Black Market (28 page)

The Vets cabs appeared suddenly. They paraded single file out of an abandoned warehouse garage in downtown Manhattan. The cabs were assimilated into normal traffic flow until they branched onto Division and Catherine streets, leading toward the East River and FDR Drive.

Each of the cabs had been equipped with PRC-77 transmitter-receivers, known in Vietnam as “monsters”. The PRC units automatically scrambled and unscrambled all transmissions. There was no practical way the New York police could intercept messages traveling back and forth among the cabs.

There were six cabs, which could carry fourteen heavily armed Vets: an assault platoon with rifleman-snipers. M-60 gas-operated machine-gunners, a thumper man with an M-79 grenade launcher, and a communications operator.

The most spectacular touch in the commando raid was that the ground-attack force had air support. Two Cobra assault copters would be backing the Vets if any combat action started on the street.

David Hudson, who scouted and studied the street from the lead cab, was beginning to feel an unexpected sense of release. It was almost over. Finally, revenge. Finally, dignity.

He experienced some of his old combat sensations from Vietnam, only this time with a difference. A big, important difference.

This time they were going to be allowed to win.

A New York police detective, Ernie “Cowboy” Tubbs, who had been dragged unceremoniously out of bed to join the manhunt, saw one of the cabs go past on Division Street. Then he saw two more Vets cabs.

He turned to his partner, Detective Maury Klein, a short man in a black tent of a raincoat. Tubbs said, “Christ, that's them. That's Green Band. Bingo, Maury.”

Detective Klein, who was addicted to Rolaids and Pepto-Bismol, peered sorrowfully through the windshield. His stomach was already killing him. “Jee-sus Christ, Ernie! Half those bastards are supposed to be Special Forces.”

Tubbs shrugged and swung their late-model Dodge out from behind the line of yellow cabs. Only a single car separated them from the rearguard Vets cab. “We've spotted Green Band!” Tubbs rasped into the hand mike on his dashboard.

Maury Klein uneasily cradled an American 180 submachine gun in both arms. The assault gun looked terribly out of place inside the Dodge, a middle-class family car. The American 180 fired thirty rounds per second. It was almost never used in city fighting for that reason.

“This sucks, man.
Sucks!
” Marty Klein continued to complain. “Bar on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, I tangled with one Green Beret Special Forces dude. That was enough for me, forever!” The notion of mixing it up with ex-Special Forces veterans seemed like one of the worst ideas he'd ever had in his police force life. Maury Klein was a vet, too, class of 1953, Korea.

At Henry Street there were only a few traffic lights working. There was almost no other traffic. An eerie, dockside feeling pervaded the steamy gray area of lower Manhattan.

“Looks like they're going to the FDR Drive for sure… Entrance is down here somewhere. Right around Houston.”

“North or south?” Ernie Tubbs yelled to his partner.

“I think both ways. South for sure. We'll see it here any… there! That's it.”

Just then Tubbs spotted the dilapitated ramp to the south lanes of the drive.

The Vets cabs were approaching fast from both directions. The first cabs were already rattling up the crumbling stone and metal ramps.

Tubbs flicked on his hand mike again. “Contact! All Panther units. They're getting on the FDR! They're heading south! Over.”

Suddenly the rear Vets cab veered sharply. It tried to cut Tubbs off.

“Son of a bitch!”

Tubbs swerved left with skillful, near perfect timing. The unmarked police sedan continued to shoot up the half-blocked entranceway that didn't look wide enough anymore.

“Jesus Christ, Ernie! Watch the walls!”

The Vets cab, meanwhile, had finished its tailspin. It was blocking off every police car except one, Tubbs's, which had somehow slipped by. “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” Detective Tubbs yelled as he fought the unmarked car's steering wheel for control.

“All units, all units! They set a roadblock on the FDR! Repeat. There's a roadblock on the FDR! Over,”

The single police sedan was now screeching into teeming traffic, filling all three narrow, twisting lanes of the FDR south. A car slammed to a jolting stop behind. Horns blared from every possible direction.

The police car was hemmed in tight by two of the cabs. The black barrels of M-16s were jammed out both windows of the cab to their left.

Ernie Tubbs couldn't breathe. He was bottled in at fifty-five miles an hour. One of the M-16s fired a round. The warning shot flared over the sedan's roof like night tracers in a battle zone.

