5:20 came, then 5:25—
Flynn looked around the column to his rear and saw Maureen and Baxter huddled together. He watched them briefly, then turned back to the vestibule.
5:30.
A tension hung in the still, cold air of the Cathedral, a tension so palpable it could be heard in the steady beating chests, felt on the sweaty brows, tasted in the mouth as bile, seen in the dancing lights, and smelled in the stench of burning phosphorous.
5:35 came, and the thought began to take hold in the minds of the people in the Cathedral that it was already too late to mount an attack that would serve any purpose.
In the long southwest triforium George Sullivan put down his rifle and picked up his bagpipes. He tucked the bag under his arm, adjusted the three drone pipes over his shoulder, and put his fingers on the eight-holed chanter, and then put his mouth to the blowpipe. Against all orders and against all reason he began to play. The slow, haunting melody of “Amazing Grace” floated from the chanter and hummed from the drone pipes into the candlelit silence.
There was a very slight, almost imperceptible lessening of tension, a relaxing of vigilance, coupled with the most primitive of beliefs that if you anticipated something terrible, imagined it in the most minute detail, it would not happen.
Book V
Assault
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
G. K. Chesterton
Bellini stood at the open door of the small elevator in the basement below the Achbishop’s sacristy. An ESD man stood on the elevator roof and shone a handheld spotlight up the long shaft. The shaft began as brick, but at a level above the main floor it was wood-walled and seemed to continue up, as Stillway had pointed out, to a level that would bring it through the triforium’s attic.
Bellini called softly, “How’s it look?”
The ESD man replied, “We’ll see.” He took a tension clamp from a utility pouch, screwed it tightly to the elevator cable at hip level, and then stepped onto it and tested its holding strength. He screwed on another and stepped up to it. Step by step, very quickly now, he began working his way up the shaft to the triforium level eight stories above.
Bellini looked back into the curving corridor behind him. The First ESD Assault Squad stood silently, laden with equipment and armed with silenced pistols and rifles that were fitted with infrared scopes.
On the floor just outside the elevator a communications man sat in front of a small field-phone switchboard that was connected by wire to the remaining ESD Assault Squads and to the state office in Rockefeller Center. Bellini said to the man, “When the shit hits the fan, intersquad communication takes priority over His Honor and the Commissioner…. In fact, I don’t want to hear from them unless it’s to tell us to pull out.”
The commo man nodded.
Burke came down the corridor. His face was smeared with greasepaint, and he was screwing a big silencer onto the barrel of an automatic pistol.
Bellini watched him. “This don’t look like Los Angeles, does it, Burke?”
Burke stuck the automatic in his belt. “Let’s go, Bellini.”
Bellini shrugged. He climbed the stepladder and stood on the roof of the elevator, and Burke came up beside him in the narrow shaft. Bellini shone his light up the wall until it rested on the oak door that opened on the Archbishop’s sacristy twenty feet above. He said to Burke in a quiet voice, “If there’s a Fenian standing there with a submachine gun and he hears us climbing, there’ll be a waterfall of blood and bodies dropping back on this elevator.”
Burke shifted Bellini’s light farther up and picked out the dim outline of the climbing man, now about one hundred feet up the shaft. “Or there may be an ambush waiting up there at the top.”
Bellini nodded. “Looked good on paper.” He shut off his light. “You got about one minute to stop being all asshole and get out of here.”
“Okay.”
Bellini glanced up at the dark shaft. “I wonder … I wonder if that door or any door in this place is mined?” Bellini was speaking nervously now. “Remember in the army … all the phony minefield signs? All the other bullshit psy-warfare … ?” He shook his head. “After the first shot everything is okay … it’s all the shit before…. Flynn’s got me psyched out…. He understands … I’m sure he’s crazier than me. …”
Burke said, “Maybe Schroeder told him how crazy you really are … maybe Flynn’s scared of you.”
