Moussa was in the far right corner.
Did he have grenades? It could be a bluff, but the worst was always possible with the Lebanese Butcher. He had been known to bring a machine pistol to a child's birthday party.
Carroll had to make a quick decision, and he had to make it for everybody trapped in the restaurant.
The people sprawled on the floor were inching toward panic; they were close to rising en masse and bolting for the door. This would be perfect for Hussein Moussa. In the inevitable confusion, Carroll wouldn't run the risk of shooting. Moussa would have his best chance of escape.
Food was spattered everywhere on the dining room floor. Carroll finally reached for a platter holding an unfinished meal of pungent lamb and rice. With a sudden, wrist snap, he hurled the dripping plate hard against the kitchen door, then shifted instantly into a professional shooting crouch-a two-handed pistol grip with both arms rigid. He was ready. He was as confident as he could be right now.
Moussa came up again, shooting. The Butcher fired twice at the slapping noise against the kitchen door. Son of a bitch had a grenade in his left hand! Arch Carroll squeezed the trigger.
Moussa looked incredibly surprised.
Blood gushed from Hussein Moussa's forehead. He slid down against a table still covered with mounds of food and tableware, dragging the cloth, plates, wine, and water glasses with him. He spit out a throaty curse across the room.
Then the terrorist's gun rose again.
Carroll shot Hussein Moussa a second time, and the bullet exploded his right cheek. The Lebanese Butcher fell heavily onto the back of a fat diner lying on the floor.
Carroll shot Moussa again as the man trapped underneath wiggled like a beached fish. The top of the terrorist's head flapped off like loose skin.
There was an eerie, terrible silence inside the Sinbad Star. A second or two passed like that. Then loud crying started again. There were angry shouts and relieved hugging all over the restaurant.
His gun thrust stiffly forward, Arch Carroll moved awkwardly across the chaotic room. He was still in a police school crouch. It was as if he were locked into that position. His hands and legs were trembling.
He carefully examined the Rashid brothers. Wadih and Anton were still alive. He looked at Moussa. The Butcher was dead, and the world was instantly a better place in which to live.
“Please call me an ambulance,” Carroll spoke softly to the astonished restaurant owner. “I'm sorry. I'm very sorry this had to happen in your establishment. These men are terrorists. Professional killers.”
The restaurant owner continued to stare with disbelief at Carroll. His black eyes were small, shiny beads stuck in his broad forehead, and he gave Arch Carroll a piercing look.
“And what are you? What are
4
Green Band struck the Wall Street financial district at 6:34 P.M. on December 4.
There had been no demands, no further warning or attempt at justification of any kind. There was no reason given why the massive attack came an hour and twenty-nine minutes past the deadline. When it happened, it was like a volcano of heat. One small, essential corner of New York seemed for a moment to tilt, then spin out of balance. And the black Manhattan sky, which had been settling down in wintry sullenness, came abruptly alive with flares of chaotic light, much like a battlefield at night.
Under towering, half-mile-high plumes of roiling black smoke, the canyons of Wall Street suddenly blazed with fierce individual fires.
The flames were like a blitzkrieg raging out of control on Wall and Broad streets, on Pine, South William, and Exchange Place. The scene of sudden random destruction reminded some news observers of Beirut; others thought back to banished memories of Berlin, to London during World War II, to North and South Vietnam.
Shrill, deafening choruses of police and hospital emergency sirens screamed through the glowing darkness. The streets were thick with uniformed police, hospital medics, forensic vans, detectives' and commanders' vehicles. Army, network news, and New York Police Department helicopters chattered overhead, barely avoiding tragic collisions among themselves.
A well-known and respected eyewitness TV reporter stood, without hat or coat, on what had recently been the stately corner of Wall and Broadway, right under Trinity Church spires. He spoke solemnly into a gaping ABC videotape camera lens. Genuine awe was softening his usually thespian voice.
“Thus far this is our definite information, and more is coming in all the time… The following sites in the Wall Street area were either partially or completely destroyed tonight: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where over one hundred billion dollars in foreign-owned gold bullion is stored… Salomon Brothers, one of the country's largest traders in government securities… Merrill Lynch at One Liberty Plaza… the Depository Trust Company, which handles debits and credits for brokerages via computer… Lehman Brothers, an old-line investment house…
“Also reportedly struck during the siege of unexplained bombings were safe deposit and storage vaults at Chase and the U.S. Trust Company; the New York offices of NASDAQ; the venerable New York Stock Exchange Building; Three Hanover Square, which is where Manufacturers Hanover and the European American Bank were located.
