by Dick Wolf
The mayor went on, his words amplified by hundreds of speakers and reverberating off the water, “Detective Fisk single-handedly thwarted the assassination of President Obama . . .”
Waiting stage left to receive the key, Fisk wanted to enjoy this experience, he really did. He wished he could have notified family and friends. But seeing no need to do the Cartel any favors, he had done what he could to make sure that tonight’s “surprise presentation” remained a surprise. He’d told only Chay, albeit via a last-minute text, and she texted back her regrets; she was caught up in investigating an El Polvo story. Only one other person knew: somehow Shane Poplowski, the LightningRod kid, had gotten wind of the presentation and wasted no time texting Fisk and asking for an assist in getting a VIP table for him and his buddies at Riverside Park’s Boat Basin Café, which was within spitting distance of the stage.
The other reason that Fisk wasn’t enjoying himself was that he couldn’t turn off his apprehension. Where would the attack come from? About the only place that could be ruled out was the water tower in which he’d found the rotor blade.
“. . . And today, once again, he has delivered our city from the clutches of a terrorist, restoring our independence on Independence Day . . .”
Could that be it? Could Boyden Verlyn, always a step ahead, have foreseen that his death would bring New Yorkers streaming out to celebrate Independence Day in record numbers? That would go a long way toward explaining today’s precipitous suicide-by-cop. And if his plan had included getting law enforcement to drop its guard, he’d succeeded wildly: the Iron Apple, a temporary fix, had been dismantled entirely. The few National Guardsmen who had been equipped with LightningRods were gone too. Once again, there was no system in place to detect drones, let alone counter them.
Or was there?
Fisk dug his phone from his white slacks and, cupping it in his hand for stealth, connected to the 360-degree cameras on an A-119 Koala helicopter sniffing for TATP. He wasn’t stealthy enough, though. He felt Dubin’s eyes go hot on him from the front row of seats. The Koala was circling Liberty Island, high above the Statue, offering a stunning—and stunningly sharp—view of New York Harbor, which looked like a sheet of silver gift wrap. The clarity of the feed notwithstanding, he thought, a drone would appear as no more than a dot. He might easily miss it. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t see anything. He hoped and prayed that there was nothing to see.
He did see a bird, a gray-and-white seagull, flying past Lady Liberty’s torch. To Fisk’s surprise, he was able make out the bird’s eyes and beak set in a gentle expression.
“. . . The first key to New York City was presented on June twenty-seventh, 1702, when Mayor Philip French awarded what was termed a ‘Freedom of the City’ to the Viscount Cornbury.”
Fisk tapped into the feed from another of the Aviation Division helicopters, a Bell 412, which hovered over the Hudson directly above the Holland Tunnel. The tunnel consisted of a pair of tubes situated in the bedrock a hundred feet below the surface of the river. Every year, 35 million vehicles used it to go between New York and New Jersey. A terrorist target if there ever was one. Fisk saw only the river, free of boat traffic due to the fireworks. He also had a clear view of one of the Coast Guard Maritime Safety and Security Team’s red twenty-five-foot Defender-class security boats maintaining the fireworks safety zone. He was able to read the white numbers on the Defender’s bow: 91106.
“By the middle 1800s, it became the custom to bestow a key to the city as a symbol of New York City’s intention that the recipient was free to come and go at will.”
Fisk saw more of the same via the second Bell, which was flying over the Hudson just off Riverside Park’s dog run, just a couple of blocks from the stage. Looking up, he spotted the helicopter against a backdrop of purple clouds. He realized he’d been hearing the rhythmic thumps of its rotors throughout de Blasio’s speech. The Bell’s camera provided a view of one of the five fireworks barges bobbing with the current. And no drones. One of the Koalas, over Central Park, showed tens of thousands of people on the Great Lawn and on the Sheep Meadow. There could be fifty drones hovering over this hive, Fisk thought, and he wouldn’t notice them. He was wrong: he was able to make out several helium balloons and Frisbees, a Nerf football, and two different Batman kites, and nothing hovering or zipping the way a quadrocopter would. Good. His preference was to be 100 percent wrong about an attack.
