Tower of Terror at-1

by Don Pendleton

  The elevator dropped. For a second, they almost floated from their feet. Jill laughed.

  "An executive toy," Green joked. The elevator slowed as it came to the fifth floor. "Are you a temporary from outside the company, or a temporary from the secretarial?.."

  Green turned as the elevator doors slid open, saw the woman in the telephone company uniform. "The telephone company is already here."

  He saw it as if in slow motion: the Latin woman in the uniform turning, the .45 rising as she took a combat crouch.

  Green hit her with the box of papers. He shoved the box straight out from his chest, thirty panic-thrown pounds of paper striking the .45 even as the slug left the muzzle of the pistol.

  Paper exploded. Sheets and shreds of printout flying, Jill screaming in the elevator, Green jumped on the woman in the phone company uniform. He jerked her head back with one hand, then he had her pistol in the other.

  He pointed the .45 at the Latin woman's head. "What the hell! Who are you?"

  His peripheral vision saved him. Even as he stood, he saw a second Latin in a phone company uniform. Green snapped a shot at the man, threw himself backwards into the elevator, screaming at Jill: "Hit the button! Hit it! Up! Get us out of here!"

  Slugs punched into the elevator doors as they slid closed. The single bullet Green had fired missed the man, continued twenty feet down the corridor and struck a nylon bag. The slug smashed several electronic components in the bag.

  * * *

  Julio knew the next hour would be the most critical. They had hoped to avoid discovery until after the placement of the C-4 and thermite charges. But hopes do not win liberty. Nor do hopes guarantee the success of a military operation. Their leaders had anticipated all possible problems and police reactions. They had trained Julio and his squad to succeed despite accident and opposition.

  When the garage guard alerted the police, Julio and Luisa kept the first police cars at bay with their automatic rifle fire. Julio then hurriedly placed claymore mines in the garage and basement entrances, and retreated to the lobby. Julio and Luisa took positions in the chrome and black-marble lobby. All pretense was past. Julio still wore his mover's coveralls, Luisa her phone company uniform. But they now wore .45 automatics, carried M-16 rifles.

  Julio watched the elevators. There were six pairs of elevator doors on one of the Tower's twin cores. There were six pairs plus the wide doors of a freight elevator on the wall of the other core. Both sets faced each other across the marbled corridor between.

  Luisa moved throughout the lobby, scanning the plaza surrounding the Tower for police units. "They made it so easy for us," she said to him as she passed. She motioned to the high walls of glass. Only the two elevator cores isolated in the center of the lobby blocked the view of the plaza.

  Julio had no time to reply. He was watching the elevators' indicator lights. In one elevator, his comrades rode up, distributing loads of C-4, thermite, and detonators. But other lights also moved through the series of plastic numbers. One car left the thirty-first floor, stopped at the twenty-eighth floor. Then it moved again. A second car left the eighty-fifth floor, came down without a stop.

  Julio checked his tape roller. His leaders had anticipated all situations and had included a tape roller in Julio's equipment; it was used by freight packagers to seal boxes quickly.

  Silently arriving in the lobby, the first elevator's doors opened. Julio pointed his M-16 at the chest of a secretary. She was alone in the car.

  "Don't move!" he said. "Come out of the elevator! Here!" She obeyed, too surprised even to speak. He slammed the tape roller down on her shoulder and walked around her, holding the roller in one hand, his M-16 in the other. Before she realized what he was doing, her arms were taped tightly to her body with nylon reinforced freighting tape. Then her hands to her body. He turned her, put a loose loop of tape around her legs. She could hobble, but not run, not even walk fast.

  "Oh, please! No! I don't have anything. I don't..." Julio slapped a patch of tape over the secretary's mouth.

  He saw other lights appear on the elevator indicator, one starting at the fifty-third floor, dropping fast. He kicked the secretary's feet out from under her, let her fall to the marble floor.

  "You try to move, you die!"

