88
HEAVY, HOT SMOKE
fed
by gasoline and asphalt seemed to grow stronger by the minute. Shards of broken
taillight dug into Officer Joseph Ciccone’s fingers as he struggled to heave himself
up the side of his patrol car, wishing upon wish that he had spent more time in
the gym. Defying the force of gravity several hundred feet over the water, he
tried reminding himself that rock climbers actually live for this sort of thing...
Suddenly his shoes slipped out from the police car’s broken
rear window. With his toes scuffing frantically in search of a foothold, the
synaptic alarm that his knee was scraping something sharp was blotted by the
fear of falling backwards through the air. His right foot finally found the
edge of the wheel well. He wasted no time before hoisting himself up and over
onto the vehicle’s rear bumper.
Out of breath, silently cursing his Rolling Rock paunch,
Ciccone lay on his back, eyes closed, trying to regain his composure. The voice
of professional training advised him not to venture beyond his car, to await
the professionals just as he had often preached, advice he now realized was
easier to prescribe than to follow. Especially now as the thinking part of his
brain concluded that help would have trouble finding its way. Any remaining
bridge surface on the other side of the tower was probably buckled, fissured,
and clogged with vehicle pile-ups. Suspended as his own car was some ten feet
from the mammoth tower, and fire blazing nearby, Ciccone knew that a helicopter
was going to have difficulty dangling a tether to him or any of the other
survivors.
Ciccone opened his eyes to the gray, cloudy sky. Twenty
feet over his head, a slanted section of upper deck roadway was supported on
one end by the remaining pair of catenary cables, and on the other end by only
a mangled maintenance catwalk—the section of asphalt roadway was sloped
directly toward him like a giant ramp. The bad thing about it was that wedged
between the roadway and the tower, several crushed and broken automobiles
threatened to avalanche at any moment and crush him on their way to the Hudson.
The pit of his stomach turned as several motorists attempted to gingerly vacate
the wreckage. Meanwhile, another metallic shriek emanated from under his car.
“Hey!” A voice muffled within the wreckage overpowered the
din of sirens and a helicopter hovering nearby. Ciccone realized the shouts
were directed at him.
“Hey! Somebody’s gotta tell ’em we’re alive out here!”
Ciccone gave a small wave of his hand. He pointed at the
helicopter circling overhead. “They know we’re alive. Are you hurt?” he asked
the disconnected voice.
“I can’t move my legs!”
Ciccone slowly sat upright, his heart still pounding in his
chest, and was again reminded how he
hated
heights. He shouted, “Try not
to move any more than you have to.” Very cautiously, he poked his head beyond
the bumper enough to look down at the police car’s undercarriage. The source of
his luck was even more precarious than he had feared. The rear axle had come to
rest on the broken end of a girder, an I-beam extending out with the other end
embedded in the masonry base of the tower—he could feel through the bumper the
faint, telltale grinding of metal-on-metal as the car oscillated back and
forth.
There were several twisted beams anchored in the base of
the tower, jutting out like broken teeth from the gums of a prizefighter who
had met his match. The obvious thing to do was climb down from atop the bumper
to the girder lodged under the car’s axle. He could then make his way along any
one of the beams to the relative stability of the tower.
A high shriek and scraping sound shot him with adrenaline. In
an instant he became weightless when his car slid off the girder and out from under
him. Ciccone lunged—
—his arms snared the end of the girder, his feet kicking
air as the car slid soundlessly away. “Mother-
FUCK
!” he shouted. Seconds
later he heard the watery
KA-CHUMP
as his car crashed into the river.
Several hundred feet above, the sequence was captured by a
WABC-TV cameraman aboard the hovering Sikorsky, refueled and returned to
continue covering the event now four hours old.
Ten minutes later, Ciccone sat straddling the girder,
gripping an insulated wire cable in hands that refused to stop shaking. His
eyes were watering badly from the smoke. He had done nothing to escape the
danger of the avalanche of cars poised to drag him and everything else in its
path to the river.
Down beyond the woman’s battered Hyundai, gentle eddies swirled
through the water from the masonry base of the tower.
