The shiny, green mini-bus was the latest acquisition of the Teaneck Church of God. The money for the bus had been donated anonymously after an article in a recent N.Y. Times, detailing the accident that destroyed the previous bus, caused by a drunk, teenage driver and three friends. The young driver was texting his girlfriend to let her know he was on his way to her house. That’s when the car drifted into the oncoming lanes of Teaneck Road, meeting the previous Teaneck Church of God transport van in a tragic head- on collision, killing instantly all four teenagers in the car and the driver of the church van. The $ 100,000 anonymous donation was a surprise to the church’s directors, as no one with that kind of money was a member.
Today the mini-bus was crowded with sixteen children and two chaperones as it entered the Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side. The kids were a little rowdy, as kids sometimes are, excited to be going to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan for the new dinosaur science exhibit.
Traffic seemed lighter than normal for mid-morning. The chaperones had the children singing Christian songs, as the mini-bus began to slow, not quite halfway through the eastbound tube. The two eighteen wheelers in front of the mini- bus looked like they were traveling side-by-side. The trucks continued to slow, finally coming to a complete halt.
The driver of the mini-bus, head extended out the driver’s side window as the bus slowed to a stop, could not tell if the trucks were stopped because of a traffic problem or something else; but delays weren’t unusual. It appeared the two truck drivers were talking about something.
The Church of God mini-bus driver heard one of the guys yell something, sounded like Allahu Akbar; but that was the last thing the driver heard, ever.
The Martyrs Brigade was comprised mostly of Arabs from Saudi Arabia but also had several Bosnian members. The Bosnian Muslims were not nearly as inclined to commit suicide in their endeavors of terror as were their Arab brothers who believed there actually were seventy-two virgins awaiting them somewhere in paradise, though this was never mentioned in their Holy Quran. Today, this Great Day, the Bosnians would do what needed to be done. They were needed for their Caucasian look and should evoke no scrutiny. The Americans didn’t believe in profiling, thankfully.
New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel had been chosen by Jihad’s Warriors because the Holland Tunnel would not allow large trucks, including Hertz or U-Haul moving vans. The Warriors knew the large trucks would be needed if the intent was to flood as much of Manhattan as possible, and that was the intent.
The Lincoln Tunnel was constructed from 1934 to 1937 at a cost of only seventy-five million dollars, originally a single-tube tunnel with two-way traffic. However, by 1957, two other tubes were constructed, providing two lanes of eastbound traffic and two lanes of westbound. The center tube could support one-way or two-way traffic.
At nearly one hundred feet below the base of the Hudson River, Vinny was not totally confident that the explosives in the four large trucks would be enough to penetrate the riverbed, but maybe. In any case there would be great death and destruction. Vinny loved carnage.
The plan was to have two of the eighteen-wheelers enter the eastbound tube and two would enter the westbound. Hopefully the trucks would be side-by-side in each tube, or close, at the precise time. Maybe the combined explosives of all four of the trucks, each loaded with 10,000 pounds of fertilizer and diesel, would do the job. If the tunnel flooded, the subway system would flood too. Praise Allah.
At precisely 10:15 that bright, sunny morning, a morning very similar to the morning of September 11 so many years before, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels exploded in fury, the force actually measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale. The Teaneck Church of God would need another van.
Erica Robbins felt the ground shake as she was reporting for FOX, not far from the Holland Tunnel’s Manhattan entrance. She knew this was not an earthquake.
Erica spent three months with U.S. Army troops in Afghanistan, just before the Pentagon decided to pull all U.S. troops from the Korengal Valley of Death, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Once you felt an IED from a distance, the feeling stayed in permanent memory.
Everyone in the general area seemed to stop at the sound, remaining almost motionless.
“What was that Erica?” The cameraman turned from Erica to the sound of the deep thud that shook the earth beneath him, the loose gravel on the road dancing in place.
Before she could answer, dust and debris began to emerge from the entrance and exit of the Holland Tunnel’s Manhattan side, followed by a bright-white ball of flame that seemed to go forever. Then the almost complete silence was followed by the screams of those who were, as of yet, undead but seriously burned and injured. Shrapnel exploded from the tunnel, the remnants of what had been automobiles, vans, and a shiny, green mini-bus disbursed from both the Manhattan and the New Jersey sides. Car alarms in the area began to blare.
“What the hell is going on Erica?”
The cameraman was young, thirty-something; and he was clearly dismayed at this sudden turn of events. His six foot-two, lanky frame of 175 pounds was trembling as he remembered the morning of the World Trade Center attacks, another day of dust, debris and death.
The second series of explosions to the north followed the Holland Tunnel bombing by just a few seconds; and Erica knew whose fingerprints would be all over this attack, again on the streets of New York. It reeked of al-Qaeda.
