Black Friday

  “There’s been no further contact from Green Band, other than the firebombing of Pier 33–34, which is the demonstration they promised us, Mr. President. It’s the kind of guerrilla warfare we’ve seen in Belfast, Beirut, Tel Aviv. Never before in the United States …

  “We’re all waiting, Mr. President,” Trentkamp went on. “It’s five zero six and about forty seconds. We’re clearly past their stated deadline.”

  “Have any of the terrorist groups come forward and claimed responsibility?”

  “They have. We’re checking into them. So far none has shown any knowledge of the content of the warning phone call this morning.”

  5:06 became 5:07, The time was leaden.

  5:07 became 5:08. A minute had never seemed so long.

  It was 5:09 … 5:10 and slowly, slowly counting.

  The Director of the CIA moved before the lights and cameras in the White House emergency room. Philip Berger was a small, irascible man, highly unpopular in Washington, chiefly skilled at keeping the major American intelligence agencies competitive among themselves. “Is there any activity you can make out on Wall Street? Any people down there? Any moving vehicles? Small plane activity?”

  “Nothing, Phil. Apart from the police, the fire department vehicles on the periphery of the area, it could be a peaceful Sunday morning.”

  “They’re goddamn bluffing,” someone said in Washington.

  “Or,” President Kearney said, “they’re playing an enormous game of fucking nerves.”

  No one agreed, or disagreed, with the President.

  No one said anything now.

  Speech had been replaced by the terrifying anxiety and uncertainty of waiting.

  Just waiting.

  5:15 …

  5:18 …

  5:20 …

  5:24 …

  5:30 …

  Waiting for what, though?

  Chapter 6

  6:20 P.M., Colonel David Hudson was doing the single thing that still mattered—that mattered more than anything else in his life.

  David Hudson was on patrol. He was back in combat; he was leading a quality-at-every-position platoon into the field again—only the field was now an American city.

  Hudson was one of those men who looked vaguely familiar to people, only they couldn’t say precisely why. His blond hair was cut in a short crew, which was suddenly back in vogue again. He was handsome; his looks were very American.

  He had the kind of strong, almost noble face that photographs extremely well, and a seemingly unconscious air of self-confidence, a consistently reassuring look that emphatically said, “Yes, I can do that—whatever it is.”

  There was only one thing wrong, which a lot of people didn’t notice right away—David Hudson had lost his left arm in the Viet Nam War.

  His Checker cab marked VETS CABS AND MESSENGERS rolled cautiously forward, reconnoitering past the bright green pumps at the Hess gas station on Eleventh Avenue and 45th Street. This was one of those times when David Hudson could see himself, as if in an eerie dream, when he could objectively watch himself from somewhere outside the scene. He knew this uncomfortable, distorted feeling extremely well from combat duty.

  Now he felt it again, this time in the sharp wintry wind blowing through the snowy gray streets of New York City.

  Colonel David Hudson was purposely allowing the Green Band mission to wind out just a little longer; one important notch tighter.

  Every second had been rigidly accounted for. More than anything else, David Hudson’s mind appreciated the subtleties of precision; Hudson appreciated detail and the fine-tuning involved in getting everything absolutely right.

  He was back in combat again.

  This strange, strange passion was alive again inside David Hudson.

  He finally released the hand microphone from the PRC transmitter built into the Vets cab’s dash.

  “Contact. Come in Vets Five.” Colonel David Hudson spoke in the firm, charismatic tones which had characterized his commands through the latter war years in Southeast Asia. It was a voice that had always elicited loyalty and obedience in the men whose lives he controlled.

  ‘This is Vets One…. Come in Vets Five. Over.”

  A reply immediately crackled back through heavy static over the PRC transmitter-receiver. ‘This is Vets Five. Over.”

  “Vets Five. Green Band is affirmative. I repeat—Green Band is affirmative…. Blow it all up …”

  Chapter 7

  “YOUGOTAQUARTER, SIR? PLEASE! It’s real cold out here, sir. You got two bits? … Awhh, thank you. Thanks a lot, sir. You just about saved my life.”

