Michael Ledwidge: Alert

As the wave hit the south end of the 181st Street station, a three-ton section of the vaulted tunnel’s roof tore free and crashed to the tracks — as it would in a mine cave-in — while up on Broadway, the fantastic force of the blast set off countless car alarms as it threw half a dozen manhole covers into the air.

South of the main blasts, in the tunnel between the 157th Street station and 168th Street, the shock wave smashed head-on into the approaching Bronx-bound train that Mr. Beckett had spotted. The front windshield shattered a millisecond before the train tore from its moorings, killing the female train operator instantly.

As the train derailed, its only two passengers, a pair of Manhattan College students coming back from a concert, were knocked spinning out of their seats onto the floor of the front car. Bleeding, and still barely alive, they had a split second to look up from the floor of the train through the front window at a rapidly brightening orange glow. It was strangely beautiful, almost like a sunset.

Then the barreling twenty-foot-high fireball that was behind the shock wave slammed home, and the air was on fire.

Back at the abandoned lot near the Harlem River, Mr. Joyce had to wait seven minutes before he heard the first call come in on the radio scanner he had tuned to the fire department band. He clicked a pen as he lifted his clipboard.

“We did it, Tony,” he said, giving the driver a rare grin.

“Phase one complete.”

More blue and red emergency lights than I could count were swinging across the steel shutters and Spanish-language signs at 181st Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue when I pulled up behind a double-parked FDNY SUV that morning around 4:30 a.m.

I counted seven fire trucks and an equal number of police vehicles and ambulances. As I hung my shield around my neck, I saw another truck roar up. Rescue, the FDNY’s version of the Navy SEALs. Holy shit, was this looking bad.

I found the pitch-black subway entrance and went down stairs that reeked of smoke. All I could hear were yells and the metallic chirp of first-responder radio chatter as I swung my flashlight over the tiled subway walls.

The initial report I received from my boss, Miriam, was that some kind of explosion and a subway tunnel fire had occurred. One memory kept popping into my head as I hopped a turnstile and ran toward the sound of radios and yelling.

Don’t tell me this is 9/11 all over again!

I went past a station booth and almost knocked over white-haired, blue-eyed fire chief Tommy Cunniffe, thumbing something out of his eye.

“Chief, Mike Bennett, Major Crimes, NYPD. What the hell happened?”

“Massive tunnel explosion of some kind, Detective,” Cunniffe called out in a drill-sergeant baritone. “Two stations, One Hundred Sixty-Eighth Street and here at One Hundred Eighty-First Street, are completely destroyed. We have the fire almost under control here, but there’s colossal structural damage, a large cave-in at the south end of this station. It’s like a mine accident down there. We’re looking for bodies.”

“Is anybody dead?”

“We don’t know. I heard over the horn there was a train that got fried a little south of One Sixty-Eighth, but everything else is still unknown at this point. I got two engine companies down there working a water line that we had to feed seven stories down through the elevator shaft. It’s an unbelievable disaster.”

“Chief,” came a voice from his chest-strapped radio. “We got movement. A heartbeat on the monitor.”

“Coming from where?” Cunniffe yelled back.

“Up near you, in one of the other elevator shafts.”

“Downey, O’Keefe: get me a goddamn halogen!” Cunniffe screamed at two firemen behind him.

I ran over with the firemen and helped them pry open the door to one of several elevator shafts. When we got the doors open, three huge rugby-player-size firemen appeared out of nowhere and tossed a rope.

“Hey, Danny, what the hell are you doing? It’s my turn,” said one of them as the biggest clicked his harness onto the rope and lowered himself into the darkness.

“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 cheering 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?

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.