Twelve Angry Men

March 13, 2002, Wednesday, 8:14am
Subway station, 59th Street and Columbus Circle

Pete walked briskly on the platform away from the C train. He willed himself to walk slightly slower, but, not too much slower. His internal sense of time told him it would be 8:15 in just a few seconds... it was eerily reliable on things like that. He glanced down at his watch: And it just turned 8:15, there we go.
Oh to hell with this, Pete thought, and started walking more briskly again. As he mounted the stairs, he thought to himself, three minutes remaining.

8:16am
Subway station, 34th Street and Herald Square
Abs shuffled away from the train with his hands in the pockets of his voluminous coat. Abs, a nickname he got from fellow weight-lifting aficionados at the gym he went to, slowly turned his head to look back at the train.
He knew better, but, he looked back at the train, at the subway car he had just exited, and at the still-open door.
No one was coming after him, no one was looking around urgently for someone, no one was holding up a bulky-looking shopping bag and shouting "Hey!" or anything like that.
Abs refused to let himself think. He knew how to clear his head and keep it clear, especially when it counted. He rolled his head side to side, cricking his neck, and continued walking.

And four of their friends were doing similar things at subway stations in the busiest locations during the peak morning traffic, when over one hundred passengers would crowd each subway car, when hundreds of thousands of people rode shoulder-to-shoulder on their way to work, or home from night-shifts, or to home or work from a night spent well at another person's home, this was New York City, interactions like that happened. Even barely half a year after the city had been shaken deeply by catastrophic skyline-altering life-ending events, you carried on. The city would recover, that was a fact.

The six package-droppers would have been twelve except they could only put together six of the packages. They didn't want to skimp on quality or quantity in terms of putting together the packages. These things couldn't be done half-assed.

Pete, the soft-spoken first of equals in this dozen-men group --committed, concerned people, Pete thought of them, not anything more charged or flashy than that-- had been a newb-ish boxing fan. He knew that NYC was like a heavy-weight boxer, getting up groggily from a heavy hit, slowly getting its strength back and back onto its feet.

Pete knew and made sure that everyone understood that it was vital to close in and hit again before that could happen. Another hard hit had to be dealt, another punch, to the body, to the limbs, to the head, to injure and hurt and inflict uncertainty and yes dammit fear.
 
From what we know of the so-called "Dirty Dozen," the full twelve members of this group of operatives never actually met at the same time. There was never any big "Ocean's Eleven" style get-together where everything was hashed out. They very deliberately operated as several partially-overlapping cells, with rarely if ever more than two persons at a time meeting to discuss and collaborate in person. In fact, it is pretty clear that though the ringleaders knew each other, each of them were deliberately blind to the identities of at least two thirds of their collaborators. For normal people, this is as difficult as it sounds.

Paula DiSantis, Boston University class of 2033, Psychology of Terrorism midterm exam answer for fall semester of 2031
 
Some folks at first argued that using the term "bag lady" was demeaning and didn't extend the full respect to Sherry Robinson and to what she did.

They needn't have worried.

Emotional power imbued the simple observation to give new meaning to the term.

"The lady with the bag saved everyone," a responder in a chemical suit said, first in a whisper, again in raw, choked voice, and, after taking as deep a breath as possible inside the suit and looking at his co-workers in the car, the third time in measured-out clear-as-possible phrasing. Joe Brett didn't shout it, he didn't even raise his voice to say it, the phrase was picked up and understood instantly.

It was the kind of headline that wrote itself.

"The Lady With The Bag Saved Everybody."

It was the kind of headline that wrote itself.

The phrase wasn't chiseled on her tombstone, it didn't need to be.

Sherry Robinson.

Sherry Robinson, 1970-2002, was a light-skinned black woman who liked long afternoons in Central Park with her friends.

Sherry Robinson, who lived with a former Barnard classmate in an Upper West Side apartment, worked her ass off as a lawyer and had the respect and affection of her co-workers.

Sherry had bought a shitload of pastries at a store that didn't ask "paper or plastic," that store gave you both, bag in a bag, big no-worries no-spill no-way easy-to-carry packaging that you could tote worry-free replete with a healthily-thick cardboard slat on the bottom.

Joe Brett took an instant to understand what Sherry had done.

Beautiful pastries were all around and under Sherry's body on the subway floor.

The evil package, the cyanide-spewing package, holding the two siamesed plastic bags whose contents were united by a simple timer device that ruptured the bags' shared surface and expelled the contents outward, was stuffed inside Sherry's pastry bag. Sherry had obviously wrapped the emptied pastry bag tight around the device and then managed to hold it beneath her as she lay on the floor.
 
