The Hammer of God

The NYPD had kicked the shootings at the Starlight Motel up the food chain of crimes to Major Event. Every cop in the borough of Queens was now heading for the shoddy inn on North Conduit. Emergency Services Unit en-route hearing the reports on heavy weapons called for “Big Bertha,” the N.Y.P.D.’s heavy weapons truck. Many units set up roadblocks at one-mile intervals from the motel. Their orders: “Shut down everything trying to get in or out.” Because the motel was very near JFK Airport, NYPD alerted Port Authority and they went into full prevent-defense. Ten PA cars rolled across runways and taxiways to become a virtual rolling border, guarding fortress JFK. When they rolled up to the perimeter fence, they immediately caught two men trying to scale the wire. One PA cop was injured as the bad guys decided to shoot it out. Twenty cops in cars with shotguns easily outgunned two guys with machine pistols with no cover to hide behind other than a chain-linked fence. Two others were spotted approaching the fence and ran off when the spotlights of the cop cars shone on them.

Aviation was waiting for tower clearance to swoop down on the area, but JFK landed dozens of planes an hour and the tower had to halt all landings so that a helicopter wouldn’t foul up the intake manifold of a jumbo jet with 300 or more souls on it.

The PA cops saw enough of the intention of these men to assume JFK was their target. They ordered a ground freeze and declared the airport in lockdown.

That action triggered the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which brought ten more federal agencies into the mix. JFK being a major potential terrorism target, every conceivable asset that the combined agencies could muster was already conveniently pre-stationed there. That meant that every state and federal anti-crime, terrorism, biological, nuclear, chemical, conventional, and support unit was a five-minute roll from the Starlight Motel.

Blue-helmeted members of the Hercules Anti-Terrorism Squad, in all their body armor, started advancing towards the motel. Regular patrol units held ground and laid down support fire as the heavy-weapons guys swarmed in to neutralize the threat. There were six men left in the room. One was Alzir who was bleeding and handing fresh clips to the two men firing from the window. That left three to try to escape. Each tucked the glass jars inside their shirts, waited until the next volley of fire, then bolted out the door. They were immediately cut down, literally at the knees, from four heavy weapons cops who had snuck around to each side of the room. Unlike the movies, these guys didn’t have to yell “Freeze” and thereby give the bad guy a shot at making their kids orphans. They aimed low and took out their legs, “Perpetrator Shot Running” was the police terminology.

A sergeant tossed a flash bang into the windows like a Ranger tossing a grenade into a pillbox on Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Kilgore/Schermuly Stun Grenade quieted the room in an instant. Four more body-armored cops hit the room as the four outside secured the weapons from the ones who got clipped trying to run. In the two minutes and twenty-two seconds the heavy weapons squad was on the scene the situation had been stabilized.

Wallace had gotten all of it on tape. As the surviving bad guys were being dragged to an interrogation area set up in a command van in the street, Wallace emerged from his car and went over to the heavy weapons unit commander.

“Commander, I’m Wallace Barnes. I was on the job thirty years out of the 42 in South Bronx. I was on a P.I. stakeout when this went down. I got video of the two homicides next door, and, as far as I know, that perp is still in the room.”

“Two homicides! What room?”

“108.”

The commander spoke immediately into his portable. “Be advised all units, armed gunman in room 108. Repeat. Armed gunman in room 108. Two deceased persons and gunman still in room. Approach with caution, and advise.”

Immediately, a path was cleared at an angle, which would cover the line of fire to and from room 108.

At the exact second of the transmission, a white shield, anti-crime cop, still shaking from the first heavy weapons shootout in his six-year career noticed and approached a jar lying on the parking lot asphalt next to one of the downed bad guys. He had one of the forensic team members snap a photo of it to record its position next to the body. He was reaching for it with his surgical gloved hand when the “take cover” order squawked across his radio. For the split second his hand hovered over it, he could swear it was giving off heat. He sought cover, now keeping his eyes on the window next to the blown out ones of the shoot out room.

Two heavily armed cops then scampered around the side of the building like before, only this time they also carried a fiber optic camera. They slid the slim end of the plastic lens under the door and, from a safe distance, manipulated the flexible cable to scan the room. Wallace heard their radio report.