Black Sunday

26

ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, the red sun rising silhouetted the New Orleans skyline in fire. Michael Lander woke early. He had been dreaming of the whales, and for a moment he could not remember where he was. Then he remembered, totally and all at once. Dahlia was in a chair, her head back, watching him through half-closed eyes.

He rose carefully and went to the window. Streaks of pink and gold lay along the east-west streets. Above the ground mist he could see the lightening sky. “It’s going to be clear,” he said. He dialed the airport weather service. A northeast wind at fifteen knots, gusting to twenty. That was good. A tailwind from Lakefront Airport to the stadium. Wide open, he could get better than sixty knots out of the blimp.

“Can you rest a little longer, Michael?”

He was pale. She knew that he did not have much strength. Perhaps he would have enough.

The blimp was always airborne at least an hour before game time to allow the TV technicians to make final adjustments and to let the fans see the airship as they arrived. Lander would have to fly that long before he came back for the bomb.

“I’ll rest,” he said. “The flight crew call will be at noon. Farley flew last night, so he’ll sleep in, but he’ll be leaving his room well before noon to eat.”

“I know, Michael. I’ll take care of it.”

“I’d feel better if you had a gun.” They could not risk carrying firearms on the flight to Baton Rouge. The small arms were in the truck with the explosive.

“It’s all right. I can do it all right. You can depend on me.”

“I know it,” he said. “I can depend on you.”

Corley, Kabakov, and Moshevsky set out for the stadium at nine a.m. The streets around the Royal Orleans were filled with people, pale from last night’s celebrations, wandering the French Quarter with their hangovers out of some sense of duty, a grim determination to see the sights. Paper cups and bar napkins blew down Bourbon Street in the damp wind.

Corley had to drive slowly until they were clear of the Quarter. He was irritable. He had neglected to get himself a hotel reservation while the getting was good, and he had slept badly in an FBI agent’s guest room. The breakfast he had been served by the agent’s wife was pointedly light. Kabakov appeared to have slept and breakfasted well, adding to Corley’s irritation. He was further annoyed by the smell of a cantaloupe Moshevsky was eating in the back of the car.

Kabakov shifted in his seat. He clanked against the door handle.

“What the hell was that?”

“My dentures are loose,” Kabakov said.

“Very funny.”

Kabakov flipped back his coat, revealing the stubby barrel of the Uzi submachine gun slung under his arm.

“What’s Moshevsky carrying, a bazooka?”

“I have a cantaloupe launcher” came the voice from the backseat.

Corley shrugged his shoulders. He could not understand Moshevsky easily at the best of times and not at all when his mouth was full.

They arrived at the stadium at nine thirty. The streets that would not be used as the stadium filled were already blocked. The vehicles and barriers that would seal off the stadium when the game began were in place on the grass beside the main traffic arteries. Ten ambulances were parked close to the southeast gate. Only outbound emergency vehicles would be allowed through the blockade. Secret Service men were already in place on the roofs along Audubon Avenue overlooking the track where the president’s helicopter would land.

They were as ready as they could get.

It was curious to see sandbag emplacements beside the quiet streets. Some of the FBI agents were reminded of the Ole Miss campus in 1963.

At nine a.m., Dahlia Iyad called room service in the Fairmont and ordered three breakfasts to be delivered to the room. While she was waiting for them, she took a pair of long scissors and a roll of friction tape from her bag. She removed the screw holding the scissors together and put a slender, three-inch bolt through the screw hole in one half of the scissors, binding it in place with the tape. Then she taped the entire handle of the scissor and slipped it up her sleeve.

The breakfasts arrived at nine twenty a.m.

“You go ahead, Michael, while it’s hot,” Dahlia said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She took a breakfast tray to the elevator and descended two floors.

Farley’s voice sounded sleepy as he answered her knock.

“Mr. Farley?”

“Yes.”

“Your breakfast.”

“I didn’t order any breakfast.”

“Compliments of the hotel. The whole crew is getting them. I’ll take it away if you don’t want it.”

