by Paul Batista
The morning was also delicious because he had slept for twelve hours. He worked fifteen hours every day except Sunday as an emergency room doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital, a cluster of old and modern buildings directly across from Central Park on Fifth Avenue between 97th Street and 101st Street. Because it was close to East Harlem, the emergency room was always hectic on Saturday nights: men, women, and even children who had been shot or knifed or who had overdosed on Valium, Xanax, Percocet, Vicodin, OxyContin, and other opioids, the new street drugs of the twenty-first century.
As he walked on 82nd Street, he could see at the end of the block the colorful crowds on the grand steps of the museum. There were wagons with bright umbrellas where food was sold, the New York fare of hot dogs, salted pretzels, and Italian ices. The food wagons were all aluminum. Their sides glinted in the bright daylight. From the heights of the museum’s walls immense banners displaying the names of artists and exhibits were suspended. They undulated in the cleansing breeze. Gabriel wondered if he would, in fact, find among the hundreds of men, women, and children on the museum steps the dark man who had sent him in one of his many text messages that single indistinct picture of himself.
The first explosion came from one of the food wagons. It was a flash at least as bright as the sun. A wall of sound and debris blew toward him, a dirty tsunami of dust and small flying objects of glass, broken stones, and flecks of metal. Still clutching Oliver’s leash, he lifted his hands to shield his face and felt the stinging of debris. Oliver wailed, hurt and bewildered.
Gabriel lowered his hands as soon as the hail of small, fragmented objects swept by him. He was able to see the steps of the museum. Bodies were on fire as if self-immolated. The remnants of the food wagon were burning. The banners along the heights of the museum were tattered. A sheet of fire flared on the waters of the long fountain in front of the museum even though, incredibly, the water continued to rise up. Water couldn’t quench the flames.
Even though he felt it immediately, he couldn’t see the source of the second explosion. His view was blocked by the apartment building at the corner of 82nd Street and Fifth that faced the museum. But he did see another nuclear-style wave of smoke, dust, and debris rushing down Fifth Avenue from the source of the explosion. More bodies in flame, propelled by the new explosion, were littered across the steps. He thought he could hear the crying and shouts of voices interwoven with the bell-like concussive ringing in his ears.
He pulled Oliver into the doorway of a brownstone. Although the dog was not visibly hurt, his trembling and crying were intense. Gabriel double-knotted the leash to the iron railing and tried to soothe him. The dog stared at him with bewildered, hurt eyes. He loved the devoted dog but knew he had to act.
Gabriel ran toward the museum. He had nothing with him to deliver aid to anyone, but he did have his knowledge and his experience as a combat-trained emergency doctor. Just as he reached Fifth Avenue, a third explosion, this one at the north end of the museum, blew him to the ground. He quickly jumped to his feet, like a football player knocked down and immediately rising, and ran across Fifth Avenue to the wide plaza and steps. He saw cars and buses in flames on the avenue and sidewalk. On top of one of the double-decker London-style tourist buses, passengers, mainly the Asian tourists who had visited the city in the thousands over the last six years, were thrown against the railings as it careened down the avenue before toppling over, spilling people onto the street like damaged toys.
He turned his attention to the injured on the nearby steps. Within an area of ten feet there were at least seven bodies, including two children torn to pieces like rag dolls. One of the adults, a woman whose face was ripped apart, appeared to be breathing, but when he knelt over her it was clear she was dead. In his two years as an Army surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had learned to abandon the dead immediately and seek out the wounded, like Dracula hunting hungrily for fresh blood. He could never help the dead, but he might be able to help the living.
A man lying near the first exploded wagon was moaning. His left arm below the elbow was limp, obviously broken, and hemorrhaging. Gabriel knew that the first essential act with even a mortally injured person was to give assurance—in Iraq he had come to call it “placebo hope.” As he took off his shirt to make a tourniquet of one of the sleeves, he leaned over the man. He was sweating, as was Gabriel. On the man’s face, just below his left eye and spreading just above his heavy beard from his cheek to his left ear, was a vivid birthmark in the shape of Japan. He was clearly an Arab, probably one of the men who worked at the first exploded food wagon. Somehow, he looked familiar to Gabriel, a vague image in the recesses of Gabriel’s anxious mind.
They were within inches of each other, their eyes totally engaged. “You’ll be fine,” Gabriel said. The man exhaled the breath of the near dead.
But Gabriel knew he could be saved. He twisted the sleeve of his own torn shirt around the man’s sinewy upper arm. The bleeding lessened. On his left wrist the man wore a metallic bracelet. It was thick, surprisingly large and silvery, with chain-like links, and sticky with blood. It was flexible enough to remove, and Gabriel did that because it could further aggravate the wounds. He slipped it over the man’s knuckles. Gabriel put it into his pocket, thinking he might keep it safe for this injured stranger, a man he knew he was unlikely ever to see again. It was odd, Gabriel thought, that this Arabic man, probably a Muslim, wore an ornament. The Koran forbade it, and in his years in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had never seen a native with even a ring on his finger.
