“The subways are apparently going to be a problem,” Oglethorpe was remarking, “unless we can find a way to run the evacuation without telling people what’s going on.”
“Not tell people what’s going on?” The Mayor started to shout and not just to make himself heard over the thump of the rotors. “Are you crazy? You can’t do anything in this town without telling people what’s going on. I want to use those subways, I gotta tell the head of the Transit Workers his people got to do special shifts. ‘Emergency?’ he’s going to say to me.
‘What’s the emergency?’ And then he’s going to say, ‘Hey, listen, I gotta tell Vic Gottbaum and the Municipal Workers.’ And Gottbaum’s gonna say, ‘Listen, I can’t keep this from Al Shanker and the teachers.’ “
The Police Commissioner leaned forward. “That’s his problem, Abe. At that point we haven’t got a train driver left in the city, you realize that?”
Stern spun angrily around to confront his Police Commissioner. He was about to yell something, then stopped himself. Instead, he turned back and crumpled dejectedly into his seat.
“Our only hope is a highway mode evacuation.” Oglethorpe was looking down at the Battery. “But down here we’ve got some real problems. The Holland and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels, our best escape routes, only have two lanes each. We figure the best you can do is seven hundred fifty vehicles per lane hour, calculate five people to a vehicle, that’s fifteen thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe stopped. “We’ve got about a million people down here to clear. It’s going to be a terrible scene. You’ll have to have awfully good police control. I mean, your officers will have to be ready to shoot the people who want to break the line and disrupt things.”
Do that, Walsh thought grimly, and you’ll have to shoot nine tenths of the people in the city. And some of them are going to shoot right back.
They were skimming up the Hudson now, passing midtown. “Up here we’re in better shape,” Oglethorpe offered hopefully. “We’ve got six lanes in the Lincoln Tunnel, nine on the George Washington Bridge and twelve between the Major Deegan and Bruckner Expressways. That would give us an outflow of about a hundred thousand people an hour.” Oglethorpe was getting hoarse from shouting over the rotors; yet he plowed on, a determined slave to his facts and figures, to all those years down there in Washington making things work on the charts and computers. “We’ll need plenty of police to handle the movement on the ramps. Helicopters to monitor the traffic flow.”
Abe Stern wasn’t listening anymore. He turned again in his seat to face the Police Commissioner. His old friend’s face mirrored what he had expected to see, the reflection of his own despair.
“It isn’t going to work, is it, Michael?”
“No, Abe, it’s not.” Bannion looked down at the rooftops of the tenements crowding the Upper West Side, the snow-filled sweep of the park. “Maybe thirty, forty years ago. A different time. A different city. Maybe we would have had the discipline then, I don’t know. Now?” Sadly he shook his head.
“Now, there’s no way we can do it. We’ve all changed too much.”
Oglethorpe, ignoring their exchange, rattled on about the need for good, disciplined crowd control, about the right system to manage the flow to the bridges.
“Oh, shut up!” Stern barked. The jolted bureaucrat blushed. “The whole thing is crazy. We’re wasting our time. We’re not going to evacuate this city. I’m going back to tell the President to forget it. We’re stuck here and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.” He leaned forward and gave a sharp jab to the pilot. “Turn this thing around,” he ordered. “Take us back to the plaza.”
The helicopter pivoted in a tight arc. As it did, the panorama of Manhattan Island below them seemed to tilt end on end for an instant, rising up to meet the horizon, a flashing insight, Abe Stern reflected, into the upside-down world they were living in.
On the surface the scene in the spacious sitting room six thousand eight hundred seventy-five miles from New York City was one of touching domestic tranquility. Menachem Begin’s youngest daughter, Hassia, sat at the grand piano of his official residence entertaining her father with the crystalline notes of a Chopin etude. A menorah, two of its eight candle branches flickering was set in the window. Begin himself had lit the candles just an hour earlier to mark the first night of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.
He was sitting now in a leather wing chair, legs crossed, chin resting in the cat’s cradle of his folded fingers, apparently wholly absorbed in his daughter’s music. In fact his mind was miles away, where it had been all day, on the crisis confronting his nation. His armed forces were on alert.
Just before he sat down he had talked with the military governor of the West Bank and the embassy in Washington. The West Bank was quiet; if the Palestinians who were to benefit from Qaddafi’s appalling initiative were aware of what was going on, they gave no indication of it. So, too, was Washington. Nothing, the embassy reported, had leaked out to indicate to the United States’s public the crisis at hand. Of even greater concern to the Israeli Prime Minister was the fact that the embassy’s usually reliable sources inside the White House had revealed nothing of the debates in the government’s inner councils.
His daughter finished her etude with a flourish. Begin rose, walked to the piano and kissed her gently on the forehead. As he did, his wife appeared in the doorway.
“Menachem,” she announced, “the President of the United States is calling.”
Hassia saw her father stiffen the way he often did when he was about to review a guard of honor, then march from the room. He settled into the office where he had taken the President’s first call and listened in stolid silence to his proposal for a solution to the crisis. He would call an emergency joint session of Congress. The United States would offer Israel the ironclad guarantee of its nuclear umbrella inside the 1967 frontiers.
The Chairman of the Central Committee had already agreed to associate the Soviet Union publicly and formally with the U.S. declaration. In return, the Israeli government would announce its immediate, unilateral decision to withdraw its forces, administration and settlements from the occupied territories and return them to Arab jurisdiction. Begin paled visibly listening to the President, but otherwise he appeared completely composed.
“In other words, Mr. President,” he said when the American had finished, “you are asking me and my people to yield to a tyrant’s blackmail.”
“Mr. Begin,” the President rejoined, “what I am asking you to do is to accept the only reasonable solution to the gravest international crisis the world has ever faced.”
“The only reasonable solution was the one we were prevented from carrying out this morning by the Soviet Union-with, or without, your nation’s complicity.” Again the Jewish leader pronounced the words without heat, nothing in his manner indicating the interior storm shaking him.
“If that were a reasonable solution,” the President replied, “I could — and would — have invoked it hours ago. But my first consideration in this crisis, Mr. Begin, is to save lives, the lives of six million innocent people in New York — and, indeed, the lives of two million equally innocent Libyans.”
“But you are asking us to abandon the fundamentals of our national sovereignty in response to an action which is criminal, which is without precedent in history, which you yourself told me this morning jeopardizes the very foundations of world peace and international order.”