Statues, carvings, and sculptures from the land of the pharaohs were packed and shipped, each truck occupied by museum staff, plus a minimum of a dozen armed soldiers. An absolutely priceless life-sized, limestone sculpture of Queen Hatshepsut enthroned, who ruled during the fabled Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1342 B.C.), was transported in an Air Force truck all on its own, save for the stern attendance of twelve unsmiling bodyguards from the National Guard. It must have been like old times for the Queen, as she roared over the Triboro Bridge, not even considering the possibility of the tolls. The entire Temple of Dendur, a gift from the people of Egypt, had been dismantled and trucked out. The massive stones dating from the Roman period, and depicting Caesar Augustus making offerings to the Egyptian and Nubian gods, had been presented to the U.S. for helping to save ancient monuments during the 1960s, after the construction of the dam at Aswan, which flooded the Nile and formed Lake Nasser.
Roman and Greek statues and sculptures — some up to 5,000 years old, even a bronze chariot worth millions — had been packed and sent north to the enormous Fort Drum Military Base, far upstate in the Watertown area, where the St. Lawrence River runs into Lake Ontario.
Paintings were in the process of being removed by a special detachment of United States Marines, an entire battalion of six hundred men, working around the clock. By special order of the Pentagon, one of the greatest collections the world has ever seen was being removed to West Point Military Academy, 50 miles up the Hudson. Thus, from the moment they were taken down from the walls, the paintings were under guard in the hands of some of the most trusted men in the United States.
During the weekend, they had packed and trucked away almost the entire collection of Florentine and Venetian masters — works by Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, and Tiepolo, plus some of El Greco’s greatest work. The $100 million Juan de Pareja, painted by Diego Velázquez in the mid-seventeenth century, was already being guarded at the U.S. Army’s stronghold on the Hudson.
And one of the most famous paintings in the world, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt, was due to leave at the end of the afternoon, in company with the artist’s several other works owned by the Met. The shimmering waters of Claude Monet, Van Gogh’s cypresses, the dancers of Degas, the works of Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, Manet, Rodin, and every other renowned artist who has ever lived, were also on their way north.
The Met’s collection of drawings alone, by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Dürer, Rubens, and Goya, were worth sufficient money on the world market to operate the annual budgets of every African country south of the Blue Nile.
Master Sergeants prowled the corridors of the museums, while Privates and Corporals sweated and heaved the huge wooden packing cases. Officers supervised the convoys. Inside the Met there were two U.S. Marine Brigadier Generals.
Two hundred miles to the north, the city of Boston, though less than a quarter the size of Brooklyn, was in as great a danger as New York, its downtown district being surrounded by open water. The tsunami would roll in from the southeast, heading northwest, and although the island of Nantucket, the shoals of Nantucket Sound, and the narrow sandy land of Cape Cod just might offer some kind of shield, expert opinion nonetheless forecast that the wave that would come seething up Massachusetts Bay and smash into the downtown area would still be over 100 feet high.
There were only 550,000 people resident in the city, 250,000 of them students at sixty different colleges and universities, all of which had been closed, similar to the 3,000 software and Internet corporations, which sprouted around the city during the high-tech revolution of the ’80s and ’90s.
Of greatest concern were the famous education centers: the Harvard School of Business, situated three miles upstream, right on the west bank of the Charles River. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sprawled across 150 acres downstream near Harvard Bridge, one mile on the Cambridge side of the wide Charles River Basin, right on the water.
Boston University, the third largest university in the United States, had a vast waterfront campus west of downtown Boston, on the opposite bank of the river from MIT. Dr. Martin Luther King’s old alma mater had 30,000 students from fifty states and 135 other countries, most of whom had returned home or to friends for the week.
The evacuation of the universities and the museums was identical in procedure to the other great East Coast cities, but little Boston was somehow more vulnerable than the others. It lacked the granite muscle of New York and Washington’s shelter from the ocean. There was a feeling of genuine terror all around the historic New England seaport.
The runway of La Palma Airport, newly extended, was now a mile long, almost as if the arrival of the four giant U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III freighters that were now making their approach from the west — six miles apart, line astern — had been anticipated. The cargo leviathans, with their 170-foot wingspans, stood 55 feet high on the ground, with a cargo compartment three times longer than a Greyhound bus and over 12 feet high.
Right now, all four were full, as they came in over the Atlantic, circled around to the north, and headed directly into the southwest wind gusting over the runway. One by one, they touched down at the little airport seven miles south of the main town of Santa Cruz, 20 miles northeast of the yawning crater of the Cumbre Vieja volcano.
Each of the aircraft taxied to a special holding area where its massive rear doors were opened and lowered. There, over the next two hours, they were unloaded by U.S. Army personnel who had traveled all the way from Air Mobility Command, Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina, 437th Airlift Wing.
The first Globemaster contained the front ends of four army trucks, which were driven out and then backed up the ramps of the other three. When they drove back down and onto the blacktop, they looked more complete, with the long bed of the truck now attached.
And fitted to those flatbeds were the mobile truck-loaded Patriot Missile Launchers, eight of them, the super-high-tech platform for the state-of-the-art MIM-104E guidance-enhanced missiles, the only SAM that has ever intercepted ballistic missiles in combat.
Each launcher came complete with four of these MIM-104E Patriots, the sensational long-range, all-altitude, all-weather defense system designed to counter tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and advanced aircraft. The thirty-two, already fitted inside the launchers on La Palma, were built by Raytheon in Massachusetts and by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Florida.
Their theoretical objective was relatively simple — to seek out and destroy incoming missiles. The reality, though, was rather more complicated. These things traveled at Mach 5, close to 4,000 mph, which pretty much guaranteed that whatever enemy missile might be on its way would have zero time to get out of the path.
The U.S. military spent all of the 1990s trying to perfect the Patriot after it missed too many of Saddam’s SCUDs over Israel in the first Gulf War. Months and months were spent in the Pacific, ironing out problems. The new, updated, improved Patriot had an uplink from its ground-radar control unit with which to feed it final course-correction target-acquisition orders, and possessed a downlink to feed back information on the target’s position. These had to be transmitted pretty sharply, since the Patriot was traveling as close to the speed of light as possible.