Mancuso scrunched up his nose. He did not want to remember much of what he had seen. “How about lab?”
“FBI’s got most of that. Arson/Explosion wants in, but the feds have their own EOD, that guy from Redstone. Our forensics can’t compete with that D.C. lab.” O’Donovan shrugged. “We’ll probably just get old news.”
“Yeah,” Griffin agreed, with the cynicism of a veteran. “I don’t even know why Joint Terror’s letting us touch it.”
“Our DOAs, our case,” said O’Donovan.
“Not even,” Mancuso corrected. “It’s the Seventeenth’s.”
“And I’m running their squad for now, so we’ll keep it.”
“Lucky us,” said Griff. “Hey, did you voucher that scummy tooth?”
“What tooth?” O’Donovan asked innocently.
“Come on, Detective. Did you?”
“I was logging at the scene.” Mancuso joined O’Donovan’s conspiracy. “Don’t remember a tooth. Do you, O.D.?”
Griffin looked at both men, then shook his head slowly. “If you kids are doing an end run, you better be ready to take some kind of heat if it doesn’t pay off.”
Tim Griffin reminded O’Donovan so much of his own father that when the big Irishman spoke in tones of admonition, it made him feel like a five-year-old on the verge of a spanking.
“Hey, Griff,” O’Donovan said now, just to offset his insecurity.
“Yeah?”
“Voucher this.” He raised a middle finger from his fist. Mancuso laughed, but Griffin did not. He just shook his head again.
“Okay, troops!” Binder clapped his hands together as he reappeared. “Did my homework. Let’s deedee.”
“You coming to lunch?” Mancuso asked O’Donovan.
“Yeah, take a break,” Griffin prodded.
“No, I am not coming to goddamn lunch,” said O’Donovan. “What is this, a surprise party?”
“Is it your birthday, Sergeant?” Binder asked.
“No.”
“Then suck a burger at your post.” He grinned, saluted, and added, “Sir.”
The three detectives moved away to gather their coats and gloves. O’Donovan returned to his Fives, shaking his head as the men’s chatter receded down the stairwell.
“Speaking of parties,” Griffin was asking. “What’s on for Christmas?”
“Probably a four-to-four at P. J. Moran’s,” said Mancuso bitterly.
Binder began to sing. “Jingle bells, mortar shells, Charlie’s in the grass . . . You can take your Christmas and shove it up your ass . . .”
The laughter and voices echoed away as a door slammed.
On most days the profane banter of the squad could raise O’Donovan’s mood and swing it out into a higher, lighter orbit, where he could view his ugly world with objectivity. But he was feeling more and more like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. He stared down at the blue paper before him, rereading the details without digesting: Jenkins, Timothy M/W/24 Homicide by Handgun. Sept. 1, 1990. There was a color photograph of the crime scene stapled to the file folder, a shot of the Columbus Circle subway stop, four chalk circles around spent shells on the platform, a pool of blood, yellow barrier tape, and the helpless postures of detectives and uniforms, hands in pockets, staring at their shoes for answers. The body was not in the Polaroid, for the young tourist’s friends had quickly carried him up the stairwell and rushed him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt in a cab. He was already dead, but the people who love you are always slow to surrender.
The squad was going to wrap this case and had already picked up four of the six black perps, who had killed Jenkins for his cash so they could go dancing at Roseland. None of them was over fifteen years old.
Such successes were supposed to bless O’Donovan with the Job’s only true reward, except that they were grossly overshadowed by the hundreds of open mysteries. Department regulations stated that you could not close an unsolved case, so the files multiplied like an alien, incurable disease: precarious piles on desks, bound stacks with no hope of a home, rainbow pages protruding from cabinets like wagging, accusatory tongues.
O’Donovan wanted to burn them all. He wanted to lock his door and never have to face the citizens at a scene again, with their childish trust forever shattered when their stereos and TVs were taken from their apartments and no one even bothered to dust for prints.
