These unsung heroes of the U.S. Navy displayed the lunatic, rarefied skills of their profession almost always in private, out here in the Atlantic, away from the celebrity-obsessed society they were trying to protect.
It took six hours to complete the transfer of the aircraft, and it was almost midnight when the final Hornet made its landing. By now, the rain had stopped, and the weary flight-deck crews were heading for their bunks. The fighter pilots were going home with the Truman and their aircraft.
The Seahawk crews, now safely on board the Ronald Reagan, were mostly asleep. Their task, their ceaseless, intensive mission, to find the Barracuda, would begin at first light on Tuesday morning, October 6. And there would be little rest until the submarine was detected. If it would be.
Another twenty-four-hour-a-day operation had been taking place simultaneously, 2,700 miles away to the west in the concrete canyons of New York City.
Ten times more vulnerable than Washington, D.C., New York would take the full might of the tidal wave head-on, straight off the ocean. And although the great towers of Wall Street would probably be the most resolute barrier the tidal wave would hit, they could not possibly stop a force that would probably have swept the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge clean off its foundations seven miles earlier, planted the Coney Island fairground on top of Brooklyn Heights, and dumped the Statue of Liberty into the bottom of upper New York Harbor.
Whether the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan would still be standing after the opening surge was a subject currently being assessed by a team of eighteen scientists working everywhere, from basements to the city’s skies. Opinion ranged high and the only thing they could agree on was that none of them thought more than a half-dozen buildings at best could survive in any shape whatsoever.
Midtown, with its close, tight grid of towers, stretching high into the sky, was an even worse prospect. The breakwater of Wall Street would have reduced the first two waves significantly, but nonetheless, like a house of cards, Midtown would fall. Several of the scientists believed that if two or three high-rises crumbled before the onslaught of the ocean, they would cause a chain reaction and bring down others until the city was leveled.
The most dangerous part was the two wide rivers that flowed past, east and west of Manhattan — the Hudson and the East River. The tsunami would have lost none of its power when it rampaged up these ship-going seaways, and both rivers could rise, initially, by around 100 feet, with millions of tons of ocean water crashing through the city’s cross streets. The tides of east and west would probably collide somewhere in the middle, around Park Avenue, moments before the main surge smashed with mind-blowing force into the old Pan-American building, somewhere around the 15th floor.
New York City was no place to be these two weeks. And the same went for Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The flatlands of New Jersey were even more exposed, and places like Bayonne, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Union City were utterly defenseless. So was Newark, with its flat, wide sea-level airport, right where the Passaic River widens into Newark Bay. That was tsunami country, with a vengeance.
New York City’s evacuation operation had begun the previous Wednesday, but the city’s biggest problem wasn’t so much historic documents, books, and artifacts. It was people. New York City received more visitors every day than the combined permanent population of Washington, D.C., and its environs. In addition to its eight million residents, who lived and worked in the crowded urban sprawl of New York and its greater area, 800,000 visitors took in the sights below the world’s most famous skyline every day.
It was a colorful, vibrant melee of races, religions, and nationalities, a voliatile mix in a time of crisis. Immigrants from the Far East, India, and Mexico had been pouring in for years, and most of them had few contacts outside their ethnic neighborhoods. Now they had no way of moving themselves, their families, and their few possessions out of the city to higher ground. A couple of days after the President’s TV address, Tammany Hall had accepted the responsibility of evacuating two million residents of New York City, providing food and shelter for those who had nothing and those who would most likely have nothing to go back to.
The exodus from New York had already begun, and thus far there had been monumental problems, due to the sheer volume of people who had to be moved westward. Most of them were terrified, panicked, and shocked. Rumors coursed wildly; crowds were alternately lining up for cars and gas masks or hitting the highway in a rush, sitting for hours on congested roads. Everyone was up in arms, and the Army and National Guard could just barely control the mobbed streets, anxiety and fear flaring on every corner, spreading slowly across the city, simmering. Hundreds of National Guardsmen were drafted in from all over New York State to prevent the breaking out of riots.
The Police Department had by now issued instructions for the more affluent members of society to drive out of the area. They designated highways as strictly one-way systems, and decreed which roads could be used to get away, no matter who you were. If you lived in Brooklyn or Long Island, the way out was across the Verrazzano Bridge to Staten Island, and then through the Outerbridge toll, wide-open now, crossing onto highways running west and southwest.
Residents of Queens and Manhattan were ordered to use the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and then pick up the westward highways. The great span of the George Washington Bridge was off-limits both ways, for the use of the Police, Army, and Government Officials only. The great convoys of trucks evacuating the city were nonstop, both ways, twenty-four hours a day.
During the weekend, a brand-new worry cropped up. Thousands of people, many of whom hardly spoke English, were too afraid to wait for their transportation slots from the Army, the National Guard, or the New York City Police Department. Some were more afraid of those than of the incoming tidal wave. Many took matters into their own hands, buying and temporarily fixing up an entire armada of ancient car wrecks, not only unfit to be on the road but a danger to anyone in or near them.
This clapped-out procession of backfiring, brakeless rattle-traps was moving like a mobile junkyard out into the mainstream of the traffic, which was now already crowding the roads and highways.
By Sunday evening, the traffic jams had escalated, the likes of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in the free world. People were sitting on the roadside beside vehicles that were filled to overflowing with humanity and possessions. Cars edged slowly towards the west, coming to a complete standstill as soon as an ordinarily harmless, flat battery felled a vehicle in front of it. On the Triboro Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge, both levels of each were throbbing with cars. Cars jammed the Whitestone, clogged the Throg’s Neck, and brought the West Side Highway to a standstill. The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the Harlem River Drive were simply parking lots.
By Monday morning, the Mayor had signed an edict giving the New York Police Department emergency powers to sequester every broken-down truck in the city and hand it over to the National Guard. The authorities could designate instant scrap-yards; under raised highways and under bridges, they beat down wire fencing to free up space on outdoor basketball courts. They dragged vehicles off the bridges and out of the tunnels and dumped them in the nearest available space.
The Mayor had already declared New York City a potential disaster area, and now he had the army move in and take over the subway and all of its trains, as well as Amtrak and the entire Long Island Rail Road.