A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Read online

  That cleared the worst of it. Kahn jumped back into the truck and Diaz started moving before the door closed. Out of habit, Kahn re-buckled his seatbelt. Then he brushed the water from the lapels of his raincoat.

  They nodded to the uniformed cops at Lexington and Fifty-Second, chirped through the intersection at Madison, and nodded again to the uniforms at the blue sawhorses, obtaining immediate admittance. Along Fifth Avenue by the cathedral, eight police vehicles stood in a line, functioning as a steel curtain.

  Kahn rolled down his window and talked to a uniformed sergeant. Over his shoulder, a family of duded-up Hispanics, held back by police along with the rest of the crowd, shouted in hysteria, the woman alternating between wails and the dabbing of her tears. The guy looked so agitated that steam rose into the cold February air from his shoulders and slicked-back hair. From what Diaz could glean, they were missing a funeral.

  “It’s on the other corner,” the uniformed sergeant said. “What took you?”

  “We’re shorthanded this week. Friggin’ bird flu. We’ll jump the curb here and take the sidewalk.”

  “Roger that.” The uniformed sergeant instructed his men to move the barricade. Diaz took it slow and the response truck rode high, but its suspension groaned and the equipment in back rattled as they clambered over the curb.

  Diaz had been on a hundred bomb calls in New York City, but this one involved more craziness than usual: rain coming down in a fine mist, honking cars and wailing mourners pressing to get inside, cops shouting at everyone, cameras flashing in the hands of rubberneckers, sirens still converging on the scene. Kahn had predicted right, Diaz admitted to himself. The place was a zoo.

  But, over the din, when they stepped outside he thought he perceived organ music coming through the closed doors of the cathedral.

  “You hear that?”

  Kahn half nodded. “Guess the funeral started without us.”

  The uniformed sergeant pointed out the suspicious package and retreated. It rested against the bottom step, an overstuffed black messenger bag with unnatural bulges, partly held together with brown packing tape.

  “Whoever made that,” Kahn said, “had no appreciation for aesthetics.” He took the key from Diaz and opened the truck’s rear doors. The Wolverine robot inside looked like a folded stainless steel crane. They checked for obstructions and unlocked the black nylon straps that held fast the gleaming machine. Kahn powered it up, watching closely as it rolled down the aluminum ramp and onto the sidewalk. Then Kahn twisted the joystick on the controller. The robot began to turn, juddered and appeared to die.

  While Kahn fiddled with the control panel, Diaz used a pair of khaki green Celestron Cavalry binoculars to peer over the hood of their truck at the suspect IED. Given the constraints of midtown geography, they were closer to the device than they’d like to be, no more than forty feet. If a blast went off, it would reach them in a fraction of a second. But at least that proximity afforded him a pretty good look.

  The messenger bag was frayed at the corners, like someone had carried it around for a good long time before repurposing it as a means of terror. The tape had been applied hastily but not recently. It appeared to hold together a tear where the fabric met the piping, and it also showed signs of wear. From the top of the bag, the corner of what looked like a manila folder protruded. Between that folder and the half-open zipper, a pair of white wires looped out of the bag and back inside.

  Kahn was cursing at the robot, which rested right where it had frozen two minutes ago, hadn’t made a sound or moved an inch. He crouched over it, checking the inner workings and looking back and forth to the control panel, which lay on the floor of the truck bay like a prop in a Batman movie, Diaz thought. Kahn worked the joystick some more and turned a couple of knobs. The thing didn’t respond. From what Diaz could see, no image feed from the camera appeared on the controller screen.

  Fifty feet behind Kahn, the Hispanic woman with the handkerchief broke past the police barrier wailing like her hair was on fire. She made a run for the front door to the cathedral in her patent leather high heels, big bosoms flopping like water balloons under an open coat. A police officer gave chase in his long yellow slicker, and it proved to be an unequal match. She collapsed on her ass as he caught up to her. Didn’t even make it to the first step.

  “Fucking thing!” Kahn said. He’d attached the orange backup cable and resumed working the robot’s controls, but he continued to stare in astonishment as nothing happened.

  “The definition of insanity…” began the voice in Diaz’s head. Kahn looked up at him. Had he said it aloud?