“Lady, can you hear me?” Ciccone shouted at the dangling
car.
Sobbing inside the Hyundai that tapered off and stopped
suggested she might be ready to communicate.
“Listen to me. I’m going to try to climb down to help you
from your vehicle.”
The woman whimpered. “No...”
“If we stay here, we might be in danger.” It would be
counterproductive to describe the impending avalanche, likewise whatever
invisible thread of luck kept her car’s rear wheel attached to some sort of
tensioning cable. The braided wire was as big around as his forearm. He
considered trying to reach it and shinny down. He was afraid he might
accidentally shake her car loose.
Jutting beside the girder Ciccone sat straddling was
another mangled I-beam. He took the telephone cable in his hands and made
several loops around it. He paid out more than enough cable to reach the
dangling Hyundai, and then tied it off. Rising slowly to his feet atop the girder,
he placed his foot beside the wire knot and tugged as hard as he could. Satisfied
that it was secure, he had an additional idea. He pulled the wire back up and
tied the free end tightly around his leather belt. A free fall of any
significant height would probably snap his spine, but he figured it was
probably better than nothing.
Oh, how I just love heights...
He let the loop of wire out to hang free and sat, feet
dangling, on the edge of the girder. Gripping the wire between his hands, he
took a deep breath and slowly lowered himself over the side, paying out wire to
control his descent. After descending a few feet, he wrapped the wire around
his ankle as he had been taught in Army Basic Training.
A swirl of fresh air swept away some of the smoke. Fighting
a sense of vertigo, he looked up at the face of a man peering down from beside
the cameraman aboard the hovering chopper. The whole event was being recorded.
Ciccone slowly worked himself down to the car; fortunately,
all of its windows were missing. The woman trapped inside appeared to be in her
mid-twenties, pretty, eyeing him fearfully while sitting facing him from the
dashboard of her car.
He heard the helicopter edging closer overhead, the
increased downdraft steadily bathing them in fresh air. It was a double edged
sword. Ever so slightly, the wire he was clinging to started to twist. Glancing
down he discovered that the car also was beginning to twist and sway in the
helicopter’s breeze.
Ciccone freed his hand and threw a menacing wave at the
chopper. “Get out of here,
you stupid son-of-a-bitch!
” How can they not
see what’s happening?
For whatever reason, the pilot perhaps distracted by drama
unfolding elsewhere on the crippled bridge, the chopper held its position.
Ciccone looked in at the young woman and tried to smile. First
things first. “Are you hurt?”
The woman shook her head. “I lost my shoe and cut my foot. Please
don’t try to move me. I saw what almost happened to you.”
“Thing is, I don’t know how long your car...look, Miss, we’re
wasting valuable seconds.”
The woman closed her eyes, sobbing.
“I’m a little scared myself. To be honest, I’d like to get
back up there, so why not go with me?” He tried to think of another way. Seeing
how badly shaken she was, he could hardly ask the woman to climb up by herself,
could he? He swallowed hard, but his mouth was dry. “Whadda ya say?”
The car twisted fractionally in the crosscurrents of air
when, for no other apparent reason, a headlight fell out of the car’s grille
and drifted downward. Ciccone watched until it hit the water with the expected
splash. “Now would be good!”
His sudden resolve seemed to break the young woman’s fear. She
maneuvered herself into the passenger window. Gripping the passenger door
handle to steady himself, Ciccone offered his back for the woman to climb onto.
She stooped to clear her head of the window frame and put first one leg then
the other over the edge—the Hyundai was twisting disturbingly now.
“That’s it, don’t look down, just wrap your arms around my
neck.” With her legs dangling outside over the rear view mirror, Ciccone
released the door handle and gently grabbed her forearm to guide it toward his
shoulder. “Lady, you’re going to have to help—”
In the time it took for his mind to register her hand on
his shoulder, the Hyundai lunged downward with a loud
SNAP!
The girl
screamed—her full weight tore her forearm free of his grip and she launched
herself onto his back. But Ciccone had only one hand gripping the cable...
The sudden imbalance spun them around on the cable, its
friction grip slipping past his ankle. The woman lost her own grip and slid
down his back—she latched her hands onto his belt and screamed. Ciccone
summoned all of his strength to grip the slender cable. His only real hope was
to arrest their slide with his feet.