  He crossed to the door of one of the elevators that was coming down, but it stopped at the fifth floor. Then, suddenly, the doors of another car opened. Loud voices broke the lobby's silence.

  Two executives, immaculate in their conservative gray suits, left the elevator arguing. Julio ran to them, shoved them.

  "Watch where you're going, spic punk!" one of them swore. Then the executive saw the M-16, staggered backwards, dropping his briefcase.

  Julio jammed the long gun barrel into the man's chest, jarring him backwards into the black marble wall. The man sank to the floor, his hands out in front as if to shield himself from the automatic rifle.

  The other executive sprinted away, his overweight body lurching with every stride.

  "Harvey! Don't run!" the executive on the floor screamed.

  Intestines and excrement sprayed from the running man's body as Julio fired a six-round burst through his gut. A second burst from Luisa's rifle threw the carcass sideways across the polished floor. Bullets exiting from the victim ricocheted off the tall, tinted, shatterproof windows on two sides of the lobby.

  "Noooooo!" The surviving executive half-screamed, half-sobbed. Julio went to him, kicked him hard in the solar plexus. He fell sideways, his body heaving as he tried to vomit and breathe at the same time. Julio wrapped him up with tape, shoving him from side to side.

  Julio's hand-radio buzzed. The voice of their squad lieutenant whispered through the earphone. "This is Zuniga, on the fifth floor. One of them has escaped. He took Ana's pistol. You must kill him..."

  But the light blinked from the number five, flashed into the higher numbers, into the upper ninety-five floors of the Tower.

  Ana, on the fifth floor, shoved an extra thirty-round magazine into her phone company uniform. She jerked back the cocking lever on her M-16, and punched an elevator's "up" button. She waited.

  "Back to your duty!" Zuniga ordered.

  "I'll kill him! I'm going up to find the..."

  "No! You had your chance to kill him, and he took your weapon. Now return to your duties. Nothing else is important."

  Her face remained hard, livid with anger. Zuniga coaxed her. "We'll hit the alarms soon. That'll bring them all out."

  "And if he hides up there?"

  "Then he's blown to bits."

  Ana smiled, flipped back the safety on her M-16. She returned to her task of distributing one-kilogram blocks of C-4 around the two columns of elevators.

  The detonators were Zuniga's responsibility. He returned to the unit he had been assembling. It was then that he saw the torn nylon bag.

  He ripped open the velcro flap. The radio-trigger fell to pieces in his hands.

  The loss of this one single component threatened their entire mission. Zuniga forced himself to remain calm. It would be impossible for their leader to smuggle another detonator past the police lines which surely surrounded the Tower already. He thought of executing Ana, or forcing her to remain behind and trigger the blast. But no, she had not been careless. The man had surprised her while she worked.

  He considered alternatives to radio detonation. He had been well-trained. He knew of a hundred ways to trigger the C-4. But it must be a technique or device which would both insure the success of the mission andhis own survival.

  Zuniga's laughter rang in the silent corridor. He threw down the shattered component. He intended to execute all the hostages anyway. He would use their fearas the detonator.

  * * *

  "We have terrorists downstairs!" Quickly Green related to his overtime office staff what had happened on the fifth floor. "I saw two. There could be any number of them in the Tower — five, ten, twenty crazies. And they have automatic rifles."

  "Ther
e's no money in the building!" Sandy interrupted. She was a tall, slender blonde, one of the temporary workers who rotated through the various offices of the Tower. There was panic in her voice.

  "There's nothing here they could want...what could they possibly want?"

  "We'll hear all about it on television tonight," Green told her. "WorldFiCor is an international corporation. What they want could have nothing to do with us. All that we have to do right now is live through it."

  "But they know we're here," Jill said. "They know what floor we're on! From the elevator numbers!"

  "I hit all the numbers when we got out," Green told her. "The elevator stopped on every floor above us."

  "If we hide," Sandy interrupted again, "the police will be here soon. They've got to be!"

