Threat Level Black

by Jim DeFelice

  “Peace, then?” asked Xi.

  “Peace, yes,” said Blitz.

  “Korea is an interesting country,” said Xi, still speaking like a sphinx. Much like Blitz, Xi had an academic as well as government background, and the national security advisor waited for the lecture about history or at least a remark in that direction. But Xi said nothing else, and Blitz was moved to ask if his country was afraid of peace, aware that he was being provocative.

  “Afraid?” Xi spoke English as well as Blitz but he said the word as if he did not understand the meaning.

  “Afraid of the future?” prompted Blitz, trimming back the question slightly. “The uncertainty.”

  “One should never be afraid of the future,” said Xi. “For it comes of its own. As for peace…”

  An aide tapped the UN representative on the arm, and Xi turned before finishing. Blitz, too, was interrupted: France’s UN representative told him she thought the President had done very well.

  “I’m going to stay in New York this afternoon and into the evening,” the President told Blitz a few minutes later. “We can sneak over to the NCAA championships.”

  “Presidents can’t sneak anywhere.”

  “Relax, Doc. The IBM box has already been reserved, and we have Secret Service people flanking it. You just don’t want to see Syracuse win,” added the President. “Come over with us. Take the night off.”

  “I have a pile of work.”

  “State will be there. And I think Claussen from the CIA.”

  The President was teasing him: He often joked that if he wanted Blitz somewhere, all he had to do was invite his rivals. Obviously the President was feeling good about the speech and Korea—and maybe even the basketball game.

  “Oh, I suppose I can go back later with you,” said the national security advisor.

  “Who says there’s room on the plane?” said the President before turning away.

  Chapter

  22

  Fisher left the interrogation room as quickly as he could, striding down the caged hallway to the small observation area. Identity confirmed, he was searched again before being allowed out.

  Fisher checked his cigarette pack when the guard handed it back to him with his weapons: You just never knew about the ethics of people connected with the prison system.

  “It’s going to be tonight,” said Fisher as he counted.

  “What?”

  “It’ll be at the basketball game. The championship.”

  “What is?”

  “Whatever they’re planning.”

  “How do you know they’re planning anything?”

  “Because they know less about college basketball than you do.” His cigarettes counted, Fisher put one in his mouth and lit up. “Call off the game.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. You’re talking about the NCAA championships here, Andy. New York worked for years to get this, to bring them to the Garden. You’re out of your mind.”

  “Faud left the bomb. That tells us two things: One, he’s not back in Yemen; two, time is running out. I thought it was an early-warning system, but I’m wrong: It’s a diversion.” Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette, striding out to the gangplank that led back to land. It was a gorgeous New York day—sun high in the sky, the odor of dead fish on the wind—but he didn’t stop to notice.

  “We got their sarin,” protested Macklin.

  “Maybe we didn’t get it all. I’m telling you, you have to stop that game.”

  “The security tonight is going to be crazy,” said Macklin. “Half of New York will be locked down. They’ll never get close.”

  “The E-bomb,” said Fisher.

  “They have it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Fisher thought about that as they reached the car. “We have to get the police to stop and search every flower truck in Manhattan. Anything that looks like the ones taken from Pete’s Florist.”

  “Man, you’re reaching.”

  “I have a thing for roses,” said Fisher, sliding into the car and taking out his sat phone.

  Howe was just thinking of leaving the office early when his secretary buzzed him to say he had a call.

  “I think I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” he told her.

  “It’s somebody named Andy Fisher,” said the secretary. “He said it was important.”

  Howe punched the button on his phone.

  “I figured it out,” Fisher said. “They’re going to set the E-bomb off in New York tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Somewhere around eight o’clock. Maybe a little after. By my watch that’s four hours. I have this theory, but it doesn’t have a lot of proof.”

  “Share it,” said Howe.

  “The Korean is pissed about us beating the crap out of him, so he hooks up with these crazies here. I don’t know whether he sells them a bomb or is going to set it off himself, but it’s hooked into this terrorist cell of assholes with sarin gas. Maybe they got the sarin from him, too, I don’t know.”

  “How do you know there’s an E-bomb?” asked Howe.

  “Because one of my suspects, the one I can’t find, has night-vision goggles and an injector to ward off the effects of sarin gas. The only thing I don’t have totally worked out is how the bomb goes off, because the tech people I talked to say it’s got to explode in the air. Or that’s the best thing or something; I forget the details.”

  “The UAV?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

  Howe stood up from his seat. You could use the rocket pack to launch the UAV like a missile. Once launched, the engines would take over.

  “You sure about all of this?” Howe asked Fisher.

  “Of course not. Listen, we have to keep air traffic away from New York, and we have to look for a UAV. I have to talk to a million people, and most of them think I’m a pain in the ass, so it’s going to take a while.”

  “Have you talked to the Air National Guard?”

  “My task force guy will, but I don’t know how serious they’re going to take him. I don’t even take him seriously,” said Fisher. “But you’ve got a ton of pull, right?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Howe.