The bombing at the Israeli Consulate might just be the springboard to a better professional life, if he could muster the political savvy to leverage a transfer. He knew that while a task force job was viewed as sexy, it would also harbor frustrations, yet the idea of focusing on a single area of investigation appealed to his assaulted soul. You could become an expert, instead of a dilettante. A sleuth of a single AO, instead of a jack-of-all-crimes.
O’Donovan’s father, a devout Irish Catholic who had spent thirty years on patrol and had come to be called the King of Bed-Stuy, had always told his son that to advance into the upper echelons you had to be much more than a good cop. You also had to know whose hand to shake, which beers to buy, when to show your “moxie,” and how to hold your tongue.
His father had never gotten out of uniform. The O’Donovans were not known for holding their tongues.
Yet perhaps O’Donovan’s first stumble toward the Joint Terrorism Task Force had been fortuitous. . . .
He had been over at the Seventeenth, checking the previous shift’s “60” sheet, when the call came in. A uniform patrolling in an RMP on Second Avenue had heard the explosion, hustled to the scene, and breathlessly radioed the desk. O’Donovan quickly advised the Detective Bureau and his own precinct that he was responding and took off. He jockeyed his car the wrong way up Second, and Binder and Mancuso nearly front-ended him as the two cars skidded to a stop in front of 800. Civilians in shirtsleeves were holding tissues over their mouths as they streamed from the skyscraper.
“Frank,” O’Donovan yelled to Mancuso as he grabbed Binder. “Call Fire.”
“Did it.” Mancuso was halfway out of the driver’s seat, still holding the mike.
“Then put ESU on standby.”
“Ten-four.”
“And EMS.”
“Watch it!” Mancuso yelled, and O’Donovan turned and jumped back. An Emergency Medical Service crew nearly dumped him as they raced into a side door with a trauma board like a pair of mad surfers.
“Frank, get some uniforms out here,” was O’Donovan’s last order as he and Binder pushed their way into the building. The sergeant did not expect to nab a bomber. For all he knew, the explosion had been caused by a gas leak. But if the damage was the result of a crime, he had to maintain the integrity of the scene, control the flow of civilians and cops. Careless intruders could destroy crucial evidence. “Remember,” his father had often repeated, “when you go in, you bring something with you. When you leave a scene, something is lost.”
Binder flashed his gold at a building security guard, who danced out of the way, but the elevator was down and the detectives had lost the EMS people.
“You police?” A wiry young man addressed them in heavily accented English, then he saw the badge. “Follow me.” He ran around a corner, pulled open a door, dashed into a stairwell, and Binder and O’Donovan ran after him. O’Donovan noticed that the youth was wearing a pistol, and he realized that this was not going to be just another case.
The two detectives were in good shape, but the Israeli kid took the stairs three at a time without faltering. When they passed the eighth floor, Binder managed to grunt, “I—hate—youth.”
The first moments inside the consulate’s labyrinth were suffused with a flat silence, interspersed with muffled shouts, the curdling sound of children crying, and the rasp of their own breathing. They followed the security man down a long hallway and into the passport and visa section. The two EMS men and three civilians were down on the floor, working over a crumpled, bloody form. A gray cloud carrying flimsy curls of burnt epoxies hung below the ceiling like an inverte
d lake mist, moving quickly out a bank of shattered windows to the left. From the right, two figures emerged from what appeared to be the blast area. They were wearing black rubber gas masks and carrying red fire extinguishers.
One of the men dropped his cylinder, tore off his mask, and said, “Koos shel ha’ima shel ha ben-zonah,”which O’Donovan and Binder did not understand. But they had both been to war, and they watched the Israeli with empathy as he charged for a men’s room door.
The second man removed his mask, walked to one of the punctured windows, and stood with half his face outside, taking in air. O’Donovan realized that the man was speaking to him and Binder.
“Muzzerfokker killt a girl,” he said.
O’Donovan moved to him. “Where?”
“In zeh waiting area.” The Israeli looked back over his shoulder.
“Okay,” said one of the EMS technicians. “Let’s strap him to the board and get a gurney.”
“Forget zeh gurney,” a civilian Israeli said quickly. “Down zeh stairs. Zehr are five of us.”
“Right,” an American voice replied.
