Dead Simple (28 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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A
s nine o’clock drew closer, Jack Tyrell could feel his heart thudding harder against his chest. He was about to do something no man had ever done before, yet suddenly he felt a profound sense of sadness, the pain of loss never more real for him. Mary deserved to be by his side now. They should be doing this together, their son still safe and alive.
But he was dead, and now so was Mary, and with them had gone what little hope Tyrell held out for the world. He found the irony striking. Working for Black Flag had been the only way he could guarantee the boy a safe and healthy existence. Cooperate or your boy dies. So Tyrell had cooperated, and his boy had died anyway.
Tyrell closed his eyes, as he always did when sadness started to get the better of him, closed his eyes and lost himself in what gave his life its purpose:
The moment the bomb went off.
He never felt more alive than when death was at hand. Each time, his mouth went bone dry with anticipation. Flinching in the last moment before detonation, and then viewing the single flash followed by the roaring fireball that swallowed one world and coughed another back up. In that blessed moment life found meaning, a sensory feast.
From the blinding glow, to the ringing that left his ears fuzzy and hollow, to the high-pitched screams of the wounded and dying, to the wondrous
stench of flesh burning amidst the acrid scent of scorched metal … the air cracking and popping, stubborn embers blown outward … pieces of the blast spewed into the air and falling back to the earth as unrecognizable husks …
Tyrell saw it all when he closed his eyes, opened them again to the smell of skin fried black and the sight of charred eyeballs that looked like marshmallows dropped off the stick.
He brought his transmitter up to eye level, studying the black button within easy reach of his thumb. Thought of Mary and the son he had watched from afar. He always imagined himself walking up one day and taking a close look at him, wondered if the kid would look back and know. That moment would never come now, and sadly, the closest he ever came to his son was at his funeral a month before.
The wall clock ticked to 9:00.
Jackie Terror held his breath and pushed the button.
O
n the George Washington Bridge, Sal Belamo’s rental car had just crawled past a tow truck hauling an old Lincoln, even with the bungee jumpers when Blaine heard what sounded like a massive thunderclap—not just heard but felt, deep in the pit of his stomach. There was a flash in the rearview mirror that made him squint in the final moment before the world was yanked out from beneath the car.
He felt it being lifted off the bridge and spun violently around. His first thought was that there had been some awful chain collision that sent a hundred cars plowing into each other. But flaming vehicles were actually
hurtling
past him through the air, to be deposited back on the bridge in ragged clumps of charred, smoldering steel. His own car bounced one way, then the other, and ended up with its front tires shakily riding the bed of a four-by-four.
Shock wave
…
The words sticking in Blaine’s mind, he grabbed for the breath that had been sucked out as a burst of superheated air washed over him.
 
