there is believed to be as much as one thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.”

Then, footage of hordes of people evacuating neighboring buildings. Several people had been trampled in the ensuing panic. None had been killed, but several were injured.

“Police sources tell CNN that all entrances and exits to the Moore Street building have been blocked off except the main, front entrance. After a standoff between federal and local authorities, a team from the Department of Energy known as NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, has taken control of the scene.”

There was a shot of the front of the Network building. Six buses had been lined up, three on a side, forming a narrow passageway, a chute, that led directly from the building’s front doors to a courtyard across the street.

The buses looked like regular city buses except for one crucial difference. Steel plates attached to the sides of each bus had been lowered to the pavement so that no one could crawl out underneath them. In effect, the buses formed high metal walls that would keep anyone from escaping. Everyone evacuating the building had to pass between the specially modified buses to the courtyard, where everyone could be inspected or even questioned if need be.

This same method had been used in 1979, when armed Sunni fundamentalists had seized the holiest of Islamic shrines in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, with twenty thousand people trapped inside. Saudi troops had to figure out how to get the religious pilgrims out without letting the terrorists lose themselves in the escaping herd. They used riot-control buses to construct a corridor through which the pilgrims were funneled to a nearby stadium, and there questioned.

Pappas smiled to himself.

Fire department volunteers stood both inside and outside the front entrance, rushing the panicked workers through the revolving front door three at a time and into the bus corridor. Once safely in the courtyard across the street, each person was looked over by a small team of observers from MINOTAUR, led by Vigiani and Sarah.

The process did not go smoothly at all. The lobby swarmed with people, many banging against the plate-glass windows in terror.

“I’m going to die in here!” one woman kept shouting.

“Let us out!” a man yelled.

The building’s windows, like those of many office buildings in the city, could not be opened, but on the street people could hear thudding. In one office on the sixth floor a metal desk chair was hurled through the plate-glass window, scattering shards of glass over the sidewalk. A voice screamed out in terrible agony, “I can’t stand it!” and then a woman in her early twenties jumped from the jagged hole.

The impact of the pavement hurt the woman badly, broke several bones, but she survived the fall, which the police and fire department crews feared would encourage others to do the same.

The commander of the Bomb Squad, though chafing at being supplanted by NEST, picked up a bullhorn and announced: “Stay in your offices! There is no reason to panic! There is time!” But he didn’t believe what he himself was saying. Poor bastards, he thought.

*   *   *

For the most part, Sarah and Vigiani were able to scan the emerging workers at great speed. Baumann was a master of disguise, but from a distance of a foot or two, he would not pass by undetected.

A few men were detained—bearded men, including one with long hair who worked in computers in a law firm on the second floor—but after a few seconds of additional inspection they were cleared.

“I’m going to sue your fucking ass,” the long-haired man said.

“Good luck,” Sarah said tightly.

There was another crash, as a desk was hurled out of a twelfth-floor window. Fragments of glass hit several onlookers, drawing blood, though no one was seriously hurt.

“Anyone attempting to leave except through the front entrance will be detained,” a metallic voice thundered.

“Who the fuck cares?” a middle-aged man shouted from the lobby. “We’re all going to die!”

Sarah turned to Vigiani. “All right, now you take over. I’m going in.”

“You’re …
what
?” gasped Vigiani.

“Going in the building,” Sarah said, striding off.

“You’re out of your mind!” Vigiani shouted after her.

“Yeah,” Sarah said softly to herself, “but I’m the boss.”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

At the same time as the police and firemen were herding office workers out of the building, NEST had already begun to move equipment up a loading ramp and into the rear service entrance of the building.

They were escorted by a tight blue knot of uniformed patrolmen who made sure no one was able to escape the building as they entered. Several persons attempted to force their way past the NEST men but were grabbed by the policemen.

The first to enter was the NEST commander, Dr. Richard Payne, a tall, lanky man in his forties with a head of prematurely gray hair. Dr. Payne, who had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, was in his regular life a special projects manager in the Advanced Technology Division of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. In the U.S. government’s bureaucratic hierarchy he was a GS-15. He had wide experience in nuclear weapons and was considered brilliant by everyone who’d ever dealt with him.

