A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1
Read A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Online
Authors: J.E. Fishman
Table of Contents
A Danger to Himself and Others
A Danger to Himself and Others
Bomb Squad NYC
Incident 1
A Danger to Himself and Others
J.E. Fishman
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, institutions, businesses, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America and throughout the world in English by Verbitrage, LLC.
Copyright © 2014 by Verbitrage, LLC, Series 5
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.
Edited by Patrick LoBrutto.
Cover design by Cory Clubb, Go Bold Designs.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-9898461-0-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-9898461-1-0
Books by J.E. Fishman
Standalone Fiction
The Dead Field
(short story)
Cadaver Blues: A Phuoc Goldberg Fiasco
The Bomb Squad NYC Series
A Danger to Himself and Others
Death March
The Long Black Hand
Blast from the Past
Bottle Rocket
As Contributor
The Beautiful Anthology
Non-Fiction
All I Need to Know I Learned from My Horse (co-author)
Life Is a Series of Presentations (co-author)
Dynamite: A Concise History of the NYPD Bomb Squad
Dedicated to Paul “Buddy” Bucha,
whom I am honored to call friend
Series Technical Advisor
Mark Torre
Lieutenant, New York Police Department
and
Commander of the NYPD Bomb Squad
Author’s Note
Members of the NYPD Bomb Squad respond to more than 1500 calls a year. Most of these are precautionary sweeps or false alarms. When they find unexploded bombs or dangerous explosives, Bomb Squad technicians remotely disarm them or remove them ninety-nine percent of the time with minimal risk to themselves and others.
Naturally, storytellers—and readers—aren’t so interested in the ninety-nine percent. It’s the unusual cases that call to us—the possibilities, the what-ifs, the dangers of tomorrow.
With the help of Mark Torre, who currently commands the NYPD Bomb Squad, Kevin Miles, who retired in 2013 as the FBI’s leading bomb technician, and other sources, I have made every effort to achieve technical accuracy in this book without compromising the safety of law enforcement personnel or the public. In the interests of storytelling, I have taken some liberties with regard to police procedures. I hope readers will make appropriate allowances for this. After all, no one wants to spend his leisure time watching cops fill out forms.
The real NYPD Bomb Squad, as many know, consists of fewer than forty individuals annexed to a police precinct in lower Manhattan. To avoid any confusion between the world in my head and the world “out there,” I have moved the Bomb Squad to an imaginary precinct on a different street.
This is indeed a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, events, and incidents are either a product of my imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Like any novelist, I am ultimately not hunting facts here but the greater truths of the human condition.
The real-life heroes of the NYPD, the FBI and other members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force do their best to protect all of us from harm. At some point, if not all of the time, even real heroes must face their own troubles and demons. The difference between them and the rest of us is that they set aside those troubles every day to pursue the greater good.
In sum, this book isn’t factual. But you may find it true.
A Danger to Himself and Others
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK,
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
1.
DAY ONE—Light
MANNY DIAZ HAD THIS DEAL
where sometimes he’d play the voiceover to his own life in the back of his head.
“Here’s Manny, down the sidelines—thirty, twenty, ten!” Or…
“As Supercop walked along the dark alley, demons and serpents fled from his path.” Or, more poignantly…
“Manuel Diaz occasionally wondered whether he was the hero of his own life or if someone else had landed the part.”
In Iraq, when he was part of an EOD team, Manny would run a voiceover while looking for tripwires: “Lieutenant Diaz, fifth call of the day and not even two in the afternoon. One-twenty in the shade. Dust thicker than paint from a spray can. He approaches the target with caution, knowing that one false step could mean the end.”
Kind of cute, right? But it wasn’t a joke exactly, more like comic relief, a means of keeping your heart light under pressure, of banishing distractions from the task at hand. Because, as everyone in this game knew, sometimes you looked away on purpose. Sometimes the booby trap was harder to see head-on and easier to see from the corner of a man’s eye.
Today was nothing like that, more a way to keep the boredom at arm’s length. Manny was the junior detective on their third bomb sweep of the morning, tasked with the role of sweeper in half the hallway of the VIP floor at the Waldorf-Astoria while one of the dogs, Sheba, and her handler, Detective Third Grade Cam Fowler, went about their business sniffing for trouble in each room of his segment. A few other guys, including the sergeant, were playing sweeper behind another EDC or doing visual checks of their own.
The US Secretary of State, someone said, would be staying here tonight in preparation for a speech at the UN. In another suite, some Arab potentate planned to sleep with his harem on satin sheets. Before all that, the Secret Service would take up their posts when the NYPD gave the all-clear. They already had the lobby secure.
