“Oh yes,” he said with a nervous half-chuckle, “I think I recognize this one. I think that’s the girl I nearly knocked down the other day at the foot of the stairway coming down the train platform.” The memory of the incident came flooding back. “Of course. It’s her all right. It was quite embarrassing. I ran right into her and she had to grab onto me to keep from falling.”
“Mr. Putman,” Angelo asked very quietly, “could the other day have been Friday?”
The importer hesitated, trying to reconstruct the moment in his mind. “My goodness,” he said, “you know, I think it was.”
The detective took the photograph back and studied the girl’s pretty face, her provocative breasts so defiantly exposed to the policeman’s. camera.
“You didn’t bump into her, Mr. Putman, she bumped into you. They love to work with girls with big tits. She jams those knockers into you while the dip boosts your wallet.”
He noticed a flush on the importer’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, Mr. Putman.
Everybody gets turned on by girls with big tits. Even guys like you from Oyster Bay.”
Abe Stern glanced angrily at Jeremy Oglethorpe. The evacuation expert was bustling around the Police Commissioner’s office, hanging flow charts, diagrams, maps with those damnable colored circles all over them onto walls and easels, displaying an energy so frenetic he might have been a Madison Avenue account executive about to make a presentation for a new toothpaste account.
The Mayor had elected to bring him here rather than to City Hall because the Police Commissioner’s office was more secure than his. They had come by helicopter right from the Marine Air Terminal to the pad on the roof.
“Well,” Oglethorpe announced, surveying his display with quiet pride, “I think I’m ready if your people are.”
The Police Commissioner turned to one of the two inspectors he had summoned to the meeting. “Where the hell is Walsh?” he growled.
“He’s on his way, sir.”
Walsh was Timothy Walsh, thirty-seven, a six-footthree-inch Brooklyn-born lieutenant who presided over the NYPD’s Office of Civil Preparedness. He was a shrewd, ambitious, empire-building Irishman who had been moved to Civil Preparedness from the Intelligence Bureau with orders to make it snap, and snap it did. Any kind of catastrophe that might strike the city was supposed to be in his bailiwick. Walsh, however, had a solid preference for those that were the high-media-exposure areas, the areas that could get you applause from the Commissioner’s office, beef up your budget, swell your staff; things like power failures, hurricanes, flooding, blizzards.
Evacuation and civil defense were at the bottom of the pile. The problem with civil defense, Timothy Walsh was fond of remarking, was, “People don’t want to know. It’s ‘Hey, look, don’t bother me with those fucking Russian bombs. I got a foot of snow in my driveway.”’
His own thoughts on the subject were succinctly summed up in a phrase he often repeated to his deputy: “Every so often I go down to Washington and genuflect on the altar of the thermonuclear holocaust so I can keep the federal money coming in for the things that really count in this city, like getting some more portable generators for our next power failure.”
Now, whistling cheerfully, Walsh nodded at the detective manning the electric gate leading to the Police Commissioner’s suite and found himself quickly ushered into his office. At the sight of all the heavies in the room, Walsh’s cheerfulness disappeared.
“Walsh, have we got a plan to evacuate this city in a crisis?” the Police Commissioner demanded.
Oh-oh, Walsh thought, why is he asking that? Better use a little soft-shoe routine here. Toss a few balls in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. Such a plan did, in fact, exist. It was called “The New York Target Support Area Operational Survival Plan, Volume I, Basic Plan.” Drawn up in 1972, it contained 202 pages and was generally acknowledged to be worthless. So worthless, Walsh had never bothered to read it; nor, as far as he knew, had anyone else in his department.
“Sir, the last time we looked at evacuation was a report we did in December 1977 for Commissioner Codd. Con Ed wanted to start running liquefied natural gas up the East River to their storage farm at Berrian’s Island and we were asked if we could clear the East Side in a helluva hurry if there was a spill.”
“And?”
“And the conclusion was it was an absolutely hopeless job. Better not to let the LNG up the river in the first place.”
The Police Commissioner grunted. “Well, sit down and listen to this man here. Between now and four o’clock this afternoon, you and he have got to come up with a plan to clear this city in the shortest possible time.”
Walsh folded his large frame onto the Police Commissioner’s blue sofa, a whole series of alarm bells ringing in his psyche as he did. He watched Oglethorpe moving to his charts. There was something vaguely familiar, it occurred to him, about the face of the man above the blue polkadot tie.
Oglethorpe took up a rubber-tipped pointer and began, a professor lecturing a class. “Fortunately, the problem of evacuating New York City is one that we have spent a great deal of time in studying. I don’t need to tell you it’s a staggering challenge. The shortest time we’ve been able to come up with for clearing the city in our crisisrelocation studies is three days.”
“Three days!” Abe Stern snapped. “That son of a bitch over in Tripoli is barely giving us three hoursl”
Oglethorpe grimaced his acknowledgment. Unfortunately, as he explained, all Civil Defense evacuation plans were built around what he called “a wartime scenario.” In it, the United States would have five to six days warning of a Soviet thermonuclear attack because of certain preparations the Russians would have to make which would be observed by U.S. satellites. This prospect was one they hadn’t thought a great deal about.
“To be safe,” Oglethorpe went on, “we’ve got to plan on evacuating Manhattan, the southern Bronx, most of Queens and Brooklyn and a strip of New Jersey river shore four miles deep.”
“How many people will that involve?” Abe Stern asked.
“Eleven million.”
The Mayor groaned softly. Walsh looked at him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought, what do you evacuate eleven million people for? Only one thing.
Oglethorpe turned back to his map. “One thing we do know, it’s going to be a ground burst. That means fallout, bad fallout. Looking at New York’s prevailing winds tells you that Queens and Long Island have the highest probability of getting heavy fallout. We’ve got the Weather Service monitoring the winds for us now and it looks like they’re going to get drenched if this goes. The best natural fallout shelter for those people is the cellar. In New York State you’ve got one of the highest cellar percentages in the country-seventy-three percent.” Oglethorpe was on familiar ground now, dealing with statistics, numbers, figures. “Unfortunately, that figure drops down to twenty-two percent out on Long Island because the island’s got a high water table. Those people are going to be in a lot of trouble out there if this thing explodes.”
“Shouldn’t we evacuate them too?” the Mayor queried.
“How?” Oglethorpe replied. “They can’t swim off that island, and if we pull them back toward the bridges we’ll be exposing them to more fallout and the possibility of burns.” Normally the mildmannered Oglethorpe wouldn’t have replied in so brutal a fashion, but New Yorkers, he firmly believed, liked tough, pragmatic speakers.
“The one thing we’ve got to avoid at all costs is moving people into fallout. So that means unless there’s a shift in the weather patterns our evacuation is going to have to go north up into Westchester and west into Jersey.