“It’s not about the parade at all,” Reid told his team quickly. “The attack is going to be on a tunnel.” His hands were shaking; their plan was completely disrupted and utterly wrong.
“But which one?” Talia asked. “How do we know where they’re targeting?”
“We don’t,” Reid said quickly. “We need to alert the authorities and shut them all down. It could be any of the major tunnels leading in or out of the island—Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown, Brooklyn-Battery…”
Watson blinked at him. “You want us to ask them to shut down and evac every major underwater route into the city? They’ll think we’re insane. We’re already off agency radar on this.”
“Then we call it in as a bomb threat,” Reid said urgently. “Give them no other choice than to listen—”
“Are you insane?” Watson scoffed. “That’s grounds for incarceration, Zero—”
“What choice do we have?” Reid said heatedly. “Don’t you realize what’s at stake here?”
“Wait!” Maria shouted at them both. “Shut up a second. Listen, in Baghdad, the Brotherhood planted their bomb under the guise of a contractor crew, right? So maybe there’s a way to narrow this down.”
Reid understood immediately and already had his sat phone out, punching in a number he had memorized. “Bixby, it’s Zero,” he said before the engineer could greet him. “Listen to me. We have reason to believe the target is one of the primary tunnels leading into the city. I need to check right now and tell me if any of them are undergoing construction.”
“On it,” Bixby said through the phone. Reid heard a clattering of keys in the background. “Looks like the Holland Tunnel is currently undergoing some construction on the north tube. It’s down to one lane about a quarter-mile in and spanning another half mile. It’s causing some major delays, total gridlock at the moment with all these people coming into town for the parade.”
“Holland Tunnel,” Reid said quickly to Maria. “Alert the authorities—NYPD, MTA, FBI, whoever you can. Get it shut down and evacuated.” He turned to Watson. “Call Cartwright. Don’t talk to anyone else. Tell him what we think is going on, have him activate anyone the CIA has got in the area.” To Mendel he said, “Call 911 and tell them to send any emergency personnel available to the Holland Tunnel.”
“Zero?” Bixby said through the phone. “What can I do to help?”
“Hedge our bets,” he told the engineer. The Holland Tunnel was a primary thoroughfare into New York, connecting the city to New Jersey, and was their best guess—but until there was evidence, it was still just that, a guess. “Get in touch with authorities on the opposite ends of the other three main tunnels leaving New York and do whatever you’ve got to do to shut them off to anyone coming in.”
“No easy task,” Bixby said, “but I’ll do what I can.” The line clicked as he hung up.
Reid’s heart was pounding a mile a minute with the prospect of a bomb being detonated in one of the underwater tunnels. Not only would there be immediate casualties, but if it was strong enough to collapse and flood the tubes, thousands would die.
Calm down, he scolded himself. Think straight.
“We need to get there,” he murmured aloud. If the authorities discovered a bomb, the RF jammers could stop any signal from detonating it. But the four of them were on the opposite side of the island from the Holland Tunnel. “We need a car.”
He stepped right out into the street, holding up both hands as oncoming traffic swerved around him amid sharp horn blasts. A yellow taxi screeched to a halt less than a foot from him, the irate driver shouting and gesticulating with his hands behind the windshield. Reid threw the door open.
“Sir,” he said, “I need your vehicle.”
“The hell are you talkin’ about?” The cabbie, a Jewish man in his fifties wearing a derby cap, scowled up at him. “Get out of here!”
Reid leaned over and, in one swift motion, unclipped the driver’s seatbelt with one hand as he dragged him out of the seat with the other, unceremoniously dropping the man to the pavement. “Sorry,” Reid muttered as he slid behind the wheel.
“Hey!” the driver shouted. “That’s my cab! Somebody stop that guy! Asshole!”
Agent Mendel stepped up and, with a quick flash of a Glock, sent the cabbie fleeing for his life. She slid into the passenger seat with the black bag of equipment in her lap. Watson and Maria piled in quickly behind them, and Reid slammed the gas before their door was even shut.
“911 is sending emergency services,” Talia told him.
“MTA is shutting down the tunnel,” said Maria, “and the NYPD is sending every available unit. But evac is going to take some time. That tunnel is a mile and a half long.”
“No answer from Cartwright,” Watson announced. “But I’ll keep trying.”
Reid swerved in and out of traffic, cursing in frustration at his lack of speed. Screw it, he thought. “Hold on to something.” He jerked the wheel and mounted the curb, slamming on the horn in bursts to alert pedestrians out of his way. Any cops in the area would undoubtedly give chase in no time, but that was the least of his concerns at the moment. And hopefully, we’re the least of theirs, he thought. If the MTA and NYPD were taking the threat seriously, a stolen taxi was of little consequence.
“Everyone make sure you’ve got an RF jammer,” he told them between blasts from the horn. Mendel unzipped the black nylon bag and pulled out a handheld black box, about the size of a nineteen-eighties cell phone, with two rubber-coated antennae protruding from the top at odd angles.
“Got it,” Watson confirmed as well.
“Jammers?” said Talia questioningly. “That is your plan?”
Reid hardly had the time or the patience to go through another explanation. “Look, I can’t be sure, but this thing could be going off sooner than we anticipated, and we need to be ready for that if they can’t evacuate in time.” He turned specifically to her and added, “So yes, jammers. That’s my plan.”
“You understand that for this to work, we would have to be positioned in range of the bomb, yes?”
