One of his men said, “It’s not too cool to blow him away with all those people watching from Rockafeller Center.”
The squad leader looked out the opening at the buildings across the Avenue. Despite orders and all the police could do, hundreds of people were at the windows and on the rooftops watching the climber make his way up the granite spire. A few people were shouting, making encouraging motions with their hands and bodies. The squad leader heard cheering and applauding and thought he heard gasps when the man slipped. He said, “Assholes. The wrong people are always getting the applause.” He released the safety switch, moved toward the opening, and looked up. He shouted, “Hey, King Kong! Get your ass back here!”
The climber glanced down but continued up the spire.
The squad leader pulled his head back into the room. “Give me the rappelling line.” He took the nylon rope and began hooking himself up. “Well, as the homicide detectives say, ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ That is the question.”
The other half of the Sixth Assault Squad descended through the south tower and, following a rough sketch supplied by Gordon Stillway, located the door to the long southwest triforium. One of the men kicked the door in, and the other four rushed down the length of the long gallery in a crouch. An ESD man spotted a man dressed in kilts lying crumpled at the corner of the balustrade, a bagpipe sticking out from under his body.
Suddenly a periscope rose from the triforium across the transept, and a bullhorn blared. “Get down! The loft! Watch the loft!”
The men turned in unison and stared down at the choir loft projecting out at a right angle about thirty feet below them. A muzzle flashed twice, and two of the five men went down. The other three dove for the floor. “What the hell … ?” The team leader looked wildly around the long dark gallery as though it were full of gunmen. “Where did that come from … the loft?” He looked at the two dead men, each shot between the eyes. “I never saw it…. I never heard anything….”
One of the men said, “Neither did they.”
The fifteen men of the 69th Regiment had moved back into the Cathedral after the carrier had stopped burning, and they lay on the floor under the choir loft, sighting their rifles down the five wide aisles toward the raised sanctuary. Major Cole rose to one knee and looked over the pews with a pair of binoculars, then scanned the four triforia. Nothing seemed to be moving in the Cathedral, and the loudest sound was the striking of bullets from the Fenian sniper overhead. Cole looked at the smoking armored carrier beside him. The smell of burnt gasoline and flesh made his stomach heave.
A sergeant came up beside him. “Major, we have to do something.”
The major felt his stomach heave again. “We are not supposed to interfere with the police in any way. There could be a misunderstanding … an accident …”
A runner came up the steps, moved through the battered doors, and crossed the vestibule, finding Major Cole contemplating his watch. The runner crouched beside him. “From the Governor, sir.”
Cole took the handwritten report without enthusiasm and read from the last paragraph. “Father Murphy still missing. Locate and rescue him and rescue the other two hostages beneath the sanctuary pews….” Cole looked up at the sergeant.
The sergeant regarded Cole’s pale face. “If I found a way into that loft and zapped the sniper, you could dash up the aisle and grab the two hostages—” He smiled. “But you got to move quick because you’ll be racing the cops for them.”
Major Cole said stiffly, “All right. Take ten men into the loft.” He turned to the runner. “Acknowledge message. Have the police command call their men in the triforia and tell them to hold fire on the loft for … five minutes.” The runner saluted and moved off. Cole said to the sergeant, “Don’t get anyone hurt.”
The sergeant turned and led ten Guardsmen back into the south vestibule and opened the door to the spiral staircase. The soldiers double-timed up into the tower until they saw a large wooden door in the wall. The sergeant approached it cautiously and listened, but heard nothing. He put his hand on the knob and turned it slowly, then drew open the door a crack. There was complete blackness in front of him. At first he thought he wasn’t in the loft, but then he saw in the distance candlelight playing off the wall of the long northern triforium above, and he recognized the empty flagstaff. He drew open the door, crouched with his rifle held out, and began walking in one of the cross aisles. The ten soldiers began following at intervals.
The sergeant slid his shoulder along the pew enclosure on his left as he moved, blinking into the darkness, listening for a sound somewhere in the cavernous loft. His shoulder slipped into an opening, and he turned, facing the wide aisle that ran up the center of the sloping loft. The entire expanse was pitch black, but he had a sense of its size from the massive rose window looming in the blackness, larger than a two-story house, glowing with the lights of Rockefeller Center across the Avenue. The sergeant took a step up the rising aisle, and he heard a sound like rustling silk in the pews above him.
A woman stood a few feet in front of him on the next higher step. The sergeant stared up at two points of burning green light that reflected the candlelight rising from the Cathedral behind him. The piercing eyes held him for a fraction of a second before he raised his rifle.
Megan screamed wildly and discharged a shotgun blast into his face. She jumped up on a pew and began firing down into the aisle below. The soldiers scrambled back along the aisle, buckshot pelting their helmets, flak jackets, and limbs as they retreated into the tower.
Leary shouted, “Keep them away, Megan! Keep me covered. I’m shooting like I never shot before. Give me time.” He fired and moved, fired again and moved again.
Megan picked up her automatic rifle and fired quick bursts at the tower doors. Leary saw a periscope poking over the parapet in the southeast triforium and blew it away with a single shot. “I’m hot! God, I’m hot today!”
Burke heard the shotgun blasts from the loft, followed by the short, quick bursts of the M-16 and then the whistling of the sniper’s rifle as rounds chipped away at the balustrade over his head.
The ESD man beside him said, “Sounds like the weekend commandos didn’t capture the choir loft.”
Burke picked up the field phone and spoke to the other three triforia. “At my command we throw everything we’ve got into the loft.” He called the sacristy stairs. “Tell Malone and Baxter we’re putting down suppressing fire again, and if they want to give it a try, this is the time to do it—there won’t be another time.”
Burke waited the remainder of the five minutes he had given the 69th, to be sure they were not going to try again to get into the loft, then put the field phone to his mouth. “Fire!”
Twenty-five ESD men rose in the four triforia and began firing with automatic rifles and grenade launchers. The rifles raked the loft with long traversing streams, while the launchers alternated their loads, firing beehive canisters of long needles, buckshot, high explosives, gas grenades, illumination rounds, and fire-extinguishing gas.
The choir loft reverberated with the din of exploding grenades, and thick black smoke mingled with the yellowish gas. The smoke and gas rose over the splintering pews, then moved along the ceiling of the Cathedral like an eerie cloud, iridescent in the light of the burning flares below.
Megan and Leary, wearing gas masks, knelt in the bottom aisle below the thick, protruding parapet that ran the width of the loft. Leary fired into the triforia, moved laterally, fired, and moved again. Megan sent streams of automatic fire into the sanctuary as she raced back and forth along the parapet.