Born to Run (22 page)

The baby squealed as if he sensed the danger, and the two women’s eyes paused only to blink at each other before they snaked along the two thin wires, one yellow, one green, that led from
the blasting cap to the anodised aluminium cube on which a small screen was flashing a three-digit red number. It flashed again.

320…

Three-hundred-and-twenty what?

319…

Seconds.

AT Melrose Station in the Bronx, the train doors hissed shut against the few who’d run onto the platform a second too late to board. Phlegmatic, they shrugged and
unravelled their newspapers as the train pulled out without them. There’d be another along soon.

Those who’d just made it and slid into their seats were hit by the acrid stench of body-heat that filled the car as well as the confronting racket that pumped out of the large black
boom-box in the seat between two scruffy teenagers.

A
RMONDO CRUZ IN Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security had just placed his phone bets on the next day’s card at Parx Racetrack when
the call to the tip-off line came in at 5:15 PM. Cruz, a former cop had only transferred to POHS from Philadelphia’s northeastern 22nd District a week earlier so his first anonymous call,
especially one so urgent, freaked him, though the caller with the middle-eastern accent didn’t seem to notice.

Taking deep breaths, he meticulously followed procedures. Using the encrypted security codes he’d been given, Cruz’s computer, as well as instantly alerting everyone up the chain of
command and triggering certain pre-set actions, tagged directly into the hangar hidden in the city’s outskirts—even he didn’t know where—and set off an immediate dispatch of
Captain Merrill Jefferson and his crack team of counterterrorist specialists to the suspect address.

“Imminent threat. Alleged Muslim terrorists ready to launch,” Cruz passed on. “Anonymous tip-off. Caller with middle-eastern accent. Immediate response required.” Cruz
was taking no chances.

Captain Jefferson’s unit was primed and ready, as always. They clipped on their arsenal as they ran through the armoury toward their Huey, one of two unmarked UH-1 Iroquois choppers at
their disposal. Their pilot, Terry Jarmin, was already firing up the rotors. Only minutes later, at 17:20, Jarmin dropped ten of Jefferson’s men half a block north of the suspect address and
they ran down the street spreading toward it. It was an especially chilly evening for October at only 5ºC. A few rugged-up residents huddled on the street but when Jefferson’s
black-garbed men appeared, they all seemed to be summoned inside for various family crises—all except a waifish drunk in filthy coveralls who was slumped in the gutter between two vehicles, a
burnt-out Ford Escort and an ’83 Mustang. His—or was it her?—black dreads snaked out from under a grey baseball cap and his hands, with sky blue fingernails no one noticed because
of the gloves, gripped a half-empty gin bottle, whose contents were merely water.

When the chopper pilot saw the men below were in position—two clustered at the steps of each row house either side of the suspect property, two crouched behind a ’78 Chevy opposite,
and four in the street at the rear—he hovered the Huey high and dropped the cables. Three men, including Captain Jefferson, slithered down to scale over the roof and launch themselves in
through the upstairs windows. Over the city emergency radio networks, black and whites were ordered to seal off all streets leading to the area and to prepare to evacuate homes. Fire crews and
paramedics were dispatched to wait silently one block back.

The pilot watched Jefferson and his men slide down the cables, smooth and fast until a sudden stop just short of the roof to avoid any tell-tale boot crunch. But the second their steel-capped
toes touched, the front ground-floor windows blew outwards, the hollow-point bullets cutting clean through the Chevy and lodging into the walls of the houses opposite, missing the two men hiding
behind the car by a hair’s breadth. Someone had seen them.

The drunk, startled awake from his alcoholic daze in the gutter, lurched off in fright.

Two of Jefferson’s men covering the sides of the house had already dropped to the ground with weapons positioned to retaliate, another two kicked in the doors of the houses next door and
charged through to the back, scaring the hell out of the families already cowering in the corner after the blasts a few seconds earlier. The two men opposite watched. Those already in the rear
jumped the back fence and stayed ready. Captain Jefferson, on the roof and still clipped to one of the Huey’s cables, swung out and down, tossing a grenade in through a window.
“Jarmin… all up,” he commanded through his helmet microphone and, instantly, he and the other men on the roof were hoisted up about thirty feet until the blast cleared. The three
then lowered themselves back to the roof, slipped down the slope to the guttering, flew over the sides and swung themselves inside the windows, guns ablaze.

318…

Don’t panic, Maxine told herself. She and the woman clasping her baby stared at each other, too afraid to speak.

317…

Stay calm.

Even under this tension, Maxine could still calculate that 317 seconds was just over five minutes. Shaking, she was a good ten feet from the foot of the platform’s exit stairway. Back
further, she could see maybe a hundred commuters, and more were piling in. All these people…

316…

“BOMB!” she shouted, her lungs on fire.

For one, maybe five, of the next 315 seconds, those close by on the platform craned their necks to see what was going on, few trusting their ears. “It’s a bomb,” she screeched,
“It’s on a timer… Five minutes… Run!”