“No, I’ll take it. Just a minute.”

Farley, hair tousled and wearing only his trousers, let her into the room. If someone had been passing in the hall they might have heard the beginning of a scream, abruptly cut off. A minute later, Dahlia slipped outside again. She placed the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and went back upstairs to breakfast.

There was one more piece of business to be settled. Dahlia waited until she and Lander had finished eating. They were lying on the bed together. She was holding Lander’s mangled hand.

“Michael, you know I want very much to fly with you. Don’t you think it would be better?”

“I can do it. There’s no need.”

“I want to help you. I want to be with you. I want to see it.”

“You wouldn’t see much. You’ll hear it wherever you go from the airport.”

“I’d never get out of the airport anyway, Michael. You know the weight won’t make any difference now. It’s seventy degrees outside and the aircraft has been standing in the sun all morning. Of course if you can’t get it up—”

“I can get it up. We’ll have superheat.”

“May I, Michael? We’ve come a long way.”

He rolled over and looked into her face. There were red pillow marks on his cheek. “You’ll have to get the shot bags out of the back of the gondola fast. The ones beneath the backseat. We can trim it up when we’re off. You can go.”

She held him very close and they did not talk anymore.

At eleven thirty Lander rose and Dahlia helped him dress. His cheeks were hollow, but the tanning lotion she had used on his face helped disguise the pallor. At eleven fifty she took a syringe of Novacaine from her medical kit. She rolled up Lander’s sleeve and deadened a small patch on his forearm. Then she took out another, smaller hypodermic syringe. It was a flexible plastic squeeze tube with a needle attached, and it was filled with a thirty milligram solution of Ritalin.

“You may feel talkative after you use this, Michael. Very up. You’ll have to compensate for that. Don’t use it unless you feel yourself losing strength.”

“All right, just put it on.”

She inserted the needle in the deadened patch on his forearm and taped the small syringe firmly in place, flat on his arm. On either side of the squeeze tube was a short length of pencil to keep the tube from being squeezed by accident. “Just feel through your sleeve and press the tube with your thumb when you need it.”

“I know, I know.”

She kissed him on the forehead. “If I shouldn’t make it to the airport with the truck, if they are waiting for me—”

“I’ll just drop the blimp into the stadium,” he said. “It will mash quite a few. But don’t think about the bad possibilities. We’ve been lucky so far, right?”

“You have been very clever so far.”

“I’ll see you at the airport at two fifteen.”

She walked him to the elevator, and then she returned to the room and sat on the bed. It was not yet time to go for the truck.

Lander spotted the blimp crew standing near the desk in the lobby. There was Simmons, Farley’s copilot, and two network cameramen. He walked over, exerting himself to put on a brisk manner.

I’ll rest in the bus, he thought.

“My God, it’s Mike,” Simmons said. “I thought you were out sick. Where’s Farley? We called his room. We were waiting for him.”

“Farley had a rough night. Some drunk girl stuck her finger in his eye.”

“Jesus.”

“He’s all right, but he’s getting it looked at. I fly today.”

“When did you get in?”

“This morning. That bastard Farley called me at four a.m. Let’s go. We’re late now.”

“You don’t look too good, Mike.”

“I look better than you do. Let’s go.”

At the Lakefront Airport gate, the driver could not find his vehicle pass and they all had to show their credentials. Three squad cars were parked near the tower.

The blimp, 225 feet of silver, red, and blue, rested in a grassy triangle between the runways. Unlike the airplanes squatting on the ground before the hangars, the airship gave the impression of flight even when at rest. Poised lightly on its single wheel, nose against the mooring mast, it pointed to the northeast like a giant weathervane. Near it were the big bus that transported the ground crew and the tractor-trailer that housed the mobile maintenance shop. The vehicles and the men were dwarfed by the silver airship.

Vickers, the crew chief, wiped his hands on a rag. “Glad you’re back, Captain Lander. She’s ready.”

