The Zero Hour

He loved flying the ASTAR, loved the look and feel of it. It was a French-made helicopter-actually, it was produced by a French-American firm-and so it didn’t operate in quite the same way as American choppers. That made it a tough helicopter to fly.

For one thing, the ASTAR’s rotor system turned the opposite way from the American rotor system. When you were trimming it in flight, you had to put in opposite control movements for antitorque, to keep the nose straight. Instead of applying left pedal when you added power, you applied right pedal.

Once you got used to that, it was a pleasure. It was powered by a French jet engine, the Turbo Mecca, a 640-shaft-horsepower engine. It cruised at 120 knots, the fastest single there was. It was also expensive, costing over a million dollars.

But it was a beauty. The fuselage was of a unique design, sleekly built and sweeping in appearance. It was jet-black, with titanium and plum striping and a silver lightning bolt down the expanse of fuselage. Its windows were deep-tinted. Its blades were blue, its interior tan. There were even oriental rugs to make the executive passengers feel at home. It seated four passengers, and one pilot, comfortably; it was air-conditioned and equipped with a telephone and a CD player.

The ASTAR was different, too, in that it had a panoramic passenger area, a 180-degree field of view. Your basic American helicopter had club seating, whereas this was like the interior of a luxury car. The pilot and passengers occupied the same cabin space. Also, its cabin was far quieter than those in American choppers, in which you really couldn’t hold a conversation. In the ASTAR you could talk in normal tones.

Altogether, it was a spiffy helicopter, Dan Hammond thought, just the right one for his farewell flight.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, three Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aircraft were landing, bearing multiple cargoes of gear on pallets. There were radios and beepers and cellular phones and PBX telephone equipment; there was every tool and widget detector imaginable, from screwdrivers to Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and Haley & Webber E182 Multi-Burst stun grenades employing high candela and decibel levels: a dazzling array of state-of-the-art weapons, surveillance devices, communications equipment, and radiation-detection equipment for locating clandestine bombs or stolen fissionable material.

Separately, over the course of several hours, more than thirty members of the NEST render-safe team had arrived on commercial flights from around the country.

***

“All right, I want everything from Broad to Whitehall, and from Water to Pearl, secured and blocked off,” the man in the BOMB SQUAD wind-breaker announced to the squad members milling around him.

Sarah marched up to him and flashed her credentials. “Special Agent Cahill, FBI,” she said. “I’m in charge of this operation.”

“Oh, really?” the commanding officer of the Bomb Squad said, giving her a bored glance. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

The New York City Police Department’s Bomb Squad is the largest and oldest full-time bomb unit in the country. Operating out of the Sixth Precinct, at 233 West Tenth Street, between Hudson and Bleecker, it handles some thirteen hundred calls a year to look for and disarm explosives. The squad is made up of six teams of two detectives, labeled A through F; the commanding officer is a lieutenant, and below him are four sergeants.

The Bomb Squad is part of the NYPD’s Scientific Research Division, which is a unit of the Detective Bureau. But to be precise, though squad members wear gold badges, they are not detectives but “Detective-Specialists,” which is something of a slap in the face to this all-volunteer, brave-to-the-point-of-foolhardiness group.

According to the Patrol Guide protocol, the Bomb Squad can appear on a scene only when called in by the Emergency Service Unit. They had been summoned on this occasion by ESU after one of the patrolmen searching the area realized there was a serious possibility there was a bomb in the building. The patrolman was simply doing his duty.

Until NEST’s arrival, Sarah didn’t have a card to play: the Bomb Squad was in charge. But once NEST showed up, the unit’s Rules of Engagement-the most sweeping and comprehensive of any U.S. elite force-would place it unquestionably in charge.

There was a squealing of brakes. Sarah saw with enormous relief that NEST had arrived.

***

A CNN reporter was doing a stand-up in front of the tumultuous crowd surrounding the Network building on Moore Street.

Pappas and Ranahan stared at the television screen.

“… a bomb in this building,” the reporter was saying, “which houses a sensitive and highly secret Wall Street computer facility. In the basement of the building, according to police sources, there is believed to be as much as one thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.”