“Which motherfucker?” O’Donovan asked.
Hanan Bar-El turned from the window. “Zeh one out zehr in little pieces.” He watched the black-and-crimson face of the wounded man as it passed by on the stretcher. He murmured something to the unconscious figure, then said to O’Donovan, “Maybe zeh bastard finished my man here too.”
Then the quiet ended. Sirens flooded up from below, and the clatter of equipment crescendoed as panting firemen charged in wearing inverted air tanks and using their picks as hiking sticks. A wide-eyed uniform showed, then a sergeant from the Emergency Service Unit, then Bomb Squad, and Arson and Explosion, wearing their stenciled jackets like movie stuntmen.
It was O’Donovan’s scene, and he immediately took over, calling Mancuso up to log while Binder acted as muscle. After the area had been declared secure, Crime Scene was already working when Jack Buchanan strode in with his troops.
O’Donovan half expected the SAC to try to relieve him, but he was pleasantly surprised.
“You in charge?” Buchanan asked.
“O’Donovan. Midtown North.”
“Buchanan. Joint Terror. You have homicides, right?”
“Two, so far. One might be the perp.”
“You know our drill?”
O’Donovan knew. The JTTF worked in pairs of NYPD detectives and FBI agents. The task force had major “juice” and would easily supersede other authorities on such a politically loaded case.
“Yes,” said O’Donovan.
“Okay.” Buchanan nodded sharply. “So we’ll work everything but the DOAs. You’ll work that angle. We’ll be linked up on progress. You want to clear it?”
“After the fact.”
“Good man. What’s your name again?”
So Buchanan had watched O’Donovan run the scene. He had apparently been impressed, because by Saturday morning, and before the confrontation with the Israeli security people, he had bent to the detective and whispered:
“This works out, Sergeant, and I might offer you a chance to blow off chain snatches for good. We’re short.” Then he winked and walked away. . . .
The telephone rang, and O’Donovan twitched. He looked at it for a moment before picking it up.
“Midtown North.”
“O’Donovan?”
“You got him.”
“Jack Buchanan.”
O’Donovan straightened up, thinking of another of his father’s expressions. If you dream too much of the devil, he will appear.
“What’s up, sir?”
“What you got so far?” Buchanan asked.
“Lots of canvasses. License plates around the scene, half checked out clean so far. Four outside witnesses, all said the guy was solo. I know the Israelis say no way this guy was really a Hasid, but I think we should run his description, maybe in Brooklyn.”
“Police artist? A composite?”
“The Israelis have a videotape, Mr. Buchanan.”
“Jack.” The FBI man paused, knowing that he would not be successful on that end. “Think you could get a copy through that Colonel What’s-his-name?”
“Baum?”
“Yeah. Baum.”
“He’s coming over here today.” O’Donovan tried not to let his distaste show. “Just got a message.”
“Work him, Mike. It’s Mike, right?”
“Yes, sir. It’s Mike.”
“Work him, Mike. Run it out like the whole case is yours. Then just feed me, okay?”
“Ten-four.”
“Good man.”
Buchanan hung up.
O’Donovan replaced his handset, a sensation of itchy discomfort creeping under his collar. There was something about Buchanan, something that his father would have pegged instantly and not liked at all. There was no way to tell if the FBI agent regarded him as a promising additional resource or as a convenient slave to be forgotten once the crop was in.
He decided that it did not matter. The Chief of Detectives had approved the linkage, and Buchanan had just issued a liberating order: Run it out.
But what about Arthur Roselli, the CIA man who had let his disdain for the SAC pour out in mixed company? Had Buchanan forgotten about the “deal,” whereby Roselli was supposed to serve as liaison to the Jews? No, men like Buchanan did not forget having their arms twisted. The FBI agent was simply bypassing Roselli and replacing him with O’Donovan.
But Mike O’Donovan could not easily bypass, or forget, Arthur Roselli. They had history together that no internecine squabbles could erase. . . .