Switching to the camera aboard one of the Port Authority Police Department’s Sikorskys, in the air above Union City—just north of Hoboken—his eye was drawn to movement between the roofs of two industrial buildings. Something about the size of a pizza box. He zoomed in. A quadrocopter. Although he couldn’t read it, he could make out the shape of the sporty red Specter logo on the fuselage.
Fighting the inclination to jump from the shock, he tried to get a read on the drone’s heading.
“It is my great honor to present a key to the city of New York on this July Fourth to a true American hero—”
“Thank you, Mayor de Blasio,” Fisk said, advancing to center stage.
Surprised at the interruption and understandably indignant, de Blasio handed over the gleaming skeleton key in its leather case. Fisk accepted it—an afterthought. He needed to figure out a way to bring down the quadrocopter without sending millions of people into a panic in the process. Turning toward the Boat Basin Café, he said, “I want to thank Shane Poplowski. Where are you, Shane?”
A high-pitched whoop from within the crowd directed him to Shane’s white-blond hair, above which his arms were raised. The kid had taken off his shirt, revealing uniformly burned skin. Fortunately he still had on the LightningRod in its scabbard.
“Shane, come up here, please?” The kid’s cry of joy matched any game-show contestant’s. If he only knew what was coming. “I also need the chief of NYPD Intel,” Fisk said, looking for Dubin, finding him looking on, openmouthed. “Barry Dubin, please join me too—it’s important.”
Getting it, Dubin snapped into his commander mode and rocketed out of his seat. Fisk held his hands in front of him as if he were turning a steering wheel. Dubin nodded, message received.
Fisk continued, “These men represent the blend of state-of-the-art technology and shrewd old-school intelligence that makes our city as safe as anyplace on the planet.” Handing the microphone to the mayor on his way off the stage, Fisk added, “And we need to get back to work.”
The mayor said, “That’s the spirit, ladies and gentle—” The ovation drowned him out. Leading the cheers were the two public relations executives who’d been at Dubin’s apartment. Meanwhile the chief’s Tahoe rolled to the end of the nearest asphalt walkway. Policemen fanned into grass on either side of it to keep spectators back.
Hurrying toward the Tahoe, Fisk corralled Poplowski. The kid was clearly befuddled, a function of the situation as well as, Fisk surmised from the skunklike scent, smoking something New York had yet to legalize.
“Is something up?” Shane asked between gasps.
“Nothing that we can’t bring down,” Fisk said. As he and Poplowski met Dubin and proceeded to the Tahoe, Fisk told them about the quadrocopter he’d seen headed across the Hudson River from Union City, probably laden with the explosive TATP. Barreling into the SUV, Dubin got on his radio, issuing intercept orders to the Aviation Division and Emergency Services.
The quadrocopter was flying slowly, just ten or fifteen miles per hour. Still, none of the three helicopters would be able to get within firing range before the drone reached Manhattan. The Air National Guard redirected two F-16s from their air patrols within fifty miles. Flying at their top speed of fifteen hundred miles per hour, the fighter jets would be in range within two minutes, which would put its arrival in Manhattan at about the same time as the quadrocopter’s.
While trying to maintain a visual on the quadrocopter via his phone, Fisk directed Dubin’s driver through the Riverside Park dog run. The SUV parked on the unpopulated cement shoulder of the
Seventy-Second Street West Side Highway on-ramp, out of view of everyone except northbound drivers. The drone, flying at about fifty feet over the river and one hundred yards off the industrial pier at Fifty-Ninth Street and Twelfth Avenue, was beginning to blend in with the dusk.
Like Dubin, Fisk sprang out of the Tahoe. He ran to open the door for Poplowski, who slid out, meanwhile regarding the LightningRod readout panel with consternation.
“What is it?” Fisk asked.
Poplowski groaned. “The charge is wicked low.”
Of course it is, thought Fisk. “How about you try it anyway?”