  “It worked yesterday morning and I know the battery’s good,” Kahn said. “Couple more things I can try.”

  Diaz went back to analyzing the bag. The wires looked like the kind that attach earbuds to an iPod. Beyond the actual explosives—for which in practicality there were only a few options—the materials that went into a bomb were as limitless as the human imagination. Yet Diaz thought someone’s imagination had run wild on this one, and it wasn’t the bomb maker’s.

  He might take a ScanX x-ray kit and get a shot inside the messenger bag, but instead Diaz went around the truck and approached the thing with what he considered to be appropriate caution. That tape...unless someone built this bomb months ago and carried it around ever since, it didn’t add up. The tape was there to fix the old tear, not to help hold together a bomb package. And without the tape the bag looked a lot less suspicious.

  When he got within fifteen feet, he felt pretty confident that his judgment had been correct. He lifted his right pant leg and reached into the scabbard on his calf, extracting his Leatherman folding knife. Again he thought maybe he should go get the bomb suit and initiate an x-ray procedure, but he knew x-rays and personal protection would be a waste of time.

  Diaz looked over his shoulder just once. Kahn was still messing with the robot, paying him no mind. The hysterical funeral people had been hustled away. The rest of the crowd and the traffic had fallen silent—not in real life, but their constant murmur had receded beyond the periphery of the bomb tech’s concentration.

  Using one hand, held up at the level of his ribs, Diaz flicked the blade launcher to open the knife. He kept it as sharp as any folding knife could be and the straight-edge/serrated blade combination gave him maximum flexibility. With even strides he closed the rest of the distance to the bag and dropped to one knee in the rain.

  Now a sound did come from behind him. It was Kahn, calling over the noise of the crowd. Diaz couldn’t hear the words exactly, just his own name, delivered with an attitude. Screw it—today forced patience felt nearly as suffocating to him as the bomb suit could be. And he’d already drawn his conclusions about the bag. Crouched on top of it now, Diaz ignored the sergeant. Steadying the messenger bag gently with his left hand, he used the straight edge of his knife to slice with even pressure through the middle of the fabric.

  For two seconds blade through nylon sounded vaguely like fingernails on a chalkboard. When he’d finished, the insides lay exposed.

  This was no IED. It contained only a sheaf of legal papers, a navel orange, a paperback book, a tin of Altoids, and, as Diaz had suspected, an iPod Nano with earbuds attached.

  “YOU! DON’T! DO! THAT!” KAHN was still red in the face halfway back to the station house.

  “I could see it was nothing,” Diaz repeated for the third time.

  “You could see—how could you see? Did you x-ray it?”

  Diaz shook his head. “The time it took—what? I was gonna climb into the bomb suit while you messed with the robot? Or we were gonna send back to the garage for another robot? Stand out there getting wet? Block Fifth Avenue for half the day for a bag of papers? It was nothing. I could feel it and I could see it.”

  “First of all, the rain isn’t an excuse for anything. Second, how did you do the RSP?”

  “There was nothing dangerous, therefore nothing to render safe.”

  “How did you open i
t?”

  “With my knife. You saw.”

  “Why not pull the zipper?”

  “Because it could be booby trapped.”

  “But you said it was nothing. You knew there was no bomb—just knew! So how could it be booby trapped, a bag of papers?”

  “Better safe than sorry. If it was a bomb—”

  “So you didn’t know. If you knew for sure, why not use the zipper? Why cut it open?”

  Diaz scratched his forehead with his thumbnail. “Following procedures? Is that what you want me to say?”

  Kahn stared out at the street. At least he’d stopped giving driving directions. “You’re damn straight that’s what I want you to say. You cut it open because you were following procedures, but the procedure starts with the Wolverine, doesn’t it? We use the robot to make the assessment, not our hands. Not our guts.”

  By the book, Diaz thought. Which one is the robot?

  He turned the truck onto Seventh Avenue near the boarded-up St. Vincent’s Hospital building. Used to be ambulances stacked up there. Now it was too quiet. Diaz waited for some people to cross, turned on the light bar for a second, and ran the stoplight.

  Next to him, Kahn had the incident report form on his lap and was writing with vigor. “All those people there...no way around this, Diaz. I gotta tell it straight. I like you, kid, I really do. But I gotta tell it straight for Cap’s sake.”

