The Black Ships (20 page)

He weaved his way past a stopped cab and
raced across Lexington, driving straight into an underground parking structure.
He turned right and pulled into a spot against the heavy concrete wall. Hopping
out, he opened the back door.

Ellen was just unbuckling her seatbelt when
a hand clamped over her face, holding a cold wet cloth over her nose and mouth.
Kidnapping?
she managed to wonder before everything went black.

^~*~

“W
hat the hell are we doing?” Frank yelled suddenly, startling the
people in his office. 

Brecker shook his head in disgust. “Frank’s
right; everyone get across the hall into boardroom three. Even at this height,
we’re in danger if we stay on this side. The elevator core is made of concrete
and reinforced steel; that’s the only place that can save us from the blast.”

They ran out the door, suddenly aware of
how foolishly exposed they were. They ran down the hall for fifteen feet before
turning right and pouring into the empty meeting room. “The first five feet are
storage  and mechanical rooms,” shouted Brecker. “Everyone huddle right
here.” He chopped his hand towards a spot on the wall and the small crowd
complied. “The elevator shafts are behind this section.”

There was a short wait, almost
anticlimactic after their mad dash from Frank’s office. Frank was about to
suggest that maybe the bomb wouldn’t detonate when they heard a loud roar. At
first, it sounded like a large helicopter flying overhead but it continued to
grow in volume and a shock wave struck the building, knocking Frank’s head away
from the wall and leaving him dazed.

The shock wave was clearly visible through
the window for a few moments as it flowed across midtown, shattering windows
and tearing away loose structures such as gargoyles and water towers. Parts of
the ship traveled with the wave, embedding in buildings or tearing large chunks
out of their corners to rain debris on the pedestrians below. The expanding
dome of pressure quickly reached the top of the Secretariat Building, sending
glass shards, filing cabinets and sections of wall through the walls to either
side of the huddled group. The debris smashed out through the windows of the
Manhattan side of the building with almost undiminished force.

Looking down the length of the building,
Frank could see no walls, only the concrete columns that held up the building.
Sparking wires and bits of acoustical tile dangled from the ceiling. His ears
were ringing from the sudden pressure and he felt as though his head would
explode. Walking over to the edge, he looked down to see a tidal wave, twenty
feet high, racing inland. The wave only had a small section of the East River
to draw from and its awesome force was quickly spent.

It was a strange feeling to watch such
destruction but not be able to hear any of it. The combination of ringing ears
and their height above the tsunami gave the scene an eerie unreality.  The
water had lost half its power just getting across 1
^st
Avenue and as
it receded, he was shocked to see an Abrams tank embedded sideways between the
first and second floor of a Tudor City apartment block.

 Massive shards of metal continued to
rain down on the entire south end of the city. Pieces of the ship, ranging from
a few ounces to over a ton, continued to fall for over a minute. A little girl
who had run ahead of her parents on the sidewalk of 6
^th
Avenue
turned suddenly at the sound behind her. She saw a ship’s bulkhead laying
between her and her startled parents, exactly where she would have been walking
had she not raced ahead.

Less than ten blocks away from the river,
Jules King, the undisputed master of the corporate chop shop, was on the verge
of closing a new deal. They would take a marginally profitable electronics
plant, shut it down, sell off its assets and develop the land for mixed
residential and light commercial. Jules would throw the money on his growing
pile and a few hundred workers would be looking for new jobs. Those jobs were
saved as the two-thousand-pound anchor shaft crashed through the corner window
and, in a rare moment of poetic justice, took most of Jules with it as it
smashed its way through the 23
^rd
floor and out the far side of the
building.

Ten miles away at JFK International
Airport, passengers lining up to board a flight to Detroit abandoned the usual
silence and talked among themselves about the loud blast they had just heard.
The talk turned to screams of fright as the anchor fluke, easily twice the
weight of the one ton shaft, smashed into the jet that waited for them. It
struck just behind the wings, the force of the impact shearing off the tail and
driving the rest of the aircraft forward. Its nose smashed the outer glass,
driving across the Arrivals walkway and shattering the glass wall of the inner
side, nearly toppling the status kiosk.

The boarding clerk looked up at the open
jawed face of the pilot, seven feet from his desk, before routine intruded
itself on his shaken mind. Perhaps finding refuge in mundane tasks, he turned
to his keyboard and began to type. The screen behind him updated; TGA 3346 –
Detroit – Delayed.

