Vigilante (20 page)

He zoomed his goggles even further, trying to get a better view of the chaos. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what he was looking at.

“
Listen, the radio’s still pretty chaotic. The police were really caught off guard by all this,
” said Branford, his voice unusually hollow. “
But it sounds like some kind of shooting war took place about an hour ago between the NYPD and a large group of criminals. It didn’t start there, but I think the crooks lured the cops there on purpose, stationing themselves behind the Castle at the waterfront, because there was some kind of explosion under the Castle, and the cops were caught in it. There’s an unknown number of vehicles trapped in the tunnel, too. Rescue personnel are working blind; they can’t see anything down there.
”

Nolan’s mind was spinning fast, his breathing rapid. “This was an act of war. Somebody
attacked
the NYPD tonight. Do they have a count on the number of dead?”

“
Fourteen cops and six civilians so far. More than twenty officers are unaccounted for. Hold on a second, there’s some chatter. . . .
” After a moment, Branford said, “
It sounds like they’re having trouble getting down into the viaduct. Both ends of the tunnel are sealed off, and there’s a lot of damage inside.
”

That was all Nolan needed to hear. He stood to his full height. “How do I get in?”

He heard the tapping of computer keys.
“Both ends of the tunnel are completely blocked off by the police. How about this: there’s a big ventilation duct about sixty meters southeast of the Castle. All roads in are closed. I don’t know how to get you there.”

Nolan pulled out the grappler and triggered open the four hooks on its tip. “I do.”

“
No.
No
!
” shouted Arjay into his ear.
“That vent is three hundred meters from your position, with nothing but low-hanging trees in between. Have you forgotten what I told you? Up and down only!
”

“Those people don’t have time!” said Nolan, terse, immovable. “It’s the only way. There’s more than enough cord in the grappler to make it.”

“
There’s nothing to stop you from dropping like a rock!
” Arjay called back.

“The grappler’s fast,” Nolan argued, using his goggles to find the top of the ventilation shaft. It stood in the midst of a large area of green foliage. “It’s crazy fast. It’s got enough pull to clear the street beneath me. I’m sure I can get at least halfway there before I hit the ground, and I stand a good chance of hitting a tree. Should soften the blow. I’ll try to roll or run when I reach the ground.”

“
Nolan,
” fretted Alice, “
this is a really bad—
”

“Think,
man!
” said Arjay. “
You’ll impale yourself on a tree branch!
”

“Not likely with this graphene armor you gave me,” Nolan said, projecting confidence. More than he felt.

“
It won’t keep you from breaking your—
” Arjay tried to argue, but it was too late.

Nolan had already taken aim and was firing the grappler directly at the vent cover. Allowing some slack in the line, he backed up as far as the rooftop would allow and breathed a silent prayer. Then he ran at a dead sprint for the edge. When he reached it, he did his best long-distance jump with every ounce of will he had, while releasing the grappler’s trigger.

The cord caught tight the very instant he let up off the trigger, and it pulled on him at full force. It happened so fast it took Nolan’s breath away, and he didn’t have time to anticipate and react as it yanked him forward like a rocket. One second he was running on the roof, the next he was hurtling into a patch of trees just inside the barrier of smoke.

He did what he could to tuck and roll, but the speed of the grappler made it impossible to situate himself perfectly for his first contact with the ground. He barreled through the trees, obliterating leaves and branches with sickening cracks until finally he stopped, sprawled flat on his back, the air entirely sucked from his lungs. With a heaving gasp he tried to recover from the great shocking rush of it all. He needed air, but he found the oxygen replaced by bitter, putrid hot smoke.

He was completely disoriented by the impact, but there was no time, no time to stop and get his bearings. He had to get down inside that shaft. He ordered his body to get up, to ignore the pain and
rise
.

Right now
.