“Thank you.” Lander began the traditional walk-around inspection. Everything was in order, as he knew it would be. The blimp was clean. He had always liked the cleanliness of the blimp. “You guys ready?” he called.

Lander and Simmons ran down the rest of the preflight checklist in the gondola.

Vickers was berating the two TV cameramen. “Captain Video, will you and your assistant kindly get your asses in that gondola so we can weigh off?”

The ground crew took hold of the handrail around the gondola and bounced the airship on its landing wheel. Vickers removed several of the twenty-five-pound bags of shot that hung from the rail. The crew bounced the airship again.

“She’s just a hair heavy. That’s good.” Vickers liked the blimp to take off heavy; fuel consumption would lighten it later.

“Where are the Cokes? Have we got the Cokes?” Simmons said. He thought they would be airborne for at least three hours, possibly longer. “Yeah, here they are.”

“Take it, Simmons,” Lander said.

“Okay.” Simmons slid into the single pilot’s seat on the left side of the gondola. He waved through the windshield. The crewmen at the mooring mast tripped the release, and eight men on the nose ropes pulled the blimp around. “Here we go.” Simmons rolled back the elevator wheel, pushed in the throttles, and the great airship rose at a steep angle.

Lander leaned back in the passenger seat beside the pilot. The flight to the stadium, with the tailwind, took nine and a half minutes. Lander figured that, wide open, it could be done in a shade over seven minutes, if the wind held.

Beneath them, a solid stream of traffic jammed the expressway near the Tulane exit.

“Some of those people are gonna miss the kickoff,” Simmons said.

“Yeah, I expect so,” Lander said. They would all miss half time, he thought. It was one ten p.m. He had almost an hour to wait.

Dahlia Iyad got out of the taxi near the Galvez Street wharf and walked quickly down the block toward the garage. The bomb was there, or it was not. The police were waiting or they were not. She had not noticed before how cracked and tilted the sidewalk was. She looked at the cracks as she walked along. A group of small children were playing stickball in the street. The batter, no more than three and a half feet tall, whistled at her as she went by.

A police car made the players scatter and passed Dahlia at fifteen miles an hour. She turned her face away from it as though she were looking for an address. The squad car turned at the next corner. She fished in her purse for the keys and walked up the alley to the garage. Here were the locks. She opened them and slipped inside, closing the door behind her. It was semidark in the garage. A few shafts of sunshine came in through nailholes in the walls. The truck appeared undisturbed.

She climbed into the back and switched on the dim light. There was a thin film of dust on the nacelle. It was all right. If the place were staked out, they would never have let her get to the bomb. She changed into a pair of coveralls marked with the initials of the television network and stripped the vinyl panels off the sides of the truck, revealing the network emblem in bright colors.

She found the checklist taped to the nacelle. She read it over quickly. First the detonators. She removed them from their packing and, reaching into the middle of the nacelle, she slid them into place, one in the exact center of each side of the charge. The wires from the detonators plugged into the wiring harness with its lead-in to the airship’s power supply. Now the fuse and its detonator were plugged into place.

She cut all the rope lashings except two. Check the bag for Lander. One .38 caliber revolver with silencer, one pair of cable cutters, both in a paper sack. Her Schmeisser machine pistol with six extra clips and an AK-47 automatic rifle with dips were in a duffle bag.

Getting out, she laid the Schmeisser on the floor of the truck cab and covered it with a blanket. There was dust on the truck seat. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped it carefully. She tucked her hair into a Big Apple cap.

One fifty. Time to go. She swung open the garage doors and drove outside, blinking in the sunshine, and left the truck idling as she closed the garage doors.

Driving toward the airport, she had an odd, happy feeling of falling, falling.

Kabakov watched from the command post at the stadium as the river of people poured in through the southeast gate. They were so well dressed and well fed, unaware of the trouble they were causing him.