  “I’m counting on that,” said Fisher.

  Howe pressed the button to talk to his secretary. “I need to get ahold of the unit responsible for air traffic over New York,” he told her. “I want to talk to the commander personally, right away. And then I need to have one of our planes at Andrews readied for a flight: Iron Hawk. You can get me the numbers I need, right?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “But?”

  “It’s almost five.”

  “We’ll pay you overtime,” snapped Howe.

  “I meant you better let me call over to Andrews right away,” said the secretary. “Because otherwise the ground people may go home before you get to them.”

  Part Six

  The Final Four

  Chapter

  1

  Madison Square Garden was neither near Madison Avenue nor appreciably square, and the last time anything approaching a garden had been on the spot, the local Indians were unloading swampland on the Dutch.

  Which made it the quintessential New York landmark, if not the essence of New York itself.

  “You’re being kind of hard on the place, Andy,” said Macklin as they walked across Eighth Avenue. Ordinarily that would have been suicidal, but the area had been blocked off for the game. Traffic snarled through the rest of the city, but the streets around Madison Square Garden were a veritable island of peace and tranquillity.

  Except, of course, for the troop trucks, Humvees, Stinger antiaircraft missile batteries, two tanks, and upward of five thousand National Guardsmen, soldiers, and police officers.

  “You’d think they’d’ve let a pretzel guy inside the barricades,” said Fisher.

  “Well, well, Cassandra showed up in person,” said a voice from behind a phalanx of approaching soldiers.

>   “Kowalski, it’s about time you got here,” said Fisher. “Did you find the UAV yet?”

  “I have half the damn Air Force flying overhead, Fisher. You sure as hell better be right.”

  “Only half, Kowalski? I thought you had pull.”

  “Yeah, yeah, wiseass. Real funny. How are they getting the gas into the place, anyway? Did you think about that?”

  “I thought about it, but I couldn’t figure it out,” admitted Fisher.

  “We have the ventilation system guarded,” said Macklin. “And the backup generators. Everything’s been checked and rechecked. Power goes off, we’ll have it back on in a jiff.”

  “Unless they blow up the bomb overhead, right?” said Fisher.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Or within five miles.”

  “Or more, depending on how good the bomb is,” said Macklin. “But if they don’t, we’re fine.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Michael: You’re always looking on the brighter side of things.”

  “Maybe I should get more batteries,” said Macklin.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” said Kowalski. “I think this is all just the product of Fisher’s wild imagination. Even the maestro of conspiracy falters once in a while.”

  “Don’t lie, Kowalski,” said Fisher, taking out his cigarettes. “I get it wrong all the time. Want one?”

  “I wish I did smoke,” said Kowalski, shaking his head. “What a fuckin’ nightmare. I don’t know whether to hope you’re right or wrong.”

  “Wrong’s better,” said Fisher. “What’s the latest on the florist trucks?”

  “NYPD’s got a good handle on it,” said Macklin. “They have an exclusion area and they’ve already searched beyond it. There are no vans within ten blocks.”

  “Oh,” said Fisher.

  “Oh?”

  “Stop the trains.”

  “Which trains?”

  “Anything that goes anywhere near Penn Station.” He threw his cigarette away and began running toward the nearest police command post. “Amtrak, LIRR, New Jersey, subways—everything.”

  “Andy?” yelled Macklin.

  “Just do it!”

  Chapter

  2

  Faud huddled near the end of the passage, sipping the last of his bottles of water. He did not know exactly when the time would be. He knew only that he was to wait until the lights blinked off.

  The journey across the tracks had been an ordeal—a train had come just as he opened the panel—but it was past. The rest now was easy.

  When the lights went off, he would put on the heavy coat and the hat, pull up the two tanks that looked like an oxygen pack. He would need the goggles to see. He had a light, but it was better to use the goggles: The light would give him away.

  Faud would carry the pistol in his hand.

  Several times he had thought of dressing and being ready, but the weight of the gear dissuaded him. He also had been instructed to keep the tanks in their insulated case for as long as possible.

  The air tube where he could insert the gas was only a few feet from the shaft he had to climb. He had a small drill to make the hole. Once the nozzle was inserted, he would set the unit down and turn the wheel at the base of the tanks, activating the pressure feed. The gas itself was under very high pressure and would probably fill the ventilation system itself so long as it remained hot, but there was no way of knowing whether the loss of power would permanently disrupt the forced-air system, and the mechanism was designed to cover that contingency. The room above the insertion point had steam pipes that would make the system considerably hotter than the seventy degrees necessary for the sarin to remain a gas. If the auxiliary power came on, the gas would be forcefully pulled into the building, killing everyone within seconds; but even if it didn’t, the flow of air through the system and the difference in pressure would bring the gas up into the building.

  As long as Faud managed to find the right duct line. There were three; he had to tap the one farthest to his right as he climbed from the shaft.

  That was what he had been told. He knew a great deal about the gas, but nothing about the shafts.