New York State

January 16
^th
, 2027

E
llen woke slowly. She was looking up at rusty steel trusses.
Where
am I?
she wondered absently. She realized, with a start of fear, that her
wrists and ankles were bound.
Kidnapping,
her last conscious thought
came back to her. She struggled to a sitting position on her cot and looked
around. The building appeared to be an old metal shop. There were massively
heavy machines that looked like they could bend just about anything, but they
were coated with at least a decade’s accumulation of dust. A police cruiser sat
facing the steel, garage-type loading door and to the right was a large
aluminum framework supporting a white sheet. An array of lights and wires
surrounded a chair in front of the screen and a camera stood on a tripod
opposite the chair.

Frank…

“Misery loves company, yes?”

Ellen spun to the left in surprise at the
voice; she had thought the building was empty. She saw two other cots; one had a
middle-aged man sitting on it. His wrists and ankles were similarly bound with
electrician ties. She looked down at a cable-type bicycle lock that ran between
her arms to a shackle mounted in the concrete floor.

“My name is Jarl,” he said. “I’ve been here
for at least a month.” His beard seemed to confirm his story. “I was kidnapped
when I got into a taxi at the airport.”

“I was taken by a cop,” she answered,
nodding over at the cruiser. “Where is our host right now?”

“He said he was going out to get supplies,”
Jarl answered. “He’s been gone for less than an hour, I would think, though it
gets hard to tell time when you’ve been locked up as long as I have.” He
shrugged apologetically.

Ellen looked down at the ties on her
wrists. They operated on the same principle as the tag holders on store
merchandise. A plastic clip in the head allowed one way passage of an insert
that would then be locked in the closed position. She had a lifetime habit of
removing the tags in a way that would allow them to be reattached. Growing up
in a low-income family meant that they returned shoddy merchandise that many
families would have simply thrown away. That meant preserving the ability to
reattach the original price tag.

Ellen still maintained the habit, even
though both she and Frank were successful in their respective fields. Clothing
tags were no challenge at all. She simply pushed the little plastic insert cone
to one side, then down one of the slits at the side of the lock and finally,
back into the center. The insert would slide right out. She held her wrists
close to her face for a closer inspection.
The only difference is that the
lock is adjustable,
she mused, immune to Jarl’s excitement at having
someone to talk to. She realized that she still had a paper clip from a client
invoice in the tiny watch pocket of her jeans.

She fished out the clip and quickly
unfolded it before setting it in her lap. With her teeth, she pulled the tie
around her wrists so that the lock sat over her left wrist. Picking up the
piece of wire, she moved her right hand under her left so she could get at the
inbound side of the locking mechanism. She slid the wire into the lock until it
reached the little plastic arm that held the teeth of the zip tie. With a
gentle push, she shoved the wire under the arm, separating it from the teeth
and the tie came loose.

With a feeling of triumph, heightened by
Jarl’s surprised approval, she repeated the procedure with the tie at her
ankles and sat up a free woman. She frowned for a moment as she looked at her
fellow prisoner.
If we call for help but they don’t get here before our
captor, he’ll find us missing and make a run for it. Then again, he might come
back and move us as well, or even use us as hostages in a standoff with the
cops.
She got up, heading over to Jarl’s cot.
Screw it, I’m getting out
of here.
She bent down, freeing her fellow captive’s bonds far more easily
than her own, now that she was able to use both hands.

“How bad was the bomb?” He stood up and
followed her over to the cruiser. “I could hear it as though it were next
door.”

Ellen opened the driver’s door and looked
inside; the keys were in the ignition. “I don’t know,” she said as she turned
the key to the accessory position. “I was unconscious before it happened.”
Is
Frank alive or dead?
The radio crackled to life and she grabbed the mike
off the dashboard. “This is Ellen Bender. I  was kidnapped from UN
headquarters and I have…”

“Jarl, Jarl Brevik, also from the UN,” the
bearded prisoner said in surprise.

“… Jarl Brevik with me. Does anyone hear
me?”

“This is Nassau County dispatch.” The voice
replied. “All units are currently assisting victims of the blast. Are you able
to get away on your own?”

