Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

Carter smiled. “He’s the only man in the world who loves those cameras more than I do.” He lapsed into silence. “So tell me what he said about Gina Carbone’s resignation?”

  “Not word one.”

  “Didn’t Lazarus get my order to him?”

  “That was Lazarus just on the cell with me. He did give your order.”

  “Before or after Fortune’s press conference?”

  “Before.”

  “Before?”

  “Right, before.”

  “So what did the motherfucker say at this press conference?”

  “Fortune praised Commissioner Carbone as if she were the Ulysses S. Grant of the twenty-first century. He said that because of her effectiveness he was ordering the immediate lifting of the lock-down of Manhattan. The city, he said, is now safe enough for that.”

  Carter’s moods and reactions had always been a mystery to Fitton. Carter and Fitton had known each other for the few years their careers in the Senate overlapped when they had adjoining office suites and both served on the Foreign Relations Committee. As Defense Secretary, Fitton had met with Carter at least twice a week over the last three years in the Oval Office and conference rooms in the Pentagon and elsewhere. Fitton had never once been invited to the legendary basketball games Carter held at the White House gym.

  As the Bombardier leveled with the sureness of an arrow, with the flat New Jersey terrain racing on both sides of the slender craft, Andrew Carter said nothing. Whoever the pilot was had the expertise of an astronaut. The wheels of the jet made a velvet contact with the old and somewhat rutted runway of the small airport.

  Even when the Bombardier stopped completely, its flawless engines subsiding into silence, no one in the cabin moved; there were no snapping sounds of seat belts clicking open and loose. This was because Andrew Carter, ordinarily as vigorous and fast at fifty-two as he had been decades earlier as a college, and briefly a professional basketball player, remained motionless. The only sound, the only movement, came two minutes after the jet halted when the pilot opened the cockpit’s sealed door. The pilot, who had close-cropped blond hair, was a woman. Andrew Carter and the other people in the luxurious cabin hadn’t known that because the door to the cockpit was closed and sealed when, less than an hour before, they had quickly scaled the stairs to the inside of the plane. The pilot and copilot, a large man in a Navy pilot’s uniform who left the cockpit only when the attractive woman was at the front of the cabin, hadn’t made any announcements during the flight.

  Without unfastening his belt, the president leaned closer to Roger Fitton, asking, “Rog, how many Army and Marine soldiers do I have in the city?”

  “Between fifteen and twenty thousand troops.”

  “Where are they primarily?”

  Fitton shrugged. “All over Manhattan.”

  “Roger,” the president said, “those are not really adequate answers. In fact, they’re lousy answers.”

  Roger Fitton had an almost inflexible cheeriness, a quality that enabled him to win by huge margins every election he ran in Ohio. The president had picked him as the secretary of defense because he felt he needed at least one bright face among the sour collection of men and women, including Harlan Lazarus, who ran what the press always called the president’s “national security team.” And Fitton also carried at least an aura of military service: as a young man he had enlisted in the Army Reserve, spent four months on active duty and then twelve years on almost nonexistent reserve duty, leaving with the rank of major, the reason why some soldiers in the Administration addressed him as “Major.” Andrew Carter knew it was a joke. Fitton had entered the Army because he always intended to be a politician and believed, correctly, that a claim to military service would give him some intangible edge, a credit, particularly in a state like Ohio.

  “I don’t understand, Mr. President. That’s the best information I have. I can get you exact numbers and locations in two seconds.”

  The president glanced at him with unveiled disdain and, after the tense beat of two or three seconds, he turned to his left. General Foster was staring straight ahead, as if at attention. “General?” Carter said.

  Without hesitating, the general said, “Twelve thousand three hundred and seventy-five, sir. They’re located at every street corner in Manhattan. There are an additional two thousand nine hundred troops on Naval and Coast Guard craft on the rivers and in New York Harbor, all ready for specific deployment.”

  “General, I want your reserve troops to concentrate at every bridge and tunnel leading into and out of Manhattan. Your commanders must make sure that no one, absolutely no one, leaves or enters Manhattan until I give that order.”

  “Mr. President,” the grim general said, “those access points are currently under the control of the NYPD.”

