Michael Walsh - Early Warning

And then he felt a tap on his back, more of a bump, and he began to fear that his prayers were not sincere enough, that he had been discovered by the enemy. He slipped his hand inside his jacket and felt the grip of the gun as he turned to see what was the matter.

The taxi let Hope and her children off at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. To the east, a series of multiplexes beckoned. They weren’t the kind of theaters she was used to back home-for one thing, there was noplace to park-but she’d heard that once you were inside, it was like being at an especially nice shopping mall. Behind them, the ugly monstrosity that was the Port Authority bus station loomed.

“What’s that?” cried Rory, pointing across Eighth Avenue at something called the Adult Entertainment Center. “Never mind,” said Hope, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him east along 42nd Street. He would learn about porn soon enough, if he hadn’t already. Up ahead, the theater marquees beckoned…

The man blocking the Friedhof family had still not budged. Instead, he was staring at his cell phone, as if waiting for a call. He was also cocking his head to one side, as if listening for something, but the only thing he could possibly hear, besides the traffic, was the rumble of the IRT subway under the ventilation grate beneath his feet. In any case, he wasn’t moving.

His patience exhausted, Uwe pressed forward again, deliberately bumping into the man. Pedestrianism was a full-body contact sport in much of Europe, especially in Germany, so what Uwe was doing was, by his lights, a perfectly reasonable way to show one’s displeasure and to remind the fellow to get a move on. Unfortunately for Uwe, the man did not see it that way. Ali Ibrahim al-Aziz turned back to him, but instead of speaking he pulled a revolver from beneath his Windbreaker and shot Uwe Friedhof right in the face.

At that moment, Byrne was on the blower to all available patrolmen in that part of Times Square, and was calling in reinforcements from elsewhere in the city. If his hunch was right, there was no time to lose.

“I want a cordon around Times Square. Nobody in and nobody out. Shut down all the West Side subway lines, including the IND, the BMT, and the IRT. No need to be subtle about it: I want the full surge. But this is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

Lannie and Sid caught up with him. “What is it?” asked Sid.

“It’s a go, isn’t it?” said Lannie. If this was for real, it would be his first taste of action.

Byrne turned to his two protégés. “Not for you-I need the two of you right here. Lannie, check all the communications monitors and see who’s been calling into Times Square on cell. Sid, go back over the SIGINT files for the past 48 hours and see if you can get the slightest lead on whatever the hell it is that’s going down.”

A voice from the back of the room-“There’s a report of shots fired, somewhere in the pedestrian zone. That’s all we’ve got right now.”

Mentally, Byrne gauged how long it would take him to get from Chelsea to Times Square. With the surge already under way, there was no point in taking a car-if he hustled he could get there on foot in ten minutes. He wasn’t as fit as he used to be but, damn it, he could still run down a perp if he had to.

“I’m going in,” he shouted, heading for the door.

Uwe Friedhof never had time to realize what had happened as he toppled and fell. Helga started to scream and then she, too, dropped with a bullet in the chest. Hubertus, who had dreamed of studying the law in Munich, had just enough time to register a dark beard and a pair of piercing brown eyes when the next shot hit him in the gut. He collapsed into the street, where he was hit by a speeding taxi anticipating the change of the light. His body flew into the air as the cab stopped, then landed on the windshield and rolled off and onto the ground.

The cabbie, a recent immigrant from Bangladesh, jumped from his taxi, recoiling in horror as he realized what had happened. Three young women dropped their ice cream cones as the enormity of what they were witnessing overtook them. Others screamed, cried, fled. The gunman, however, never moved, but instead seemed to be talking to himself, muttering really, as the roar of the Seventh Avenue express train approached. As the brakeman slowed the train, the roar changed to a screech, and Ali held his cell phone aloft in the air for all to see, and bear witness.

At that moment, Marie Duplessis decided that her Metro-Card needed a refill, and that as long as she was here, she might as well go back down the stairs and put some more money on it. She hated running for a train only to realize she was short of funds, so while she had money in her pocket and plenty of time to get to her next job she could take care of it now and not have to worry about it later. She turned and headed back down the stairs. She stuck her card into one of the addfare machines, punched in how much she wanted, and inserted a $20 bill.

Hope and her children were moving east on 42nd Street, savoring the marquees of the theaters on both sides of the broad crosstown street, trying to decide what to see. This was not like even the big cineplexes back home. This was a veritable feast of cinematic choices. There were a couple of vulgar sex comedies, which she was under no circumstances going to allow them to see, along with the usual assortment of full-length cartoons, vampire movies, gruesome slasher flicks, and movies about giant robots that could turn into cars and other heavy machinery. She had not been to the movies on a regular basis for years, and from the choices available, she could see she wasn’t missing much. Why couldn’t they make movies like Tender Mercies anymore? Well, she supposed those days were long gone; not enough sex, and nothing to blow up. It was going to have to be the talking cars.

They went inside the AMC Theaters complex on the south side of the street and bought their tickets. Even though she was expecting the worst, Hope was still amazed at how expensive they were, twice as much as back home. How in the world could people afford to live here was beyond her.

They took a series of endless up escalators, higher and higher, until she was sure they were heading for the top of the Empire State Building, which she knew was around here somewhere. At last, they got to the top floor, where a giant candy counter practically begged them to spend some more of their money, but Hope steered Rory clear of temptation and pointed him and Emma toward the theater. She was about to wonder what had happened to grownup culture when suddenly the whole building shook and everything went dark.

A car bomb is no ordinary bomb, nor even an enhanced Improvised Explosive Device (IED). In fact, it is three bombs in one. The first bomb is the one packed tightly in the trunk or under the vehicle-Semtex, or C-4 plastic explosive. Detonating with the force of 150 pounds of TNT, it will destroy everything within a 100-foot radius, shattering glass, penetrating and exploding brickwork and masonry, tearing and rending flesh. Its fireball will incinerate everything it touches, and as the blast radius extends outward, it will singe all living creatures within a tenth of a mile. But that is just the beginning.

The second, and worse, effect is the air-blast shock wave, which causes devastating failure in exterior walls and interior columns and girders, resulting in floor failure. The third effect is shrapnel. For, packed tightly into the plastic explosive, is an array of common objects-nails, screws, ball bearings, washers-that turn suddenly lethal when propelled at several hundred miles an hour. They rip through flesh and bones effortlessly, hurtling outward like some ontological recapitulation of the phylogenic Big Bang. And, in a confined space such as a movie theater or a New York city street, the amount of damage they can do to human beings is almost incalculable.