“Come on Stretch,” Erica referred to her cameraman by his nickname. “We need to get to higher ground.”
“What for?”
“Never mind, just follow me.”
Erica led the way across Canal Street and into the new Sheraton Hotel. She knew that Grits, the four-star topside restaurant specializing in Southern cuisine, would be serving brunch. They would be safe in case the Hudson River came pouring in, and they would have a good view to the north.
Exiting the elevator, Stretch following closely behind Erica, they entered Grits where all the morning patrons had been eating the famous country sausage biscuits and gravy but were now standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing toward the smoke and dust. Some looked west toward the Holland Tunnel, now hidden by the black, gooey smoke pouring from the two outer tunnels, looking like the legendary dragon, belching smoke and fire from its nostrils. Others looked to the north, and most knew that the Lincoln Tunnel was belching smoke and fire too.
Erica turned to face Stretch, and he had the camera on in seconds.
“Condi, are you still there?” Erica was out of breath but was always on duty, night or day. She waited while she was patched through to the news station Live Desk.
“Yes Erica, we’re here. What’s all the commotion? We are getting scattered reports that Holland Tunnel has had a fire and explosion. No reports of deaths yet. Do you have any news?”
“Condi, sorry, I’m out of breath. Yes, yes, there have been explosions at the Holland Tunnel and now to the north of us. I am assuming that the smoke you are seeing on camera is from the Lincoln Tunnel. If not, there’s smoke coming from somewhere close to the Lincoln.”
Helicopters were now flying overhead, rescue vehicles coming from all directions.
“Erica, do you see any water coming from the Holland Tunnel?” Condi tried to squeeze as much from the first reports as possible. She was glad they had dispatched Erica to report on the tunnel closures; because she was the only reporter there, from any network. FOX had done it again.
“Condi,” Erica finally catching her breath, “We see no water so far, just thick, black smoke pouring out. “I don’t know how anyone could survive the inferno; but it looks like there are people running out, covered in soot. Wait, oh my goodness.”
Stretch’s camera panned the tunnel openings as the burning woman ran from the tunnel exit and collapsed on the street, now just a burning pile of human flesh, probably resembling the burning Christians of Nero’s day, and the Christians who were routinely burned to death in some of the more extreme Islamic countries. Others ran past the burning woman, and Stretch wondered if they even knew it was a woman. It looked just like some of the other burning debris that had blown from the tubes.
Erica’s favorite cameraman was changing jobs after this day. Stretch could take the trauma and the drama no more, as he remembered the bodies of the Asian couple who landed on the street beside him on September 11, 2001, barely ten feet away, after their plunge from the rooftop thirteen hundred sixty-eight feet above. Their bodies exploded into small human fragments of flesh and bone and lots of blood. It was a week later that Stretch found out the couple was Japanese, because that bit of evidence was not noticeable at the time.
That was a day that Stretch would never forget; and he remembered the news videos coming out of Gaza and the West Bank that day ten years earlier, Palestinians dancing in the streets, firing their guns in the air in celebration of the collapsing World Trade Center and wrecked Pentagon. He had been angry about that and wondered if they would be celebrating in the streets again today. He figured they would.
“Erica, can you and Stretch make it to Lincoln Tunnel, do you think it’s safe?” Condi had a nose for news but didn’t want to endanger anyone. “There have been no reports of flooding from either of the tunnel systems.”
“You bet. We’ll head there now.”
The massive explosions in the Lincoln Tunnel, nearly 40,000 pounds going off in a dance of simultaneity, did not penetrate all the way to the Hudson River bed located nearly one hundred feet above but did destroy all vehicles in the tunnel: cars, small trucks, vans and a motorcyclist. The damage to the Lincoln Tunnel ceiling was significant, the explosives directed upward to shake the integrity of the structure and possibly invite the river in for a long and messy visit.
The bedrock beneath the riverbed seemed to be holding as helicopters zoomed their cameras in to show those in TV land the latest religiously-inspired gore. The cameras mounted on the tunnel ceilings would have been ineffective, even if they had been operable; but the massive blast took care of that. No hackers would be necessary to interrupt camera security in the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels. The cameras had simply disappeared, kind of like so many people were disappearing.
Had the interior tunnel cameras been operable and had the smoke not been too thick to block the camera’s view, those in TV land would have seen the small but growing trickle of water, splattering into the cavern that now replaced the surface that had been a street just a few minutes earlier.
The flow rapidly increased in volume, and the newly formed cavern would soon fill to capacity as the Hudson River came crashing through, the water’s only path of egress, the tubes that had transported only motorized vehicles earlier in the day. The Lincoln Tunnel would soon be more like an aqueduct.
Erica and Stretch exited the Sheraton on Canal Street. Walking was their only mode of transportation. Traffic was at a dead stop.