  Around 7:30 that evening, on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, a familiar bag man called Crusader Rabbit was expertly soliciting loose change and cigarettes.

  The bag man begged while he sat huddled like trash against the crumbling red brick facade of the Atlantic House Yemen and Middle East Restaurant. The money came to him as if he were a magnet made of soiled rags.

  After a successful hit, forty-eight cents from a trendy-looking Brooklyn Heights teacher-type and his date, the street bum allowed himself a short pull on a dwindling half pint of Four Roses.

  Drinking while begging change was counterproductive, he knew, but sometimes necessary against the raw cold wintertime. Besides, it was his image …

  The deep, slack cough that followed the sip of whiskey sounded convincingly tubercular. The man’s lips were bloated. They were corpse white and cracked, and they looked as if they’d bled recently.

  For this year’s winter wardrobe, he’d selected a sleeveless navy parka over several layers of assorted, colored lumberman’s shirts. He’d picked out open-toed high top black sneakers, basketball player snow bird socks, and painter’s pants that were now thickly caked with mud, vomit and spit.

  The tourists, at least, seemed to love him.

  Sometimes, they snapped his picture to bring home as an example of New York City’s famed squalor and heart-lessness.

  He enjoyed posing: asking them for a buck or whatever the traffic would bear. He’d hold his two puffy shopping bags, and smile extra pathetically for the camera. Pay the cashier, sport

  Now, through gummy, half-closed eyes, Crusader Rabbit stealthily watched the usual early evening promenade along Atlantic Avenue’s Middle Eastern restaurant row.

  It was a constant, day-in day-out noisy bazaar here: transplanted Arabs, college assholes, Brooklyn professionals who came to eat ethnic.

  In the distance, there was always the clickety-clack of the El.

  A troupe of McDonalds counter kids was passing by Crusader Rabbit, walking home from work. Two chunky black girls; a skinny mulatto boy around eighteen, nineteen.

  “Hey, McDonalds. Whopper beat the Big Mac. Real tough break. Gotta quarter? Something for some Mccof-fee?” Crusader coughed and wheezed at the passing trio of teens.

  The McDonalds kids looked offended; then they all laughed together in a high-pitched chorus. “Who asked you, Aqualung? You old geek sheet-head. Kick your ass.”

  The kids continued merrily on. Rude little bastards when Ronald McDonald wasn’t watching over their act.

  If any of the various passersby had looked closer, they might have noticed certain visual inconsistencies about the bag man called Crusader Rabbit.

  For one thing, he had impressive muscle tone for a sedentary street bum. His shoulders were unusually broad.

  Even more unusual were his eyes, which were almost always intently focused. They scanned the avenue over and over again, watching all the street action.

  There was also the small matter of the quality of the dirt and dust thickly caked on his ankles, on his exposed toes. It was a little too perfect Almost as if it might be black Kiwi shoe polish—shoe polish carefully applied to look like dirt.

  The conclusion was obvious after a careful look at the street bum. Crusader Rabbit was some kind of undercover New York cop. He had to be some kind of cop on a stakeout …

  His real name was Arch Ca
rroll and he was on a stakeout a five-week one, with no end in sight.

  Meanwhile, across the busy Brooklyn street, inside the Sinbad Star Restaurant two Iraqi men in their early thirties were sampling what they believed to be the finest Middle Eastern cooking available in New York City. They were the objects of Carroll’s long and painful stakeout.

  The Iraqi men had chosen a rear alcove of the small, cozy restaurant, where they noisily slurped thick carob bean soup.

  They gobbled up mint-flecked tabbouli, and cream-colored humus. They eagerly munched greasy mixtures of raisins, pine nuts, lamb, Moroccan olives, their favorite things to eat in the world life was good.

  Chapter 8

  BACK OUT ON Atlantic Avenue, Arch Carroll shivered unhappily in the probing icy-cold fingers of the rising night wind.

  At times like these, Carroll sometimes wondered why it was that a reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old man, someone with decent enough prospects, someone with a law degree, could regularly be working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, invariably eating stone-cold pizza and Pepsi-Cola for dinner, was sitting outside a Middle Eastern restaurant on a Friday night stakeout?