With his practiced hands, he then probed under the man’s torn clothing for other wounds. He felt blood on the area above the left kidney and then, probing further, he touched a sharp point from which the bleeding came. He pulled, removing a shard of the aluminum casing of the food wagon. It was so large that when he tossed it away it made a distinctive noise, like a dropped nail, on the stone.
Holding his hand over the wound, Gabriel noticed in the midst of the debris around them an intact bottle of water. He opened the bottle, poured some water into his hand and washed the man’s face with it. Responding, the injured man opened his eyes wider and with his right hand held Gabriel’s wrist as if in gratitude. Gabriel put the bottle to the man’s trembling parched lips, and he drank.
Gabriel propped the man’s head on a fragment of loose concrete. Then he heard a woman’s voice nearby. She was moaning, “Help me, God. Help me.”
He did.
***
Later that day, after the security footage was retrieved from the debris, the image of Gabriel Hauser wandering alone among the dead and injured was broadcast around the world. By that time the police knew his name. Gabriel Hauser, the Angel of Life.
CHAPTER FOUR
AS GINA CARBONES convoy approached 79th Street and Madison Avenue, the streets were wild. Hundreds of people were out, looking in the direction of the museum as dense smoke billowed above it and the elegant nearby apartment buildings. Traffic was at a complete standstill, a hopeless gridlock, a virtual parking lot, and she and her staff left the convoy and walked three blocks uptown to the public school building, PS 6, that occupied the entire block fronting Madison Avenue from 81st Street to 82nd Street. She had ordered that the building be taken over as her command center. There was so much confusion on the streets that no one seemed to notice that the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and a phalanx of uniformed officers carrying M-16s and other evil-looking assault weapons were steadily walking through the chaotic crowds. Some people in the crowd with cell phones held aloft were recording her.
She made her way to a classroom on the northern side of the building. She was able to look down 82nd Street toward the museum. Through the leafy trees she had a glimpse of Fifth Avenue and a portion of the museum’s steps. Using binoculars, she saw uniformed officers setting up barriers and beyond them what at first looked like multiple cigarette butts scattered on the steps.
They were charred bodies.
Gina Car
bone had served in the Gulf War and from helicopters had seen the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers scattered on the desert. She had no sense of connection with them. But now she realized that the smoking smudges were people just recently killed by shrapnel and fire. Part of her reputation was built on the perception that she was cool, unflappable, and tough, but she found herself audibly inhaling as though she was on the brink of screaming. These fuckers, she thought, how did they get here?
Donna Thompson, a black police captain, was waiting for her. Crisp and efficient, she had a sheet of paper on which she had written the information she knew Gina needed.
“How many dead people have I got?”
“Fifty at least,” Thompson calmly said. “We’ve only just now started letting EMT people through the barrier.”
“Why so long?”
“We had reports that there might be more bombers inside the museum itself.”
“How many wounded?”
“Not many so far. Ten. There are more likely more dead than wounded.”
Gina was an NYPD sergeant on 9/11. She had arrived in lower Manhattan six hours after the towers fell. At old St. Paul’s Church on lower Broadway, a church surrounded by a cemetery with gravestones from the 1600s and 1700s, doctors and medics were waiting to care for the wounded. It became chillingly obvious as the hours passed that there were very few wounded, just as there were very few intact bodies. Doctors and nurses stood around uselessly. Soon the church became a rest station with water and food for the people working at the scorched place where the towers had collapsed.
“What do we know about how many people were at the museum when this happened?”
“One of the security guards was at a coffee shop on a break. He said that on a pretty summer day they could have as many as three hundred people on the steps, sitting on the benches on the plaza, looking at the pictures and other stuff in the outdoor stalls, just hanging around. Not to mention tourists on the buses, those double-decker kinds. There were five tour buses lined up on the avenue.”
Gina was making notes on a pad of paper. She wrote columns of numbers as she listened.
“How about inside?”
“This guy is a guard in the Temple of Dendur on the northern end of the museum. Part of his job is to count as best he can the number of visitors in the area on one of those old-fashioned handheld clickers. He had a headcount of 350 when he left for his break. Pretty primitive, but at least it’s some info.”
Gina thought about the slanting expanses of panes of glass that encased the Temple of Dendur where Egyptian tombs and statues were displayed. The shattered glass would have been hurled to the sloping lawn at unimaginable velocity. There must have been sun-bathers on a gorgeous day there. Even a fragment of glass could maim or kill. When she wrote down the number 350 on her pad the lead point of her pencil broke. She was that tense.
“And what about the rest of the museum?”
“At any one time on a Sunday there are as many as a thousand people inside, more on a rainy day.”
“Anything else?”
“Sure. Every window facing Fifth Avenue in all the big apartment buildings was blown out from 86th Street down to 79th. All of the glass blown inward. There are dead and injured people there. We don’t have easy access. They’re Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, after all. The security system in every one of these rich people’s buildings is better than the Pentagon. Besides, God knows how many of them were at their houses in the Hamptons on the weekend.”