Bellini nodded. “Yeah …” He laughed, then his face hardened. “You know something? I feel like killing someone…. I have an urge … like when I need a cigarette … you know?”
Burke looked at his watch. “At least this one can’t go into overtime. At 6:03 it’s finished.”
Bellini also checked his watch. “Yeah … no overtime. Just a two-minute warning, then a big bang, and the stadium falls down and the game is over.” He laughed again, and Burke glanced at him.
The ESD climber reached the top of the shaft. He tied a nylon rope ladder to the pulley crossbeam and let the ladder fall. Bellini caught it before it hit the metal roof of the elevator. The communications man threw up a field-phone receiver, and Bellini clipped it to the shoulder of his flak jacket. “Well, Burke … here goes. Once you get on the ladder, you’re not getting off the ladder so easy.” He began climbing. Burke followed, and one by one the ten ESD men climbed behind them.
Bellini paused at the oak door of the Archbishop’s sacristy and put his ear to it. He heard footsteps and froze. Suddenly the crack of light at the bottom of the door disappeared. He waited several more seconds, his rifle pointed at the door and his heart pounding in his chest. The footsteps moved away. His phone clicked, and he answered it quietly. “Yeah.”
The operator said, “Our people outside report all the lights are going out in there—but there’s … like candlelight … maybe flares lighting up the windows.”
Bellini swore. The flares, he knew, would be white phosphorus. Bastards. Right from the beginning … right from the fucking beginning … He continued up the swaying ladder.
At the top of the shaft the climber sat on the crossbeam, pointing his light farther up, and Bellini saw a small opening where the shaft wall ended a few feet from the sloping ceiling of the triforium attic. Bellini mumbled, “Caught a fucking break at least.” He stood precariously on the crossbeam, eight stories above the basement, and stretched toward the opening, grabbing at the top of the wooden wall. He pulled himself up, squeezing his head and broad shoulders into the space, a silenced pistol in his hand. He blinked in the darkness of the half attic, fully expecting to be shot between the eyes. He waited, then turned on his light, cocking his pistol at the same time. Nothing moved but his pounding chest against the top edge of the wall. He slid down headfirst five feet to a beam that ran over the plaster lathing, breaking his fall with his outstretched arms and righting himself silently.
Burke’s head and shoulders appeared in the opening, and Bellini pulled him through. One by one the First Assault Squad dropped into the small side attic behind the triforium.
Bellini crawled over the beams, sidled up to the wooden knee-wall and moved along it until he felt a small door Stillway had described. On the other side of the door was the southeast triforium, and in the triforium, he was certain, were one or more gunmen. He put a small audio amplifier to the door and listened. He heard no footsteps, no sound of life in the triforium, but somewhere in the Cathedral a bagpipe was playing “Amazing Grace.” He mumbled to himself, “Assholes.”
He backed carefully away from the wall and led his squad to the low, narrow space where the sloping roof met the stone of the outside wall. He unclipped the field phone from his jacket and spoke quietly to his switchboard below. “Report to all stations—First Squad in place. No con tact.”
The Second Assault Squad of ESD men climbed the rungs of the wide chimney, fire axes
slung to their backs. They passed the steel door in the brick and continued up to the chimney pot.
The squad leader attached a khaki nylon rappelling line to the top rung and held the gathered rope in his hands. The cold night air blew into the chimney, making a deep, hollow, whistling sound. The squad leader stuck a periscope out of the chimney pot and scanned the towers, but the Fenians were not visible from this angle, and he pointed the scope at the cross-shaped roof. Two dormers faced him, and he saw that the hatches on them were open. “Shit.” He reached back, and the squad commo man cranked the field phone slung to his chest and handed him the receiver. The squad leader reported, “Captain, Second Squad in position. The damned hatches are open now, and it’s going to be tough crossing this roof if there’re people leaning out those dormers shooting at us.”
Bellini answered in a barely audible voice. “Just hold there until the towers are knocked out. Then move.”
