by Ben Coes
The grenade whistled as it traveled across the elevator atrium, striking the wall across from the elevator, then exploding. The floor shook as the explosion destroyed everything in its vicinity, ripping the ceiling down, furniture, art, walls, and scorching the floor. Several small fires sparked immediately. Dewey moved the fire selector to auto hail, and pulsed the carbine trigger, sending 5.56mm cartridges in a furious spray across the wall of the hallway.
Receiving no counterfire, Dewey stood and moved through the door, through the burnt-out elevator atrium, M203 in front of him. The debris from the grenade was choking, blinding. He looked on the ground for the corpse of the dead terrorist, but found nothing. On the ground, the MP7 Fortuna had been using lay, the magazine spent.
Past the demolished atrium, he moved down the long corridor to the kitchen. At the kitchen entrance, he saw the first SWAT-clad agent slumped on the ground, head gone, blood everywhere. The second agent he saw a second later, lying in a large pool of blood, neck gashed. But no Fortuna.
In the back of the kitchen, Dewey saw an open door. A crimson shoe print on the marble floor. A stairwell leading upstairs. He moved to the stairwell, carefully. It was a tight space, and he harnessed the M203 back over his shoulder, took out the Colt, inserted a new clip, then began his ascent.
At the top of the steps, another door, also open. Cold air blew into the stairwell. Dewey moved through the door, inch by inch, expecting the terrorist to attack, but nothing came, and he stepped onto the snow-covered roof. Fresh tracks led across the roof, to the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Then the tracks disappeared over the side of the roof.
Dewey ran to the ledge, looking down. More than halfway down the building, almost invisible due to the falling snow, Fortuna dangled from a rope, desperately descending along the side of the building. Dewey found the rope, reached for his ankle sheath, pulled the Gerber blade out. Reaching forward, he cut the thick nylon rope. Suddenly, the taut line popped and went limp. Fortuna suddenly dropped and disappeared into the blinding snow.
Fortuna’s hands quickly grew bloody and raw as he climbed down the face of the building, toward the street. He descended quickly, moving two floors at a time, trying not to look up or down, bouncing his feet against window frame after window frame as he descended. He let rope through his hands in increments, ignoring the pain as the nylon sliced through the skin on his hands, each length of rope tearing away at his palms.
Suddenly, he felt a tug on the rope, then it went limp. A sense of airlessness bloomed in his spine, then turned into panic as gravity pulled him helplessly toward the cement at least ten stories below.
Fortuna clawed for a window ledge as he dropped away, legs kicking the air. His fingers grabbed the closest ledge, but the granite was slippery, and he kept falling. He tried to grab the next ledge, again his fingers could not hold, then another ledge, again unsuccessfully, his rate of descent accelerating uncontrollably.
A small terrace came rapidly up at him then, and he saw it as it grew larger in the fraction of a second it took him to fall, and instinctively, in that half second, he braced himself, landed on the hard granite of the terrace with a painful crash, then rolled. He ignored the pain, looking for a dazed moment at his hands, which were now raw and bleeding profusely.
Fortuna kicked in the French door that led to the terrace, entered the apartment, ran limping past an elderly woman, who started screaming. Through the apartment door, he found the stairs and took the final five flights to the building’s basement as blood dripped from his torn-up hands. He exited through the building’s delivery entrance onto sixty-ninth Street. He walked calmly, limping, down sixty-ninth Street to the corner of Fifth Avenue.
On Fifth Avenue, he looked uptown and saw two police cars pulling up to the front of the building, then a pair of black Suburbans. He walked casually to the Mercedes parked a block south on Fifth, climbed in back.
Dewey took the twenty-eight flights from the roof recklessly, jumping from landing to landing, each floor going by in a matter of seconds. He sprinted through the empty lobby, through the front door, past a flock of NYPD officers arriving on the scene. Outside, he looked around frantically. He searched the spot where Fortuna would have fallen, finding nothing but pristine, untouched snow.