Some of the most famous people in the world lived in those buildings, the most desirable in Manhattan, with unobstructed views of the museum and all of Central Park. For the first time that morning, Gina gave some thought to the type of mind that could envision and execute all this. These were people who knew that large concentrations of vulnerable men, women, and children would be clustered together on a day of the week when the city was relaxed and festive, the numbers of police at reduced levels, and vigilance taken down a notch.
And whoever had done this knew the city especially well for another reason: not only would the massacre kill and maim many tourists from around the country and the world, but it was bound to kill and maim rich and famous people in the most expensive buildings in the world. Jackie Onassis had lived for years in a building directly across the avenue from the Met. The bombings on 9/11 killed thousands of innocent people but very few famous ones. The World Trade Center was a place where most of the people worked as clerks and technicians for big brokerage firms and government agencies. Although it was a huge, spectacular target of opportunity, it was not the place where members of the power elite were likely to be killed.
“And what about the roof garden?”
“Not sure, no word.”
“I know there were people up there for a party.”
“There are trees and plants up there,” Captain Thompson said. “It’s all still burning, like a forest fire.”
Gina Carbone didn’t like pretty boys, but Roland Fortune was more than a pretty boy. She first met him three days after he was elected mayor. He had campaigned in part on the need to replace the top people in the police department. She was at least three rungs below that level. He interviewed several men and two women who ranked higher than Gina and who were better educated and with more years of service. But he had responded well to her and five days later he held a televised press conference announcing her appointment in which he described her as a gritty, streetwise, brilliant officer who had vision, integrity, and drive. In private he never tried to charm her. He was a patient listener, often, but not always, endorsing anything she recommended. She admired him. The thought that he was blown to shreds or burned to death unnerved her.
She was on the verge of asking about the physical damage to the museum. But a hand touched her shoulder. “The president’s on the line.”
She took the secure cell phone. She covered her left ear to avoid any distractions and turned to stare at the elementary school’s undersized basketball court. There was an odor of varnish and scuffed sneakers. The gym was hot. There was no air conditioning in early summer and there were too many people in the room. The grimy windows were reinforced with steel mesh.
“Commissioner?” The voice was easily recognizable. Andrew Carter was the most famous person in the world.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me what’s going on. Like everybody else on the planet I only know as much as what I see on CNN.”
She wanted to sound authoritative and controlled. “We have as many as three hundred people dead. An unknown number of wounded. I gave the order a minute ago to let our emergency people enter the secure area. We were concerned that additional bombers might still be on the scene. I don’t want a situation like 9/11 when the rescuers blindly go running in to help the victims only to become victims themselves.”
“Understood.”
“The city’s locked down, the subways are stopped, tunnels and bridges are closed, police boats are in the rivers, and airports in lockdown.”
“What about the air?”
“At least ten police helicopters are up. They haven’t been challenged.”
“There’s a contingent of fighter jets five minutes from the city.”
Fighter jets? She restrained the impulse to tell the President of the United States that fighter jets were about as useful as camels. She needed real troops on every corner. This was guerilla war, not Star Wars.
He asked, “Are there other places up there where large groups congregate on the weekends?”
The president, she remembered, was from Los Angeles. Obviously he knew nothing about Manhattan on a summer weekend.
“We have huge concentrations of people on days like this at Battery Park, Riverside Park, Washington Square Park, Times Square. I have units at or en route to all those places and others.”
“Do you folks have any information as to who’s responsible for this?”
“At the moment, sir, the blunt truth is we have no idea. There w
as no more chatter or negative information than we have had for years, just the usual low and sustained hum of danger. Do your people have anything?”
“I’m getting information on that.”
Gina thought about all the billions of dollars spent on the worldwide apparatus of national security since 9/11, and the president didn’t have any information as to the men who carried out this devastating attack. In fact, she knew more than he did. Suddenly she felt impatient, eager to get back to her work, and annoyed that the president was distracting her from the real things she had to accomplish.
She said, “This is a huge failure. I have hundreds of people, maybe more, dead and wounded on my turf and on my watch. I’m going to find out why my people, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, all those security honchos, had no clue this was coming. But right now, sir, I need to organize relief efforts, make sure hospitals all over this island are ready to accept the wounded, and guard against the possibility that there are other lunatics out there right now about to carry out more attacks.”
“I appreciate, Commissioner, that you have work to do. We all have work to do.”
“Is there anything else I can tell you right now?” She knew she could be abrasive. She detected the impatience in her voice.
“I understand something might have happened to the mayor. We tried to reach him. We were told he may be a victim.”
“He was at a party on the roof garden of the museum when the explosions happened. I’ve had a report from one of our helicopters that there are many dead people on the roof. There are fires still burning up there. There’s a lot of foliage up there, plantings of rare trees and shrubs. We’ve got no information as to whether the mayor was one of the victims.”
“That leaves you with a huge responsibility, Commissioner. You’re now in charge, at least for the time being. You can’t let too much time pass before you have a press conference to reassure the public.”
