8:56 A.M.
LINCOLN TUNNEL
WEEHAWKEN, NEW JERSEY
Farhad reached the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel earlier than anticipated. He’d driven the speed limit from Sloatsburg, and there was traffic the entire way, yet still he was there already. He was too early, he realized—as the multitude of lanes funneled into four as they crawled toward the tunnels. He could not enter yet. He would get through to the other side before nine o’clock.
There was still an exit ahead, but he also feared that if he got off at the final exit before the tunnel, he might not be able to navigate back and reenter the tunnel in time.
There were two entrances ahead, each with two lanes of traffic. Just before the tunnel was an empty space, strewn with garbage, an embankment no bigger than a car or two. Farhad moved into the right lane and cut before another car. Horns blared. He pulled onto the small embankment and stopped. He was perspiring. People were yelling, horns continued to blare, but soon the noise died off and he just sat there, in park, waiting. It was all he had to do. Just a few minutes.
8:59 A.M.
BROOKLYN-BATTERY TUNNEL
RED HOOK
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Dariush drove as fast as he could, down Route 23, west of the city, then Route 46, then Route 3 through New Jersey, picking up 95 just across from Manhattan and heading south. Traffic was terrible. Dariush crossed into other lanes haphazardly, weaving dangerously. He knew he had less than ninety minutes to make a trip that—at rush hour—should’ve taken at least two hours.
He rode up on trucks and cruised down the breakdown lane when things became jammed near Secaucus.
He got onto 278 and headed across Staten Island. When he came to the entrance of the tunnel, he breathed a sigh of relief, and then he remembered he was about to die.
As the lanes converged near the entrance to the tunnel, the van was next to a yellow school bus. A group of young girls in white-and-blue uniforms waved at Dariush.
At first, he didn’t acknowledge them, but then he couldn’t help thinking that one of the schoolchildren reminded him of his younger sister, Hannah.
“Hello there!” shouted one of the girls as they all waved, giggling and laughing.
“Hello,” said Dariush, smiling as he waved back. He told himself he did it so as not to raise suspicion, but the truth was, he thought of his sister and how much he would miss her. He let the bus cut in front of him, and then swerved into the line of traffic. He was inside the Battery Tunnel a minute later. He slowed down and let others pass him.
In those moments, Dariush wanted time to slow down. He hoped the school bus would be out of the tunnel by the time the clock struck nine.
“Drive faster, little ones,” he said aloud, to no one.
8:59 A.M.
HOLLAND TUNNEL
JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY
Mohsen had the rearview mirror aimed at himself as he drove. He smiled at himself in the mirror, and pushed his hand back through his thick locks, admiring himself in the mirror.
If he looked behind himself, Mohsen could see the wall of octanitrocubane.
He was in the tunnel now, in the long queue of cars and trucks, and he smiled at himself again in the mirror.
In mere moments, he would be dead, and so at this moment, along his final drive, and last bit of time here on earth, he tried to distract himself by looking at himself in the mirror.
He saw a BMW in the other lane and it reminded him of his uncle.
Mohsen knew he was in his final moments.…
8:59 A.M.
QUEENS-MIDTOWN TUNNEL
LONG ISLAND CITY
QUEENS, NEW YORK
Shahin was the most important of the four. The Queens-Midtown Tunnel emptied into Manhattan just beneath the United Nations. The success of Shahin’s attack was crucial to the plan and would create in-theater environmental chaos that would help to obscure the street-level attack by Mansour and a brigade of Hezbollah soldiers, all loyal to Mansour and to the Republic.
He was stuck in a line of traffic. Some sort of accident up ahead. By 8:15 Shahin was still in Queens, aboveground, in a line of vehicles inching along toward the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
By 8:55 Shahin was inside the tunnel. Ahead, he saw the lights of police cruisers. Every lane was shut except for one.
At 8:57, he was just a few cars away. Two cars looked dented and partially crushed. Two ambulances were on the scene.
A car suddenly stopped in front of him. Someone in the car was screaming. It was a woman. She recognized one of the cars in the accident.
He looked at his phone:
08:59:31
The woman was older, in her sixties, and overweight. She climbed out of the car crying the name of a woman, her daughter, whose car she recognized, crushed in from the side.
Shahin abruptly swerved out from behind the line and accelerated, just as a policeman ran to meet the hysterical woman. Shahin floored it, honking his horn as he went from 30 to 40 to 50 mph, but the noise just blended into the confusion and disarray. He hit the policeman first, slamming him with the right front of the van before he even was aware. He struck the woman dead center and she went tumbling under the van, her screams soon muted as Shahin bounced the tire of the van over her skull, crushing it like an egg.
As bullets clanged into the van, Shahin kept his foot to the pedal, weaving in and out of cars past the accident.
08:59:48
He saw digital signs demarcating the end of the tunnel just ahead, and as he swerved the last few hundred feet in between cars, he checked his watch. As the seconds ticked toward their ineluctable fate, he glanced one more time.
08:59:59
09:00:00
09:00:01
For a moment, Shahin thought perhaps something was wrong, and he felt, in that split second, a sense of relief, reprieve, as if somehow he might escape.…
Then Shahin suddenly saw white energy everywhere, and, for a fraction of a moment, felt warmth that grew hot, and suddenly there came the sound—and he felt the concussion as it blew out his ears, as he lost his vision, he felt pain, and saw the final moment and then it was all gone—it went black—as he was vaporized by the explosion. It all blurred into nothingness and one, a continuum, as suddenly he was immolated in heat and fire, as the octanitrocubane exploded out, sucking up oxygen, incinerating everything, including steel, and the end of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel suddenly fell down from above in white heat, unfathomable destruction that shot back into the tunnel and cascaded out the other end in massive chutes of chemical-laden flames.
The explosions occurred toward the end of each of the tunnels. The four vans had all made it into the last hundred feet of each respective tunnel. There were only four vehicle tunnels into Manhattan. For decades, this vulnerability had been studied by law enforcement and by those in charge of America’s national security. Now, it was done.
In each tunnel, the concussive blast moving back into the tunnel melted every vehicle for fifty feet. The larger destruction occurred at the ends of the tunnels. Blue and orange flames blew out from the site of the actual detonations into a fearsome tornado of heat, fire, and seismic trauma. Within seconds, the blocks surrounding the end of the tunnels, where they fed up into Manhattan, were caught up in bluish-orange fire. Anyone or anything nearby was pulverized, melted, killed, by the first flash from the octanitrocubane.
Soon smoke, fire, and heat overwhelmed the surrounding areas, and buildings went alight in fiery winds as automatic heat-sensored alarms screamed from buildings all around.
The cataclysm was all fire and wind. The heat was beyond intense, shooting in every direction, scorching anything nearby the tunnel entrances.
The terrorists now had time to conduct an even broader attack on America. On the president. On the Federal Reserve.
Manhattan was cut off. It was an island.