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On Sherry Robinson's car, two people died.

This had been almost a miracle, scratch the almost if you asked anyone who had been on that subway car or anyone in Robinson's circle of family and friends.

The other subway cars saw body-counts ranging from five dozen to nearly one hundred. Altogether, two hundred and forty-three people had died as a result of the gas spewed out by the packages.

Abs, Pete and Jeff knew it wasn't about the numbers. They had understood that their initial idea of thousands writhing in agony-spiked panic beneath the streets was, while a powerful idea, not realistic with their resources.

They still figured it would be a kick in the teeth to the city that had just begun to look ahead.

Even if "only" 243 people had been killed by the gas, the emotional tremor of the event had been as brutal as they had anticipated.
 
March 18, 2002, Tuesday, 5pm
Downtown Manhattan

Pete didn't hate Sherry Robinson. He made sure Abs didn't hate her either.

Pete had felt his friend begin to react when they walked past what must have been the fifth person in several minutes to have a laminated picture of the dead lawyer on the lapel of their jacket on a busy Manhattan sidewalk.

Pete reached over to Abs's upper arm and pinched, hard.

Abs caught himself about to react to the pain and stilled his reaction.
Pete looked at Abs and held back from smiling.

He knew they could count on each other to stay focused. They each knew they weren't done and needed to be very, very aware of themselves and their surroundings if anything else was going to be successfully planned and done.
 
The CCTV cameras in the subway will likely have some pictures. The city will likely be in a VERY high security mode. Still, there are ample weak points for a terrorist to strike.
I am sure Sherry Robinson will get numerous honors after her death.

As an aside, I do have a suggestion for something the terrorists could use as a weapon. I'd be glad to send it via PM, if you wish.
 
The CCTV cameras in the subway will likely have some pictures. The city will likely be in a VERY high security mode. Still, there are ample weak points for a terrorist to strike.
I am sure Sherry Robinson will get numerous honors after her death.

As an aside, I do have a suggestion for something the terrorists could use as a weapon. I'd be glad to send it via PM, if you wish.


You can put it here. I don't mind stealing good ideas especially if I'm encouraged to do so. :D

But if I wanted to have it as an element of surprise, then PM as you like.

Thanks in advance!
 
Given how gun-happy American cops are you could well see several repeats of what you got in London after the second, failed, bombing with the no-warning murder of the Brazilian plumber. Have six or ten of these incidents occur in NYC and you have an added dimension.

Good writing btw!

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Simple chemical weapon: Swimming pool chlorine tablets, mixed with Ammonia (try and distill the latter). Result: ammonium chloride gas. Restrictions on component purchase: none.
 
April 3, 2002, Wednesday, 7:20am
Subway station, 34th Street and Herald Square

Pete glanced thoughtfully at the impressive number of uniformed soldiers on the platform and by the turnstiles. What were they, he wondered idly, national guard? State guard or something. The soldiers inspected large bags, albeit at times perfunctorily. Some just stood on the platform and surveyed the crowd with watchdog attentiveness.

Crowds. Yeah.

Crowds of commuters had returned by and large to the subways in the last couple weeks. The soldiers helped. Pete watched a train come in, and noticed a rough approximation of the Sherry Robinson button sprayed on the side of one of the cars. He noticed others looking at the picture and visibly relaxing, some smiling or at least lifting the corners of their mouths.

Pete had always had an interest in subways, underground trains, mass transit, etc. As he walked away from the platform to the exit-ways, he cleared his mind and decided to lightly brainstorm subway systems.

Pete was big on traveling, and he had seen numerous cities, and, numerous subway systems in these cities too.

He had seen the Metro in Montreal, and its cousin Metro in Paris, both with their distinctive large Michelin-tired wheels on the "rails."

He remembered the Paris Metro, and how, when he had last been there, all the trash cans at the Paris Metro had been shut, welded closed, blocked. He remembered why.

He tossed a candy bar wrapper into a trash can as he neared the stairs to go outside. He smiled.
 
May 6, 2002, Monday, 9am
On the road in a posh suburb of Washington DC

Adam Green was beside himself with fury, terror and anxiety.

His little sister was dying.

Maybe she wasn't, maybe she was okay, maybe she was just injured.

Maybe she was already ____ing dead.

Adam Green had no way of knowing.

Adam had been planning to visit his little sister in New York City later that week, but...

Adam would usually have put the radio on for news and traffic and what-not almost immediately after getting into his vehicle. He was very, very preoccupied.

Adam wanted to get to New York City as fast as humanly possible and knew he would go batshit if he had to wait in line at any airport or rail station. He was in a hurry. He needed to be doing something. He would drive.