  Diaz wanted to say he didn’t give a rip, but that wouldn’t accomplish anything, and besides it was untrue. He said, “The other day I looked up ‘procedure’ in the dictionary. It comes from the word ‘proceed.’”

  “Yeah?” Kahn turned to peer at him over his reading glasses.

  Diaz nodded, kept his eyes on the road. “And the word ‘proceed’ comes from the Latin for ‘to go forward.’ That’s all I was doing, Sergeant. Going forward.”

  Kahn’s jaw went slack. “You looked that up—procedure?”

  “I sure did.” Diaz grinned, smug.

  “And you think that’s a mark in your favor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because to my mind the only reason a person would look up the word ‘procedure’ in the dictionary would be in preparation for questioning the department’s procedures. Do you know how many cops in the NYPD Bomb Squad have fallen in the line of duty?”

  Diaz pictured the wall of honor at the precinct. “Six?”

  “That’s exactly right. Six in more than a hundred years, and one of those at the Twin Towers, which was a whole different thing entirely. Why so few? Because they followed procedures and those procedures constantly improved over time. One of those improvements is the robot for remote threat assessment. That’s why we use it—not to get too close—to save lives.”

  Of course Diaz knew all of that. “It wasn’t working.”

  “You might’ve worn the suit then.”

  “The suit? The bag contained no threat!” He pulled into the small parking lot of the station house and cut the engine. Neither man moved for a couple of breaths. Then Kahn pocketed his reading glasses and climbed out.

  Diaz followed him to the side entrance. “All I’m saying is that sometimes you just gotta proceed, play it by ear if you have to. It’s an imperfect world.”

  “It sure is, Manny.” Kahn stopped in his tracks. “Return this vehicle to the garage and figure out what the hell’s wrong with that Wolverine.”

  ALBERT HORN WORKED AS A computer programmer in the research department of National Bible Publishers at 1440 Broadway. It had the potential to be a peaceful job and Albert Horn coveted peace. He saw it in the eyes of his coworkers, in their placid manners, in their kind smiles, and he wished he could find it in himself.

  Mercifully the seventh floor felt more like a library than a business office. The small programming department huddled in one corner around a bend, the only part of the floor where people didn’t speak in hushed tones by default. Miles of bookshelves occupied most of the other areas: volumes upon volumes on subjects so esoteric that Albert Horn couldn’t explain them if he had years to prepare. All day long, on that part of the floor, scholars came and went. Editors settled down in carrels and at giant wooden tables, poring over ancient Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. When Albert Horn once asked a research librarian what those people were looking for after so many years, she replied with one word: “Insights.”

  Insights. Albert Horn could dig it, looking for insights in books. Why not? He’d tried every other way and it had gotten him nowhere—worse than nowhere. He’d long ago mastered the computer world, once relished the places the Internet could take you, the way it could stimulate your mind. But that was a tease. You couldn’t touch and smell those places. On the screen they were just words and pictures.

  In late 2002, when he was eighteen years old, Albert Horn had left Jamaica, Queens, for the United States Army. War was afoot and Horn considered himself a patriot, but it was more than that. He wanted to imbibe the world, touch it and taste it. And if he had to risk his life to do that, to his youthful mind that seemed worth the chance. He trained at Fort Jackson in South Carolina—first time he’d set foot below the Mason-Dixon line in his life—and got posted to the Eighth Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas. Before he shipped out, he and some buddies hiked the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Albert Horn used to tell whoever would listen that he never again felt as close to God as he did in the Blue Ridge—not in America or Europe or the Middle East, not in any church, and certainly, sad to say, not on the seventh floor of National Bible Publishers. Not that he didn’t try like hell to keep his chin up. In Hollis, Queens, where he lived, he rented a back-room apartment from his sister and her family, who were for the most part kind to him. They often ate together, sometimes went to church together, even hung out watching football and playing video games together. But, for all that, Albert Horn felt a creeping despair that carried him further from God’s love every day.