“
Nolan?!
” shouted Branford. “
Nolan, do you copy? Are you hurt?
”

Nolan rolled onto his stomach and put his hands beneath him, pushing up to a crawl. He forced his mind to run through the training he’d received all those years ago for how to react in low-oxygen environments. It was a mind-over-matter thing—like everything the military had taught him—where he had to concentrate on slowing his heart rate and taking short, shallow breaths to allow the lungs to adjust to the poor air quality.

After a minute of concentrated effort, he dared risk no longer. Painfully pushing himself to his feet, he felt a number of sharp pains throughout his ribs, legs, and arms, but ignored them all. He had to get inside that tunnel. . . .

“
Nolan!
” Branford was still shouting in his ear.

“I’m here, I copy,” he replied, as loud as he could manage. “I’m all right, General—”

“Nolan!
Do you read me!
” shouted Branford.

The com system was fritzing again, probably because of the smoke and interference from the dozens of rescue workers in the area. There was no time to worry about it now.

The grappler was still attached to the vent shaft, so he followed the wire to it. The vent was a few hundred feet to the south of Castle Clinton, about five feet across, and it jutted up two or three feet out of the ground. Climbing unsteadily atop the vent, Nolan balled up a fist and started pounding on the wide grate with his rock-hard glove. After several blows, it gave way and swung down open.

Nolan didn’t have the strength to dive. He forced his way up and over the hole and allowed himself to fall.

W
ith Branford still shouting in his ear, Nolan opened his eyes inside the South Street Viaduct and found himself in the fires of hell. Or if not hell, some nightmare that could only have been born out of that terrible place.

Illuminated only by the beams of headlights and the flicker of flames licking at a half dozen or so of the countless vehicles, Nolan surveyed the wreckage. Unbreathable smoke filled every crevice, every square inch, and it burned through Nolan’s throat and lungs. The volcanic heat was nearly unbearable, and only his eyes, protected by the goggles, escaped being singed.

Nolan heard screaming and crying from all around, and switching over to X-ray vision, he found that all through the tunnel, vehicles were crashed. Rear-ended into one another, slammed into the tunnel walls, sideswiped and totaled, and twisted into unrecognizable shapes. One sports car was actually perched across the bed of a beefy pickup truck.

The X-ray also revealed the victims. They were everywhere; they surrounded him on all sides. They were pinned inside their cars, or they’d been ejected through their front windshields. Far too many of the skeletons his X-rays revealed were twisted and bent into impossible positions. Dead. So very many, dead.

He set to work at once, approaching the nearest car and using his steel fists to break its glass windows. Its roof was crushed, and a teenage boy sat in shock at the wheel. Blood gushed down his face, and he couldn’t seem to make any sounds come out of his mouth beyond panicked moans and screams. He looked up to meet Nolan’s eyes, his face ghostly pale and drenched in blood and sweat. Nolan then saw that the boy’s right leg was pinned and impaled by a piece of his transmission sticking up through the car’s undercarriage.

Could he save this man, or was he already dead? The tactical side of his brain was telling him to triage: assess quickly, do what he could, and move on. There were others here with a chance of living, who were in danger of losing that chance if he spent too much time helping one person.

How was he to decide who lived and who died? He wasn’t a doctor.

Nolan set to work. He had to get the car’s door off its hinges; there was no way he could get proper leverage on the boy’s leg if all he could do was stick his head in through the window. Once again he shouted into his earpiece, hoping the static had cleared. “Do you copy?!” he yelled. “I’m in the tunnel, are you reading me?”

“
Loud and clear!
” replied Branford.

Nolan had to fight the urge to swear as he tugged with all his might against the crumpled door. “Where are the paramedics?!” he screamed in a furious howl, partly over the devastation around him, and partly with his efforts to pull free the driver’s side door. “It’s really bad down here!”

“
They’re all over the place—they’re scrambling,
” said Branford. “
They’re spread out, dealing with the victims on the surface. They seem to be concentrating most of their efforts on the cops that were hurt in the gunfight.
”

“We’ve got to get them down here!” Nolan shouted.