The Third Assault Squad climbed the chimney behind the Second Squad but stopped their ascent below the steel door. The squad leader maneuvered to a position beside the door, directing a flashlight on the latch. Slowly he reached out with a mechanical pincher and tentatively touched the latch, then drew it away. He called Bellini on the field phone. “Captain. Third in position. Can’t tell if there are alarms or mines on the door.”
Bellini answered, “Okay. When Second Squad clears the chimney, you open the door and find out.”
“Right.” He handed the phone back to the commo man hanging beside him, who said, “How come we never rehearsed anything like this?”
The squad leader said, “I don’t think the situation ever came up before.”
At 5:35 the ESD sniper-squad leader in Rockefeller Center picked up the ringing field phone on the desk in a tenth-floor office. Joe Bellini’s voice came over the line, subdued but with no hesitation. He gave the code word. “Bull Run. Sixty seconds.”
The sniper-squad leader acknowledged, hung up, drew a long breath, and pushed the office intercom buzzer in an alerting signal.
Fourteen snipers moved quickly to the seven windows that faced the louvered sections of the towers across Fifth Avenue and crouched below the sills. The intercom sounded again, and the snipers rose and threw open the sashes, then steadied their rifles on the cold stone ledges. The squad leader watched the second hand of his watch, then gave the final short signal.
Fourteen silenced rifles coughed, and the metallic sound of sliding operating rods clattered in the offices, followed by whistling sounds, then the coughs of another volley, breaking up into random firing as the snipers fired at will. Spent brass cartridge casings dropped silently on the plush carpets.
Brian Flynn looked down at the television sitting on the floor of the pulpit. The screen showed a close-up shot of the bell tower, the blue-lit shadow of Mullins staring out through the torn louvers. Mullins raised a mug to his lips. The scene shifted to another telescopic close-up of Devane in the south tower, a bored look on his face. The audio was tuned down, but Flynn could hear the droning voice of a reporter. The reporter gave the time. Everything seemed very ordinary until the camera panned back, and Flynn caught a glimpse of light from the rose window, which should have been dark. He realized he was seeing a video replay from early in the evening. Flynn reached for the field phone.
A dozen Fenian spotters in the surrounding buildings watched the Cathedral through field glasses.
One spotter saw movement at the mouth of the chimney. A second spotter saw the line of windows in Rockefeller Center open.
Strobe lights began signaling to the Cathedral towers.
Rory Devane knelt behind a stone mullion, blowing into his cold hands, his rifle cradled in the bend of his arms. His eye caught the flashing strobes, and then he saw a line of muzzle flashes in the building across the Avenue. He grabbed for the field phone, and it rang simultaneously, but before he could pick it up, shards of disintegrating stone flew into his face. The dark tower room was filled with sharp pinging sounds and echoed with the metallic clatter of tearing copper louvers.
A bullet slammed into Devane’s flak jacket, sending him reeling back. He felt another round pass through his throat, but didn’t feel the one that ricocheted into his forehead and fractured his skull.
* * *
Donald Mullins stood in the east end of the bell room staring out across the East River trying to see the predawn light coming over Long Island. He had half convinced himself that there would be no attack, and when the field phone rang he knew it was Flynn telling him the Fenians had won.
A strobe light flashed from a window in the Waldorf-Astoria, and his heart missed a beat. He heard one of the bells behind him ring sharply, and he spun around. Muzzle flashes, in rapid succession like popping flashbulbs, ran the width of the building across the Avenue, and more strobe lights flashed in the distance; but these warnings, which he had been watching for all night, made no impression on his mind. A series of bullets slammed into his flak jacket, knocked the breath out of him, and picked him up off his feet.
Mullins regained his footing and lunged for the field phone, which was still ringing. A bullet shattered his elbow, and another passed through his hand. His rifle fell to the floor, and everything went black. Still another round entered behind his ear and disintegrated a long swath of his skull.