On Fifth Avenue, Dewey looked south as a black Mercedes lurched from the sidewalk onto a snow-coated Fifth Avenue. He pulled the M203 off the shoulder harness. From the belt pack, he took the other .40mm antipersonnel round, quickly inserted it into the grenade chamber as he ran toward the fleeing sedan.
At the corner, he stopped, aimed carefully, then pulsed the trigger just once. The grenade screamed from the chute, sailed in a hard line down Fifth Avenue toward the Mercedes. Suddenly, the car lurched left. The grenade whistled by; two seconds later it struck a yellow taxi, incinerating the vehicle in mortar and fire.
Fortuna leaped into the back of the black sedan.
“Drive, Jean!” he screamed. “Fast. East Hampton. Move it.”
Jean hit the accelerator and the S600 peeled out. He flipped it into all-wheel drive and the tires gripped the pavement, barely registering the snow that had accumulated, more than six inches in an hour and a half.
“What happened?” asked Jean, anxiety in his voice.
“Drive,” Fortuna said from the backseat. “Just drive the fucking car.”
Dewey saw a cab in front of the building, stopped at the light. He ran to the front door and opened it, pulling the cab driver from the car and hurling him to the ground. Looking in back, he saw a young, wealthy blond-haired woman and her daughter, dressed up, petrified.
“Get out,” he barked. “Now.”
Dewey peeled out, down Fifth Avenue, into its heavy rush hour traffic, in pursuit of Fortuna. He turned left where the Mercedes had just turned, but couldn’t mark the car. He took a right on Park. After a few blocks, running red lights, swerving in and out of traffic, which was now slowing down because of the snow, Dewey saw the black sedan three blocks ahead of him. He sped ahead and tried to catch up with the speeding vehicle.
He flipped open the cell phone and pressed the button for Jessica.
“They set off another bomb,” was the first thing Jessica said. “Bath Iron Works in Maine. It’s pandemonium. I’ve got a mess on my hands.”
Dewey remembered going there as a teenager with his grandfather, to see the launch of the USS Samuel Roberts. He quickly put the thought from his mind. He needed every ounce of focus he could muster.
“I have one of the detonators,” Dewey said. “He’s running for the other one. He killed the two agents. I’m behind him in a stolen taxicab. Have you run his other properties?”
“I’m in the back of a chopper on the tarmac at Newark. The largest shipbuilder in America and a large chunk of the surrounding town was just leveled by a bomb and there are hundreds of people dead, maybe thousands. I can’t even get through to CENCOM. No, I haven’t run it. I can’t get through!”
“Keep cool,” he said, weaving through traffic.
“You need to stop him before he gets wherever he’s going,” she said, encouraging Dewey in return. “Shoot to kill. Run his car off the road. Do whatever you have to do.”
“I will. Call me when you have the location.”
The snow was starting to accumulate in large piles on the streets. The Mercedes glided along quickly, but was not out of control. The cab was one of many that filled the street behind it. But the Mercedes moved quickly. Dewey was having a hard time catching up for a clean shot.
At Thirty-sixth Street, the Mercedes turned left and entered heavy traffic queued up for the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Dewey was a dozen cars behind. He slid the cab out to the left, rolling down the window. He picked up the Colt. He moved up alongside the row of cars, into the breakdown lane barely wide enough to fit the cab. The front bumper bounced against the guardrail several times as horns blared at him. He moved toward Fortuna’s dark sedan.
Fortuna’s sedan was queued up in the fast-m
oving express lane. Dewey rolled down the window. He prepared to fire.
Fortuna turned and looked out the back window. Several cars back, he saw the cab, trying to move up the breakdown lane. His view was partially obstructed by a snowplow. He couldn’t see the face of the driver.
“There’s somebody behind us,” said Fortuna, looking at the rearview mirror. “In a cab.”
“I see them,” said Jean. “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep moving,” barked Fortuna. “Get through the fucking tolls.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Where are the weapons?”