Sweat ran down his back, his forehead, cheeks, and nose. A hacking cough took hold of him and wouldn’t let go. It was hard enough to get a lungful of air amid the smoke without all this exertion making his body’s need for oxygen that much worse. But every time he thought about how impossibly hard this was, he directed his attention back to the victims, the ones truly suffering.

The stubborn door just refused to budge an inch, so he resorted to pounding the door straight down from the opening where the window had been. His rock-hard fists made this easier, and after a few minutes of bashing down the door, he finally had cleared it away enough to get at the teenager inside.

The kid let out a primal screech when Nolan reached inside and pulled him out of the car, carefully—but not slowly—pulling his leg up and over the jagged piece of metal that had skewered it. Once he was freed, the boy passed out from the pain.

Nolan threw him over one shoulder and ran back to the spot beneath the ventilation shaft.

“Arjay, how much weight will this thing hold?” he asked, whipping out the grappler.

Arjay faltered on the other end of the line. “
It
 . . .
I’m
 . . .
It’s never been tested above three hundred—
”

“Arjay!” Nolan roared.

“
I have no idea!
” the young engineer cried.

Nolan weighed one ninety-five. This kid had to be well over a hundred pounds. Would that nearly invisible but super strong line snap?

“I need your best estimation,” Nolan persisted.

Arjay cleared his throat.
“My best estimation is that the more you use it, the more it’s going to be pushed beyond its limits.”

Oh, God, please let this work.
 . . . he prayed.

He fired the grappler straight up until it snagged on something outside the vent. He released the trigger and up they went. If this was putting a strain on the grappler, Nolan couldn’t tell. It was just as fast and powerful as ever.

In two seconds, he was at the rim of the vent, where he was met by a familiar face.

“What are
you
doing here?” he cried.

“Same thing you are!” Coral shouted, grabbing the unconscious teenager by his shoulders and helping Nolan heft him up through the vent.

The boy was out of the hole quickly, and Nolan gave a final shove as Coral pulled him over the edge and out of sight. Nolan pulled himself up further to stick his head out of the hole and gulp down a few lungfuls of air. The smoke was still thick up top, but it was considerably better than the air down in the tunnel.

He swiveled his head until he could see Coral as she was pulling the boy down to the ground and applying pressure to the gaping puncture in his leg. Blood was gushing out of the hole, and Coral produced a length of fabric which she tied around the kid’s upper leg to make a tourniquet.

“Are you still following me?” Nolan shouted, his words a furious accusation.

“You think this is the time to talk about that?!” She glanced back up at him for a fraction of a second, her eyes flashing in such anger that they could have been on fire.

Nolan said nothing, preparing to lower himself back down into the tunnel.

Before he went, Coral reared back and shot him a nasty look. “But hey, if you’ve got this under control, I can leave.”

He didn’t dignify her sarcasm with a response, instead dropping back down into the tunnel to retrieve another victim.

T
hree hours.

It was three hours of the most grueling work Nolan had undertaken since the war, in the most horrific conditions imaginable. Cramped spaces, unbreathable air, scorching heat. And amid the smell of burning rubber, hot steel, and that blasted smoke, the stench of death was overwhelming.

Worse was the psychological toll. Each corpse brought to mind unwelcome memories that he had to fight against every bit as hard as he fought the pain in his body and the impossible nature of his task. He was into his second hour when rescue workers eventually found their way down into the tunnel. In the end, Nolan had single-handedly found and returned seventeen survivors and twenty-two bodies to the surface, delivering them into Coral’s arms. He’d pushed on every time, doggedly returning to the dungeon-like space to continue digging.

There were so many dead. More than sixty at final count. Many of them some of New York’s finest.

And why? Why would someone do this? What was any of it for, he wondered.

The media had shown up in herds, converging as close as possible to the bloodiest, goriest scenes of the attack. It was a spectacle, an off-Broadway production on a massive scale, that people would talk about for years.

He and Coral never said anything further to each other. They just continued working. Whether she was there as an officer of the law who’d just happened to be in the neighborhood, or she’d followed him there, he never got an answer to. In the end, he didn’t care.