  "Sandy, let me finish. We don't have to be brave, but we have to keep cool. We have to think out what we'll do. We can stay up here, or we can try to get out. If we stay up here," Green detailed his thinking, "we might be here for days. They might have time to search all the offices. But if we try to get out, we're betting our lives that the crazies won't be waiting for us. We'd have to shoot our way past them, and I've only got six rounds in this pistol."

  "Seventeen bullets," Mrs. Forde corrected. She took a snub-nosed .38 revolver from her purse. "Five in the cylinder, and six extras. And I know how to use it."

  "Mrs. Forde!" Green said in mock horror. "Pistols are illegal in New York City."

  "Yeah. Murder and rape, too. And what about terrorism?"

  "We still don't have fire superiority," Green continued. "But if they find us, or we have to break out, we could surprise one or two of them. Surprise them to death. So what's it going to be? It's time for a vote."

  "No voting!" Mrs. Forde told him. "You're the Department Director. None of the girls has got your experience. We'll do what you say."

  "This is not an accounting project. And it's their lives we're talking about, Mrs. Forde."

  The woman turned to the others. "Mr. Green was a company commander in the Army. Two tours of duty in Vietnam. If you don't want to do what he says, take the elevator downstairs. Maybe you'll make it to the street, maybe you won't."

  Diane, the third temporary worker, smiled, gave Green a quick salute.

  "You got my vote."

  Sandy and Jill raised their hands.

  Green nodded. "Command accepted, with reluctance. And now, troops, get comfortable. Your fearless leader has to think of what to..."

  Screaming drowned out his voice. It was an electronic wail. In every office and corridor of the hundred floors, sirens sounded the alert to evacuate the Tower.

  "Fire! They've set fire to the..." Jill shrieked, running to the door.

  "Shut up!" Green shouted. He grabbed her, pushed her back into a chair. "Really, Jill, keep cool! It's just noise, a fire alarm. It could be a trick. When we smell smoke, then we'll panic."

  Green knew that the building was considered fireproof. Something else must be up.

  * * *

  One by one, in twos, sometimes in joking and laughing groups WorldFiCor employees and executives left the elevators. Every one of them assumed the evacuation of the Tower was a weekend drill. Within seconds of stepping into the lobby, each employee became a prisoner. The soldiers of Zuniga's squad seized and immobilized the employees with freighting tape. They did not resist. It happened too quickly.

  Zuniga waited for a proper subject for his upcoming demonstration. His improvised plan required horror. It was not enough that the prisoners saw the corpse of the fat executive sprawled on the lobby's polished marble floor. They might think the fat man provoked his captors. The prisoners might hope for mercy. Without blind, unthinking terror twisting their emotions, torturing their intelligence and logic, the prisoners might not take the desperate chances his plan demanded.

  A woman screamed. Zuniga watched his soldiers throw a young black woman against the wall. She was very young, perhaps still in her teens. They silenced her screaming with a rifle butt to the stomach, then a loop of tape around her head to cover her mouth. Loops of tape immobilized her hands.

  Cocking his .45 automatic, Zuniga started toward her. But to his side, elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman stepped out. She walked slowly, her back stooped from decades of bending over a desk. Under one arm, she carried an account folder, sheets of paper and adding machine tape hanging from the folder. Two of his soldiers, Carlos and Rico, grabbed her, wrenching her arms behind her.

  She cried out in pain, and Carlos released his grip. The old book-keeper fell to her hands and knees. Rico jerked her to her feet. Screaming, anger and horror on her face, she tried to twist away.

  Zuniga glanced at the prisoners. All of them watched Rico struggling with the old woman.

  Crossing to her in three strides, Zuniga jammed the barrel of the .45 automatic into the old woman's mouth and blew her head away.

  6

  Returning to downtown Manhattan, Lyons called Gadgets on his limo's secure phone.

  "Hardman One for Hardman Three, connect please!"

  "This is Mr. Three's liaison, will you hold for a moment?"

