AT 3:23 A.M., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR Drive into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.
After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a bottle of orange Gatorade from the cooler they’d brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating profusely; he had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.
“Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?” said Tony, coming up for air.
“No. All you, Tony. Truly, you broke your butt down in the hole. I’m proud of you,” Mr. Joyce said.
It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few suggestions about his hygiene, but no one could say he wasn’t a worker. He’d been going at it hard for the previous three hours, shuttling between the two manholes, really hustling. He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task without a word of complaint.
They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.
“How’s the link?” Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.
“Crystal clear,” Mr. Beckett, in the other truck, replied.
They had hacked into the MTA’s internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every 1 line station from Harlem to Inwood.
“Okay, I see it,” Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. “It’s pulling out of One Fifty-Seventh in the northbound tunnel. There. It’s all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce.”
Mr. Joyce took a cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a simple phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone’s only preprogrammed number.
Theory becomes reality, he thought. He thumbed the Call button, and the two pressure cookers preplanted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.
CHAPTER 10
THE INITIAL EXPLOSION of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the previous three hours.
The tunnel was dome-shaped, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within milliseconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms that late at night, but in both stations, the wave ripped apart vendor shacks on the platforms, MTA tool carts, and wooden benches.
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 1 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.”
CHAPTER 11
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 1, the FDNY’s version of the Navy SEALs. Holy shit, was this looking bad.