by Ben Coes
Daisy wrapped her arms around the terrorist’s neck, trying to stop him.
“Take me!”
64
UNDERGROUND
NEW YORK CITY
“What do you mean, ‘problem’?” asked Dewey.
“Not everything is easy, you know. There was bound to be at least one problem.”
“So crawling through a fucking hole that’s tighter than a nun’s ass wasn’t a problem?”
“That was a minor inconvenience,” said the Plumber. “This is slightly bigger. In any event, we don’t reach it until we’re closer to the building. We need to move.”
They followed the Plumber down the tunnel. They moved at a fast clip, jogging through the pool of foul-smelling water, sloshing fetid, muddy, rat-infested sludge as they pushed on. In places, the filthy water came all the way up to their thighs.
Everyone except the Plumber had on a headlamp. The Plumber gripped the portable lantern. Shadowy silhouettes danced along the walls as they moved. After twenty minutes, the Plumber stopped and held up his lamp. A few feet ahead, the tunnel stopped at a large steel door. It looked like a bank vault, covered in rust, with a round wheel for opening it.
The Plumber removed a stethoscope, which had been wrapped around his neck and tucked inside his shirt. He stepped to the steel door and listened.
“Just as I thought,” he said.
“Where are we?” asked Dewey.
“Directly beneath the building.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“When they built the dormitory, they upgraded the university’s electrical grid, how they connect and what they connect to. In order to do that, they also needed a tunnel for maintenance. A way for the workers to move up and down as they constructed the new infrastructure—cables, circuitry, diagnostic equipment, redundancies, et cetera. That tunnel provided access to the smaller electrical tunnel. The workers could work on the wiring through side hatches. That tunnel is right behind that steel door. It leads up into the basement of the building. It’s big, with ladders on both sides, and, I’m guessing, still has some lights that work.”
“Sounds perfect. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is, access to that tunnel is on the other side of the door.”
Dewey stepped toward the steel latch. He put both hands on the wheel and started to turn.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s filled with water. That’s why there’s a big steel door there. It’s why there’s a little water in here. It leaks through.”
“So we get a little wet.”
“It’s a lot of water.”
“How much?”
“At any one time, we’re talking about several thousand tons of pressure,” said the Plumber. “Imagine being hit by a tidal wave, then multiply that by about a hundred. Like a freight train made of water.”
Dewey stared daggers at the Plumber.
“So why the fuck did we bother going through all this?” he asked. “What’s the point? You said we could get into the building.”
“Oh, we can,” said the Plumber. “You see, the tunnel on the other side of the door is what we call a switch pipe. It’s one of about twenty places where the water department alternates among the reservoirs that feed into the city’s water supply. It’s automated. Like clockwork. At precisely fifteen minutes after the hour, one supply main gets shut off and the other gets turned on. During the switchover, the pipe is empty. That’s when we can open the door, go to the worker tunnel, and climb up without getting killed.”
Dewey looked at his watch. It was ten after four.
“How much time do we have?” asked Smith.
“To open the door, move through, close the door, go about ten feet, open the hatch to the worker tunnel, climb up, then shut the hatch behind us,” said the Plumber, “we have exactly one minute.”
“One min—” Tacoma started, eyes bulging, incredulous.
Dewey glanced again at his watch.
“What time do you have?” he asked the Plumber.
“Four thirteen.”
“How close is that to the clock the water department is on?”
“Down to the second.”
Dewey tightened the weapons ruck on his back and stepped to the steel hatch. He gripped the wheel and turned to Smith, Katie, and Tacoma.
“I’m going. If you don’t want to, I understand. You need to decide on your own. But it needs to happen right now.”
“I’m in,” said Katie.
Smith and Tacoma nodded without saying anything.
“You stay here and close the door after we’re through,” Dewey told the Plumber. “That’ll buy us a few seconds.”
“I want to help,” said the Plumber, though a nervous grin belied his words.
“You already have. But unless you have close-quarters combat experience, you’ll get in the way.”
The Plumber looked relieved. He nodded and looked at his watch.
“You have fifteen seconds.”
Dewey looked at Tacoma, who was tightening his duffel to his back.
“I’ll open this door. You go first. Get the hatch open—”
“Ten seconds,” said the Plumber, who moved to the side of the door and listened through his stethoscope.
“… and climb like a motherfucker,” continued Dewey. “Katie, you go next—”
“Five.”
“… then you, Damon.”
“Three, two, one,” barked the Plumber. “Go!”
Dewey tugged with all his might on the wheel that secured the door, but it didn’t move. Smith joined him, then Tacoma. A high-pitched squeaking noise followed a few seconds later. The wheel moved imperceptibly.
“You need to hurry!”
The three men struggled harder. The squeaking grew louder and steadier.
“You only have forty-five seconds,” said the Plumber. “Forty. Wait until next hour! If the hatch door doesn’t open—”
Dewey ignored him, and like peer pressure on the playground, his continued struggle with the door made Tacoma and Smith continue turning. Suddenly, the wheel turned more quickly, then spun. The steel hatch burst open. A small wave of water followed, waist high, which splashed across the five as the door opened fully.