There was some grumbling when lines formed at the metal detectors, and louder complaints when now and then a fan was asked to dump the contents of his pockets in a plastic dishpan. Standing with Kabakov were the members of the east side trouble squad, ten men in flak jackets, heavily armed. He walked outside, away from the crackle of radios, and watched the stadium fill up. Already the bands were thumping away, the music becoming less distorted as more and more bodies baffled the echoes off the stands. By one forty-five most of the spectators were in their seats. The roadblocks closed.

Eight hundred feet above the stadium, the TV crew in the blimp was conferring by radio with the director in the big television van parked behind the stands. The “NBS Sports Spectacular” was to open with a shot of the stadium from the blimp, with the network logo and the title superimposed on it. In the van, facing twelve television screens, the director was not satisfied.

“Hey, Simmons,” the cameraman said, “now he wants it from the other end, the north end with Tulane in the background, can you do that?”

“You bet.” The blimp wheeled majestically northward.

“Okay, that’s good, that’s good.” The cameraman had it nicely framed, the bright green field, solidly banked with eighty-four thousand people, the stadium wreathed with flags that snapped in the wind.

Lander could see the police helicopter darting like a drag onfly around the perimeter of the stadium.

“Tower to Nora One Zero.”

Simmons picked up the microphone. “Nora One Zero, go ahead.”

“Traffic in your area one mile northwest and approaching,” the air controller said. “Give him plenty of room.”

“Roger. I see him. Nora One Zero out.”

Simmons pointed and Lander saw a military helicopter approaching at six hundred feet. “It’s the prez. Take off your hat,” Simmons said. He wheeled the airship away from the north end of the stadium.

Lander watched as the landing marker was deployed on the track.

“They want a shot of the arrival,” the cameraman’s assistant said. “Can you get us broadside to him?”

“That’s fine,” the cameraman said. Through his long lens, eighty-six million people saw the president’s helicopter touch down. The president stepped out and walked quickly into the stadium and out of sight.

In the TV van, the director snapped, “Take two.” Across the country and around the world, the audience saw the president striding along the sideline to his box.

Looking down, Lander could see him again now, a husky blond figure in a knot of men, his arms raised to the crowd and the crowd rising to their feet in a wave as he passed.

Kabakov heard the roar that greeted the president. He had never seen the man, and he was curious. He restrained the impulse to go and look at him. His place was here, near the command post, where he would be instantly alerted to trouble.

“I’ll take it, Simmons. You watch the kickoff,” Lander said. They switched places. Lander was tired already, and the elevator wheel seemed heavy under his hand.

On the field, they were “reenacting the toss” for the benefit of the television audience. Now the teams were lined up for the kickoff.

Lander glanced at Simmons. His head was out the side window. Lander reached forward and pushed the fuel mixture lever for the port engine. He made the mixture just lean enough to make the engine overheat.

In minutes the temperature gauge was well into the red. Lander eased the fuel mixture back to normal. “Gentlemen, we’ve got a little problem.” Lander had Simmons’s instant attention. He tapped the temperature gauge.

“Now what the hell!” Simmons said. He climbed across the gondola and peered at the port engine over the shoulders of the TV crew. “She’s not streaming any oil.”

“What?” the cameraman said.

“Port engine’s hot. Let me get past you here.” He reached into the rear compartment and brought out a fire extinguisher.

“Hey, it’s not burning, is it?” The cameraman and his assistant were very serious, as Lander knew they would be.

“No, hell no,” Simmons said. “We have to get the extinguisher out, it’s SOP.”

Lander feathered the engine. He was heading away from the stadium now, to the northeast, to the airfield. “We’ll let Vickers take a look at it,” he said.

“Did you call him already?”

“While you were in the back.” Lander had mumbled into his microphone all right, but he had not pressed the transmit button.

He was following U.S. 10, the Superdome below him on the right and the fairgrounds with its oval track on the left. Bucking the headwind on a single engine was slow going. All the better coming back, Lander thought. He was over the Pontchartrain Golf Course now, and he could see the airfield spread out in front of him. There was the truck, approaching the airport gate. Dahlia had made it.

