Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [5]
Today, like every other workday, Calvin Mohammud wore a thigh-length, pale gray clerk’s tunic with a frayed armband that said VETS MESSENGERS. On either side of the capitalized words were fierce Eighty-second Airborne fighting eagles.
But none of that was noticed either.
Calvin Mohammud didn’t look like it now, but in Vietnam and Cambodia, he’d been a Kit Carson Army scout. He’d won a Distinguished Service Cross, then the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life. After returning to the U.S. in 1971, Mohammud had been rewarded by a grateful society with jobs as a porter at Pernn Station, a delivery boy for Chick-Teri, a baggage carrier at LaGuardia Airport.
Calvin Mohammud, Vets 11, unslung his heavy messenger’s shoulder bag as he reached the graffiti-covered newsstand at the corner of Broadway and Wall.
He tapped out a Kool and lit up behind a plume of yellow flame.
Slouched in a nearby doorway, Vets 11 then casually reached into his shoulder bag and slid out a standard U.S. Army field telephone. Still concealed in the deep cloth bag was a sixteen-inch machine gun pistol, along with half a dozen 40-millimeter antipersonnel grenades.
“Contact.” He moved back into the cold building shadows, then whispered into the field telephone. “This is Vets Eleven at the Stock Exchange. I’m at the northeast entrance, off Wall…. Everything’s very nice and peaceful at position three…. No police in sight. No armed resistance anywhere. Almost looks too easy. Over.”
Vets 11 took another short drag on his dwindling cigarette. He calmly peered around at the noisy hustle and bustle that was so characteristic of Wall Street on a weekday.
Broad daylight.
What an amazing, completely unbelievable scene, just to imagine the apocalyptic firelight that would be coming down here at five o’clock.
At 0830, Calvin Mohammud carefully wound a tattered strip of cloth around a polished brass door handle at the back entrance of the all-powerful New York Stock Exchange—a proud, beautiful green band.
Chapter 4
GREEN BAND STARTED savagely and suddenly, as if meteors had hurtled themselves with malevolent intensity against New York City.
It blew out two-story-tall windows, and shattered asphalt roofs, and shook whole streets in the vicinity of Pier 33–34 on Twelfth Avenue between 12th and 15th streets. It all came in an enormous white flash of painful blinding light.
At approximately 9:20 that morning, Pier 33–34— which had once hosted such regal ships as the Queen Elizabeth and the QE II—was a sudden fiery cauldron, a crucible of flame that raked the air and spread with such rapid intensity that even the Hudson River seemed to be spurting colossal columns of flames, some at least four hundred feet high.
Dense hydrocarbon clouds of smoke bloomed over Twelfth Avenue like huge black umbrellas being thrown open. Six-foot-long shards of glass, unguided missiles of molten steel, were flying upward, launching themselves in eerie, tumbling slow motion. And as the river winds suddenly shifted there were otherworldly glimpses of the glowing, red hot metal skeleton that was the pier itself.
The blistering fireball had erupted and spread in less than sixty seconds’ time.
It was precisely as the Green Band warning had said it would be: an unspeakable sound and light show, a ghostly demonstration of promised horrors and terrors to come …
The dock for trie Mauretania, for the Aquitania, the Ile de Trance, had been effectively vaporized by the powerful explosions, by the sudden, graphic flash fires.
This time, one of the thousands of routinely horrifying threats to New York was absolutely real. Radio listeners and TV viewers all over New York would soon hear the unprecedented message:
“This is not a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.”
At 10:35 on the morning of December 4, more than seven thousand dedicated capitalists—DOT system clerks, youthful pages with their jaunty epaulets and floppy Connecticut Yankee