J
ack Tyrell felt as though he were tripping on acid. All the times he had dropped the stuff and lived out the fantasy of the world rupturing at its core, blowing apart from the inside out. He and the other soldiers of Midnight Run alone left to witness people peeled back to the bone. Close his eyes and he could see it happen, make believe it was real.
But this time it was indeed real. The command center, though safely isolated, rumbled like a house set against an airport runway when a jet takes off. Tyrell quivered as the television screens brought his wondrous work to life.
His viewing started with the most dramatic sight of all, at the George Washington Bridge, where the force of the blast from dual spans had created a flaming vortex of air, spinning and hurling vehicles in all directions. Some crashed against each other in a domino effect, while others ended up atop one another. Still more dropped through the huge chasms in the bridge into the charcoal-broiled air, turning on their noses and rolling over before smashing into the waters below.
On the upper deck, a school bus was sent whirling like a propeller along the bridge, smashing cars from its path until it slammed into a toppled tractor-trailer. Impact sent the bus careening toward the safety rail, where it mounted a number of mashed, burning car husks and smashed through the guy wires, turning them into steel-like tentacles whipped wildly about. The bus teetered on the edge with its nose ever so close to turning downward. Flames licked at its tail before receding as if the blast had sucked them back in.
Goddamn blast was powerful enough to blow itself ou
t, thought Jackie Terror, sweeping his eyes across the remainder of the screens.
Goddamn
…
The center of the Lincoln Tunnel had collapsed in a firestorm of rubble and twisted steel. Numerous secondary explosions snapped off, hurling asphalt in all directions. The smoking, crackling tunnel center looked like a barricade formed of stacked car skeletons and assorted debris.
At the Queensboro Bridge, the explosion had first blown a chasm even bigger than either of those in the GWB and then collapsed a huge portion of the center of the span onto Roosevelt Island below. Cars and trucks showered down after it, twisting against each other in the blast-baked air before landing in a mesh of ruined metal and death.
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, meanwhile, did not fare nearly as well as the Holland or Lincoln. The explosion ruptured the seams layered along both its sides, exposing the walls to incredible pressure from the East River. In almost no time at all, those sides had given way to an avalanche of water as the river poured in, dousing the flames at an incredible cost.
The Williamsburg Bridge provided the biggest delight for Tyrell’s eye. A smoother flow of traffic allowed the blast to catch a number of vehicles in motion, projecting them into the air, where they actually seemed to be flying. The illusion held only until they plopped back down through the flames, either atop other vehicles, still holding to the bridge, or joining the cars that had toppled through the chasm to the waters below.
What Tyrell couldn’t see but pictured clearly all the same was the quartet of huge electric transformers responsible for powering Manhattan’s
subways, Grand Central and Penn stations exploding in a shower of sparks to more conventional explosives. Over the next few moments every train in the city came to a halt, thousands and thousands of commuters forced to hike their way fearfully out of the tunnels through the darkness.
It was all there on the screens before him, fresh shots already being captured from a greater distance by his spotter helicopter. Smoke rose in billows around the entire island of Manhattan. Tyrell invented the smells and sounds, closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting his imagination paint the picture for him. He was an artist, and this was his mural, his landscape, the shape of his vision come to pass in one blood-soaked moment that had cut New York City off from the rest of the world.
Jack Tyrell ran his eyes over the screens again, holding on the George Washington Bridge where the blackened school bus was still teetering on the safety rail, a stiff wind away from plunging to a watery death in the river below.
“Goddamn,” he said, out loud this time.
 
D
on Imus, host of an immensely successful and nationally syndicated morning radio show originating in New York, reached for his studio phone.
“I’m calling him myself.”
“He’s in a meeting,” his producer said again. “Something came up.”
“The White House. Good morning,” a voice greeted.
“Don Imus for Bubba.”
“Excuse me?”
“The I-Man, lady, calling from the Big Apple, where Bubba’s booked for a segment this morning. We’re talking again. Now put down your doughnut, hustle your butt to his office, and tell him to pick up.”
Before the receptionist could respond further, a technician knocked on the studio’s glass and then barged through the door.
“Line three,” he announced breathlessly. “Take the call.”
Imus put the White House on hold and pressed the new line. “Is it Bubba?”
“No. Shirley, from just outside the Lincoln Tunnel.”
 
“
I
s everybody all right?” Blaine’s voice rose above the shrieks and panicked cries that seemed to be coming from everywhere around him.
Johnny and Liz both grunted their assents from the back seat of the car.
“Just barely, boss,” Sal Belamo answered from behind the wheel.
Satisfied, Blaine turned and began kicking at the passenger door. When this produced no results, he hammered his elbow against the already spiderwebbed window until it shattered and showered to the roadbed beyond. He cautiously pulled himself outside and couldn’t believe what lay before him.
The force of the blast that had launched their car airborne had carved jagged chasms through both the upper and the lower decks of the bridge. Pockets of flames pooled about the remnants of the structure, licking at the blackened shells of cars, some with the charred remains of the occupants still inside. As Blaine continued to look about, he saw that a school bus had crashed through the guy wires and was resting precariously on the bridge safety rail, starting to list ever so slowly to the front. Inside, children shifted desperately about, all their jostling quickening the inevitable tilt that would take it over the side.
One of the rear doors to their smoking car popped clean off, and Johnny Wareagle emerged to survey the scene. Liz and Sal extricated themselves from the wreck as best they could, emerging at the same time Blaine spied the tow truck they had passed just before the blast. He sprinted toward it.
McCracken tore the tow truck’s door open, singeing his hands on the latch, to find the driver slumped unconscious against the wheel, then rushed to the rear. He grabbed the truck’s winch cable and swung around to find Johnny Wareagle beside him.
“Work the winch on my signal, Indian.”
There was no clear path to the teetering school bus, which meant negotiating an obstacle course of mangled car hulks over stubborn pockets of flames to reach it before it plummeted. So Blaine took the high road, leaping from hood to hood of some cars and hurdling across the roofs of others, the winch cable dragged behind him. He skirted clear of the flaming wrecks, which popped and crackled, coughing glass and steel into the air around him. But he felt the heat of the scorched metal right through his shoes.
Blaine reached the rear of the bus, only to see that gravity had begun pulling it over the top of the safety rail, its nose tilting ever downward. He dove and snared the cable onto the bus’ exhaust manifold. The bus had just started to go over when the cable snapped taut, holding it precariously in place.
Blaine waved back to Johnny, who activated the winch. The cable began to churn, and the bus edged ever so slowly back toward the bridge.
“Oh no,” McCracken muttered, his sense of triumph short-lived when he realized that the exhaust manifold was starting to bend.
 