From the cab of the truck, Dahlia could see the airship coming. She was a few seconds early. There was a policeman at the gate. She held the blue vehicle pass out the window and he waved her through. She cruised slowly along the road flanking the field.

The ground crew saw the airship now, and they stirred around the bus and the tractor-trailer. Lander wanted them to be in a hurry. At three hundred feet he thumbed the button on his microphone. “All right, I’m coming in 175 heavy. Give it plenty of room.”

“Nora One Zero, what’s up? Why didn’t you say you were coming, Mike?” It was Vickers’s voice.

“I did,” Lander said. Let him wonder. The ground crew were running to their stations. “I’m coming to the mast crosswind and I want the wheel chocked. Don’t let her swing to the wind, Vickers. I’ve got a small problem with the port engine, a small problem. It’s nothing, but I want the port engine downwind from the ship. I do not want a flap. Do you understand?”

Vickers understood. Lander did not want the crash trucks howling down the field.

Dahlia Iyad waited to drive across the runway. The tower was giving her a red light. She watched as the blimp touched down, bounced, touched again, the ground crew grabbing the ropes that trailed from the nose. They had it under control now.

The tower light flashed green. She drove across the runway and parked behind the tractor-trailer, out of sight of the crew milling around the blimp. In a second the tailgate was down, the ramp in place. She grabbed the paper bag containing the gun and the cable cutters and ran around the tractor-trailer to the blimp. The crew paid no attention to her. Vickers opened the cowling on the port engine. Dahlia passed the bag to Lander through the window of the gondola and ran back to her truck.

Lander turned to the TV crew. “Stretch your legs. It’ll be a minute.”

They scrambled out and he followed them.

Lander walked to the bus and immediately returned to the blimp. “Hey, Vickers, Lakehurst is on the horn for you.”

“Oh, my ass—All right, Frankie, take a look in here, but don’t change nothin’ until I get back.” He trotted toward the bus. Lander went in behind him. Vickers had just picked up the radio telephone when Lander shot him in the back of the head. Now the ground crew had no leader. As Lander stepped off the bus he heard the putt-putt of the forklift. Dahlia was in the saddle, swinging around the rear of the tractor-trailer. The crew, puzzled at the sight of the big nacelle, made room for the forklift. She eased forward, sliding the long nacelle under the gondola. She raised the fork six inches and it was in place.

“What’s going on? What’s this?” the man at the engine said. Dahlia ignored him. She flipped the two front damps around the handrail. Four more to go.

“Vickers said get the shot bags off,” Lander yelled.

“He said what?”

“Get the shot bags off. Move it!”

“What is this, Mike? I never saw this.”

“Vickers will explain it. TV time costs $175,000 a minute. Now get your ass in gear. The network wants this thing.” Two crewmen undipped the shot bags as Dahlia finished fastening the nacelle. She backed the forklift away. The crew was confused. Something was wrong. This big nacelle with its network markings had never been tested on the blimp.

Lander went to the port engine and looked in. Nothing had been removed. He shut the cowling.

Here came the TV cameraman. “NBS? What is that thing? That’s not ours—”

“The director will explain it. Call him from the bus.” Lander climbed into his seat and started the engines. The crew skipped back, startled. Dahlia was already inside the gondola with the cable cutters. No time to unscrew anything. The TV equipment had to go before the blimp would fly.

The cameraman saw her cutting the equipment loose. “Hey! Don’t do that.” He scrambled into the gondola. Lander turned in his seat and shot the cameraman in the back. A startled crewman’s face in the door. The men closest to the blimp were backing away now. Dahlia undamped the camera.

“Chock and mast now!” Lander yelled.

Dahlia jumped to the ground. She had the Schmeisser out. The crewmen were backing away, some of them turning to run. She pulled the chock away from the wheel and, as the blimp swung to the wind, she ran to the mast and uncoupled it. The nose boom must come out of the socket in the mast. It must. The blimp was swinging. The men had fled the nose ropes. The wind would do it, would twist the blimp free. She heard a siren. A squad car was screaming across the runway.