Alongside him was his number two on this assignment, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Freddie Suarez, from the 112th Explosives Ordnance Division Detachment in Fort Ritchie, Maryland. Behind them the other members of the team pushed carts bearing enormous and impressive-looking equipment.

In normal circumstances, theirs was a fiendishly difficult job. Like all bomb squads, they were trained to find the device and circumvent any booby traps that prevented them from gaining access to it. After that came diagnostics: examining the device, determining how it worked. Then the device was rendered safe. If need be, this was preceded by damage-mitigation efforts.

But unlike any other bomb squad, they often—though not always—dealt with nuclear devices, or at the very least with extremely sophisticated improvised explosive devices.

They’d had ample time in the last few days to examine the fusing mechanism that had been intercepted at the airport. Although there was no guarantee whatsoever that the bomber would use an identical fusing mechanism, or even anything close to it, they were prepared in case he did.

Yet these were far from ideal circumstances. The rule book said you did not attempt to defuse a bomb until the entire area had been secured and evacuated. In fact, the rules said you needed a thousand feet “under cover”—but everyone knew that was impossible in Manhattan, where you’d be lucky to back people up to the next corner.

As he pointed his team toward the stairs to the basement, Dr. Payne thought grimly, At least I’m paid to risk my life. All these other people went to work this morning fully expecting to go home to their families and their pets and their houses and apartments. Alive.

“All right,” Dr. Payne told his assembled team in the crowded stairwell outside the basement of the Network building. “The locals have already sicced their dogs on the lobby of the building and found nothing.”

He didn’t have to explain to his men that when it came to sophisticated explosives, bomb-sniffing dogs are all but useless. They are fine for TNT or dynamite or other run-of-the-mill explosives. Even for C-4, if they got close enough, which meant within inches.

The NYPD Bomb Squad’s dogs had sniffed nothing, but they had not gone into the building’s basement. The doors to the basement were locked. Likely that was where the bomb was. From a structural-engineering point of view, that was the most logical place.

In fact, although the NEST men didn’t yet know it, bomb-sniffing dogs would not have discovered anything even if they had found the banker boxes and peed on them, for the C-4 that Baumann had used in the bomb emitted no odor the dogs could detect.

It was a fair assumption, based on the intel they’d been given, that a C-4 bomb was beneath the lobby, but the team’s first order of business was to make absolutely certain. If they could.

The mechanical version of a bomb-sniffing dog is a vapor detector, of which there are several types. Richard Payne had chosen an ion-mobility vapor detector, the size and shape of a medium-sized suitcase.

But they were working in the dark: if the bomb was in the basement, they had no idea where it was located in the basement, and it could be anywhere. They gathered in the stairwell beside the white-painted steel door that led to the basement. They did not try to force the door, because they assumed it was booby-trapped.

The shut door made it difficult for the vapor detector to operate well at all. Built into the machine was a vacuum pump, which would suck in air at a fair clip. But the bomb could be hundreds of feet away. Suarez held the intake nozzle to the floor, at the slight gap between door and floor. The machine was switched on. Air was drawn into the vapor detector’s lungs, trapping a sample that could be diagnosed.

After a few minutes, Lieutenant Colonel Suarez gestured for it to be switched off. If there was C-4 behind the door, it was not registering. Maybe it was too far away.

He shrugged.

Dr. Payne shrugged in reply.

There still might be C-4 there. They would have to do other tests.

It is a serious misconception that members of bomb squads like the Nuclear Emergency Search Team don’t get frightened. In a situation in which a bomb might go off at any moment, causing maiming or death, it is only human to be scared.

But there is a difference between fear—which, reined in and redirected, can fuel intense concentration—and anxiety. Anxiety, in the form of uncontrollable apprehension and distress, is the most dangerous thing a member of a bomb squad can face, far more perilous than any bomb. A bomb is logical (whether or not we understand its logic), and a person with anxiety is not.

Dr. Payne and Lieutenant Colonel Suarez and the twenty-eight other NEST members who lined the stairwell were professionals and were experienced in rendering bombs safe. Still, each one was deeply frightened. There was far too much about this bomb that was unknown.