  “So?”

  “If we deploy in the next hour, my soldiers will come face to face with those police officers. I understand that the rank and file of the NYPD are remarkably loyal to that commissioner, Ms. Capone or whatever her name is. She must already have directed her people that the mayor has announced the lifting of the lockdown. They see themselves as working for the mayor, not you.”

  “General, let me say it again. United States soldiers are to be posted immediately at every entrance and exit point in Manhattan. No one leaves or enters Manhattan unless I say so.”

  “What is it exactly, sir, that you want my troops to do? We soon will have armed men and women facing each other at bridges and tunnels, with directly conflicting orders. Tempers will flare. In Afghanistan I had many situations where soldiers, the Afghans and my troops, nominally allies on the same side, came into direct contact at times when they were under competing orders. And the results often were not pretty.”

  “Listen, General. I am the commander in chief. My orders are that Code Apache stays rigidly in effect until I say otherwise. How you and your people implement those orders is your business.”

  Carter then finally reached for the buckle of his seat belt. The unfastening sound of the click sharply resonated, followed immediately by a series of identical clicks as everyone else unfastened theirs.

  Malcolm Foster stood first to give Carter access to the aisle. He saw the president put his hand on Fitton’s wrist just as Fitton was about to stand.

  “By the way, General, I’m certain the major here, with his deep reservoir of military experience, can help you.”

  ***

  The silver blades of the green Army helicopter already flashed like a million swords in the bright sunlight as Carter led a small entourage through a cordon of Secret Service agents on the skillet-hot tarmac of the Teterboro runway. At six four, Carter was not only the tallest person in his entourage, he was taller than the sixteen men and two women in the Secret Service detail which suddenly materialized around him.

  The Army helicopter carrying President Carter was indistinguishable from the dozens of other green helicopters that were airborne at the same time over the Hudson River and the amazing spectacle of Manhattan, and, in the distance, the glittering expanse of New York Harbor. Carter could see the Statue of Liberty, as distinct as the miniature models of it displayed in the shops and kiosks of every airport in America.

  Behind him in the thunderous interior of the helicopter, the president heard the clipped voice of Malcolm Foster on a cell phone, but couldn’t hear the words. Carter was certain that the homely, hard-bitten general was giving out commands to follow the president’s order. As Carter had expected, the general hadn’t spoken to the secretary of defense, who sat quietly on the hard metal bench in the helicopter’s belly. Those benches were benches made for soldiers and not for the president of the United States.

  A thousand feet below the helicopter was the dazzling perfection of the grid of midtown Manhattan. It had the straight lines of crisscrossing streets and avenues and the tops of buildings that made it look like a gigantic chessboard with all the pieces in their precisely ordained places. Carter had flown over every small and larg
e city in America, and there was no sight like this anywhere else in the country.

  The helicopter suddenly dropped hundreds of feet as it approached the glimmering green tower of the United Nations Building at the far end of East 42nd Street. The president had been told that for security reasons the ungainly craft would descend straight down to the UN helicopter launch pad on the East River. The sudden descent frightened him; it was like a free fall, as if the engines suddenly and unexpectedly failed. He gripped the rails of the steel bench on which he sat. His scrotum tightened, the universal reaction of men dropped by helicopter into dangerous landing zones.

  Once the helicopter had settled on the floating UN heliport, its rotors still turning and throbbing, Andrew Carter deftly jumped down the three feet from the open door. Fitton and the general needed the outstretched hand of a burly Secret Service agent to guide their jumps. Soldiers with M-16s formed a straight alley down which Carter jogged from the heliport to the plaza that surrounded the still modern-looking UN building constructed in 1947, several years before he was born. At the end of the long cordon of soldiers were iron-plated black SUVs and a limousine. As often happened, he slipped into one of the SUVs and a stand-in who closely resembled him sat behind the tinted windows of the black Lincoln limousine in which the president of the United States was always expected to ride. He was a decoy.

  The convoy sped uptown on First Avenue. Startled people on the sidewalk stopped to stare at the convoy. Not only were there SUVs and the gleaming limousines there were also two dozen helmeted soldiers in Hells Angels-style helmets on Harley Davidson motorcycles both leading the convoy and following behind it.