A Vet in military khakis and black greasepaint screamed over at Tubbs. His voice was muffled under the traffic whistle, but Tubbs could hear every word.

“Get off at the next stop! Get the fuck off this road!… Everybody but the driver, hands up! I said hands up! Hands up!”

Closing on the next exit, Tubbs spun his wheel hard right toward the guardrail. The unmarked police car shot at a seventy-degree angle toward the off ramp.

It bumped hard over loose plates, sending off sparks. The patrol car went up on two wheels and threatened to turn over. After a moment during which gravity seemed an indecisive force, the car finally bounced back onto all four wheels. It shimmied down the off ramp, then stopped dead on the bordering city street.

“We lost 'em! Over.” Ernie Tubbs screamed into his radio transmitter. “We lost 'em on the FDR!”

Detective Maury Klein finally whispered, “Thank fucking God.”

Inside 13 Wall Street, Carroll heard the news that Green Band had been spotted. He raced down the steep flights, taking two and three steps at a time to the street.

Everything was happening at once. Total bedlam. Squad cars were screeching up and down Wall Street and Broad and Water.

Carroll was carting an M-16 rifle, which felt weird bouncing against his body. Flashback time-he was an infantry soldier again… But mis was downtown Manhattan, not Vietnam.

His coat flew open as he ran, revealing the Browning as well as a heavy bulletproof vest. His heart was as chaotic as the street noise.

A radio squad car he passed relayed the latest information on Green Band. “They're moving at about thirty-five miles an hour. Six vehicles. They're all regular Checker cabs. All are heavily armed. They're proceeding east.”

It's a setup for something else, Carroll suddenly knew it.

What, though? What were the Vets going to do now? What was Colonel David Hudson's plan? How was he going to escape the tightening dragnet?

A silver-and-black Bell helicopter was waiting in a Kinney parking lot. A few weeks earlier the parking lot would have been filled with the luxury cars of inveterate Wall Street workaholics. A rate sign announced $14.50 plus NYC tax for twelve hours. The police helicopter was whirring like an outsize moth. It was ready to fly.

“M-Sixteen and a Bell chopper.” Arch Carroll winced as he jumped inside the hot, cramped helicopter. “Christ, this brings back memories. Hi, I'm Carroll,” he said to the police pilot.

“Luther Parrish,” the pilot grunted. He was a heavyset black man with a leather flak jacket and clear yellow goggle glasses. “You ex-'Nam? You look like it. Feel like it.” Parrish snapped a thick wad of gum as he talked.

“Class of 1970.” Arch Carroll purposely played it a little combat cool. The truth was, he hated choppers. He hated seeing the goddam things. He didn't like the idea of being suspended in air with nothing to rely on but slender blades that furiously slashed the air.

“How 'bout that! Class of seventy, too. Well, here we go again, sports fans. I take it you don't much like airplane rides?”

Before Carroll had a chance to answer, the copter jumped straight up from the parking lot. The ascent left Carroll's small intestines somewhere behind. The chopper pierced the smoky city afternoon, hugging the dusky walls of nearby buildings and cleverly avoiding swift winds sweeping off the river.

As the copter swung out wide toward the East River, another Bell joined in from due south.

“No, I'm not real crazy about helicopters. No offense, Luther.”

Adrenaline flowed wildly through Carroll's body. Down below, he could see traffic streaming on the FDR.

The police pilot shouted over the roaring rotors. “Beautiful day, man. You can see Long Island, Connecticut, almost see Paris, France.”

“Beautiful day to get shot in the fucking heart.”

Parrish snorted a laugh. “You been to 'Nam all right. Let's see, we've got two, maybe three, armed patrol helicopters on them right now. Pick up more help once we find out which borough they're goin' to. I think we'll be fine.”

“I hope you're right.”

“You see them down there? Little toy taxicabs. See? See right there?”

“Yeah, with little toy M-Sixteens, toy rocket launchers,” Carroll said to the pilot.

“You talk just like ex-infantry. Ironic-type shit. Makin' me all misty eyed.”

“Still infantry from the look of things. Except I'm afraid we're fighting the Green Berets today.”

The black pilot turned to Carroll with a knowing look. “They're
bad
dudes all right. Definitely Special Forces.” He nodded as if to a secret beat. He almost seemed proud of the Vets bravado. Their urban street-fighting style had hit a chord.

