Chapter Forty-Six

Catfish Johnson had originally positioned his M-6 mobile artillery pieces out on the WTC plaza to defend the assault force against attacks from outside Tower Two.

The cluster bomb strikes had been astonishingly effective. More than two thirds of the Chekskis, along their extensive defense crescent, had been killed. Their bodies were everywhere. And those few who’d been wounded weren’t going anywhere.

But hundreds of Chekskis were still in the area. Many of them had taken up positions inside surrounding buildings and were firing at the Allied positions around the base of Tower Two. They’d become an army of snipers.

Johnson had given the use of half his guns to the Free Canadian ground commanders to help eliminate these threats. It was a simple strategy. If someone saw a gun flash from an open window, he put an artillery shell into it.

But with the successful assist they’d given the assault team to get out of the lower lobby, at Dozer’s request, Johnson repositioned the rest of his guns facing in toward Tower Two, to help the assault force move up the southeast corner stairways, one floor at a time.

The M-6 was one of the few field artillery pieces that could be hand-transported. The secret was in its modular design. It broke down into ten primary pieces, each one light enough for one man to carry. Johnson’s men could put one together and be firing in less than two minutes.

Johnson had been on the radiophone with Dozer the entire way; he heard how the stairwells were indeed full of NKVD fighters and they weren’t giving up easily. So, they’d started an odd routine once Dozer reached the eighth floor.

Johnson had ten M-6s arrayed in front of Tower Two. Instead of battling it out with the Russian police in the eighth-floor stairwell—vertical close-in fighting was the worst—Dozer marked the contested floor with a flare shot out the nearest window. He yelled for his guys to duck, Johnson’s men put two shells through the window, and that’s all it took. The few NKVD gunmen who survived the mini-barrage escaped to the next floor, where Dozer started the whole process over again.

This wasn’t how it was planned at all—literally clearing the building one entire floor at a time had been anticipated, before they realized there was really only one way up—but this approach worked amazingly well. Going up one or even two floors at a time, they reached the thirtieth floor in just ten minutes. They were on the thirty-fifth floor just a few minutes later, and they had no reason to slow down.

But that’s when Johnson started doing some calculations.

His M-6s could elevate to seventy-three degrees—and that was just enough to hit a target on the forty-fourth floor—but no higher.

After that, the boots would be on their own.

Sixty-six floors up, Zmeya was on his radiophone directing the building’s defense and constantly referring to his Plan B.

Though dreamed up to stop an army assault on his headquarters, it was working just fine against the Americans. For Zmeya, there was nothing like drawing prey into a trap.

His plan was simple. There was only one way up or down—that was the southeast stairway. Many of the offices on individual floors had been booby trapped as well, making a large part of the skyscraper a vertical minefield.

The Americans were using M-6 light artillery guns, great weapons, but Zmeya knew its firing angle limitations. Give or take a few feet, after the forty-fourth floor, the invaders would lose all artillery support.

His plan was to draw them farther upward than that. Past the forty-fifth, forty-sixth, and forty-seventh floors and beyond. Zero opposition, nothing but the clanging of retreating boots overhead. Make them think we’re giving up the fight.

Then, when the assault force reached the fiftieth floor, they would come up against a wall of Militsiya—dozens of fighters firing into the stairwell with hundreds more waiting in the wings. All they had to do was keep firing down the staircase and replace any dead or wounded with new bodies. There was no way the Americans would get past them.

This is exactly what happened—but there was more to Plan B. The Americans did a quick strategic retreat back to forty-eight, only to find NKVD gunmen had infiltrated through the northwest booby-trapped stairway and were on the forty-seventh floor below.

In a matter of minutes, the NKVD had trapped two thirds of the Allied assault force—more than thirteen hundred fighters—in the southeast stairwell between the forty-eighth and fiftieth floors.

Down on the plaza, Catfish Johnson was putting together a rescue party comprised of his own men plus some Free Canadians.

The assault team was trapped, sucked in by the clever Russians. He’d taken one last grim message from Dozer: “We’re going to try to work ourselves back down.”

Then there was gunfire, and then his radio went dead.

The book said sending more men into the building was not the solution, but Johnson had to do something. He couldn’t stand by and let his friends be killed off at the NKVD’s leisure.