  First Avenue was, even on a cloudless day, dreary. The street-level shops were primarily nail salons, stationery stores, bodegas, a McDonald’s, three Dunkin’ Donuts outlets, retail banking offices with ATMs, and bleak concrete plazas surrounding equally bleak high-rise apartment buildings. The Secret Service had picked First Avenue as the convoy’s route because it was the most direct way to Gracie Mansion from the UN building. The ride would take twenty minutes. The avenue was closed to all other traffic.

  And then it happened: the stunning sound and the incandescent flash on the sidewalk next to the urban children’s playground that ran from 65th to 68th Streets. Andrew Carter, feeling the wrenching jolt of the SUV, glanced out the tinted window to his left, the direction of the explosion and the startling starburst of fire. Before he was shoved to the floor of the SUV by three Secret Service agents who covered his body, like players in a rugby scrum, Carter saw several of the Marines on motorcycles blown down, already drenched in their own blood while the motorcycles, on their own momentum, continued forward for yards as they wobbled crazily like spinning tops and finally fell.

  Andrew Carter, his face pressed against the SUV’s floor, his large athlete’s body entirely covered with the tense bodies of Secret Service agents, was groaning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “DO YOU WANT to know, Mr. President, why you’re still alive?”

  Andrew Carter arrived at Gracie Mansion exactly four minutes after the explosion. Within that time, dozens of armed men and women, some of them Army soldiers, some New York City police officers, some Secret Service agents, some in uniforms that were unrecognizable because they bore no insignias, had swarmed over the ordinarily peaceful streets of the neighborhood. Gracie Mansion had first been built in the 1800s, when most of Manhattan above 14th Street was farmland. The mansion, originally a farmhouse, was a security nightmare. Its main entrance was less than thirty feet from the edge of East End Avenue. A tasteful brick wall and a tall wooden fence surrounded the mansion on all sides. No barbed wires, no electrified fences, no concrete barriers. The mansion was in effect part of Carl Schurz Park and of the quiet neighborhood.

  Roland Fortune had learned within seconds about the explosion on First Avenue. But he had only learned a few minutes before that the President of the United States had landed, unannounced to anyone in Roland’s administration, at the UN building and that a fast-moving motorcade was speeding uptown to Gracie Mansion. Roland believed he had sensed or felt or intuited the explosion, just as some people believe they felt, sensed, or intuited the first tectonic shift of an earthquake.

  In that four-minute interval, no one had told him definitively that the president’s damaged motorcade was speeding to Gracie Mansion. He simply knew that dozens of armed men and women had suddenly materialized on the quiet nearby streets and in the usually bucolic park. Gina Carbone had ordered him to sit in the only space in the old building that did not have windows. That was the colonial-style foyer at the main entrance to the Mansion.

  Andrew Carter was uninjured. He didn’t have any visible bruises. By the time his SUV had stopped five feet from the mansion’s main door, a female Secret Service agent had given Carter several slightly astringent baby wipes and said, “Sir, you need to wash your face with these.” She held her makeup mirror to his face. Long experienced with the politician’s skill at cleaning and freshening up, Carter used all the wipes to remove grime from his forehead and the dirty streaks on his cheeks.

  Repeating the first words he spoke to Carter when the president walked through the front door, Roland asked, “Do you know why you’re still alive?”

  Carter’s expression was not just puzzled, it was angry. He said nothing.

  “Commissioner,” Roland suddenly called out.

  As if appearing on cue through a side door on a stage, Gina Carbone entered the hallway. Roland knew that Carter had only seen newspaper, magazine, and television images of Gina. He’d be impressed by how tall and striking she was in person.

  The foyer in the mansion was small. It was crowded: Andrew Carter and Roland Fortune, both large and powerfully built men; slender and malevolent-looking Harlan Lazarus with at least two of his aides, both wizened men who resembled their boss; and four bulky, pumped-up Secret Service agents, all of them black and with the size of comic book characters.

  Yet Gina Carbone, the only woman, dominated the narrow space. She projected absolute confidence and calm.

