steel through which they had to move. The women were garishly dressed, like the women in the stills outside the porno cinemas. They seemed to move through different levels of hell, the void of a sky with no stars, the streetlamps a puslike spurt of yellow.
The tourists, four married couples from a small town in Ohio, their children grown, had decided to take a trip to New York as a sort of celebration. They had completed a certain stage in their lives, fulfilled a necessary destiny. They had married, they had brought up children, they had been able to have moderately successful careers. Now there would be a new beginning for them, the start of a new kind of life. The main battle had been won.
The triple-X cinemas didn't interest them, there were plenty in Ohio. What did interest and frighten them about Times Square was that it was so ugly and the people filling the streets seemed so evil. The tourists all wore great big red I Love New York buttons that they had purchased on their first day. No one of the women took off her button and threw it into the gutter.
'Let's get out of here,' she said.
The group turned and walked back toward Sixth Avenue, away from the great corridor of neon. They had almost turned the corner when they heard a distant boom and then a faint rustle of wind, and then down the long avenues from Ninth to Sixth came rushing a tornado of air filled with soda cans, garbage baskets and a few cars that seemed to be flying. With an animal instinct the group turned the corner of Sixth Avenue out of the path of the rushing wind, but were swept off their feet by a tumult of air. From far away they heard the crashing of buildings failing to the ground, the screams of thousands of dying people. They stood crouched low in the shelter of the corner, not knowing what had happened.
They had walked just outside the radius of destruction caused by the explosion of the nuclear bomb. They were eight survivors of the greatest calamity that had befallen a peacetime United States.
One of the men struggled to his feet and helped the others. 'Fucking New York,' he said. 'I hope all the cabdrivers got killed.'
The police patrol car that moved slowly through traffic between Seventh and Eighth avenues held two young cops, one Italian and one black. They didn't mind being stuck in traffic, it was the safest place in the precinct. They knew that down the darker side streets they could flush thieves stealing radios out of cars, low-grade pimps and muggers making menacing moves toward the peaceful pedestrians of New York, but they didn't want to get involved in those crimes. Also, it was now a policy of the New York Police Department to allow petty crimes. There had spread in New York a sort of license for the underprivileged to prey on the successful law-abiding citizens of the city. After all, was it right that there were men and women who could afford fifty thousand-dollar cars with radios and music systems worth a thousand dollars, while there were thousands of homeless who didn't have the price of a meal or who could not afford a sterile healthy needle for a fix? Was it right that these well-to-do, mentally fat, placid citizens, who had the effrontery to walk the streets of New York without a gun or even a lethal screwdriver in their pockets, felt they could enjoy the fabulous sights of the greatest city on earth and not pay a certain price? After all there still was a spark in America of that ancient revolutionary spirit that could not resist certain temptations. And the courts of law, the higher echelons of the police, the editorials of the most respectable newspapers slyly endorsed the republican spirit of thievery, mugging, burglaries, rapes and even murders on the streets of New York. The poor of the city had no other recourse; their lives had been blighted by poverty, by a stultified family life, the very architecture of the city. Indeed one columnist made a case that all these crimes could be laid at the door of Louis Inch, the real estate lord who was restructuring the city of New York with mile-high condos that shut off the sun with slats of steel.
The two police officers watched Blade Booker leave the Times Square Bar.
They knew him well. One officer said to the other, 'Should we follow him?' and the other said, 'A waste of time, we could catch him in the act and he'd get off.' They saw the big blonde and her john come out and take the same route up toward Ninth Avenue. 'Poor guy,' one of the cops said, 'he thinks he's going to get laid and he's gonna get rolled.' The other cop said, 'He'll have a lump on his head as big as his hard-on.' They both laughed.
Their car still moving slowly by inches, both policemen watched the action on the street. It was midnight, their shift would soon be over, and they didn't want to get into anything that would keep them out on the street. They watched the innumerable prostitutes stand in the way of pedestrians, the black drug dealers hawking their wares as boldly as a TV pitchman, the muggers and pickpockets jostling prospective victims and trying to engage tourists in conversation. Sitting in the darkness of the patrol car and gazing out on the streets bright with neon lights, they saw all the dregs of New York slouching toward their particular hells.
The two cops were constantly alert, afraid that some maniac would shove a gun through the window and start shooting. They saw two drug hustlers fall into step beside a well-dressed man, who tried to hurry away but was restrained by four hands. The driver of the patrol car pressed the gas pedal and drew up alongside. The drug hustlers dropped their hands; the well-dressed man smiled with relief. At that moment both sides of the street caved in and buried Forty-second Street from Ninth to Seventh avenues.
All the neon lights of the Great White Way, fabulous Broadway, were blotted out. The darkness was lit by fires, buildings burning, bodies on fire. Flaming cars moved like torches in the night. And there was a great clanging of bells and sustained shrieking of sirens as fire engines, ambulances and police vehicles moved into the stricken heart of New York.
Ten thousand people were killed and twenty thousand were injured when the nuclear bomb planted by Gresse and Tibbot exploded in the Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
The explosion was a great boom of sound followed by a howling wind and then the screaming of cement and steel tom asunder. The blast did its damage with mathematical precision. The area from Seventh Avenue to the Hudson River and from Forty-second to Forty-fifth streets was completely flattened. Outside that area, the damage was comparatively minimal. It was the mercy and the genius of Gresse and Tibbot that radiation was lethal only within that area.
All through the borough of Manhattan, glass windows shattered and cars in the streets were smashed by falling debris. And within an hour after the explosion the bridges of Manhattan were clogged with vehicles fleeing the city to New Jersey and Long Island.
Of the dead more than 70 percent were black or Hispanic; the other 30 percent were white New Yorkers and foreign tourists. On Ninth and Tenth avenues, which had become a camping ground for the homeless, and in the Port Authority Building itself, in which many transients were sleeping, the bodies were charred into small logs.
CHAPTER
15
THE WHITE HOUSE Communications Center received news of the atom bomb explosion in New York City exactly six minutes after midnight, and the duty officer immediately informed the President. Twenty minutes later President Francis Kennedy addressed the Congress. He was attended by Vice President Du Pray, Oddblood Gray and Christian Klee.
Kennedy was very grave. In the most crucial moment of his life, there was no time for anything but the most straightforward dialogue. Officially he was no longer President of the United States. But he spoke as if he still had full authority as chief of state.
'I come to you tonight without rancor,' he said. 'This great tragedy, this great blow to our nation must unite us. You must now know that I took the right course. This is the latest blow in the terrorist Yabril's plan, the one he thinks will make the United States of America sink to its knees, capitulate to his demands. We must now come to the conclusion that there is a far-reaching conspiracy against the United States. We are compelled now to gather our strength and act together. Surely now we must be in agreement.
'I therefore ask you to nullify your impeachment of me. But let me be honest, if you do not, I must still try to save this country. I will reject your act of impeachment, declare it unlawful and declare martial law to prevent any further damaging acts of terror. Let me inform you that this Congress, this glorious body that has protected the freedom of America throughout its 'lifetime, is now protected by six divisions of the Secret Service and an Army Special Forces regiment. When this crisis is over, you may again vote to impeachment, but not until then. This is the