 “Hang on.” Ellen dropped the mike and
had just stepped out of the car when she heard a key in the employee entrance
next to the garage door in front of the cruiser. “Carl, get in the car right
now,” she hissed as she shoved him in through the driver’s door and climbed in
after him.

“It’s Jarl,” he corrected nervously.

“Quiet.” She twisted the key, starting the
engine. She pulled the door closed with her left hand and pulled the shifter to
the drive position with her right. The door opened as she hit the gas. The
cruiser rammed through the old garage door in a cacophony of squealing tires, breaking
wood and screeching metal. Directly in front of her was another building and
she frantically wound the steering wheel to the right, putting a fifteen foot
long dent in the corrugated metal wall as they picked up speed and swerved back
into the middle of the narrow alley.

A quick look in the rear-view mirror showed
their captor standing in the middle of the alley with a gun in his hand. It was
hanging at his side and Ellen took that as a good sign. If he was going to
shoot, he would have done it by now. They turned again, the cowling of the
front bumper dragging on the pavement as they drove. After a few aimless turns,
they turned right onto a street and came up short at a dead end in front of a
huge industrial building.

The radio had been busy with the disaster
response throughout the drive but now Ellen heard her own name coming from the
speaker. She picked it up. “This is Ellen,” she said simply.
Am I supposed
to say ‘over’ or something?

“This is Nassau County dispatch, Have you
managed to escape?”

“Yes, we took the cop car that the
kidnapper used to grab me. I don’t really know where we are but don’t these
things have GPS?” She looked around, half expecting to see their former host come
jogging up the road. Army helicopters flew back and forth constantly in the
distance.

“Ma’am, could you tell me the city and
number of the vehicle?” She somehow managed to keep a calm professional voice
despite everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and Ellen
resolved to follow her example.

She climbed out and took a look at the
side. Reaching back inside she grabbed the mike. “NYPD 304225,” she said as she
leaned in the door. She was still too keyed up from the narrow escape to sit still. 

After a few moments, the dispatcher came
back. “No GPS signal from that unit. He must have destroyed it when he stole
the vehicle. Can you describe anything about your surroundings?”

“We’re on McCarthy road or street, I’m not
sure which. There’s a large building that looks like a power plant and then a
bunch of big oil tanks to the left.”

“You see a large open field farther to the
left?” The dispatcher sounded excited.

“Yeah, it’s about the size of a baseball
diamond,” Ellen answered with relief, giving Jarl a thumbs up. “Where are we?”

“You’re on Barnum Island. Please stand by
and transport will be there in a few minutes.”

In less than ten minutes, Ellen and Jarl
were sitting in the back of an army Blackhawk helicopter, looking out with
dismay at the scene below. From the epicenter, an area of devastation extended
for almost a mile in all directions. Though the skyscrapers had avoided falling
over, those closest to the blast had been scoured of all but their concrete and
steel frames. Most buildings within the one mile radius had lost most of their
windows.

Traffic on both sides of the midtown tunnel
was blocked as the tunnel had been closed. The force of the blast had scoured
the river bottom away from the tunnel roof, cracking it in the process. Now
fully exposed to the weight of the water, the cracks were growing.

The helicopter followed the channel down to
the upper bay, landing on a large circular patch of grass on Ellis Island.
“This is where you get out, folks,” the pilot’s voice crackled in her ear.
“Please leave your headsets on the tabs above you.”

Ellen climbed out and crouched as she ran
under the spinning rotor, heading for a man in dark blue camouflage who was
moving towards them. Her breath caught in her throat as she recognized the familiar
gait of the big man. “Frank!” She threw herself into his arms.

“The prison hasn’t been made that can hold
my girl!’ He beamed at her as he brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes.

“You look good in uniform.” She leaned back
to get a better view. “How did you end up wearing this?”

“They brought us straight here after the
blast and sent over temporary clothes from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They even
had some for you sitting in our quarters in the hope that…” His voice trailed
off, thick with the rampant emotion of a sleepless night. They held each other
tighter as the Blackhawk lifted off.

His last sentence began to sink in as a new
imperative began to assert itself. After a close brush with death, the human
mind often turns itself to the preservation of the species. Though Ellen didn’t
address it in quite those terms, it was nonetheless a very sudden and powerful
feeling. “Did you say quarters?” she asked quietly.

He nodded.

“Private quarters?”

He grinned.