  "Get me the man, right now!" Lyons glanced at his watch. Thirty-nine hours, two minutes. He looked outside. Double-parked trucks and jaywalkers jammed the traffic. Whenever Smith saw an opening, he accelerated, whipping the limousine through the traffic like a sports car. But then a traffic signal or a shopper's open car door or kids on bicycles slowed them again.

  Gadgets finally came on the phone. "This is Hardman Three. How's it going?"

  "Slow. I had a conference with the executives of the Corporation. That is one company I wouldn't want to work for. What's happening there?"

  "Nothing electronic. Two or three words on hand-radios since I got plugged in. They've got an iron fix on it in there. They also got a body count going."

  "Don't tell me the details over this line. Wait until..."

  "This line is secure. I checked it out. National Security Agency equipment. Unless someone has one of the three phone units, all they can tap in on is static."

  "Go on then."

  "I hear we got two bodies in the lobby. A man and a woman. It happened before we arrived."

  Lyons felt his gut twist. Two working people dead. Dead because they cared enough for their company and their duties to put in a sixth day this week. Not that their company cared about them. Dead because of political problems thousands of miles away. Dead because a group of psychopaths wanted to dictate the future of millions of Puerto Ricans.

  And how many more innocent people would die?

  "You there?" queried Gadgets.

  "I'm here. Those psychopaths make any demands yet?"

  "No communications whatsoever. We got a negotiation team waiting."

  "Buzz me if anything else happens. I'm going to join up with Hardman Two. Off."

  Lyons adjusted his shoulder holster, checked his pockets for speedloaders. Only four. Six rounds in his .357, twenty-four rounds in the speedloaders. He called forward to Smith:

  "Got any .357 Magnums? Or .38 rounds?"

  "9mm only, sir."

  "Call the taxi. Find out where Hardman Two is, tell him I'm on my way. Then trade in this tank for something less conspicuous. Pick up a box of .357 ammunition."

  It took Smith thirty seconds to get Blancanales' location. Lyons noted the address and cross street.

  "Drop me off at the corner, I'll take a real taxi. Get back with the other car within half an hour."

  "And that's fifty rounds you wanted, sir? .357 Magnum? Sounds like you're worried about some serious trouble."

  "I'm not worried about anything. I'm going to makesome trouble."

  * * *

  In the glass of a shop door, a shirtsleeved Blancanales spotted the two young men following him. He glanced into traffic, saw his driver park the phony cab on the other side of the street. The two young Puerto Ricans stayed a hundred yards back. They walked from block to block with him, stopping from time to
time at a shop or market, blending with the pedestrians and young layabouts on the street.

  Blancanales came to the tenement where Bernardo Commacho's mother lived. This was his third stop in Spanish Harlem. He knew Commacho would not be there. Though Blancanales had a list of names and updated addresses of known FALN couriers and soldiers, he expected to find none of them. He expected them to find him. And they had.

  Children playing in the tenement's rooms covered the sound of his steps. He went up the stairs slowly, checking the stairwell for the most likely ambush site. Perhaps they would try to take him on the way down.

  When he knocked, the apartment's door opened only a few inches. The door chain allowed it to open four inches.

  "Buenas tardes, Senora Commacho. Puedo hablar con su hijo, Bernardo?"

  "All my children are gone, moved away, long time ago."

  Beyond Mrs. Commacho's gray hair, he saw a shelf crowded with photos of her sons and daughters. One photo, framed in black, shared an alcove with the Madonna and Child. Candles burned for that dead son. Blancanales had read about the boy in his information packet; only sixteen, he died when he assaulted a police squad car with a .22-caliber rifle modified to fire full automatic. He wounded one officer, then the rifle jammed. Both officers had emptied their service revolvers into him.

  "I'm not with the police, senora."

  "Then why do you ask about Bernardo? Only the police care where he is."

  "I talked to his friends, only a few minutes ago. They told me your son visited you last week. If he's still in New York, I want to talk with him. It's very important."

  "Who is it important to?"

  "To Puerto Rico."