“Thirty seconds,” screamed the Plumber as Tacoma charged through the water and into the tunnel. “I’ll keep the door open until ten seconds. You must hurry!”
Katie followed, then Smith, then Dewey.
“Twenty-five seconds,” said the Plumber. “Hurry!”
Tacoma searched the ceiling of the tunnel with his headlamp, trying to find the hatch.
“To the left!” yelled the Plumber “Lower! You have twenty seconds! Come back! You’ll never make it!”
Tacoma searched desperately, scanning the ceiling.
“Lower!”
He finally found the hatch; it was at ten o’clock, a round section of the tunnel with a smaller latch, which also opened and closed with a wheel.
“That’s it! Turn it! Quickly! You only have ten—”
Dewey turned, watching as the big steel door closed.
“Hurry, Rob!” said Katie.
Tacoma, grunting loudly, turned the hatch wheel.
Then they heard it—in unison, all four heads turned: a low rumble echoed from somewhere up the tunnel.
“Oh, my God!” screamed Katie.
The rumble grew louder. A horrifying sound, like thunder, and the ground shook beneath them.
Tacoma loosened the wheel, spun it, pushed up the hatch, and leapt up into the open compartment. Katie jumped immediately after him as the echo of water—massive amounts of water—grew louder and more ominous, like the seconds after lightning strikes and the explosion of thunder is about to occur. A drumroll with deathly power.
The ground kicked and thrashed violently.
Smith and Dewey looked down the tunnel as the first wave of water splashed a dozen feet away. Smith pulled himself u
p just as the front wave of the water barreled down the tunnel at Dewey. It was a black wall, moving fast, the water level rising. Just as Smith climbed through the hatch, the front part of the wave hit Dewey. The pressure struck his legs first, like being tackled. He leaned forward, arms reaching out to the hatch. Across the knees was where the first crest hit, then the torso, and soon he felt himself being thrown backward, down the tunnel, as the water hit his head …
Something prevented him from being thrown back. Above him, he saw only darkness and the blurry yellow of halogen. Hands gripped his wrists—strong hands, like vises—and then his feet left the ground and he was being pulled. His head suddenly breached the water; he was inside the hatch. Above, Katie was looking down from higher in the tunnel. Tacoma was standing, legs spread across the tunnel, feet on steel rungs, and in his arms were Smith’s legs from the knees down. Smith was upside down, and Tacoma was clutching him at the knees so he could dangle down into the oncoming deluge and grab hold of Dewey.
Dewey coughed water, then registered Smith, directly in front of his face, still holding his wrists, panting, his face beet red and drenched.
“Grab the ladder!” Smith yelled.
Dewey reached for the wall, feeling for the steel as rushing water tried to yank him back down into the main. He climbed onto the ladder. Smith pushed the hatch down and twisted it shut. Tacoma lowered him slowly to the ground.
All four remained silent for almost a minute, Dewey and Smith trying to catch their breath.
It was Katie who broke the silence, in between rushed gasps for air. She looked at Dewey in the light from her Petzl, then smiled. “You okay?” she asked.
Dewey started coughing. It became slightly uncontrollable. Finally, he stopped.
“Yeah.”
65
THE PIERRE HOTEL
FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Back at his apartment, Igor went to work.
On his desk, five big plasma screens were spread in an arc. The largest screen, on his left, showed Carman Hall in a three-dimensional grid, with the precise architecture of the entire building. This was the “master” screen. Small holographs of the building’s occupants were lit up. These digital representations of the students, parents, and terrorists were like tiny lights. Igor had created a state-of-the-art, real-time tracking tool, capable of monitoring the dormitory floor by floor, to see the individuals on each floor and to monitor their movements. With a click, Igor could zero in on a particular floor or individual, then put that magnified view up on one of the other screens, enabling him to manage the team’s movements, including multiple simultaneous actions, while at the same time, through the master screen, maintaining a more holistic picture of what was going on.
The screen to Igor’s far right was a tile of live video of the building from different angles. The feeds mirrored what the FBI was looking at.
The underlying technological platform Igor had built was a relational database capable of integrating multiple diagnostic inputs from various external applications. A dynamic GPS module was one of more than two dozen programs feeding into the database, which could synchronize multiple streams of information around particular individuals; an individual marked as a probable terrorist by Igor could thus be tracked, monitored, and dimensionalized by the appliance.
Igor had also figured out a creative way to hitch a ride on the dormitory’s wireless network infrastructure and install a custom-built thermal-imaging scanner that worked in conjunction with the GPS, thus creating very accurate representations of the exact locations and movements of everyone inside the building.
What’s more, a powerful air quality module—also run via the dorm’s wireless routers—could read an assortment of chemical, electronic, and environmental emissions. Igor customized the underlying algorithm to focus in on a tighter framework of objects. By targeting microwave emissions, radio frequency waves, and non-ionizing radiation, for example, he’d been able to isolate all cell phones in the building, including those turned off. Because the terrorists had collected all cell phones and placed them in a room on the eighth floor, Igor was able to locate those few still in use.
