Chapter Forty-Three

On the 110th floor of Tower Two, Zmeya was shouting into his radio phone, ranting about his helicopter, when his aide-de-camp ran into the room.

No knocking, no asking for permission to enter.

“They’re here, sir,” he yelled at Zmeya. “They’re here.”

Others had won a bullet in the ear for bursting in on Zmeya like this, but the man was obviously terrified.

“Who is here?” Zmeya demanded. “The army? And they’re collaborating with the navy, right?”

“No, sir,” the man said. “It’s the Americans. They’re attacking us.”

Zmeya stopped for a moment. “The Americans are attacking us? What do you mean? In Queens? The Bronx or someplace? A diversion? They’re in league with—”

The man shook his head vigorously. “No—I’m saying they’re here, sir. The Americans are attacking this building. They’re on the ground floor.”

Zmeya froze for a moment, then fell into his office chair. He couldn’t believe it.

“How many?” he asked. “Is it a band of terrorists? An assassination squad?”

The aide could only shrug. “It’s not a small group,” he said fearfully. “There are at least several hundred soldiers, maybe even a thousand or more.”

“But … how?” Zmeya asked the officer, incredulous. “How did so many get this close? The bridges can’t be crossed. The tunnels are blocked. Someone would have seen them coming from miles away.”

The aide turned pale. “They used the subway, sir,” he said. “Right underneath us. They came in on old commuter trains.”

Zmeya’s face turned a deep shade of red.

“But I was told the subways here didn’t work,” he said through gritted teeth. “And I think you’re the one who told me. …”

“But that’s what we all thought, sir,” the officer pleaded.

Zmeya was beginning to perspire. He needed his meds.

“But wait a minute,” he said. “Who just bombed the Chekskis? Unless …”

Suddenly, he was fighting to keep his composure. He was the head of the NKVD in America, and he’d just been double-crossed.

“Get the army on the phone,” he ordered. “Tell them to move every unit down here right now, starting with the tanks.”

“We already tried,” the officer said, his voice still trembling. “They are not answering.”

“Call that new CO—what’s his name?—Samsonov.”

“He’s not answering, either, sir.”

More sweat on his brow. A bit of a loss of balance. Zmeya held his head in his hands for a moment. While planning the America operation back in Moscow, he’d attended meetings in which senior officers gushed about how great it would be to claim Manhattan’s forest of skyscrapers for the Motherland.

Fools! They were the worst possible objectives to defend.

But he took a breath and changed gears. A fight lay ahead. But he’d been in fights before.

“You instituted my Plan B under defensive actions, correct?” he asked the aide.

“The personnel are getting into position now,” the man replied.

“And the stairways?”

“Everything is armed that needs to be armed,” the aide confirmed.

“What’s the number of our building security force?”

“There are two companies of our special police on the ground floor,” the officer replied hastily. “Four more companies in reserve per Plan B. Two more on the floor below us. Each company is four hundred men. That’s more than three thousand men, sir—all of them Militsiya.”

“That gives us time,” Zmeya said to himself. “But we’ve still got to get that copter up here.”

The Allied assault force had advanced a hundred feet inside Tower Two when they were stopped in their tracks.

The Militsiya had set up four 50-caliber machine guns at the top of the pair of escalators that connected the foyer to the first level of the building.

Just out of range for a grenade toss, the NKVD gunners had the entire sweep of the lobby, plus a thick granite railing to use as cover from return fire below.

Dozer and many of the raiders were pinned down directly across from the blown-away front entrance. While Allied soldiers, mostly the Free Canadians, had taken up positions outside the building and were exchanging gunfire with the last of the Chekskis, those assigned to the assault force were getting increasingly jammed up near the still-smoldering entranceway. The lower lobby was already dangerously crowded, and the Militsiya gunners were regularly shooting down into it with their quartet of big 50-calibers. Good cover was hard to find.

Five minutes into this, Dozer got a message from the lighthouse back on Nantucket. Two 7CAV men had been left behind to monitor the 616, and they had two intercepted messages for him. First, they’d learned from the chatter that, as part of their security plans, the NKVD had wired up every fire escape, elevator, and stairway inside Tower Two with plastic explosives—with one exception. The emergency staircase on the southeast corner of the building was still clear. This was how the NKVD would fight its way out, if it came to that. But as far as the lighthouse techs could tell, the stairway was open for both attacker and defender alike.

Dozer passed the news to Jim Cook. The JAWS commanding officer signaled to his men in the lobby, just out of the fire zone. Not a half minute later, they all signaled back. His guys had scanned the air with their electronic sniffers and confirmed the 616 intel. The entire building reeked of explosive materials. Cook’s men also added that all of the building’s elevators had been disabled.

The JAWS guys were experts in explosives and would start clearing an alternate stairway immediately, but it was impossible to say how long that would take.

Dozer grimly acknowledged Cook’s report. At least now they knew where this fight was going to take place. In the stairwell on the southeast corner of the building and in confined lobbies and hallways beyond. The Allies would still have to fight floor by floor, for 110 floors. Even Hunter’s plan said there would be no other way to do it. But there would be no spreading out into the building itself; it would be a narrow battlefield, and that usually meant lots of casualties.

Dozer returned to the radiophone and asked the lighthouse for the second message. It was just as bleak. Radio intercepts from the 616 confirmed the five missing Russian destroyers had been spotted off Long Island.

They were heading for New York City at full speed.