Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(41)

At the precinct, he found a couple of cops holding down the fort. Everyone else, they told Rocky, was down at ground zero.

“What? Ground zero?”

“That’s what they’re calling it now.”

“They, who? The press?” Rocky asked.

“Everyone.”

“Not New Yorkers.”

“Everyone.”

For some reason, that irked Rocky. Somehow, it felt like an admission that the terrorists had forever claimed a piece of New York. He vowed not to call it ground zero; he refused to think of it as anything but the World Trade Center.

“Anyone heard from Murph yet?” Rocky asked, wondering about his longtime partner T.J. Murphy, whose kid brother Luke is with the FDNY. The two forces—NYPD and FDNY—have had a longtime rivalry, but it’s a friendly one where the Murphy brothers are concerned.

Rocky had been trying to call Murph, but his phone kept ringing into voice mail.

“Talked to him earlier. Luke’s missing” was the chilling—and perhaps inevitable—answer to Rocky’s question.

Murph had to be distraught. Luke was a good fifteen years younger. Murph was more father than brother to him, their father having died on duty before Luke was even born.

Rocky was a few blocks above the site, making his way south through a dust-shrouded ghost town littered with burned-out cars and abandoned ladder trucks, when sirens and unintelligible bullhorns erupted. A panicky wave of humanity surged toward him.

“What’s going on?” he asked a couple of rescue workers who scurried past, wearing white facemasks and hard hats.

“Secondary collapse. They’re evacuating. C’mon, you gotta get outa here.”

Rocky turned and went north again. Ran north, remembering the billowing tsunami that engulfed this spot yesterday as each tower came down.

But this collapse, thank God, was nowhere near as devastating. This time, the office tower was half the size of the Trade Center towers, and there were no people in it.

Rocky waited for the all-clear with a group of fellow NYPD officers who had been down at the scene. They briefed him on procedures at “the pile,” and told him what he could expect to find when he finally got there. They also added scores of names to his running mental list of personal friends and acquaintances, all of them first responders, who were missing.

By the time the rescue operations resumed, Rocky had absorbed the barrage of new information. He steeled himself for what lay ahead, certain he was prepared.

After all, he’s a homicide detective. On any given day, he anticipates coming face-to-face with the worst horrors imaginable.

But this . . . this was unimaginable; you’re never prepared for something like this. It was as if Rocky’s worst murder scene had collided with his experience in Saigon; civilians don’t die by the thousands here in America on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Rocky had been drafted and plunged, without basic training, directly into the front lines of a vicious war.

This, like war, was hell.

This . . .

This was ground zero.

Two hundred and twenty floors of steel and glass, walls, doors, carpets, desks, computers, couches, files, paper . . . all of it had vaporized into dust and smoke drifting like mist in glaring searchlights.

Hundreds of volunteer medics were poised to tend to the survivors, undaunted by the lineup of refrigerated trucks that had dispatched soldiers carrying body bags. Those soldiers emerged in somber twos and threes carrying the bags between them, loading them onto the trucks for the long trip uptown to the morgue as the medics stood by, idle and helpless.

Flames burned undeterred by blasting fire hoses. Bulldozers and plows pushed at the mound and cranes lifted mangled chunks of building out of the way. Power saws and blow torches cut at the mangled beams in an effort to gain access to the survivors who had been buried alive.

Barking rescue dogs nosed through the ruins; robots and cameras were lowered into dangerous crevices; firefighters and cops descended via ropes into the yawning pit to find only torn, burned, and dismembered bodies, emerging soot-covered and sobbing. Hundreds of firemen alone were among the missing. Hundreds. Thousands of civilians. Thousands. The numbers were staggering.

Someone handed Rocky a mask and he joined the bucket brigade. Tears ran down his face as he passed along heavy containers bearing chunks of concrete and insulation and tangled wire and twisted metal. Every bucketful of debris that was dug away from the pile increased the chances of finding someone . . .

Or so Rocky thought at first.

But as time wore on, he realized he was wrong; every bucketful seemed to drive home the futility of their efforts to save a life, even just one.

There were fragments of lives—shoes and desk photographs and computer disks and papers—and there were fragments of people. But not a single living soul emerged.

Everyone kept saying they just had to find the pockets where the survivors are buried alive, just had to get the fire under control, just had to stabilize the wreckage, just had to dig down deep enough . . .

Rocky talked the talk and walked the walk. But as the eerie, surreal night gave way to harsh daylight, and the dreadful day marched on toward darkness again, he gave up hope that anyone was going to come out of that smoldering tomb alive. The search, he realized, was fruitless, and yet it went on, because it was the only thing anyone could do. Search, and hope.

He looked everywhere for Murph, but didn’t spot him. A few guys said they had seen him earlier, and he was, predictably, distraught. For all Rocky knew, Murph was still there on the pile somewhere, but the scene was just too chaotic to find him.