Adam's parents had just purchased the two-year old 7,230-pound V-10 Excursion 4wd vehicle with a mind to the safety of their loved ones.

Safety.

Adam cringed with agony at the thought... It couldn't protect Christine up in New York. Certainly not from those mother____ing bags in those subways stations.

He had tried to call Christine the instant he heard the news of another wave of those damn attacks. Some detail in difference, the gas was affecting people in the hallways of the subway stations themselves as opposed to the actual subway trains.

He had called twice in the space of several minutes with no answer.

Adam's third call was answered by a person whose voice he didn't recognize, telling Adam that "she can't come to the phone right now, um, she's okay, but now's not a good time" who had then hung up without further discussion.

The background noise had been pretty lively.

On the verge of exploding or throwing up or grabbing his head and screaming his throat raw, Adam instead leapt into the bathroom, showered, dressed in record time, and bolted to the Excursion parked outside.

Adam was a pretty good driver. His parents wouldn't entrust him with a three and a half ton vehicle with the potential to knock over your smaller houses if they didn't think of the second-year law-student as a good and reliable person of sound judgement and respectable reflexes.

He got behind the wheel, yanked his seat-belt on, and checked to see if his mirrors or seat needed adjusting. Despite everything, Adam had respect for the vehicle and its potential impact if mishandled, pun unintended.

He started the engine and flew out of the driveway and down the road, towards access to the interstate.

Around that time, one of the other folks residing in the area, a man old enough to be Christine's and Adam's father walked into his garage while chatting intently on his cell-phone. The man on the cell phone continued chatting while entering his expensive but fairly nondescript luxury sedan. He had one hand on his cellphone, and, one hand for getting the garage open and then getting the vehicle moving. He figured he'd put on his seat-belt in a couple minutes, when it was more convenient.

The man on the cell phone, driving his expensive car, wearing his very expensive suit and very expensive watch, ran a stop sign without noticing that he had done so.

A moment before that, Adam had started to cry, big heavy tears that almost but not quite blurred his vision. He focused intently on the road while continuing to sob and maintaining a pretty good pace with the vehicle.

Adam wiped his eyes clear of tears and felt the abrupt CRUMP that came with sudden impact. The airbag almost instantaneously blew out, enveloping Adam's head and stinging the hell out of his arm as his hand had just begun to withdraw from his face at the moment of impact.

Coughing from the airbag-spewed gases, still shakily recovering from the crash, Adam bounded out of the vehicle and went to see how the other driver was doing.

"Ohhhh n..." Adam lurched over and vomited noisily.

The other driver was definitely definitely dead, and Adam was not taking that very well.

The other driver, L. Paul Bremer, was deader than an artificial fern. Since Bremer had seen neither the stop-sign he had blown nor the tremendous vehicle that had dramatically relocated his vital components, he had given no audible indication of distress --impending or otherwise-- to the other person on the phone. Nonetheless, with the incident occurring in the morning and even with delayed notification of appropriate persons, Bremer's fate and his obituary would have the time needed to run in the next day's newspapers.




Later that day, Adam found out that his sister had fainted on hearing the news of the subway station gas attacks, and that a roommate had grabbed the phone after it had rung unanswered. Christine was fine. Adam counted his blessings and promised to see her as soon as their parents could make arrangements for the three of them to fly up and see her.
 
Sarin? Chlorine? This could get very bad...

I had been thinking of the reports I remembered hearing that Al Qaeda had pondered attacking the NYC subway with containers placed in subway cars that would emit cyanide gas. For some reason, they canceled their alleged plan to do so, I have absolutely no idea why. It would have been a terrifying thing, being stuck in the tunnels underground with poison gas, the subway and the riders would have been marked deeply by it for a very long time.



Explosives wired to timing devices similar to the London Underground bombings?

I had been thinking that all the things would have timers set to go off the same time. I'm not very familiar with the London bombings, but, that sounds like what our cell here is doing...


The CCTV cameras in the subway will likely have some pictures. The city will likely be in a VERY high security mode. Still, there are ample weak points for a terrorist to strike.
I am sure Sherry Robinson will get numerous honors after her death.

As an aside, I do have a suggestion for something the terrorists could use as a weapon. I'd be glad to send it via PM, if you wish.

Sherry Robinson will be akin to the brave men and women who took Flight 93 to the ground before it reached its target. I'm getting the start of a lump in my throat just thinking about the latter. So, yeah. An attractive bright woman that people reminisced about emotionally, and because it's one person instead of a dozen or a thousand, she becomes even clearer in identity for many.