The drone was within fifty yards of the shore.
“We’ll have one shot.” The kid leveled the LightningRod at the quadrocopter and pressed an eye against the rear sight. “Maybe.” He clicked a button on the wand.
A pale red beam shot from the device’s mouth, reflecting on the quadrocopter, which was within twenty yards of them.
“The laser has a lock on the target system,” Poplowski said. “Now compiling data on the target-system sensors.”
“How long does that take?” asked Dubin, pacing frenetically.
“Done.” The kid glanced at the readout on his phone, then tapped in a response. “Now adjusting the collimating lenses to generate sufficient infrared.”
He again checked the readout and then input instructions accordingly. And again.
Dubin chewed a nail. “When will you shoot the thing?”
“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Poplowski started to explain. “It’s more like an arm wrestle is taking place between the UAV’s system and the—”
He stopped himself short as the drone seemed to brake in midair, then dropped like a stone. It cracked the surface of the river and disappeared.
Poplowski jumped into a victory dance and whooped. As did Dubin, almost causing Fisk to miss the ring of his phone.
He eyed the readout: PLUMMER, ROY. He hit answer, and before he could say anything, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency man said, “I’m tracking three more quadrocopters launching from Union City.”
Fisk iced up. “Heading?”
“Manhattan based on current trajectory, one is going toward Thirty-Fifth Street, give or take a block. One is angled toward the low Forties, one to around Fiftieth Street.”
Fisk looked up. Dusk veiled any drones he might have been able to see before. “Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Center?”
“It’s very probable that . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Roy?”
“Now there’s more quadrocopters.”
“How many?”
“Another fifteen, maybe twenty. Like vampire bats.”
Fisk started to do the math in his head. Twenty TATP-bearing drones landing in crowded areas, where New Yorkers were currently massed to watch the fireworks, could mean casualties in the hundreds, maybe even thousands—
“And there are other aircraft trailing them,” Plummer said with a gasp that quashed Fisk’s hope that the new aircraft were a positive development.
“Not F-16s, I take it.”
“No, UAVs, three of them. Octocopters.”
“Drones with eight rotors?”
“Huge drones—fourteen, fifteen feet in diameter—with eight rotors.”
This explained the big rotor blade at Bantam Chemical, Fisk thought. Bigger drones to deliver bigger bombs. “But what good would bigger drones do?”
“Good question,” said Plummer. “They’re more susceptible to conventional defenses—they’ll be low-hanging fruit to the F-16—” He stopped abruptly.
Fisk saw the quadrocopters launch rockets of some sort. Incandescent orange baseballs, they looked like, hundreds of them, at least two dozen from each quadrocopter. On both sides of the Hudson, spectators let out cheers, no doubt believing the fireworks show was under way.
“The quads have released a hot-burning magnesium-based composition,” Plummer said.
Fisk braced. “Meaning?”
“Decoy flares, evidently.”
The flares didn’t rise much higher than the quadrocopters, then began drifting back to the Hudson River. As the flares’ luminescent trails gave each drone the appearance of having sprouted a pair of angel’s wings, Boyden’s plan became clear to Fisk: decoy flares were used by aircraft as a countermeasure against infrared homing missiles. The missiles sought out the heat signature from the flare, leaving the aircraft unscathed. Boyden meant these flares to neutralize the F-16s and helicopters protecting New York, clearing the way for the octocopters big enough to deliver payloads of TATP, in turn big enough to dwarf the casualty total of 9/11.
Plummer said, “Pray that the octocopters aren’t packing bombs or anything like that.”
CHAPTER 52
A total of twenty-four quadrocopters, according to Plummer, had flown out of an apartment window in an empty three-story building in Union City that was scheduled for demolition. The quads preceded four octocopters that rose from the building’s water tower, in which they’d been stacked. One of them quickly fell behind, Plummer reported, evidently experiencing technical difficulties. This offered Fisk no solace—the octocopter’s TATP payload might still detonate in Union City, which had nearly seventy thousand citizens packed into just over a square mile.