  Why was that?

  Was it perhaps because his father and two uncles had been pavement-pounding city cops?

  Was it because his grandfather had been a rough and tumble example of New York’s finest?

  Or did it have to do with things he’d seen a decade and a half ago in Viet Nam?

  Maybe he just wasn’t a reasonable, intelligent man, as he’d somehow always presumed? Maybe, if you got right down to it, there was some kind of obvious short-circuit in the wires of the old brain, some form of synaptic fuck-up.

  As Arch Carroll pondered the tangible mistakes of his life, he noticed that his attention had begun to wander.

  For several minutes at a clip, he’d stare at his sadly wiggling toes, at the equally fascinating burning ember of his cigarette, at almost anything mildly distracting.

  Five-week-long stakeouts weren’t exactly recommended for their entertainment value. That was exactly how long he’d been watching Anton and Wadih Rashid.

  Now Carroll’s attention had suddenly snapped back …

  “What the …” he mumbled out loud as he stared down the congested street. Is that who it looks like? … Can’t be … I think it is … but it can’t be.

  Carroll had suddenly noticed a skinny, frazzle-haired man coming directly his way from the Frente Unido Bar and Data Indonesia. The man was scurrying up Atlantic Avenue, periodically looking back over his right shoulder.

  At a distance, he looked like a baggy coat walking on a stick.

  Carroll slowly pushed himself up out of his half-frozen lounging position against the restaurant wall.

  He squinted his eyes tight for a better look at the figure approaching from down the street.

  He couldn’t believe it!

  He stared down the street, his eyes smarting from the’ bite of the wind. He had to make sure.

  Jesus. He was sure.

  The fast-walking man had a huge puffy burr of bushy, very wiry black hair. The greasy hair was combed straight back; it hung like a limp sack over the collar of his black cloth jacket.

  Carroll knew the man by two names: one was Hussein, Moussa; the other was the Lebanese Butcher. A decade before, Moussa had been recruited by the Russians; he’d been trained at their famed Third World school in Tripoli.

  Since then Moussa had been busily free-lancing terror and sophisticated murder techniques all over the world: in Paris, Rome, Zaire, New York, in Lebanon for Colonel Qadaffi. Recently, he’d worked for Francois Monserrat, who had taken over not only Juan Carlos’s European terrorist cell, but South America, and now the United States as well.

  Hussein Moussa halted in front of the Sinbad Star restaurant. Like a very careful driver at a tricky intersection, he looked both ways.

  Twice more he looked up and down Atlantic Avenue. He even noticed the bag man camped out across the traffic-busy street.

  He finally disappeared behind the gaudy red door of the Sinbad Star.

  Arch Carroll sat up rigidly straight against the crumbling brick wall of the Syrian restaurant.

  He groped inside his jacket and produced a stubby third of a Camel cigarette. He lit up and inhaled the gruff, North Carolina dirt farm tobacco.

  What an unexpected little Christmas present. What a just reward for endless winter nights trailing the Rashids. The Lebanese Butcher on a silver platter.

  His bosses in State had said not to touch the Rashids without extremely strong physical evidence. But they’d issued no such orders for the Lebanese Butcher.

  What was Hussein Moussa doing in New York, anyway? Carroll’s mind was reeling. Why was Moussa here with the Rashids?

  The firebombing of Pier 33–34 went through his mind quickly. He had picked up strands of information from gossip he’d heard all day long on the street—somebody had taken it into his head to blow a dock and the surrounding West Side area, it seemed, and for a moment Carroll pondered a connection between Hussein Moussa and the events on the Hudson River.

  Arch Carroll had been ramrodding the Anti-Terrorist Division of the DIA for almost four years now. In that span of time only a few of the mass murderers he’d learned about had gotten to him emotionally and caused him to lose his usual policeman’s objectivity.

  Hussein Moussa was one of those few.