Given how gun-happy American cops are you could well see several repeats of what you got in London after the second, failed, bombing with the no-warning murder of the Brazilian plumber. Have six or ten of these incidents occur in NYC and you have an added dimension.

Good writing btw!

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Thank you!

I gotta do some research! Note to self... (Brazilian plumber, London...)

I'm wondering how to work that, if one or more of the dozen get cornered by NYPD.

It makes me think of the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, where three police officers approached a man who bore a strong resemblance to a sketch of a rapist in the area and thought that he had drawn a gun. Diallo, a 23-year-old man who worked as a street vendor, had pulled out his wallet. He was hit by 19 of the 41 bullets fired. From what I remember reading, it was a tragedy of errors, what with one of the cops falling backwards leading to at least one of the other cops to intensify their fire, etc. (Thirteen years ago!) http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/d/amadou_diallo/index.html
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/26/nyregion/diallo-verdict-overview-4-officers-diallo-shooting-are-acquitted-all-charges.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
with a notable excerpt from the second one, reminding me of an article back then describing how at least one of the cops on the scene had been seen sobbing uncontrollably after realizing what had happened,
Officer Carroll [in the trial described in the article] sobbed as he described how he had realized his error and held Mr. Diallo's hand as he lay dying.
(Maybe I'm fixating on the relief I felt that the cops involved were openly regretful, versus smug or stone-faced.)


Simple chemical weapon: Swimming pool chlorine tablets, mixed with Ammonia (try and distill the latter). Result: ammonium chloride gas. Restrictions on component purchase: none.

Wow.

(Reminds me of bath salts, the innocuous product that can also be an incredibly dangerous behavior-warping drug.)


It sounds eerily like Tokyo in 1995. Another fringe religious group, I wonder?

I had been imagining them as a largely self-organized "al qaeda" cell, and the more I think about it, the more I'm wondering how twelve people could just be invisible and get away with this. The 9-11 hijackers seemed to come painfully close to being caught at least once or twice, as far as I can recall. (I think the very morning of the hijackings Mohammed Atta almost got into a fight at the airport over a parking space! I thought a number of times about "if only I'd been there," macho time-traveler fantasy stuff.)

This is a sensitive subject. Tread carefully.

Part of me wants to fast-forward to occuppied Iran, since without Bremer the occupation of Iraq goes relatively "smoothly" with the almost fully retained Iraqi security forces handling security and keeping Al Qaeda largely down and out of Iraq. (I mean, until we Yanks dismantled the Iraqi security infrastructure, religious activists of any kind were at best endangered persons, let alone those with violent intent. The local security experts are going to know between Iraqi citizens and people from outside of Iraq with less than perfect explanations of their presence in Iraq.) On the other hand, that's an almost completely separate story.

I think the group would have at most one or two more attacks in them. This most recent attack, where they hold back from the trains themselves and mimic the Algerian-based terrorists in France who planted bombs in garbage cans in the Metro, was going to involve at least one of the conspirators being caught, but instead I got into altering the occupation of Iraq etc.

This article mentions the welding-shut of trash cans in Paris, the way I remember seeing on the Metro when I was in Paris around 1996-1997,
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/04/world/2-die-as-terrorist-bomb-rips-train-at-a-paris-station.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

etc.,
http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/refe...ndex.html?query=ALGERIA&field=geo&match=exact

Bitter irony department: a tourist from New Jersey is interviewed in this article, and he mentioned the '93 bombing at the WTC where he worked.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/18/w...is-with-29-wounded.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Edit: He's still alive! http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=%22Stuart+Pulvirent%22&oq=%22Stuart+Pulvirent%22&gs_l=hp.3..0i30.2047.5079.1.5344.3.3.0.0.0.0.282.782.2-3.3.0...0.0.7fD1gCMMiEY&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=a7181fecb2f88743&biw=1024&bih=562
 
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It's good so far; I am intrigued. I look forward to seeing more.
I had been thinking of the reports I remembered hearing that Al Qaeda had pondered attacking the NYC subway with containers placed in subway cars that would emit cyanide gas. For some reason, they canceled their alleged plan to do so, I have absolutely no idea why. It would have been a terrifying thing, being stuck in the tunnels underground with poison gas, the subway and the riders would have been marked deeply by it for a very long time.
It was profoundly shocking when it happened in Tokyo, particularly given how peaceful modern Japan is. The image of crowds running away from clouds of white gas, ofemergency services personnel entering the subway in full hazmat gear, of the bodies laid out on the sidewalk next to the subway exits... these images are still burned into the Japanese popular consciousness.

At the same time, though, people did not stay away from the subway as long as you might have thought.
For many people, there is simply no alternative.
 
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