  “This,” Roland said, “is Gina Carbone.”

  She said nothing. Likewise, President Carter didn’t speak to her although he glanced at her.

  “Why is she here? What was it,” the president icily asked Roland, “about my message to fire her that was unclear?”

  Roland was close enough to Carter in this densely packed space to detect, faintly, that distinctively acrid odor of sweat the president shed on the basketball court during those times Roland had been invited to play in the White House gym—which was constructed over the old pool that was legendary for years as the place where President Kennedy used to swim in the nude every afternoon cavorting with secretaries, actresses, socialites, and prostitutes. Unlike Kennedy, Carter was a happily married man with no need for afternoon trysts with hundreds of women. One of his first orders as president was to have the long-neglected fetid pool ripped out and replaced with the basketball court.

  “And what is it,” Roland asked, “about my question that you won’t answer?” He paused, calmly defiant. “Do you know why you’re alive?” he repeated.

  Harlan Lazarus interrupted, “Do you know who you’re talking to, Mr. Fortune? Does the word respect mean anything to you?”

  There were at least ten seconds of utter silence. The only sound was the faint sibilance emanating from the earpieces the Secret Service agents each wore.

  Roland said, “Listen to me carefully. Commissioner Carbone learned that a man and a woman were on the sidewalks near the city playground your convoy was about to pass. She was informed they were suicide bombers with enough explosives to take down a building. One, a woman, was on the east side of 62nd Street and First Avenue, and the other, a man, directly across the avenue. There must have been dozens of children and young parents there who were killed or hurt in that playground. Within three minutes of learning about the suicide bombers, and about your sudden, miraculous arrival and route,
the commissioner had two sharpshooters in place. The woman was hit in the head and died before she could do whatever these people do to detonate themselves. Your convoy was less than half a block away. The other sharpshooter was slightly off target. The male suicide bomber was struck in the middle of the chest. Hence the explosion. But had that explosion happened at the same time as Mata Hari was supposed to explode five seconds later, as these people had planned, you would have been the first assassinated president since 1963.”

  Andrew Carter’s face was impassive.

  Shrilly, Lazarus said, “Why wasn’t I told about this?”

  Roland turned to him. They were two feet from each other. “And why the fuck, after four days of begging this man to come to New York, weren’t we told he was on his way here? You know how the commissioner found out? Can you guess? She had taken down a suspect half an hour earlier who, after a few minutes of very uncomfortable hesitation, found it necessary to tell her people that the President of the United States was in an Army helicopter over Manhattan and about to land next to the UN building and get into a convoy to drive up First Avenue to see me to tell me to fire her. There wasn’t any fucking time to waste.”

  Roland had a powerful voice. His shouting resonated in the hallway. And then in a whisper he said, “So there was no time to tell you, Mr. Lazarus. There was only time for the commissioner to let me know what her people had learned and for me to tell her to do whatever she needed to do to save this man’s life. If I’d been spending my time firing her, on your say-so, the president would be dead.” He stopped. “Do you get that, you fucking jerk?”

  President Cater raised his hand, signaling Lazarus not to respond. “Everyone leave this room, except the agents. My friend the mayor and I need to have a heart-to-heart, locker-room kind of talk.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE BLACK, ANONYMOUS Impala stopped in the middle of the Holland Tunnel. Except for officers dressed in riot gear—men and women in bulletproof vests, combat helmets and all carrying M-16s, the black weapon that even as a doctor in Iraq and Afghanistan Gabriel knew so well and had from time to time carried—the tiled, yellow-illuminated interior of the tunnel was empty. As soon as the rear door of the car opened, Gabriel, still in the painful plastic handcuffs, was pulled from the back seat. He was led up a narrow flight of steps into a cage-like structure, similar to the kind of booths in the subway system in which clerks once sold tokens and now sold shiny plastic MetroCards. He had seen these booths many dozens of times over the years in which he had driven through the tunnel. He assumed the booths were small stations where traffic was monitored. He spent fewer than two seconds in the booth before he was pushed through a rear door and into a long, brightly lit corridor. It smelled of urine and ammonia, like a bathroom at the Port Authority bus terminal.