“
W
hat do you mean, it’s gone, Shirley?” Don Imus asked the woman calling WFAN radio from her cell phone.
“I mean somebody blew the goddamn thing up.”
“You feeling all right this morning, Shirley? Didn’t add a little Kahlúa to your coffee, now did you?”
“It’s a mess down here,” she cried. “People are going to need lots of
help
!
”
Imus cupped his hand over his ear when his producer rushed through the door.
“The switchboard’s jammed. It’s not just the Lincoln; somebody’s blowing up the whole goddamn city!”
“All right,” Imus told him. “Forget the President and get me the mayor.”
 
M
ayor Lucille Corrente’s conference room in City Hall featured a clear view of the Brooklyn Bridge. She had been meeting with her senior staff since eight-thirty sharp, had just initiated a discussion about price fixing in the city’s garbage industry, when City Hall shook and the plate-glass window in the conference room shattered.
“Earthquake!” one of the staff members yelled.
“I don’t think so,” said another, who could see the fireball that had swallowed the Brooklyn Bridge through the spiderweb of cracks in the window.
 
“
A
ll routes confirmed down!” Marbles announced happily, his eyes trained on the electronic wall map, where the red lights denoting bridge and tunnel access to the island of Manhattan were flashing in synchronized fashion.
But Jack Tyrell didn’t respond. His attention was still riveted on the scene unfolding at the George Washington Bridge, now captured on live television by a news traffic chopper.
 
B
arely aware of the helicopter hovering overhead, Blaine looked on helplessly as clamps popped out from the bus’ exhaust manifold like kernels of Jiffy Pop. Half the manifold came free, and the school bus keeled downward again, dragging the tow truck across the bridge.
Inside the bus the screaming kids were rocked forward, pitching into the aisle and sliding toward the front as though they were on ice. The rear tires had actually dropped over the edge when Blaine lunged futilely to grab hold of the cable, as if he could somehow yank the bus back up alone. Before the bus could plummet, the cable lodged firmly under its mangled frame, toppling the tow truck onto its side and leaving Blaine with the brief illusion that he was holding the bus up himself.
Blaine let go of the cable and pressed up against the safety rail, the hot metal burning him through his shirt. The nose of the bus was facing straight down now, the rear emergency exit about a yard away. Still intent on rescue, he climbed down onto the bus. His weight rocked it slightly and drew a chorus of yells from the kids trapped inside. He managed to work the emergency door open, hearing the raspy screech from the alarm as he leaned in toward the terrified faces gazing up at him.
“Come on!” he said. “Climb to me!”
But the sudden shifting of weight as the kids started pulling themselves toward him caused the bus to lurch downward again, the tow truck dragged with it and all of Blaine but his feet ended up inside. He would have fallen in headfirst if Johnny Wareagle hadn’t reached over the rail above and latched onto his ankles. Liz Halprin and Sal Belamo then grabbed hold of Johnny’s legs just in case the bus was rocked again.
But for the moment it seemed stable, and Blaine took advantage of the human chain of survivors who had braved the inferno to raise the kids up and over him so they might reach for the hands of more bystanders who had rushed to the rail to help.
“Hold it!” Blaine ordered, when the children started crowding toward him. “One at a time!”
It was an agonizingly slow process, each kid seeming to take forever. The sixth of ten in the bus had just made it over the rail when the tow truck slipped free of the cars it was wedged between and slid on its side into a toppled eighteen-wheeler. Blaine felt himself torn from Johnny’s grasp, falling all the way inside the bus. Then the winch cable split from the frame, sliding free, and the bus jerked downward, with nothing to hold it.

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