“Yes,” Reid said tightly. No one else had made vocal that concern, though they must have certainly all been thinking it.
Mendel nodded once. “Okay.”
“Who’s got the Parasite?” he asked.
“Got it,” Maria said behind him.
“What the hell is a Parasite?” asked Watson.
“It’s a small UAV that can override the controls of another,” Reid told him. He gritted his teeth as he ran a red light, swerving around the perpendicular traffic. “If the Brotherhood is in a range close enough to detonate while still being outside the tunnel, it might come in handy to help locate them.”
“And you know how to use it?”
“Um…” Bixby had given both him and Maria a crash course in the remote guidance system—but neither of them had actually tested it. “Yes,” he said simply. He didn’t bother explaining that they also had seismic detectors that would let them know the moment any bombs detonated in a particular radius, and shotgun motion sensors to pick up any aerial drone activity; the jammers were the key component. The rest of the equipment they had been outfitted with was more or less useless in the moment.
Reid’s satellite phone rang, displaying Bixby’s number on the screen. He kept one hand firmly on the wheel as he flipped it over his shoulder to Maria. “Get that for me, would you?”
“Johansson,” Maria answered. “Uh-huh… Jesus…” Then she shouted, “Kent, stop!”
“What?”
“Stop the car!”
Reid grunted as he slammed the brakes. The taxi skidded to a halt in the middle of 26th Street. Angry New Yorkers shouted and waved rude gestures in their direction. “What? What is it?”
Maria put the phone on speaker. “Bixby, repeat what you just told me.”
“The transit authority has just announced the closure of the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels,” Bixby said quickly. “But there’s something else; a truck just flipped on the eastbound tube of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, Manhattan side. Traffic is already congested heading into the city; now both lanes are stopped heading into Queens, too.”
Reid gaped at Talia beside him. An overturned truck? All four lanes congested? That couldn’t just be coincidence.
“I’m listening in on the police airwaves,” Bixby continued quickly, “and they’re saying there were two men in the truck, both dead on impact—and both of Middle Eastern descent. Neither was carrying ID.”
“And this just happened?” Watson asked.
“Just now. Two minutes ago,” Bixby confirmed.
Reid had heard enough. He slammed the gas again and spun the wheel, pulling a U-turn in the middle of the street, blaring the horn as cars swerved around him. “It’s the Midtown Tunnel. That’s the target.” He jerked the wheel again and the taxi fishtailed onto Park Avenue.
I was wrong. He blew the horn to clear pedestrians from his path. He had just focused every asset in New York on the two tunnels on the opposite side of the island. And while those were cleared out, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was clogged, two lanes in each direction and more than a mile long. He tried to do some quick math in his head; they could be talking about casualties up to four or five thousand people.
“Call everyone you can, tell them the target has changed and the attack is imminent,” Reid told his team. “If that crashed truck was them, it means they’re starting now. Trying to trap as many people down there as they can. Watson, call the agency. We need to let them know what’s happening. Tell them we’re on our way there now.”
And hopefully not too late.
*
Awad bin Saddam leaned close to the radio, intently waiting for the signal to begin.
He sat in the wheelhouse of the small freighter as they chugged slowly up the East River. A few feet from him, their Armenian helmsman silently piloted the boat. The Armenian spoke very little English and no Arabic, but he knew his role—he was to cruise up the river until Awad gave him the signal, and then idle until their task was accomplished.
After that, Awad planned to shoot him.
Below deck, Hassan and Ahmed were ready. The three silver cases that housed the remote guidance system were online and connected to the drones. Anil and Dilshad had done well so far; they had gotten the submarine drones in the water at precisely the directed position, two and a half kilometers from the freighter’s location. The signal was weaker than Awad would have liked, but it would have to suffice.
They had only one thing yet to do, the very thing that Awad was impatiently waiting for beside the radio.
Then it came. A woman announced over the airwaves that the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels were being closed. They know, Awad thought. No matter; their attention was diverted. The reporter continued, announcing that the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s westbound traffic had been blockaded by an overturned truck.
The signal.
Awad rose quickly and gestured to the Armenian with a raised fist, signaling him to stop the boat. The helmsman nodded and cut the engine as Awad hurried out of the wheelhouse.
He wondered, briefly, if Anil and Dilshad were still alive. Not that it mattered. They had served their purpose, and soon, so would he.
The plan was simple. They had three drones; there would be three strikes. The first would hit at the eastern end of the tunnel, near Anil and Dilshad’s intentional crash, in case it was cleared quickly enough for traffic to flow again. As the panicked masses trampled each other to escape the water, the second drone would strike at the western side, blocking off any chance of escape.
The third and final strike would be dead center, and at Awad’s own hand. He wanted more than just loss of life; he wanted destruction. He wanted to cause panic and fear and doubt. He did not want the bodies to be recoverable under cement and steel and water.
His initial impression had been that with three drones, he could attack three tunnels. But the Libyan had advised against it. The tunnel walls were thick and well designed; a single strike could not guarantee the sort of annihilation he was hoping for. In fact, it was the arms dealer that had suggested the Midtown Tunnel in the first place. It was the unlikeliest of the major underwater causeways should anyone discover their plan to attack a tunnel of New York.
His two brothers were waiting below deck, the silver cases open in front of them. Awad nodded to Ahmed, who would be the first to strike.
“Let us begin,” he said.