“Screw you, Brian,” the big dude said. “You snooze, you lose, bro. I got this. Watch how it’s done.”
I shook my head. These guys were amazing. Tripping over themselves to help. No wonder people called them heroes.
“Send down the rig,” said the fireman in the shaft a minute later. “We got two, a mom and a daughter. They’re okay! They’re okay!”
Everyone started ch
eering and whistling as a pudgy Hispanic woman, clutching her beautiful preschool-age daughter, was pulled up out of the shaft into the light.
“Okay, good job, everyone. Attaboys!” Cunniffe bellowed as EMTs took the mother and child up the stairs. “Now get the f back to work!”
An hour later, I was deep underground ten blocks south in full-face breathing apparatus and a Tyvek suit as I toured the devastation that had been the 168th Station with FBI bomb tech Dan Dunning, from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“This is unbelievable,” he said, swinging the beam of his powerful flashlight back and forth over the vaulted ceiling.
“Which part?” I said.
“This was one of the grandest stations of the whole subway system, Mike. See the chandelier medallions next to the cave-in and the antique sconces in that rubble there? This used to be the station for the New York Highlanders, who went on to become the New York Yankees. A part of history. Now look at it. Gone. Erased.”
“Could it have been a gas leak?”
“Not on your life,” Dunning said. “Gas and electric are surface utilities. These are some of the deepest stations in the system. Ten stories down. Whatever blew them up was intentionally put here. I can’t say for sure yet, but you ask me, these goddamn bastards set off a thermobaric explosion.”
“A what?”
Dunning pulled off his mask and spat something out.
“Thermobaric explosions occur when vapor-flammable dusts or droplets ignite. They rely on atmospheric oxygen for fuel and produce longer, more devastating shock waves. As you can see, when they occur in confined spaces, they are catastrophic. They pumped something down here and lit it up. A gasoline mist, maybe, is my guess. Just like a daisy-cutter bomb. I mean, look at this!”
We hopped down off what was left of a platform and walked over the burned-to-a-crisp tracks toward a blackened train. As crime-scene techs took pictures, I could see that one of the train’s plastic windows had melted and slid down the side of one of the cars like candle wax. Inside, the driver was burned pulp, and the two other bodies in the front car were skeletal and black, like something from a haunted house.
“Look at that,” Dunning said, pointing his light at a half-burned sneaker in a corner.
“Wow, the shock wave must have knocked them out of their shoes,” I said.
“Worse, look at the sole of it. It’s almost completely ripped off. That’s how powerful this bomb was. It separated the sole off a sneaker! Think of the incredible violence that would take.”
I shook my head as I thought about it, breathing in the sweet gasoline smell of burning that the respirator couldn’t filter out.
What was this, and where was it going?
Chapter 12
Three hours later, our command post shifted four blocks northeast, to the NYPD’s new Thirty-Third Precinct building at 170th Street near Edgecombe Avenue.
When I wasn’t answering my constantly humming phone, I was busy upstairs in a huge spare muster room helping a couple dozen precinct uniforms set up a central staging area for what was obviously going to be a massive investigation.
Everywhere I looked throughout the cavernous space were stressed-out, soot-covered MTA engineers, FDNY arson investigators, and FBI, NYPD, and ATF bomb techs chattering into phones as they tried to get a grip on the scope of the disaster.
The biggest development by far was the discovery of shrapnel in two separate sections of the tunnel. Preliminary field reports seemed to indicate that the metal shards were from some sort of pressure-cooker bomb placed at the two main blast sites. We hadn’t released anything to the press as of yet, but it was looking like this was in fact a bombing, a massive and deliberate deadly attack.
At 6:05 a.m., the mayor suspended the city’s subway service systemwide. It was a huge, huge deal. Eight million people now had to find a new way to get to and from work and school. A mega meeting at the precinct command post had been called for nine thirty. The mayor and police commissioner were on their way, as were head honchos from federal law enforcement agencies and the MTA bosses who ran the subway.
I’d managed to get hold of my first coffee of the morning and had just declined a third call from some annoyingly persistent New York Times reporter when I looked up and saw the chief of detectives, Neil Fabretti, come through the command post door. I almost didn’t recognize him in his stately white-collar uniform. At his heels was a tall, clean-cut white guy in a nice suit whom I didn’t recognize.
“Detective, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you being all over this,” Fabretti said, giving my hand a quick pump. “I already spoke to Miriam. NYPD has the ball on this, and I want you to head up the investigation. The rest of Major Crimes is now at your disposal as well as any and all local precinct investigators, as you see fit. How does that sound? You up for it?”
“Of course,” I said, nodding.