Another flourish Igor had coded on was a simple time-elapse replay module. He was thus able to watch and replay certain events and mark the actions of specific individuals against those events.
The goal was to look at the past not in order to know what had happened; it was to know what had happened in order to mark the terrorists with confidence so that Dewey and his team could kill them.
Igor was the conductor. He watched the unfolding events in real time so as to direct Dewey and the team as they made their assault on the building.
Igor had marked all nine terrorists, including the two dead men, whose corpses lay on three and six. He also had a tracking protocol on Sullivan, who was on three. But there was a slight discrepancy.
A low beeping noise came from the computer. He double-clicked on a star-shaped icon. The view of the building shifted lower, focusing on the underground floors. Thermal images, four in all, came into sharper relief as the figures came into range. The first climber was small and thin, with a female form: Katie. She moved quickly, trailed by three larger figures.
Moving the mouse and hovering, he quickly clicked on each one, making them a bright fluorescent green and labeling each holograph with initials: D, K, T, S.
* * *
Daisy held the gunman around his neck, trying to pull him down as he swung violently. People in the room were screaming. She didn’t care anymore if she lived or died. A low, guttural moan came from the terrorist. Suddenly, he let go of Andy’s hair. But then Daisy was being lifted—an arm on her hip, another squeezing her armpit—and she was hurled through the air. Her back slammed into the wall, and she dropped to the floor.
Daisy looked up. She felt woozy. She saw Andy. She slashed her eyes left, toward the door, signaling to Andy: Move. Get out of the room.
The gunman had his rifle trained on Daisy’s head.
A loud voice echoed down the hallway, shouting in Arabic. The gunman stared at Daisy for a little longer, then his eyes shot to Andy. He looked panicked, as if he might just kill everyone in the room. He took the rifle in both hands, moved toward Daisy, and slammed the butt into her face.
Gasps of horror mingled with sobs.
The steel struck Daisy below the eye, kicking her into the wall. Blood soon covered her face as she lay crumpled on the floor.
The terrorist ran to the door.
Andy crawled toward her, grabbing her head and cradling it. She took off her sweatshirt and pressed it against the wound.
“Is there a doctor?” Andy asked, looking around the room at the terrified faces. “Anyone?”
66
CARMAN HALL
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Sirhan moved to the tenth floor. The smell had become overwhelming. That he didn’t mind. The thing he did worry about was the possibility of a rebellion. If anyone in the group understood basic guerrilla tactics, they would know that even with weapons, the sheer number of students and parents gave them an advantage—if they were willing to use it. It would entail rushing against Sirhan and his men and sacrificing themselves to the bullets, but five hundred people working together could do it—and most would survive.
He found Ali standing just inside the hallway entrance.
“Move half the people to eleven,” he said. “There are too many in one place.”
“Yes, Sirhan.”
Tariq approached from the stairs.
“We’re splitting the students up,” said Sirhan. “Get Omar and Mohammed up here. They will guard eleven. You and Meuse guard ten.”
Tariq nodded.
Sirhan glanced at his watch. It was nearly half past the hour.
“And throw someone out a window,” he added.
* * *
They moved up through the tunnel toward the basement of Carman. As the Plumber predicted, a few lights were still on—old
fluorescent bulbs that somehow hadn’t burnt out over the years—and they cast grainy, bluish light.
They scrambled up the steel ladders. Katie set a blistering pace. Dewey panted hard, still coughing water. His legs and arms burned. To distract himself from the pain, he again counted rungs on the ladder. By the time Katie stopped climbing and signaled with her hand that she was at the top, Dewey had counted out 296 rungs.
Katie aimed her headlamp at the steel plate above.
“You guys ready?”
“Hold on,” said Dewey. He removed a small airtight canister from a side pocket and put his earbud in his left ear. He tapped his ear several times. The others followed suit. Katie had an extra bud, which she handed to Smith.
“Igor,” said Dewey.
“I’m here,” came Igor’s voice. “I need a COMMS check.”
“Commo one,” said Katie.
“Two,” said Tacoma.
Katie looked down the tunnel at Smith, pointing to her ear, instructing him how to trigger the device.
“Smith,” he said.
“You’re all coming through loud and clear,” said Igor. “You’re in the building. Katie is just below the entrance to the subbasement. Rob is next, then Damon. Then you.”
“Give us the lay of the land,” said Dewey.
“We have three-dimensional, real-time multilateral views of the interior of the building. Katie, push up the plate. There’s nobody in the room or, for that matter, within two floors. You’re safe.”
Katie pushed open the plate and climbed into the room, followed quickly by Tacoma, Smith, and Dewey. The room was cavernous, dimly lit, and loud—a utility room, with several large boilers on one side and a mess of pipes crossing the other.
They set down the duffels and unzipped them. Dewey nodded to Tacoma, pointing to the duffels, indicating he wanted him to get the four geared up as soon as possible.
“I’ve isolated the terrorists,” said Igor.
“Are the students still on the tenth floor?”
“Yes.”
“What about the terrorists?” asked Dewey.
“They’re spread out. A few roam between floors. Right now, I have one on six, one on seven, one on nine, three on ten, one on twelve.”