“The full extent of this awesome damage, the complete toll, will not be known tonight. Probably not for days, from the look of this incredible chaos. First estimates of the actual number of explosions range from a dozen to as many as forty separate blasts… It is an awful, awful scene here in what remains of the once proud and lofty financial district of New York.”
Green Band had struck like an invisible army.
Two justifiably nervous New York City patrolmen, Alry Simmons and Robert Havens, were carefully threading a path through the smoldering ruins of the Federal Reserve Bank located on Maiden Lane. The two men were attached at their belts to five-hundred-yard-long safety lines snaking back toward the street.
The patrolmen were now deep inside what had once been the Fed's massive and richly ornamental public lobby. Indeed, the gray-and-blue limestone, the sandstone bricks of the Federal Reserve, had always impressed visitors with a sense of their durability and authority. The fortlike appearance, the stout iron bars on every window, had reinforced the image of self-importance and impregnability. The image had obviously been a sham.
The destruction that officers Simmons and Havens found downstairs in the coin section was difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to assess. Mountainous coin-weighing machines had been blown apart like a child's toys. Fifty-pound coin bags were strewn open everywhere.
The marble floor was easily three feet deep in quarters, dimes, and nickels. Building support columns had been knocked down everywhere on the basement floor. The entire structure seemed to be trembling.
In the deepest basement of the Federal Reserve Bank was the largest single accumulation of gold stored anywhere in the world. It all belonged to foreign governments. The Fed both guarded the gold and kept track of who owned what. In an ordinary change of ownership, the Fed merely moved gold from one country's bin to another's. The gold was transported on ordinary metal carts, like books in a library. The security system in the deep basement was so highly elaborate that even the bank's president had to be accompanied when he ventured into the gold storage area.
Now patrolmen Havens and Simmons were alone in the cavernous basement. Gold was everywhere around them. Rivers of shining gold ran through the dust and rubble. Gold bars, more than they could possibly count, surrounded them. There was well over a hundred billion dollars at the day's market price of three hundred and eighty-six dollars an ounce, all within their reach.
Patrolman Robert Havens was hyperventilating, taking enormously deep breaths. His broad, flat face was expressionless.
Suddenly both emergency policemen stopped inching forward. Robert Havens let out a sharp gasp. “Christ Jesus! What the hell is
An armed Federal Reserve Bank guard was sitting on a caned wooden chair, directly blocking their path from the gold section into the Fed's main garage. The cane chair still smoldered.
The guard was staring directly into Robert Havens's eyes, but he was beyond words. He was horribly burned, charred a blistering charcoal black. The ghastly sight made them so sick, they almost missed the most important clue…
Wrapped around the bank guard's right arm was a shiny, bright green band.
As Archer Carroll carefully maneuvered his battered station wagon along the Major Deegan Expressway, the words of the Atlantic Avenue restaurant owner came back to him with the persistence of an unanswerable philosophical question:
He glanced at his tired face in the rearview mirror. Yeah, what are you, Arch? The Rashids and Hussein Moussa are bad people, but you're some kind of okay national hero, right?
He was drained, completely numb. He wanted everything to be quiet and still inside his throbbing head.
And what are you, mister?
“Nothing worth a shit,” he finally answered in the general direction of the station wagon's fogged windshield. He felt as if he were traveling inside a sealed capsule. The world he could see beyond the grimy car windows had retreated one step farther away from him.
He turned on the car radio, looking for a diversion from his mood.
Immediately he heard the news about Wall Street, delivered by a voice edged in the hushed hysteria so favored by newscasters when they describe events of national importance. Carroll turned up the volume.
Along with the newscaster's tensely delivered reportage were a couple of man-on-the-street interviews recorded against a brassy background of screaming sirens. The people spoke in shocked tones.
Carroll tightened his hands on the steering wheel. His mind was crowded with realistic images of urban guerrilla destruction. He understood that Wall Street was a perfect target for any determined terrorist group-but he couldn't make the jump from his thoughts to the horrible reality of what had just happened.
