He couldn’t see her breathing.
“Honey, please, please, we’ve got to get out of here, find Tasheya. You have to get up…”
She didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change.
Frantic, knowing in his heart that she was gone, that any human being would have to be crushed under a pile of rubble that huge, Harrison climbed up on one knee and tugged at her arm, tugged at it almost savagely, tugged at it with sobs choking his throat and tears streaming down his cheeks.
It came away from her body on the fifth tug, severed above the elbow, leaving a jagged shoot of bone protruding from her buried shoulder.
Harrison stared down at her, his eyes feverishly wide in their sockets.
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 eyes…”
“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 now!”
“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—”
“Prioritize? What are you saying?”
“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 fucking well know? I’m talking about my little girl’s eyes, her eyes, her eyes…”
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.