It took a moment for his unwilling mind to fully absorb what had happened.
And then he began to scream.
In every explosion, there is a violent outward rush of air, followed by a rapid compression as the hungry vacuum draws the displaced air back toward its center. This is the principle by which demolition experts will set off charges of HMX, TNT, and ammonium nitrate inside buildings to make them collapse upon themselves. The larger the initial release of energy, the more significant this effect can be, and the suction after the Times Square blast was enormous — blowing out windows, tearing doors off their hinges, bringing down steel scaffoldings, toppling walls, lifting motor vehicles off the ground, and pulling human beings into its monstrous throat as if they weighed nothing at all. Eyewitnesses to the catastrophe would later compare the sound of the inrushing air to that of a train moving toward them at top speed.
Above the VIP platform on Forty-second Street, the tortured groan of metal grew louder with each passing moment as the Astrovision display’s structural supports, badly damaged from the force of the detonation, and further weakened by the subsequent vacuum effect, continued to bend and twist past their tolerance.
Within seconds of the bombing, the giant television had tilted sideways on the uptown face of One Times Square, where it hung like a crooked picture frame, hundreds of pounds of glass spilling from its shattered screen and fluorescent discharge tubes. The broken glass poured down onto the street in a mangling torrent, lacerating flesh, severing veins and arteries, amputating limbs, slicing people open as if with daggers even as they ran to escape it, claiming dozens of victims before the echoes of the blast had died down. In mere minutes the pavement below had become covered with a grisly slick of blood that overspilled the curb and ran tendrils down to the sewers, backing up at the debris-clogged gratings.
The blizzard of shards came on in waves as more of the screen’s fastenings bent and snapped, shifting it farther to one side, then a little farther, and still farther, tilting it nearly ninety degrees from its original position.
At last, with a final protesting groan, it succumbed to gravity and crashed to the earth.
In the bright glare of the fires sweeping the streets, the shadow of the descending screen spread over the crowd like a huge mantle of darkness. Trapped by their own numbers, the men, women, and children below could only scream as it came plunging down on their heads, crushing many to death under the sheer weight of its thirty- foot-long metal frame and shattered electronic guts, maiming others with a shrapnel storm of steel, wire, and glass.
It was eight minutes into the year 2000 when this happened.
Two minutes later, the first of the satchel charges planted around the square detonated.
“This is the 911 operator, what is the emergency?”
“Thank God, thank God, the line’s been busy, I’m here at a pay phone and I didn’t think I’d ever get through —”
“Ma’am, what is the emergency?”
“My daughter, she’s… her eyes, oh Jesus almighty, her
“Is this a child you’re talking about?”
“Yes, yes, she’s only twelve. My husband and I, we wanted her to be here tonight… we thought… oh, shit, never mind that, please, you’ve got to help her—”
“Ma’am, listen to me, you need to calm down. Am I correct that you’re on Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue?”
“Yes, yes, how did you…?”
“Your location automatically shows on our computers—”
“Then get somebody over here, damn it! Get somebody over here
“Ma’am, it’s very important that you listen to my instructions. We are aware of the situation in Times Square. There are rescue teams arriving as we speak, but it will take them some time to reach everyone, and they are going to have to prioritize. I need to know what condition your daughter is in—”
“Ma’am, please try and cooperate with me. A lot of people need assistance—”
“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I
Sirens lashed the air, shrieky and urgent, throwing an ear-piercing lattice of sound over the city. On the streets and highways, fleets of emergency vehicles rushed toward Times Square with their tires screeching and flashers throbbing on their rooftops.
Escorted by two police cruisers, the first EMS crew reached the scene at 12:04 A.M. and hastily established a triage on Forty-fourth Street off Broadway. Victims were evaluated according to the seriousness of their injuries and the ability of the paramedics to treat them with the limited resources at their disposal. Ambulatory patients with minor cuts and burns were steered toward an ad hoc first-aid station near the parked medical van. Those in the worst condition were laid out on stretchers, and when no more stretchers were available, on whatever space could be cleared along the pavement. Scores of individuals were intubated with glucose-and-saline IVs. Oxygen was given to many more. Broken bones were splinted. Hemorrhaging wounds were stanched. Painkillers were administered to burn victims with blackened skin and charred clothing. There were nine cardiac cases in the immediate area requiring CPR and electronic defibrillation, two of whom expired before the overwhelmed emergency teams were able to get to them.
The dead were tagged and lined up on the street in double rows. Workers ran out of body bags within minutes and were forced to leave the corpses uncovered.
Around the corner on Broadway, a teenage boy and girl lay pinned under a heavy steel beam and scattered debris that had fallen from a construction site in the percussive shock wave of the blast. The young couple had been embracing when the bomb exploded and their bodies were trapped together and still partially entangled. The girl was dead, her chest horribly crushed. The boy had been spared because the beam had landed at a diagonal and come down across his legs rather than his body. Though semi-conscious, he was slipping into shock and losing a tremendous amount of blood from his ruptured femoral artery.
Ignoring the threat to their own lives from raging flames and falling, burning debris, TAC-team cops from One-Truck had been laboring to extricate him even before the EMS ambulances arrived, carrying off broken masonry by the armload, and hurrying to deploy Jaws of Life hydraulic spreaders and multi-chamber rescue bags from their vehicle. Only two inches thick when deflated, the neoprene airbags had been easily inserted between the pavement and the beam, then connected by an inlet hose to a compressed air tank and joystick controller. The officer operating the joystick carefully expanded the bag to its maximum height of four feet, keeping a close eye on the pressure gauge centered in his command console. To prevent further injury to the boy, it was vital that the lift be gradual, with no more than fourteen to sixteen inches of inflation at a time.
By 12:08 the boy had been freed from underneath the beam and wheeled away on a gurney to exultant cheers from rescue workers. But neither they nor their lifesaving equipment were about to gain a respite: someone had been heard screaming for help underneath yet another pile of rubble across the street.
With the police, medical teams, and firefighters on Forty-fourth Street struggling to their job under these hazardous, chaotic conditions, it was simplicity itself for Nick Roma’s man Bakach to slip past their attention, drop his satchel charge on the ground near the EMS vehicle, and then nudge it under the vehicle’s chassis with the toe of his shoe.
Minutes after the sidewalk triage was set up outside her window, the barmaid on shift at Jason’s Ring, a tavern on Forty-fourth Street, began passing out bottled drinking water to grateful rescue workers and victims. There was a large stock in the basement and her boss had been hauling it up himself by the carton, totally unconcerned with what it was costing him in future profits.
The barmaid had just gone to the rear of the tavern for a fresh supply when she heard a loud boom behind her on the street, snapped her head around in terror, and saw the EMS vehicle blow apart in a dazzling orange-blue fireball. A millisecond later, smoking hunks of wreckage came streaking through the window of the tavern, smashing it to countless pieces, slamming into walls, breaking bottles, crashing onto the bartop like some bizarre meteor shower. The blast of heat that came scorching through the broken window at the same time rocked her back on her