  The Lebanese Butcher liked to torture. The Butcher apparently liked to kill. The Butcher enjoyed maiming innocent civilians …

  So Carroll didn’t particularly want Moussa dead, as he studied the Sinbad Star Restaurant Carroll wanted the Butcher locked away for the rest of his natural life. Give the animal lots of time to think about what he’d done, if he did think.

  From underneath newspapers and rags inside one of his shopping bags, Carroll began to slide out a heavy black metal object. He checked the firing chamber of a Browning automatic. He quickly fed in an autoloader.

  A stooped, ancient Hasid was passing by on the sidewalk. He stared incredulously at the street bum loading up a Browning handgun. His watery gray eyes almost fell out of his sagging face. The old man kept slowly walking away, looking back constantly as he moved. Then he cantered a little faster. New York street bums with guns now! The city was beyond all prayers, all possible hope.

  Carroll finally began to weave forward through the thick, fuzzy night traffic. He only half heard the bleating car horns and angry curses directed at him.

  He was drifting in and out of reality now; there was a little nausea involved here, too.

  A middle-aged couple was leaving the Sinbad, the fat wife pulling her red overcoat tight around bursting hips.

  She stared at Crusader Rabbit and the look said, You don’t belong inside there, Mister. You know you don’t belong in there.

  Carroll pulled open the ornate red door the departing couple had let slam in his face.

  Hot garlicky air escaped as he started inside. A muffled snick of the Browning under his coat. A deep silent breath. Okay, hotshot.

  The tiny restaurant was infinitely more crowded than it had looked from the outside. Arch Carroll cursed and felt his stomach drop. Every dining table was filled to overflowing.

  Six or seven more people, a group of boisterously laughing friends, were waiting in the front to be seated. Carroll pushed past them.

  Carroll’s eyes slowly drifted along the back of the crowded dining room. Only his eyes moved. His head was absolutely still.

  Hussein Moussa had already seen him.

  Even in the packed, bustling restaurant, the terrorist had noticed his entrance. The Butcher had been instinctively watching every person who came in from Atlantic Avenue.

  So had the restaurant’s owner. An enormous, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man, he charged forward now, an enraged bull guarding his herd at mealtime.

  “Get out of here! You get out, bum! Go now!” the owner screamed.

  Carroll tried to look desperately lost,
dizzily confused, as surprised as everyone else that he was inside the small neighborhood restaurant.

  He stumbled over his own flopping black sneakers.

  He weaved sideways toward the left, before moving suddenly toward the right rear corner of the dining room.

  He hoped to God he looked cockeyed drunk and absolutely helpless. Maybe even a little funny right now. Everybody should start laughing.

  Carroll groped down his body with both hands, graphically scratching between his legs. A middle-aged woman turned away with obvious disgust.

  “Bayt-room?” Carroll convincingly slobbered, rolled his eyes back into his forehead. “Gotta go to the bayt-room!”

  A young bearded man and his girlfriend started laughing at a front table. Bathroom humor got the youth crowd every time.

  Hussein Moussa had stopped eating. His teeth finally showed—a serrated blade of shining yellow. It was the smile of an animal, a brutal scavenger. He apparently thought this scene was funny, too.

  “Gotta go to the bayt-room!” Carroll continued a little louder, sounding like a drunken Jerry Lewis. Jesus, you had to be a decent actor in this line of work.

  “Mohamud! Tarek! Get bum out! Get bum out now!” The owner was screeching at his waiters.

  Suddenly, fluidly, Arch Carroll wheeled hard to his extreme left.

  The Browning automatic flew out of the ratty and cumbersome parka.

  It was completely out of place in the family restaurant: a gun as ugly and menacing as unexpected death. Women and children began screaming.

  “Freeze! Don’t move! Freeze God damn you!”

  At the same time, one of the Lebanese waiters hit Carroll hard from his blind side, spinning him in a fast half circle to the right.

  He had ruined the drop Carroll had on the three terrorists; he had turned everything into a complete, instantaneous disaster.

  Moussa and the Rashids were already scattering, rolling sideways off the red vinyl dining chairs. Anton Rashid yanked out a silver automatic from under his brown leather car coat.