“In the trunk. Open the center hatch. You can reach the case from there.”
“Gloves. Do you have any gloves up there?”
Jean turned, saw for the first time Fortuna’s mangled hands. He said nothing, reached for the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of leather gloves.
Swallowing the pain, Fortuna pulled the leather gloves onto his hands, blood oozing from the sides of the gloves as he did so. He pulled the leather cushion in the middle of the seat to the side. He pressed a latch on the console beneath the leather and the center section folded neatly down. He reached into the trunk and felt for the metal case, finding it and pulling it into the backseat. He opened the case. Inside, two HK UMP compact machine guns lay, along with four Glock 32s.
He selected a pistol and positioned himself to fire at the approaching cab.
Suddenly, a snowplow, just behind Fortuna’s sedan, turned in front of Dewey. It cut him off completely. Dewey could only watch as the terrorist’s sedan made it to the express lane gate and slipped out of Manhattan, the snow shrouding the back of the car.
Dewey had to back up a few feet to get around the snowplow. It took him nearly a minute to push his way back into the toll line.
The phone chimed. It was Jessica. “Where are you?”
“Queens Midtown Tunnel. I just missed him. He may have seen me.”
“We still don’t know where he’s heading,” said Jessica. “Don’t lose him.”
“I’m having trouble keeping up,” said Dewey. “He’s driving a Mercedes with four-wheel drive and I’m in an old cab.”
“In case he’s headed toward Long Island, I have LIPD setting up roadblocks.”
After the tunnel, Fortuna’s sedan climbed onto the Long Island Expressway and quickly sped up. Dewey lost sight of the Mercedes as he waited for what seemed like an eternity at the tollbooth.
“You still there?” he asked.
“I’m here. The president is declaring a state of emergency. Bath, Maine, is on fire. This is insane.”
“You got that right.”
“Did you get a look at his plates?” she asked.
“No. And now I’ve lost them. I’ll call you back when I catch up.”
Dewey flipped the phone closed.
“Fuck!” he yelled. He slammed his fist down on the steering wheel in frustration.
The roads were a mess, and getting worse. Cars were pulled off to the sides of the road, while those brave enough to keep driving in the thick snow were going so slow they were in the way of Dewey’s being able to pursue the fleeing terrorist.
But if there was one benefit of growing up in Maine, it was that he had learned to drive in the snow. He had lost track of the car. For nearly twenty minutes he drove as fast as he could, barely keeping the cab from flying off the road or into another car. He searched for Fortuna’s sedan, but saw nothing.
His phone rang.
“Jess?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We think he’s heading for the Hamptons. We’re trying to get the exact address.”
“Roadblock,” Dewey grunted, straining his vision ahead for a glimpse of Fortuna’s car.
“We have the county sheriff setting up a roadblock on the LIE at the exit for Route One-Eleven.”
“Where is that?”
“Manorville. Exit Seventy.”
“I’m getting close. What if he already got off?”
“Then we’re fucked,” she said. “We’re taking off right now. Or trying. It’s going to be hairy. I’ll call you in a few . . . I hope.”
_____
The Mercedes roared down the Long Island Expressway, its thick snow tires and all-wheel drive making the piles of snow barely noticeable. If there was a challenge, it was the cars alongside them, parked on the sides of the highway or even occasionally in the middle of the road, strewn about by drivers unprepared for the wintry conditions, not helped at all by snowplow crews who were unable to keep up with the conditions.
“If there was someone, we lost them,” said Fortuna.
“Good, boss.”
“Go to the estate. I don’t have the detonator.”
“The plane—”
“Just drive, Jean. And turn on the radio.”
Jean pressed the button for the radio. Some French music came on.
“Turn that shit off,” said Fortuna.
“What do you want? Classical?”
“The news, you dumb fuck. Ten ten.”
Jean maneuvered the big sedan through what was an obstacle course of cars as he moved the dial for the radio.
On 1010 WINS, a woman was describing the chaotic scene in Bath, Maine, where Bath Iron Works had just been destroyed by a bomb.