“Hold...on...
tight!
” By the force of her knuckles
against the small of his back, he knew their fate was tied. The knot around his
belt took in the slack and they slid to a halt.
“Stop kicking your feet!”
“I don’t want to die!”
THE VICE CHAIRMAN OF
MILITARY AFFAIRS
calmly observed the carnage from the comfort of his study.
By 2:37 in the morning, Rong Peng had seen enough of the live CNN coverage. Any
more would be to partake in the quintessentially American proclivity for
overindulgence. Really, what more could they think of to say? He pressed a
button on his remote and the wide-screen television became blank. A low hum
accompanied its disappearance into Indonesian mahogany cabinetry.
While maybe not as easy as shooting fish in a barrel,
without any bullets, they were every bit as dead. Satisfied, the aspiring
Chinese emperor rose from his chair and walked to his bedroom.
89
Late Tuesday, July 7
THE FBI HAD IMMEDIATELY
begun
receiving reports through borough police and 9-1-1 operations that an explosion
with a bright flash had wrought the bridge’s collapse. There followed the
predictable deluge of calls claiming responsibility; the crank, ridiculous, and
disjointed were readily dismissed. Certain telephone calls were taken seriously
and ignited much freewheeling speculation, such as the many that alleged the
complicity of two men, of apparent Middle Eastern extraction, who were observed
loitering suspiciously outside their vehicle on the bridge the previous
evening. Consistent with the evolving view that a major terrorist attack had in
fact occurred, the pressing questions were whether or not the city was under
siege and, if so, when would the next hammer fall?
The FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group had sprung
into motion even prior to receiving a preliminary assessment from their division
in Lower Manhattan. From his office inside the J. Edgar Hoover building, and
with concurrence of the Director who then informed the President’s national
security advisor, the Assistant Director of Counter-terrorism dispatched his
deputy to accompany the CIRG team and a mobile forensics laboratory from
Quantico, Virginia. Three-hours and ten minutes after initial reports of the
disaster, a Gulfstream jet equipped for such missions completed its thirty-five
minute flight from Andrews Air Force Base and touched down at Newark
International. Once there, four agents transferred the bulky equipment from the
plane into vans for the traffic-snarled drive up I-95. A waiting NYPD
helicopter whisked away the others.
ONE-QUARTER OF A MILE
from the New Jersey riverbank and high over the Hudson, Deputy Assistant
Director Lance Lee of the FBI’s Counter-terrorism Division stood amid the wet
and smoldering remains of an asphalt and gasoline fire. The destruction around
him was worse than he had originally envisioned. A stone’s throw away, the
entire center span of the famous bridge hung down at a seventy degree angle,
its once busy roadbed twisted and buckled, supported only by the intact cable
pair on the down-river side of the bridge.
Both spans that adjoined the bridge’s collapsed center,
riverbank on one side and their respective support tower on the other, were
nearly impassable. Where Lee stood on the New Jersey span, the asphalt between
acres of collided vehicles looked to be either buckled or altogether missing.
World’s
deepest potholes
, Lee privately mused. Some two-hundred-fifty firemen and
emergency response personnel were occupied with the gruesome task of searching
for survivors among the hundreds of cars, many of them burned-out hulks,
haphazardly strewn about by what clearly had been violent undulations of the
collapsing bridge. Not unlike the old ‘9/11’ Twin Towers attack, the
devastation was reminiscent of a war zone, as if the New York City landmark had
been the target of an aerial bombing raid.
Lee heard two men shouting above the din of pneumatic
jackhammers and portable generators as a departing ambulance bounced slowly in
and out of potholes through a narrow gap in the wreckage. A hundred feet
beyond, the gargantuan Jersey-side support tower straddled the road where a
dozen blaze-orange barriers prevented emergency crews from wandering off the
edge of the precipice. Twenty feet below was a collapsed section of upper deck
roadbed, where a hard-hat crew worked feverishly to secure a mesh wire net
beneath a vehicle pile-up that looked ready to cascade into the Hudson.