followed almost punctured his eardrums before he could get the phones off. What he couldn’t get off was his eyes from his LCD screen — and one seething, snarling, angry motherfucker firing a.38 and blowing the top half of Angela’s head clear off before pumping two into the doctor. The blood spray and brain matter redecorated the sleazy room in an instant. All of it was caught in glorious digital color, in two angles, with stereophonic 48K sound.
Alzir El Benhan uttered a curse in the middle of his interrupted prayer. The 24 other men in the room on the floor in prostate looked up to see his right shoulder bleeding and the hole in the thin sheet rock wall of room 107. They had heard the shots next door but thought it was only a loud, American TV program. The 24 jars sat in the center of the room and next to them syringes. Holding his shoulder, Alzir groaned, “Take the jars! Leave now!” Then he momentarily blacked out.
“Starlight Motel, North Conduit, shots fired, two people dead. Gunman still inside.” As he spoke with the 911 dispatcher, Wallace kept his eyes trained on the door to room 108. Then he realized he had his HD200X high def video camera in his bag. He got it out and pointed it at the door. He never saw Angela’s husband before, who the shooter almost certainly was. The two cameras in the room were trained on the bed and the gunman was not near it. Wallace figured that when the man left the room, he’d get a shot of him on the HD. The cops could use it as evidence. Then he decided to narrate the tape. “9:10 p.m. Starlight Motor Lounge, thirty seconds after shoots fired, Wallace Barnes, New York State licensed investigator, on an assignment for Mrs. … What’s this?” The zoom range of the mini HD actually afforded a close-up of both 107 and 108. Although the shooter hadn’t emerged from 108, men started piling out of 107. “Three…four…five… six…seven…eight. These guys are all coming out of the next door.”
The first NYPD unit bottomed out hitting the bump in the motel’s driveway at high speed, creating a shower of sparks from its undercarriage. The New York cops quickly assumed that the men fleeing 107 were the perpetrators and winged out the doors of their cars, training their guns on them, and shouting, “Police FREEZE!”
The men were startled and Wallace could see the hesitation in their motion. “
“Put your hands up! Drop to your knees! NOW!”
Inside room 107, the men who were left tried to reason out their next steps. “We should make a run for it. Some of us will get through and that will be enough to at least inflict some casualty.”
“We should infect ourselves right here, then try to escape.”
“We should kill the cops and proceed with the plan immediately.”
Then Alzir spoke. “You must proceed. You must not fail. You can still get away, but go now.”
In excruciating pain, Alzir pointed to the suitcase under the bed. One of the men dragged it out, opened it, and found ten, older MAC 10s and a hundred loaded mags. The men quickly grabbed the outdated yet still deadly arms. Those who had trained in Afghanistan treated the weapons correctly; the four who had not trained with Al Qaeda watched and tried to emulate what the others did. Fifteen seconds later, all clips were in, safeties off, and extra clips stuffed in belts and pockets. Then two men broke the glass in the window to the room and began shooting at the cop car as two others went through the doorway.
“Holy shit,” Wallace said as World War III exploded in his camera’s eyepiece.
The two cops recoiled behind the patrol car’s doors as the fusillade of bullets ripped the sheet metal to shreds. One officer was hit in the foot and sprang back across the front seat in agony. The other reached the radio and frantically yelled, “10–13, 10–13, 10–13!”
The men kept coming through the door as the two in the window laid down cover fire. The cop dropped the radio mic and took the shotgun from the dashboard mount. He waited for a lull and pumped two blasts at two guys trying to make it across the lot. They went down like bags of bricks. The guns and something else they were carrying crashed to the ground. The staccato sound of return fire from the machine guns made him retreat back to the rear of the car. More men were leaving the room. The cop took a deep breath, turned, squeezed the trigger, and clipped one the instant he appeared between two dark cars.
