The Zero Hour

Two figures appeared at one end of the alley, one tall and lean, the other small and portly. Both were clad in heavy pants and boots, long-sleeved overshirts, and welder’s gloves.

On their backs were mountaineering backpacks and air tanks connected to mouthpieces that dangled at their sides. They approached the steaming manhole. The taller one, who was carrying a four-foot crowbar, inserted the sharp end of the crowbar between the manhole cover and casing, then pushed downward with all his body weight.

“You see why I couldn’t do this myself,” Leo Krasner said.

Baumann did not answer. He kept pushing at the fulcrum until a low, rusty moan began to sound, then a higher-pitched squeak, and then the manhole cover began slowly to lift.

“Go,” he said.

Krasner trundled over to the opening, turned his portly body around, and began clambering down the rungs of the steel ladder built into the side of the manhole. Baumann followed, sliding the manhole cover back with great exertion. Finally the ornamented iron cover was back in place. They were underground within one minute and thirty seconds.

First Krasner, then Baumann dropped from the end of the ladder into the still water below. Two splashes disturbed the silence. The smell was rank, overpowering. Krasner heaved; Baumann bit his lower lip.

They reached around for the silicone mouthpieces, pulled them up, and bit into the nubs that held them in place. Baumann switched on Krasner’s air tank, then Krasner did the same for him. With loud hisses, they began inhaling the tanked air. Krasner took several deep, grateful breaths.

Despite the stench, they were standing not in sewage but in a few inches of runoff water from storm drains, which ran through miles of tunnels beneath the streets of New York. The oval concrete tube was seven feet or so high and about five feet wide, and it seemed to go on forever. These drainage tunnels served a dual function: along the top and the upper sides of the tunnel ran many cables for power and telecommunication links.

“We can leave the crowbar here or take it with us,” Leo said.

“Take it,” said Baumann. “Let’s move quickly.”

There was a splash, and a rat the size of a small dog ran by.

“Shit!” exclaimed Leo with a shudder.

Baumann pulled a caver’s headlamp from his backpack and put it on. He checked the reading on his compass and zeroed his pedometer, then waited patiently for Leo to do the same. He did, and consulted a map that had been compiled by a group of crackers he knew who liked to do nefarious deeds in the city.

For almost a quarter of a mile they slogged through the tunnels, guided through the maze by their compasses, pedometers, and the surprisingly detailed map of the underground tunnels. A more direct route would have meant entering via a manhole on a much more visible major street, which was out of the question.

They came to a juncture between two tunnels whose curved walls were covered with a profusion of large oblong boxes connected to thick wire casings. Each removed his mouthpiece, then switched off the other’s air tank. The air here was much better.

This was, Leo explained, one of the many central switching areas in which repairmen from NYNEX could access telephone lines. To Baumann’s untrained eye, it appeared to be a forest of wires in maddening disarray.

“Each one is labeled with a tag,” Krasner said, panting. “Series of numbers and letters. By customer account number. Fear not, I know the one we want.”

Two, then three rats scurried by underfoot. One of them stopped to sniff something in the cloudy gray water, then moved on.

After a few minutes of searching, Leo located the right cable.

“Coax,” he announced. “Just like they told me.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s coaxial cable-copper wire. Hell of a lot easier to splice.”

“What if it had been fiber-optic cable?”

Krasner shook his head in disbelief at Baumann’s ignorance. “I brought every tool we’d need, whether it was copper or fiber.” With a pair of wire cutters he snipped the copper line and proceeded to strip it. “Problem with fiber is, they could tell if there’s a tap on the line. The coefficient of the material you use to connect the two cut ends of the fiber will always change the characteristics of the light pulse. So it’s going to be obvious to a monitor that there’s a new material conducting the light pulse. It would be detected instantly, soon as they’re on line.”

He fed both ends of the copper wire into a square “breakout box,” which was, he explained, made by a company named Black Box. This was a tap, a sophisticated, undetectable, high-impedance parallel tap for computers, often used for diagnostic purposes.

Then Krasner carefully removed from his backpack an NEC UltraLite Versa notebook computer no bigger than a hardcover book. He connected the breakout box to the serial port in the notebook computer.