Mullins staggered in blind pain and grabbed at the bell straps hanging through the open stairwell. He felt himself falling, sliding down the swinging straps.
Father Murphy huddled against the cold iron ladder in the bell tower, half unconscious from fatigue. A faint peal of the bell overhead made him look up, and he saw Mullins falling toward him. Instinctively he grabbed at the man before he passed through the opening in the landing.
Mullins veered from the gaping hole and landed on the floor, shrieking in pain. He lurched around the room, his hands to his face and his sense of balance gone along with his inner ear, blood running between his fingers. He ran headlong toward the east wall of the tower and crashed through the splintered glass, tumbling three stories to the roof of the northwest triforium.
Father Murphy tried to comprehend the surrealistic scene that had just passed before his cloudy eyes. He blinked several times and stared at the shattered window.
Abby Boland thought she heard a sound on the roof of the triforium’s attic behind her and froze, listening.
Leary thought he heard the pealing of a bell from the tower and strained to listen for another.
Flynn was calling into the field phone, “South tower, north tower, answer.”
In the chimney the commo men with the two squads answered their phones simultaneously and heard Bellini’s voice. “Both towers clear. Move!”
The Second Squad leader threw the gathered rope up and out of the chimney and scrambled over the top into the cold air. They had gambled that by leaving on the blue floodlights that bathed the lower walls of the Cathedral, they wouldn’t alert the Fenian spotters in the surrounding buildings or in the attic. But the squad leader felt very visible as he rappelled down the side of the chimney. He landed on the dark roof of the northeast triforium, followed by his ten-man Assault Squad. They moved quickly over the lower roof to a slender pinnacle that rose between two great windows of the ambulatory. The squad found the iron rungs in the stone that Stillway said would be there and climbed up to a higher roof, partially visible in the diffused lighting. Dropping onto the roof, they lay in the wide rain gutter where the wall met the sloping expanse of gray slate shingles, then began crawling in the gutter toward the closest dormer. The squad leader kept his eyes on the dormer as he moved toward it. He saw something poke out of the open hatchway, something long and slender like a rifle barrel.
* * *
The Third Assault Squad leader at the steel door watched the last dark form disappear from the chimney pot overhead and hooked his pinchers on the door latch, muttered a prayer, and lifted the latch, then slowly pushed in on the door, wondering if he was going to be blown up the chimney li
ke soot.
Jean Kearney and Arthur Nulty stood in dormered hatchways, which were on opposite sides of the pitched roof, scanning the night sky for helicopters. Nulty, on the north slope of the roof, thought he heard a sound below. He looked straight down at the triforium roof but saw nothing in the dark. He heard a sound to his immediate right and turned. A long line of black shapes, like beetles, he thought, was crawling through the rain gutter toward him. He couldn’t imagine how they got there without helicopters or without the spotters in the surrounding buildings seeing them climb the walls. Instinctively he raised his rifle and drew a bead on the first man, who was no more than twenty feet away.
One of the men shouted, and they all rose to one knee. Nulty saw rifles coming into firing position, and he squeezed off a single round. One of the black-clad men slapped his hand over his flak jacket, lost his balance and fell out of the rain gutter; he dropped three stories to the triforium roof below, making a loud thup in the quiet night.
Jean Kearney turned at the sound of Nulty’s shot. “Arthur! What—?”
The dormer where Nulty stood erupted in flying splinters of wood, and Nulty fell back into the attic. He rose very quickly to his feet, took two steps toward Jean Kearney, his arms waving, then toppled over the catwalk and crashed to the plaster lathing below.
Kearney stared down at his body, then looked up at the dormer hatch and saw a man hunched in the opening. She raised her rifle and fired, but the man jumped out of view.
Kearney ran along the catwalk and dived across the wooden boards, reaching a glowing oil lamp. She flung it up in an arc, and it crashed into a pile of chopped wood. She rolled a few feet farther and reached for the field phone, which was ringing.