The nose was free, but the blimp was still weighted with the body of the cameraman and the TV equipment. She swung into the gondola. The transmitter went first, smashing to the ground. The camera followed it.

The squad car was coming head-on with the blimp, its lights flashing. Lander slammed the throttles forward and the great ship started to roll. Dahlia was struggling with the body of the cameraman. His leg was under Lander’s seat. The blimp bounded once and settled again. It reared like a prehistoric animal. The squad car was forty yards away, its doors opening. Lander dumped most of his fuel. The blimp rose heavily.

Dahlia leaned out of the gondola and fired her Schmeisser at the squad car, star fractures appearing across its windshield, the blimp rising, a policeman out of the car, blood on his shirt, drawing his gun, looking up into her face as the blimp passed over. A blast from the machine pistol cut him down, and Dahlia kicked the cameraman’s body out the door to fall spread-eagled on the hood of the patrol car. The blimp surged upward. Other squad cars were coming now, growing smaller beneath them, their doors opening. She heard a thock against the gas bag. They were firing. She aimed a burst at the nearest police car, saw dust kick up around it. Lander had the blimp at fifty degrees, engines screaming. Up and up and out of pistol range.

The fuse and the wires! Dahlia lay on the bloody floor of the gondola, and hanging outside she could reach them.

Lander was nodding at the controls, near collapse. She reached over his shoulder and pressed the syringe beneath his sleeve. In a second his head was up again.

He checked the cabin light switch. It was off. “Hook it up.”

She pried the cover off the cabin light, removed the bulb and plugged in the wires to the bomb. The fuse, to be used if the electrical system failed, must be secured around a seat bracket near the rear of the gondola. Dahlia had trouble tying the knot as the fuse became slippery with the cameraman’s blood.

The airspeed indicator said sixty knots. They would be at the Super Bowl in six minutes.

Corley and Kabakov sprinted to Corley’s car at the first confused report of shooting at the airfield. They were howling up Interstate 10 when the report was augmented.

“Unknown persons shooting from the Aldrich blimp, the radio said. ”Two officers down. Ground crew advises a device is attached to the aircraft.”

“They got the blimp!” Corley said, pounding the seat beside him. “That’s your other pilot.” They could see the airship over the skyline now, growing larger by the second. Corley was on the radio to the stadium. “Get the president out!” he was yelling.

Kabakov fought the rage and frustration, the shock, the impossibility of it. He was caught, helpless, on the expressway between the stadium and the airport. He must think, must think, must think. They were passing the Superdome now. Then he was shaking Corley’s shoulder. “Jackson,” Kabakov said. “Lamar Jackson. The chopper. Drive this son of a bitch.”

They were past the exit ramp, and Corley turned across three lanes of traffic, tires smoking, and shot the wrong way down the entrance ramp, a car was coming, big in their faces, swerving over, a rocking sideswipe and they were down into Howard Avenue beside the Superdome. A screaming turn around the huge building and they slammed to a stop. Kabakov ran to the pad, startling the stakeout team still on duty.

Jackson was descending from the roof to pick up a bundle of conduit. Kabakov ran to the loadmaster, a man he did not know.

“Get him down. Get him down.”

The blimp was almost even with the Superdome now, moving fast just out of range. It was two miles from the packed stadium.

Corley came from the car. He had left the trunk open. He was carrying an M-16 automatic rifle.

The chopper settled down, Kabakov ducking as he ran in under the rotor. He scrambled up to the cockpit window. Jackson put his hand behind his ear.

“They got the Aldrich blimp,” Kabakov was pointing upward. “We’ve got to go up. We’ve got to go up.”

Jackson looked up at the blimp. He swallowed. There was a strange, set expression in his face. “Are you hijacking me?”

“I’m asking you. Please.”

Jackson dosed his eyes for a second. “Get in. Get the belly man out. I won’t be responsible for him.”