More units started pulling up. One blue-and-white unit got totally shot up before the officers ever knew what hit them. The other cops, seeing this, held back to a looser perimeter. A responding sergeant quickly accessed the scene and used his portable radio. “113 Baker portable to Central K. Alert all units, heavy weapons at scene. Multiple perpetrators trying to flee. Request ESU. Get air units up.”
Meanwhile, back in room 108, the scene of the original crime, Sal D’Martino sat in an armchair looking at the dead bodies of his wife and her lover, the small war out the window all but non-existent to him. He raised the gun to his temple.
Wallace was so scared and yet still videotaping the battle before him that he didn’t notice the flash on the monitor screen of his remote cameras as they, still in record mode, captured the muzzle flash as Sal went to meet his wife.
The NYPD had kicked the shootings at the Starlight Motel up the food chain of crimes to Major Event. Every cop in the borough of Queens was now heading for the shoddy inn on North Conduit. Emergency Services Unit en- route hearing the reports on heavy weapons called for “Big Bertha,” the N.Y.P.D.’s heavy weapons truck. Many units set up roadblocks at one-mile intervals from the motel. Their orders: “Shut down everything trying to get in or out.” Because the motel was very near JFK Airport, NYPD alerted Port Authority and they went into full prevent-defense. Ten PA cars rolled across runways and taxiways to become a virtual rolling border, guarding fortress JFK. When they rolled up to the perimeter fence, they immediately caught two men trying to scale the wire. One PA cop was injured as the bad guys decided to shoot it out. Twenty cops in cars with shotguns easily outgunned two guys with machine pistols with no cover to hide behind other than a chain-linked fence. Two others were spotted approaching the fence and ran off when the spotlights of the cop cars shone on them.
Aviation was waiting for tower clearance to swoop down on the area, but JFK landed dozens of planes an hour and the tower had to halt all landings so that a helicopter wouldn’t foul up the intake manifold of a jumbo jet with 300 or more souls on it.
The PA cops saw enough of the intention of these men to assume JFK was their target. They ordered a ground freeze and declared the airport in lockdown.
That action triggered the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which brought ten more federal agencies into the mix. JFK being a major potential terrorism target, every conceivable asset that the combined agencies could muster was already conveniently pre-stationed there. That meant that every state and federal anti-crime, terrorism, biological, nuclear, chemical, conventional, and support unit was a five-minute roll from the Starlight Motel.
Blue-helmeted members of the Hercules Anti-Terrorism Squad, in all their body armor, started advancing towards the motel. Regular patrol units held ground and laid down support fire as the heavy-weapons guys swarmed in to neutralize the threat. There were six men left in the room. One was Alzir who was bleeding and handing fresh clips to the two men firing from the window. That left three to try to escape. Each tucked the glass jars inside their shirts, waited until the next volley of fire, then bolted out the door. They were immediately cut down, literally at the knees, from four heavy weapons cops who had snuck around to each side of the room. Unlike the movies, these guys didn’t have to yell “Freeze” and thereby give the bad guy a shot at making their kids orphans. They aimed low and took out their legs, “Perpetrator Shot Running” was the police terminology.
A sergeant tossed a flash bang into the windows like a Ranger tossing a grenade into a pillbox on Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Kilgore/Schermuly Stun Grenade quieted the room in an instant. Four more body-armored cops hit the room as the four outside secured the weapons from the ones who got clipped trying to run. In the two minutes and twenty-two seconds the heavy weapons squad was on the scene the situation had been stabilized.
Wallace had gotten all of it on tape. As the surviving bad guys were being dragged to an interrogation area set up in a command van in the street, Wallace emerged from his car and went over to the heavy weapons unit commander.
“Commander, I’m Wallace Barnes. I was on the job thirty years out of the 42 in South Bronx. I was on a P.I. stakeout when this went down. I got video of the two homicides next door, and, as far as I know, that perp is still in the room.”
“Two homicides! What room?”
“108.”