The swarm of drones then began its way to the Hudson River, which now resembled a mosaic, flickering from black to white in reflection of the building lights on either side. Under ordinary circumstances, at their speed of between ten and fifteen miles per hour, the drones would cover the mile and a fifth to Manhattan in five minutes. The westerly wind now accelerated that, leaving Fisk with closer to four minutes to stop them.
First he needed to defeat the veritable obstacle course between the Seventy-Second Street on-ramp and the shore—an eight-foot chicken-wire fence, two medians, three sets of guardrails so far, and the speeding cars and trucks he had to dodge. He couldn’t tell whether the moisture he felt was blood spurting from the wound in his hip, now reopened, or just perspiration. The pain said the former. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except getting to the NYPD Harbor Patrol boat Dubin had ordered. Getting to the edge of the water where the boat would meet them, that is. Meanwhile he dragged Poplowski along.
“So can this work?” Fisk asked. For the third time.
“I just don’t know, man.” The spindly kid, probably not much of an athlete on his best days, struggled to haul himself over the final West Side Highway guard wall before the water. “Theoretically, yeah, I guess so. The thing is, I’ve seen fireworks videos recorded by drones flying through the fireworks, so obviously those fireworks didn’t do much to the sensors.”
Fisk helped him down, onto the mucky roadside between the highway and the water. “Could it work if we sent up hundreds of fireworks?”
“Could, maybe, yeah.”
Fisk was hoping for a stronger endorsement of his plan.
When the patrol boat was within ten feet, he ran and jumped the watery gap. Dubin, lagging behind, still on the highway median, waved Fisk ahead. Probably better he stay behind anyway, Fisk thought, so that he could oversee the other desperation measures, including distributing night-vision goggles to cops on the street so that they could take their best shots at the drones. Although unable to shoot down the octocopters, the F-16s could still aid in the defense of the city, ironically by use of their onboard pyrophoric flares, which ignited on contact with the air as soon as they were dropped, and, like the fireworks, might overwhelm the drones’ sensors. One more line of defense for New York was Poplowski, who remained behind in hopes of recharging the LightningRod using the Tahoe battery. And perhaps the Emergency Services Unit would deploy the LightningRods they’d purchased from his company.
Such were the countermeasures that the city had been able to muster one minute into an attack that Boyden Verlyn, Fisk suspected, had had several days to plan.
“We’ve been briefed, Detective,” the harbor cop in the
boat’s small wheelhouse said as Fisk came aboard. “Except which barge do you want to go to?”
“Good question.” Fisk had counted five of the behemoths in a row along the center of the river, distributed evenly over the seventy or eighty blocks between Chelsea and Morningside Heights. “How about the one closest to Union City?”
The harbor cop spun the wheel, meanwhile flattening the throttle. The boat lurched out onto the river, the shore seeming to fly away. Fisk had to grab hold of a rail to remain standing. Noting the streetlights flickering like stars on the ink-black water, he might have believed the boat was in outer space if not for the repeated thumps of the bow.
In thirty seconds, the boat slowed alongside the barge, which was surprisingly large close up, bigger than a basketball court, yet rising and falling with the slightest wave. Fisk guessed three minutes had elapsed in total since the drones took off, meaning they were more than halfway to Manhattan.
Looking up, he discerned flashes from the gray clouds overhead: whirling rotors. As the boat engines quieted, he heard the drones’ whine.
He wasted no time, jumping from the bow and onto the deck of the barge, which was almost entirely covered with wooden crates, each the size of a child’s desk, their open tops providing a view of the sand filling them. The sand held in place cylindrical metal mortar tubes that launched the fireworks shells. Thousands of wires led from the crates to a single control panel, where a chubby twenty-something technician with a neck beard was sitting. He was snacking on a bag of cheese curls, until, seeing Fisk, he got up and brushed some of the orange crumbs off his T-shirt. He asked, as people always do when the police pull up, “Everything okay?”
Fisk met him in the middle of the deck. “Can you launch all the fireworks at the same time?”