Sand in the midnight wind. Billows of sand, twisters of desert chalk loosened by the turbine storms of giant steel propellers. Jet streams of rock particles pummeling his face, filling every crevice between neck and collar, flowing up beneath his buttoned sleeves. No oxygen to breathe, just a suffocating sea of dust, mocking his squeezed eyelids and nose as it collected in muddy clumps between his teeth, filled his ears, and turned his face into a cracked grimace.
Thunder. The unholy power from twelve jet engines of six giant RH-53D Marine Corps helicopters, the violent whopping of their blades joining the higher scream of sixteen more fan turbines on the black wings of four C-130 transport planes. A chorus of iron Valkyries setting up a vibration in the Iranian wasteland that jellied knees and turned your guts to water. A sound so thick you could nearly touch it, so all-consuming that it was like wearing stereo headphones, through which some demonic torturer pumped the howl of a typhoon.
And still he smiled.
“We are here,” he said, though no one heard him and he could not hear himself. “We are going to do it.”
It was not yet 0200 on the morning of April 24, 1980. For nearly six intolerable months, fifty American citizens had been held hostage in Tehran, all blindfolded, shackled, prodded, and kicked for the amusement of a madman called Khomeini. The incomparable might of the Great Satan made impotent by the rusty gun muzzles of a ragtag throng of Pasdarans. Yet in less than forty-eight hours, the community of nations was going to be served with a reminder that America was not the whipping boy of the third world. The United States Armed Forces’ Joint Special Operations Detachment “D” for Delta had landed by night on the desert salt flats at Posht-e Badam. Operation Eagle Claw was under way, and when it was over, the Israeli raid on Entebbe would look like an assault on a kindergarten.
First Sergeant Michael P. O’Donovan was not actually a Delta “operator.” He was a light and heavy weapons specialist with a twelve-man A-Team of the Tenth Special Forces Group Airborne, part of the First Battalion stationed at Bad Tölz, West Germany. Mike had certainly wanted to go Delta, along with every other young Special Forces adrenaline junkie when he first heard that Colonel Charles A. “Chargin’ Charlie” Beckwith was putting something very special together over at the Fort Bragg stockade, which had been emptied of prisoners to accommodate the fledgling counterterror force. The Tenth’s CO, Othar Shalikas
hvilli, had encouraged his SFers to try out for Beckwith’s outfit, but there was an age minimum of twenty-two, and O’Donovan’s birthday was painfully far off. So he had waited and watched, feeling like a frustrated junior high school student as the big kids went out for varsity ball. And then he was stunned when SF professionals, master sergeants and captains, Vietnam three-tour combat veterans, returned from Beckwith’s selection course with bruised egos, shaking their heads. Only one man from the Tenth made the first cut, and Mike buried the dreams of Delta in his footlocker.
Almost two years passed, and Operation Eagle Claw was already well into the planning phase, when a piece of disturbing intelligence reached the Stockade. Not all of the fifty hostages were being held at the U.S. embassy compound on Talleghani Street. Three men—the U.S. chargé d’affaires, L. Bruce Laingen, Political Officer Victor Tomseth, and Security Officer Michael Howland—were secluded separately in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a few blocks south of the embassy. Beckwith did not have enough trained Delta operators to effectively split his operation, so he called on the Tenth SFGA to provide Eagle Claw with a Special Assault Team. “Shali” selected O’Donovan’s A-Team for the job.
Training began in late November of 1979. O’Donovan’s captain treated the exercise as just another “problem,” saying nothing revelatory. But the team’s instincts were tuned to changes in their normally secretive routines. There were plenty of facilities at Bad Tölz for constructing mock targets, but for this problem they went elsewhere. They traveled by night, in separate cars with civilian German plates, wearing climbing clothes and carrying their weapons and gear in colorful rucks. They rode south along the Lenggries road and turned west toward Jachenau on a winding mountain track, where they practiced their assault on a four-story abandoned factory building whose broken windows howled in the Bavarian wind. They always returned to Bad Tölz before dawn, slept a few hours, and then worked the problem on paper. Their captain would update the team with fresh “intelligence,” but unlike other exercises, he did not seem to be concocting it with their “Excess Officer,” the XO.
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