Kabakov and Corley pulled out the startled belly man and climbed inside the cargo bay. The helicopter leaped into the air with a great blatting of its blades. Kabakov went forward and pushed up the empty copilot’s seat.

“We can—”

“Listen,” Jackson said. “Are you gonna bust ‘em or talk to them.”

“Bust ‘em.”

“All right. If we can catch them, I’ll come in above them. They can’t see above them in that thing. You gonna shoot the gas bag? No time for it to leak much.”

Kabakov shook his head. “They might set it off on the way down. We’ll try to knock out the gondola.”

Jackson nodded. “I’ll come in above them. When you’re ready, I’ll drop down beside them. This thing won’t take a lot of hits and fly. You be ready. Talk to me on the headset.”

The helicopter was doing 110 knots, gaining fast, but the blimp had a big lead. It would be very close.

“If we knock out the pilot, the wind will still carry it over the stadium,” Jackson said.

“What about the hook? Could we hold him with the hook, pull him somewhere?”

“How could we hook on? The damn thing is slick. We can try if there’s time—hey, there go the cops.”

Ahead of them they could see the police helicopter rising to meet the blimp.

“Not from below,” Jackson was yelling. “Don’t get close—” Even as he spoke the little police helicopter staggered under a blast of gunfire and fell off to the side, its rotor flailing wildly, and plunged downward.

Jackson could see the movements of the airship’s rudder as the great fin passed under him. He was over the blimp and the stadium was sliding beneath them. Time for one pass. Kabakov and Corley braced themselves in the fuselage door.

Lander felt the rotor blast on the blimp’s skin, heard the helicopter engine. He touched Dahlia and jerked his thumb upward. “Get me ten more seconds,” he said.

She put a fresh clip in the Schmeisser.

Jackson’s voice in Kabakov’s earphones: “Hang on.”

The helicopter dropped in a stomach-lifting swoop down the blimp’s right side. Kabakov heard the first bullets hit the belly of the helicopter and then he and Corley were firing, hot shell casings spattering from the automatic weapons, glass flying from the gondola. Metal was ringing all around Kabakov. The helicopter lurched and rose. Corley was hit, blood spreading on his trousers at the thigh.

Jackson, his forehead slashed by the glass in his riddled cockpit, mopped away the blood that had poured into his eyes.

All the windows were out of the gondola and the instrument panel was shattered, sparks flying. Dahlia lay on the floor; she did not move.

Lander, hit in the shoulder and the leg, saw the blimp losing altitude. The airship was sinking, but they could still clear the stadium wall. It was coming, it was under him, and a floor of faces was looking up. He had his hand on the firing switch. Now. He flipped the switch. Nothing. The backup switch. Nothing. The circuits were blasted away. The fuse. He dragged himself out of the pilot’s seat, his lighter in his hand, and used his good arm and leg to crawl toward the fuse at the rear of the gondola, as the blimp drifted between the solid banks of people.

The hook trailed beneath the helicopter on a thirty-foot cable. Jackson dropped until the hook slipped over the blimp’s slick skin. The only opening was the space between the rudder and the fin beneath the rudder hinge. Kabakov was coaching Jackson, and they got it close, dose, but the hook was too thick.

They were stampeding in the stadium. Kabakov looked around him desperately and he saw, coiled in a clip on the wall, a length of three-quarter-inch nylon rope with a snap shackle in each end. In the half second he stared at it, he knew with an awful certainty what he had to do.

From the ground, Moshevsky watched, his eyes bulging, fists clenched as the figure appeared, sliding spiderlike down the cable beneath the helicopter. He snatched the field glasses from an agent beside him, but he knew before he looked. It was Kabakov. He could see the rotor blast tearing at Kabakov as he slid down the greasy cable. A rope was tied around his waist. They were over Moshevsky now. Straining back to see, Moshevsky fell on his rear and never stopped watching.