And Manny’s voiceover silently intoned: “In the shadows, danger lurks.” Except that it didn’t. Not here. Both Labrador retrievers came back without once alerting. The sergeant reappeared and began filling out his report. All as routine as could be.
After raising the Secret Service guys on the radio, the Bomb Squad team waited to be relieved from covering the elevator and the emergency exits. The USSS agents showed up quick enough, chests out like someone held the tip of a knife to their spines. Showy. More full of crap than a week-old latrine, so far as Diaz was concerned.
The cops left together via two elevators. Down on the street, Diaz ended up in one of the response trucks with Fowler, the dog resting inside the built-in cage in back, still licking his chops from the Milk-Bone reward.
“You’re quiet today,” Fowler said. “Something on your mind?”
“Nah. Just bored. I was thinking about that expression: danger lurks. Why does it lurk? Where does it lurk?”
Fowler bit his lip. He had a long face and a sharp jawline. His blue eyes looked past the expansive white hood of the vehicle. “I don’t know. Is this some kind of brain puzzle?”
“The thing is,” Diaz said, “for the infantry, the marines, you know, danger don’t lurk. It smacks you in the face, dares you to confront it. This stuff here, what we do—”
“It lurks.”
“Yeah.”
“And you miss it, the other kind, facing it head-on.”
Diaz’s defenses went up. “I didn’t say that. It’s just a different feeling. That’s all.”
THE BOMB SQUAD OCCUPIED THE
rear garage and a handful of cluttered upstairs rooms of the Third Precinct building on Commerce Street in the West Village. Most of the crew from the Waldorf had stopped along the way for coffee, but Diaz and Fowler came straight back because Fowler was eager to uncrate his dog. When they walked in, there were only a few warm bodies upstairs.
Diaz heard Patti Morris, the squad secretary, fielding a call. The head of the squad, Lieutenant Joseph Capobianco, to whom she usually fed important decisions, had called in sick that afternoon, available only by phone or radio in an emergency.
Morris placed the receiver in its cradle and turned to Sander Kahn, a sergeant supervisor who was the highest-ranking person in the room at the moment. When you reached that rank you got a higher pay grade, so colleagues sometimes affectionately called you, “Money.” Sometimes not so affectionately. She said, “Hey, Money, report from the Seventeenth of a suspicious package at Saint Pat’s.”
“We have anyone in the vicinity?”
She consulted a sheet. “Not really.”
“I’ll take it myself. Diaz!”
“On it.” Diaz turned right back around, checking reflexively for the Glock in a hip holster under his pullover.
“Some kind of luggage by the Fifth Avenue steps,” Morris said, “south side.”
“Great.” Kahn shook his head as he removed a key from the metal box on the wall. “Right by Saks. Should be nice and zooish this time of day.”
The key belonged to one of the response trucks. In the garage Kahn opened the back doors and they peered inside to make sure they had all necessary equipment. Everything looked in order. Diaz climbed behind the wheel and Kahn slid in next to him. He was a large man, stocky with thick forearms and a broad chest. His hair and his eyebrows were fully gray, a shade or two lighter than the color of his suit, and the contrast made his dark eyes all the more penetrating. He carried himself like a person of formidable strength, but while Diaz didn’t doubt the man’s toughness, he suspected that Kahn had gone soft in the midsection like anyone middle-aged.
Diaz had had a lot of opportunity to study the sergeant over the past six months. Nobody said anything specific, but they rode together a lot and Diaz thought he knew why. Although a detective third grade with six years on the force, Diaz had only joined the Bomb Squad eleven months ago. He figured that his rides with Kahn were supposed to season him. In the army, eleven months in theater burned you out. But in civilian law enforcement things moved slower. Even the Bomb Squad didn’t match the intensity of a combat environment.
“Squad room’s like a damned ghost town today,” Diaz said as they drove up Hudson Street, heading for Eighth Avenue.
Kahn kept his eyes on his phone, where he was thumbing out a text. “Eight guys down with the flu—eight! Plus two sergeants and the lieutenant. Never seen anything like it. Cap, I’m told, is totally on his ass, can’t even get out of bed.”
“They say it started with some chickens in China. All these crazy diseases always seem to come from Africa or Asia.”
“Maybe those Chinese cooked it up in an effort to reduce the local population. Wouldn’t put it past ‘em.” Kahn lifted his eyes to see rain falling and traffic building around Twenty-Third Street. He pocketed the phone and took hold of the squawk box mouthpiece. “Better hit the lights. Take it easy at the intersections though.”
The voiceover in the back of Diaz’s head kicked in again. It said: “After two hundred rides together, SDS Sander Kahn still didn’t trust the new guy behind the wheel.”