  If all else failed, he had already decided on an alternate plan: He would pass the ventilation shaft and walk to the end of the room, where the stairs led to a hallway behind a concession area. He would simply turn on the gas and walk through the stuffy building. Those who did not die of the gas would die from the panic as they tried to escape.

  His place in Paradise would be guaranteed no matter what else happened.

  The imam had insisted on giving him a plan to escape after he placed the gas, and told him it was his duty to follow it.

  Was it, though? The imam had been wrong on many things; perhaps he was wrong on this as well.

  Was it sacrilegious to ask such a question?

  Faud finished the water. He should not think of it anymore. His path now was clear. He had only to wait for the dim light at the far end of the shaft fifty feet away to go out.

  Chapter

  3

  The lights on the coast shone like the diamonds of a woman’s necklace, glittering against the blackness of the nearby water. A yellow string of jewels circled the shore, the lights of cars on the Belt Parkway.

  A 747 had just taken off from Kennedy Airport; Howe could see it climbing off to his right. Air traffic in the region had been strictly curtailed, and the few flights allowed into the New York metropolitan area had to follow instructions to the millimeter. Two Air National Guard F-16s circled over Manhattan, ready to pounce. Another pair was standing by on the ground in nearby New Jersey.

  Howe’s aircraft, the Iron Hawk, was not equipped with offensive weapons, but its AMV radar provided a finer detection net than the F-16s’ APG-68. So far all he’d spotted were a few birds. The radar popped them on the screen momentarily, briefly tracking them before its program decided for sure that they were birds, not a cleverly designed aircraft whose radar profile mimicked a seagull.

  If Fisher was wrong, Howe would look like a fool. He could already hear Nelson’s voice and see Blitz’s disapproving stare. But he had decided he didn’t care. He had to do what he thought was right, which meant risking looking like a fool.

  No, it meant he would look like a fool sometimes. But it was worse to feel like a fool.

  Howe checked his fuel and the rest of his instruments, then began a turn as he banked over New Jersey. Patrolling like this was surprisingly difficult; it was so boring that the natural temptation was to wish something would happen. That he didn’t want: Among the eight million people down there in the city was his friend Jimmy, who’d scalped tickets to the basketball game Fisher thought was the target. Howe had tried calling him but gotten only his machine.

  The F-16 pilots were jumpy despite the cool and laconic snaps of their communications. When an Airbus heading in from Chicago failed to acknowledge a ground communication, the lead pilot jumped on the air so quickly that the airliner’s captain apologized three or four times for what was, at worst, a moment’s inattention.

  “Iron Hawk, this is Falcon One,” said the F-16 flight leader as they worked through their patrol pattern.

  “Iron Hawk,” said Howe, acknowledging.

  “Viper Flight is about to take off,” said the pilot, informing Howe that a second group of F-16s was coming up to spell the first group. Falcon One and Two would head back once their replacements were on station. Another pair of F-16s would take their turn below on standby, providing blanket coverage of the airspace.

  Howe started to acknowledge when a ground controller from an FAA station to the north came onto the line with a warning: A light plane was straying off its flight plan toward the restricted area north of Manhattan and, thus far, had failed to answer hails.

  The pilot in Falcon One opted to check it out himself, instructing his wingman to remain in the patrol area until he was relieved. Even as he was giving the instructions, the F-16 pilot was changing course and linin
g up an intercept on the small plane, which was just heading over the Hudson River south of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

  “It is what they say it is,” Howe told Falcon One, checking the contact with the AMV radar. He was too far to see if there was a bomb aboard. “Nothing else there.”

  “Falcon One.”

  Howe checked his position, orienting himself in the night sky as he flew westward, tracking over New Jersey as he flew toward the light plane. The police had already been alerted to check all of the airports in the area that might be used to launch the UAV. Vehicle-based installations of Stinger missiles were guarding the main power plants in the area, and a separate F-16 flight was over Indian Point, the nuclear power station along the Hudson up near Peekskill, fifty-something miles north of New York City.

  Everything was covered. Except what they didn’t expect.

  And what would that be?

  A light plane reconfigured to hold a bomb?

  The civilian pilot was answering the F-16’s radio call.

  If Howe had the UAV, he’d set it up in a barn somewhere north of the city, one that had an open field for it to climb through after the rocket engines ignited. When the time came, he’d pull open the big doors and fire away.

  Something flashed in the sky ahead. Howe’s breath caught in his chest as his brain tried to make sense of what his eyes had just seen.

  Chapter

  4

  Fisher stood on the A train platform, hands on hips. Six National Guardsmen with M16s and bulletproof vests watched from the stairs behind him; another knot of men patrolled both sides of the long platform, which sat between the north- and southbound tracks.

  NYPD had already considered the problem of trains coming into Penn Station, which sat below the Madison Square Garden area, and posted details to search the trains before they got to the station. The job was not as difficult as might be imagined: Relatively few trains were inbound to the station at this time of day, and their progress could be easily tracked.