A thousand feet below, the FDR Drive was a delicate ribbon of silver and shiny jet black. The Vets cabs looked intensely yellow down there. As the lineup of cabs crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the two helicopters swung high and wide to avoid being seen. They actually disappeared briefly into low-flying clouds.

Carroll's shirt was already soaked through. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance. The world was slightly fuzzed and unreal. They were going to solve Green Band, after all.

On the Brooklyn side of the bridge, he could see that traffic was heavy but moving. The steady
whoosh
of cars, an occasional bleating horn, traveled all the way up to the cockpit.

“They're getting off at the exit for the Navy Yard! This is Carroll to control. The Vets convoy is exiting at the Navy Yard! They're proceeding northeast into Brooklyn!” Carroll screeched into the microphone.

Brooklyn

At that same instant, a deafening explosion jarred the underbelly of the helicopter with a jolt that rattled right through Carroll's bones. His head cracked hard against the metal roof, and sharp bolts of pain stabbed behind his eyes.

Then a second jarring blast struck the cockpit.

Splinters of glass flew in all directions. Star fractures cob-webbed across the windshield. Everywhere, metal was ringing with gunshots. Glaring red flashes were angrily ribboning the sky.

“Ohhh, goddamn, I'm hit. I'm hit,” Parrish moaned as he slumped forward.

A machine gun chattered loudly off to Carroll's left. He caught a brief glimpse of floating, blinking red lamps on the right and the hulking shapes of two choppers he hadn't seen before.

Christ! Two Cobras were attacking.

The sky filled with bright, jarring yellow orbs of light, with roaring fire and billowing black smoke. The companion police helicopter had disintegrated before Carroll's eyes.

Within seconds there was nothing left of the chopper but leaping gold-and-orange flames. Nothing but an eerie, fading afterimage in the sky.

Carroll could see that Luther Parrish had been badly hit. Puddles of blood were collecting from a wound on the side of his head. The electric circuits in the cockpit seemed to be completely out.

Heavy machine-gun fire suddenly welled up from below. The pilot moaned and grabbed his legs. The helicopter had begun to fall, to somersault and plummet.

Carroll crazily fired his M-16 at one of the attacking Cobras. The red light winked derisively-then the copter calmly disappeared from sight.

Carroll froze. The police helicopter suddenly flipped over. It was upside down. Blood was rushing, swirling through his head.

The helicopter was now in a deadfall, sailing and spinning into the Brooklyn Navy Yard below. A flat black rooftop, with a water tower mounted on it, suddenly loomed at the copter's windshield. Carroll could see them skimming over an expanse of shadowy factory buildings a block long, at least. They missed a smoking industrial chimney by inches. Then the copter's tail was clipped off by a high brick retaining wall.

A deserted grid of avenues and streets appeared through the windshield as the chopper cleared the last building. Cars were parked in long, uneven lines up both sides.

Carroll was familiar with helicopters from his many trips in Vietnam, though not how to fly. Reflexively he grabbed at the controls.

He was beyond all fear now, beyond anything he'd even felt in combat or police action. He was in a new realm-a place where he was acutely conscious of everything around him.

This was it, he thought. He was going to die.

The helicopter's belly cleanly sheared the rooftops off half a dozen parked cars. Carroll covered his face and shielded Parrish as best he could.

The helicopter struck the street on a side angle. It skidded, bounded violently, then issued a grinding shriek. Sparks, plumes of intense red flames, flew in every direction. Whole sides of parked automobiles, headlights, and bumpers were effortlessly cut away. A fire hydrant popped out of the sidewalk.

The helicopter plowed to a tearing, screaming, crunching halt against two crushed cars.

A man in a factory security uniform came running down the deserted street, zigzagging crazily toward the unbelievable accident. “Hey, hey! That's my car! That's my
car!
”

Carroll cradled the badly wounded pilot. “Grab hold. You just hold me,” he whispered, hoping the man wasn't already dead. “Just hold me, Luther. Don't let go.”

He began to half carry the hulking NYPD pilot away from the burning helicopter wreckage. His eyes nervously searched the skies for the attacking Cobras, but he could see nothing.

The choppers might as well have been a nightmare. The nightmare of Vietnam all over again.
But it was happening right here on the streets of Brooklyn
.