He got a hundred Canadian volunteers, added to fifty of his guys. They were about to enter the building when they heard a loud, screeching noise over their heads.

It was Hunter’s clown plane returning from the waters off Long Island. Before anyone could move, it slammed down onto the plaza right next to Johnson’s CP.

Hunter jumped out, still wearing his duct-taped crash helmet and carrying his M-16. He and Cat did a soul shake.

Johnson couldn’t help but ask, “What’s with all the rubber, brother?”

“Came like that from the factory,” Hunter told him with a shrug.

Johnson updated him on the situation. More than thirteen hundred of the good guys were trapped about halfway up the skyscraper, lured there after his artillery had reached its elevation limit.

“Like when the B-17s used to lose their fighter protection halfway to Germany,” Johnson said. “Those guys are on their own now. They’ve got Reds above them and below them. We were getting ready to go in.”

He let his voice trail off.

Hunter bit his lip hard. This was certainly not in the plan.

But then a bolt from the blue. The funny thing was, it hit Hunter and Johnson at the same moment.

“Tower One,” was all that Hunter had to say to him.

“Read my mind,” Johnson replied.

In minutes, Hunter, Johnson, fifty of his men, and fifty Free Canadians were carrying component parts and ammo for ten M-6s across the plaza to Tower One. The remaining Canadians took over Johnson’s CP and covered the hastily assembled team.

Compared to Tower Two, which was lit up with fire, smoke, and gun flashes, its twin looked dark and sinister. MOP hadn’t gotten around much to Number One. There were no lights on anywhere, no signs of life. It looked like a huge black monolith stretching to the stars.

Airstrikes against Tower Two were out of the question. They’d agreed on that back in Nantucket. Even if they could somehow get more Su-34s down from the Isakov, if one of the powerful fighter-bombers unloaded all its ordnance on the tower’s midsection, combined with the entire building being wired with explosives, it might send it crashing to the ground. The same for the Kamov gunships, if they attacked it repeatedly.

The M-6 was a much more precise weapon. Its HE shells went where you wanted them to go and caused a fire, but not an overload of structural damage. Or so they hoped. Nothing was ever certain in war. But the situation was getting desperate and they would have to chance it.

So they were going to bring the artillery pieces up to the same floors in Tower One that corresponded with those where their friends were trapped inside Tower Two, put the guns back together, and fire across at the enemy. Artillery support from the fiftieth floor.

But then they hit a roadblock of the strangest kind.

All the entryways for Tower One were not only locked tight, they were covered with plastic explosives. Warning signs, hanging everywhere, declared that any tampering with the locks would result in the detonation of all the explosives ringing the huge building. The notices were simply signed “MOP.”

Half the artillery team dispersed, trying to find another way of entry or maybe a break in the line of interconnected plastic explosives. But when they all returned to the starting point, the universal report was the same: They could find no Achilles’ heel.

“Fucking Russians,” Hunter spat. It would take days for the JAWS guys to deactivate all the plastique around the bottom of Tower One. There was literally tons of it.

“What they do is never pretty,” Johnson said, “but it always seems to work.”

Then one of Johnson’s men found a computer circuit box next to the building’s main entrance. It seemed designed to take a four-digit code, which would turn off the miles-long string of explosives and open the doors.

“That sounds easy,” Johnson said. “Got any ideas for the code?”

“N-K-V-D?” Hunter suggested—he was no good at these things.

Johnson shrugged and began to enter it. But before he could punch ENTER, a figure came out of the darkness and grabbed him.

Johnson’s guys were on top of the assailant in a flash. Hunter and Johnson added their M-16s to the dozens of weapons pointed at the man on the ground.

He was wearing a hooded overcoat and was tensed up as if ready to take them all on in a fight.

They got him to his feet and patted him down for weapons. Only then did Hunter flip back the hood.

They found themselves looking at a man about fifty, thin face, almost regal-looking. Under the cloak, he was wearing a battered and burned Russian Army uniform with colonel’s leaves.

He was also wearing a patch over his right eye.

“The code is U … S … S … R,” he told them in heavily accented English. “Had you punched in anything else, it would have detonated everything.”

Before any of the Americans could say a word, the man punched in the code and then ran back into the night. He called over his shoulder to them, “And the elevators still work.”