Kabakov had his foot in the hook. Corley’s face was visible in the opening in the belly of the chopper. He was talking in the headset. The hook slid down, Kabakov was beside the fin, no! The fin was rising, swinging. It hit Kabakov and knocked him away, he was swinging back, passing the length of rope between the rudder and the fin, beneath the top rudder hinge, snapping it in a loop through the hook, one arm waving, and the helicopter strained upward, the cable hardening along Kabakov’s body like a steel bar.

Lander, crawling along the blood-slick floor of the gondola toward the fuse, felt the floor tilt sharply. He was sliding and scrabbled for a handhold on the floor.

The helicopter clawed the air. The tail of the blimp was up at fifty degrees now, the nose bumping against the football field. The spectators screaming, running, the exits jammed as they fought to get out. Lander could hear their cries all around him. He strained toward the fuse, lighter in hand.

The nose of the blimp dragged up the stands, the crowd scattering before it. It caught on the flagpoles at the top of the stadium, and lurched over, clear and moving over the houses toward the river, the helicopter’s engine screaming. Corley, looking down, could see Kabakov standing on the fin, holding on to the cable.

“We’ll make the river, we’ll make the river,” Jackson said over and over, as the temperature gauge climbed into the red. His thumb was poised over the red drop button.

Lander heaved himself the final foot up the slanting floor and thumbed his lighter.

Moshevsky tore his way to the top of the stands. The helicopter, the blimp, the man standing on the fin, hung over the river for one instant, fixed forever in Moshevsky’s mind, and then they were gone in a blinding flash of light and a Doomsday crack that flattened him on the shuddering stands. Shrapnel slashed the trees beside the river as the blast uprooted them, and the water, whipped to foam, was blown out in a great basin that filled again with a roar of its own, the water rising in a mountainous cone into the smoke. And seconds later, far downriver, spent shrapnel pocked the water like hail and rattled off the iron hulls of ships.

Miles away, finishing a late lunch at the Top of the Mart overlooking the city, Rachel saw the flash. She rose, and then the tall building trembled, the windows shattered, and she was on her back, glass still falling and, looking up at the underside of the table, she knew. She struggled to her feet. A woman sat on the floor beside her, mouth hanging open.

Rachel looked at her. “He’s dead,” Rachel said.

The final casualty list totaled 512. At the stadium fourteen were trampled to death in the exits, fifty-two suffered fractures in the struggle to escape, and the rest had cuts and bruises. Among those cut and bruised was the president of the United States. His injuries were suffered when ten Secret Service men piled on top of him. In the town, 116 persons received minor injuries from flying glass, as windows were blasted in.

At noon on the following day, Rachel Bauman and Robert Moshevsky stood on a small pier on the north bank of the Mississippi River. They had been there for hours, watching the police boats drag the bottom. The dragging had gone on all night. In the first few hours, the grapnels had brought up a few charred pieces of metal from the helicopter. Since then, there was nothing.

The pier on which they stood was riddled and splintered with shrapnel. A large dead catfish bumped against it in the current. The fish was punched full of holes.

Moshevsky remained impassive. His eyes never left the police boats. Beside him on the pier was his canvas suitcase, for in three hours he would take Muhammad Fasil back to Israel to stand trial for the Munich massacre. The El Al jet that was coming for them also contained fourteen Israeli commandos. It was felt that they would provide a suitable buffer between Moshevsky and his prisoner on the long flight home.

Rachel’s face was swollen, and her eyes were red and dry. She had cried herself out on the bed in the Royal Orleans, fingers locked in a shirt of Kabakov’s that reeked of his cigars.

The wind was cold off the river. Moshevsky put his jacket around Rachel. It hung below her knees.

Finally, the lead boat sounded a single long blast. The police fleet pulled in their empty grapnels and started downstream. Now there was only the river, moving in a solid piece toward the sea. Rachel heard a strange, strangled sound from Moshevsky, and he turned his face away. She pressed her cheek against his chest and reached her arms as far around him as they would go and patted him, feeling the hot tears falling in her hair. Then she took his hand and led him up the bank as she would lead a child.