The woman with the baby was stuck solid in shock. Her adrenaline didn’t seem to kick in. The baby laughed and gurgled, but this time no one thought it was cute. Maxine grabbed the
mother’s free arm, dragging her and the baby toward the stairs. Others were already running and pushing ahead of them, behind them, beside them. Maxine could feel the wave of raw panic
surging up the platform. As they passed an alarm box she slammed her palm against the flat red button. The mob swelling behind her was shoving her forward, and wouldn’t stop pushing to give
her time to answer when the station attendant squawked “What’s the problem?” through the speaker.

Maxine turned her head back but was propelled by the heaving crowd. She managed to cry out “Bomb” before her ankle twisted and she went over.

And under.

TWO minutes from Grand Central, the Metro-North train was already slowing.

At Grand Central, a courier stood waiting at the head of Track 110, unaware of the red timer ticking down inside the white box he’d lugged here. If he could’ve seen it, he’d
know he had 280 seconds to get the hell out. It was the same for the courier at Track 45… and the one at Track 120. Grand Central was a big place.

279…

278…

S
IX MORE SHOTS blasted out of the row house’s ground floor windows, spraying what little glass was left after the first blast across the
sidewalk. A quick radio count confirmed that none of Jefferson’s men was hit. He ordered Adder, across the street, to wait five seconds and fire a flash-bang CS gas grenade in through one of
the windows. Inside, and upstairs, Jefferson signalled to Smith and Fredericks to brace for the noise, slip on their gas masks and sweep the upper floor.

They found no one.

Jefferson heard the grenade whistle over the street. Even upstairs and muffled through his ear protectors, the force of the explosion stung. Downstairs the flash was solar bright, deafening,
designed to stun its targets for forty indispensable seconds.

Jefferson two-stepped down the stairs first, the other two men covering him from above. Unusually, there was no coughing or moaning in response to the gas. Nothing.

A trap?

Jefferson took a turkey peek, hooking his head around the doorpost into the living room, and his left arm motioned for the other two to come down. His mask still in place, he took a long sweep
before he withdrew his head back from the room. After one second, he swung back briefly as though to confirm something. “Five perps,” he whispered into his helmet microphone when he was
back in the corridor, his back hard against the wall. “Two immobilised, seated centre of room. Backs to me, facing toward front windows and computer laptop on coffee table. Two pistols on
table… one’s a Glock, the other’s a Siggy P226.” The Sig-Sauer was one of Jefferson’s favourite hand-guns; he loved its Colt/Brown short recoil.

“Computer monitor shows a timer… numbers going down second-by-second. Last one I saw was 185. 185 seconds. Three other men… huddled below front windows… armaments at
feet…. zero movement. Believe weapons to be MP5 and M16 fitted with M203s.” Jefferson was impressed—these men carried some serious protection: the classic M16 was fitted with a
40mm grenade launcher mounted under the barrel, and a Heckler & Koch MP5 carbine that handled beautifully as a machine gun. Jefferson preferred it for its laser-sighted single shots. Giving
cross-hair accuracy up to 600 feet, it fired the same 9mm Parabellum rounds as the Siggy, just a lot more of them and a hell of a lot faster, at 800 rpm.

“Jefferson, there’s a bomb on a timer at 42nd Street subway on Manhattan. The caller suggested this might be connected. The two men at the computer? Are they functioning?”

Jefferson edged his mask back in again. The gas had pretty much cleared and the screen was already counting down to 178… no, 177.

Not even three minutes to go. They must be detonating the subway bomb from here. His bones told him it couldn’t be a coincidence.

Jefferson stepped sideways and filled the doorway. “Hands away from the computer,” he ordered. “Back off…! I said back off… now!”

Neither man moved a muscle.

“Back off or we shoot to kill.”

One of the men shunted his arm toward the Siggy on the table. Jefferson fired, hitting him square in the back of the head and propelling him to the floor. The other man moved—maybe the
first guy had nudged him as he fell, but no one was taking chances here and Fredericks, who’d followed Jefferson inside, fired a single shot into his back, smack into the curve of the
“2” on his Michael Jordan basketball jersey, Chicago Bulls number 23.

One of the three men slumped under the window rolled his head, and his arm agitated toward the M16. Fredericks fired a three-burst shock round and took all three men out, though Jefferson wished
he hadn’t—they’d have no one to interrogate.

Surveying the dingy room for anyone else was quick work—there was scant furniture to hide behind. Fredericks headed back to search the rest of the ground floor. Smith did a dead-check on
Fredericks’ kills by the windows while Jefferson attended to the two computer jockies.

“Checking three perps below window… All in paradise fucking virgins,” Smith reported into his microphone. He patted them all down. “No body weapons.”

Jefferson removed a glove to pulse-check the necks of the other two. “Two at computer… same. Okay, men… all inside the house… NOW!” he ordered. “Full
search. Fast.”