Jean looked back.
“Was that one of ours, Alexander?”
“Yes, Jean,” said Fortuna. He felt a slight smile cross his face. But it vanished just as quickly, for Fortuna knew that the government had to have been closing in for the bomb to be set off. Fortuna tried to remember the name of the cell; he pictured the boy’s face, but he could not remember his name. He closed his eyes for a moment, chided himself for his bad memory, then prayed for the young bomber. He opened his eyes, slammed his fist down on his knee, came back to the task at hand.
“Make this car go faster. We’re running out of time.”
At the Route 111 exit off the Long Island Expressway, a long traffic line was now backed up nearly a mile. Eight New York State troopers were running a roadblock stop-and-search, looking for the black Mercedes sedan they knew might be coming their way. The line of snow-covered vehicles was being waved through as quickly as possible. At the front of the line, four officers stood, two with automatic machine guns. The snow had continued unabated, making the lines move slowly. Two false alarms, one a Mercedes S600 driven by a seventy-eight-year-old woman on her way to her home in East Hampton, and another driven by a chauffeur for a couple from Quogue, caused a further delay.
Jean sped the Mercedes along the highway and came upon the slow-moving line for the exit.
“We have a problem,” he said, turning the radio down.
Fortuna leaned forward from the backseat. They could make out the glow of blue flashing lights from the police cars.
“A welcoming committee,” he said. “Can we get off before the exit?”
“This is the exit, Alexander. The last exit was more than five miles back.”
“Shit!” Fortuna yelled. He slammed his fist down on the seat. Then he looked behind him, searching for anything suspicious.
“What should I do?” asked Jean.
“Get in the side lane and move up to the front.”
Fortuna unlatched the seat compartment that led back into the trunk. He pulled out both of the UMPs.
“There are half a dozen troopers up there, Alex! They’re running a fucking checkpoint. They’re looking for us!”
“I’m less worried about them than about what’s coming behind us.” Fortuna ducked his head and began to crawl from the backseat into the trunk of the Mercedes.
“There’s nobody behind us.”
“Not yet there isn’t. Now get up to the front of the fucking line and stop jabbering. Don’t panic when they pull you to the side. Be polite. They will be looking for a black Mercedes. When they ask you to pop the trunk, do it.”
Fortuna pulled the seat latch from his position now in the trunk, closing off th
e compartment. He lay down inside the trunk, looking up in the dark, weapons trained back at the trunk latch, waiting.
_____
In the taxi, Dewey continued along the highway. Twice the cab spun out only to be saved from tumbling down a side hill by the guardrail. After another ten minutes, his phone rang again.
“Hi, Dewey.” Jessica’s voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of the chopper behind her. “Where are you?”
“Still on the LIE. I lost him.”
“I just got off with the deputy running the Manorville checkpoint. You should hit the line soon.”
“Do they have their weapons locked and loaded? He’ll know what they’re looking for—if he hasn’t already gotten off the highway.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Where are you?”
“Over Long Island, coming your way.”
“Do we have the location of his house? Anything turn up at his office?”
“Nothing. We’re talking with local police in East Hampton and Southampton. We should have a location within five, ten minutes tops. When we do, if my pilot can get through this mess, we should be able to get there quickly. Just keep following him. Hopefully they’ll stop him at the checkpoint. I’m sure he won’t go down easily. If you come on him before then, take him.”
Suddenly, Dewey heard a short burst of beeping noises from his cell phone. He looked down.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m losing the battery on this phone.”
“Let’s get off,” said Jessica. “Call me when you get to the checkpoint.”
Dewey powered off the cell phone. Ahead, he saw the brake lights of a van shine red through the falling snow. He came upon the line of traffic, winding ahead through the falling snow. Dewey accelerated toward the breakdown lane, sliding lightly into the guardrail, then pushing up alongside the traffic line. Far in the distance, he saw the blue flashing lights of the police cars.