They did not pursue him. The doors opened, and they rushed the M-6 components into the lobby of Tower One. They pressed every elevator button they could find.

“How the hell did you arrange that?” Johnson asked Hunter, still incredulous over the encounter outside.

Hunter shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m just glad you saw him, too.”

The fifty Free Canadians stayed on the bottom floor, covering their six.

Hunter and the Righteous Brothers took a total of twenty-five elevators up to the forty-eighth floor, bodies jammed in with jigsaw pieces of M-6s. It all seemed so surreal to Hunter, just like everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He still had the taste of oranges in his mouth and he hadn’t been to sleep in almost five days. A lot of weird things were happening—more than usual.

But the man with the eye patch was the weirdest.

Hunter was astonished by how quickly Johnson’s men could put the M-6s together. They were loaded and ready to go in under two minutes, and that included equipping each with a pair of mini-tires to help mobility.

Johnson’s men pushed each of the ten guns up to windows looking right across at Tower Two, where the assault team was trapped. They looked like cannons on an old-time sea galleon, getting ready to deliver a broadside.

Now Hunter and Johnson talked strategy. If something like this was going to work, then they first wanted to clear out the NKVD troops on the floors below their trapped friends and hopefully open up an escape route down.

But then two problems instantly popped up. The first was they didn’t know exactly where their friends were at that moment.

“The last time I talked to Bull, he was trying to make his way back down from forty-eight,” Johnson said. “And then his radio went dead.”

“So did they go down a floor?” Hunter wondered out loud. “Or are they still trapped on forty-eight?”

It made a big difference in where they would aim their guns.

Problem two: The way the exterior facade of the Twin Towers had been designed, it was difficult to tell one floor from the other when looking directly across the divide between the two mammoth buildings.

“In theory, we should be parallel to each other,” Johnson said. “But these buildings are so damn big, we’d have to consider the curvature of the Earth if we decided to guesstimate where to put the ordnance. That would be very dangerous for Bull and the guys.”

Even through night-vision goggles they couldn’t see clearly into the next building; they just weren’t close enough. Making it worse, the NKVD had shut off just about all the lights in Tower Two by now, including those in the stairways and in the office spaces adjacent to them. All this was totally unexpected, but the unexpected had to be expected in combat.

Johnson took off his battle hat and wiped his face with his hands. “How the hell do we do this, Hawk?”

Suddenly, Hunter jumped to his feet and started running for the elevators.

“Stand by,” he told Catfish. “I’ll try to fix this.”

Johnson heard the buzzing about five minutes later.

He and his men knew what it was right away. Pressed up against the windows, they watched as the clown plane streaked by them in a flash of light.

It did a hard bank and was suddenly circling the midsection of Tower Two, going in the opposite direction. It went around the building three times. On the fourth orbit, the clown plane’s engine gave out a mighty screech and suddenly it was standing up on its tail, hovering in flight.

Johnson’s men were astonished by the maneuver. Their CO just laughed.

“He’s done this before,” he told them.

They watched as Hunter stuck his hand out the plane’s open glass panel and fired a flare into a window right on the corner of the building.

At the same moment, Johnson’s radiophone came alive.

It was Hunter.

“Bad guys on forty-seven, ten ball in the corner pocket,” was all he said. Then the nose of the little plane came down, and it was gone in a flash.

Johnson clicked the radio twice then yelled to his men, “Go to the light, brothers!”

Hunter had veered away from the building just seconds before the M-6s fired. He had the best view of anyone of what happened next.

It really did look like a broadside coming from one old warship to another. This was no two-shot mini-barrage. It was a ten-cannon fusillade. The multiple streaks of fire crashed into the windows of the forty-seventh floor’s southeast corner—but then blew out the other side, carrying a wave of flame and debris that was so powerful it disrupted the air flow around the circus plane. Some of the booby traps in the inner offices must have detonated, Hunter guessed, because Tower Two suddenly began to shake. He could see it plainly with his night-vision goggles.

“Stay together, baby,” he whispered, desperately battling his controls to stay level. “You’re made of good old US concrete and steel. You can take more than that.”

For several long moments, though, he was sure the building was going to topple right over.

But then it stopped shaking. There was still a lot of fire and smoke, but everything seemed to settle down a little.

Hunter let out a long whistle of relief. Tower Two remained standing.

It had been a case of bend not break.