  This was no secret. His sister knew there was something wrong with him, something deep in his mind, something beyond his physical disabilities. His boss, Youssef Naftali, also knew. Their team was halfway through a multiyear project but had fallen behind schedule. If this had been Microsoft or Oracle, some geek with a Coke in his hand would be standing over them pounding the table, urging them through all-nighters. Albert Horn couldn’t have handled that. He couldn’t even handle Naftali standing over him two hours ago, telling him gently that last week’s coding turned out to be dog poo. “Dog poo”—those were the words he used. Management allowed no cursing in the building.

  Now, as a kind of forced leave, Horn had two tickets from Naftali to a Broadway matinee in his shirt pocket.

  “They’re for Spider-Man,” Naftali had said. “Take them. Turn off the dark! You earned it, guy.”

  Delivered in an Indiana twang, the cheerleading made Albert Horn sound like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Horn himself had a pronounced New York accent, but he hadn’t used it that morning to protest any further. He’d pretended to call his sister and invite his niece to accompany him, although in reality he’d done no such thing.

  At exactly 2:30 he called for the elevator. A minute later he rode it down to the lobby. And a minute after that he walked out onto Broadway.

  He called his sister, Lydia, from his cell phone as he hit the street. Naftali, he told her, in suggesting that he leave early had implied that Albert Horn’s prosthetic legs couldn’t carry him as well as another man’s, which was true up to a point, but just barely. After years of practice out in the real world, he hardly thought of the legs as a limitation—at least not in his daily routine, which took him on and off the subway, along city sidewalks, in and out of chairs, even up and down steps.

  He turned east onto Forty-First Street, away from the theater. He had plenty of time to make the curtain if he decided to go, but he had to think first. All in all, it had been a pretty depressing day—a pretty depressing week or two. Something had triggered within Albert Horn and he’d gone i
nto emotional free fall.

  It pertained to his brother-in-law, Kyle Butterworth, who was trying to decide whether to join the marines at the age of thirty-six. Even though they ate dinner together nearly every night, Albert never felt close to Kyle. He didn’t hate him or anything, but they didn’t connect either. Kyle worked as a plumber and Albert Horn had an office job. Over dinner they might exchange a few words about the weather or the neighbors, but they never shared their inner thoughts with one another. They could sit in front of a baseball game for two hours and never exchange a word between them, just talk to the television if at all.

  A few weeks ago, however, the dynamic had changed. All of a sudden, Kyle wanted to talk and talk about joining the marines and wanted to hear stories from his brother-in-law’s days in the army. Albert Horn wondered how much Kyle had researched this thing on his own. Can you even join the marines so late in life? And where did the desire come from? Not like Kyle hates Muslims or needs the job. Horn wondered whether all this talk of the marines was just a way to draw him out, maybe Kyle’s curiosity getting the better of him after so many years not hearing a peep from this guy who strapped on his legs every morning in the rear apartment.

  Meanwhile the memories that Horn had repressed for nearly a decade began to come back, first in dreams—you couldn’t call them nightmares, he told his sister, because they weren’t all horrible—and then in waking flashbacks. He might see a young girl in the street and he’d flash to a young girl in Kabul, crouched over her dead grandfather. He might pass a shadow and his mind would flash to a bloodstain on a pockmarked wall. He might be sitting on the subway and see a blemish on someone’s face and flash to the first man he ever killed, a black-bearded militant in an open window across a dirt road.

  But the worst—and what had turned Horn’s code to “dog poo,” he was sure—were the memories that came back unbidden from the Battle of Fallujah, where Horn lost his legs not to an IED, as many soldiers lost limbs, but in house-to-house combat. You might call it a freak accident, but it was no accident because it involved an enemy RPG and it was not freak because nothing in combat was freak. You attempted to do violence to one another and awaited the results. The RPG...since Kyle had started asking all his questions, Albert Horn had begun to see the smoke from its launch when the light caught a window in a certain way. He’d go into a miniature seizure, almost like a trance, he told his sister, see the grenade sail under his outstretched arm, missing him as he dove for cover, then scutter along the splintered wooden floor and embed itself in the wall for a long fraction of a second. Albert Horn knew what happened after that but he couldn’t remember it. He knew from the accounts of others that stones went flying and the floor gave way and his unconscious body hung trapped between beams, his legs dangling into the space below as a vicious firefight ensued on the ground floor, eventually reducing his lower legs to shattered bone and bloody pulp. Unsalvageable.