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Chapter 1: Elena

Lieutenant Elena Labat put her team’s chance of surviving somewhat north of fifty percent. Not too bad. They approached the skyscraper from the southwest. From helicopters a mile above them, the rescue team was a pre-dawn shadow moving beneath trees in the plaza. We’re here to save the world, Elena reminded herself and half-smiled. Humor was where she retreated when all seemed lost. Today it wasn’t really a joke.

It was late May, still cool at six-thirty in the morning, ten minutes until dawn. Light rising from the east would reflect off the skyscraper’s thousands of windows and send indecipherable signals flashing across the sky. Despite the cool, Elena was sweating—pre-op anxiety. It would abate when they got going, replaced by the sweat of physical exertion.

Dressed in black garments meant to wick away sweat, with sleek oxygen masks, backpacks, climbing shoes and harnesses, eight elite officers took a knee and held in place—anonymous, ready, and waiting for “Go.” Hidden in the shadow of the giant building, they geared up mentally. They had the skills and training for this operation. Tested under fire during the last five years, they were good at their job. This wasn’t the time for misgivings, although each of them had their own. Elena certainly had hers.

She scanned the environment for anything out of place. All streets around the entire World Trade Center complex in lower Manhattan were closed to traffic and pedestrians. SWAT teams assembled on the north side of the building waited for a signal to storm the front, back, and side doors on the ground floor simultaneously. National Guard troops were in place around the entire perimeter and throughout the below-ground visitor and retail space. Social media transmissions were blocked within a square mile to prevent civilians from posting images of their impending strike. Press, cordoned off two city blocks back from the building and barricaded by police, were embargoed from reporting on this mission until it was completed. Media had been warned: anyone breaking the police line would be treated as a terrorist.

Elena tucked an errant black curl back under her helmet. In spite of the cool weather, sweat trickled down the back of her neck. Inside her mask, the world smelled empty. She patted her utility belt for one last check: knife, Ruger LCP semi-automatic pistol and loaded back-up clips, taser, truncheon, ropes, carabineers, oxygen concentrator, nearly forty pounds more weight in weapons than she carried on her bones. Touching the shoulder straps of her emergency parachute, she reminded herself BASE jumpers had climbed up the building in 2013 before it was completed, opened their chutes, jumped, and survived. If she slipped, she could survive also.

Her problem was waiting. It was now half an hour since they took their places. She wasn’t good at waiting. Waiting opened the wormhole of fear, fear that rendered her either inert or bent on a rampage. Waiting preceded the death of people she cared for. Waiting was what you did before your buddy stepped out from cover into a sniper bullet or your vehicle rolled over an IED.

Elena snapped her mind back to the task at hand. Her squad had trained in buildering, climbing up the face of skyscrapers, but never under this kind of pressure, never for real, and never this high. It was 1,268 vertical feet to the top floor. They would climb two-thirds of that distance, ascending in pairs, scaling first the special grooved glass that encased the concrete and steel podium at the base of the building. The first one to reach a steel cross beam would lash a rope to it and so on up a thousand feet. No looking down. No time for fear. No second-guessing.

They had no illusions about the feasibility of this mission. It just had to be done. They deliberately quashed memories of the beautiful September day two decades before when two commercial planes flew into the twin towers: the flying debris, the smoke, the sudden collapse of thousands of tons of steel, glass, and concrete that stunned the world. They called only on their fury from that day. Fury fed resolve. Grief they left at street level.
Elena’s sister, Alissa, was one of the hostages who did not escape from this skyscraper yesterday. Alissa told her family she needed to complete a brief before she knocked off for the long weekend. She’d now been out of contact for twelve hours—no texts or calls to or from her cell phone since 4:30 p.m. yesterday. Elena refused to believe her sister was dead.

It doesn’t matter what the terrorists demand, Elena thought. It doesn’t matter, either, what the hostage negotiator is saying to the terrorists, or that the US Attorney General is claiming these criminals would be brought to justice. That was all smoke. Any negotiation was only performance. We’re going to find them and kill them. The directive was simple and clear.

Their advantage is that they don’t value life the way we do. Elena’s thought startled her. In spite of everything she’d seen as an Army medic under fire, she’d never allowed herself to admit indifference to life was a tactical advantage.

Her mind flashed frame by frame through the video and slides the squad had been shown to acquaint them with the skyscraper’s interior: three-million square feet of space, miles of corridors, thousands of doors. Alissa must be hiding somewhere in all of that space, in an over-looked closet that wouldn’t be checked by the terrorists in a rapid search. She had to hope that was true. She had to get to her sister before the terrorists found her, before any bombs went off, before the building collapsed.

Minimal information gave Elena a kind of claustrophobia. She felt boxed in, only knowing what she was told by her supervisors. They knew only what was happening after the fact, after it was reported to them. Everything else was speculation. Anything could go wrong and probably would. That was the norm. That was the way it went in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the early morning briefing, the Captain told them the operation was risky. They might die. They might lose civilians. RANGE-R radar devices mounted on drones flying circles around the building had taken infrared images through the windows. Individual red and yellow blobs that roamed freely through the structure were presumably terrorists moving around to control their hostages and patrol the building. Hostages were huddled together on five floors from the seventeenth to the eleventh, making rescue more difficult. But terrorists would expect a police incursion from ground level, not from above them. A first rescue attempt to rappel down from stealth helicopters hovering above the building was scuttled when wind shear slammed the lead jumper into the building’s four-hundred-foot spire.

Elena’s team would make the second attempt. After the ascent, their job was to clear the top portion of the building floor by floor from the observation deck to the twentieth floor. From the twentieth floor, they would rappel in pairs down four different elevator shafts to the floor directly above where a group of hostages were held. They would take the seventeenth floor first, kill the terrorists, save the hostages, and proceed to the next floor. That was the plan, and it had to be executed perfectly or the terrorists might blow everyone in the building to kingdom come.
On her earpiece she heard the voice of the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. “We’ve got a go!”

Holding her hand up to get the squad’s attention, Elena pointed to the building. “Move out.”
She raced forward and leaped up to grab a handhold on the highest angled glass fin protruding from stainless steel panels she could reach. For however long the climb took, her complete focus would now be on her hands, feet, breathing, and pushing her body up the face of the building to the platform above.

Her fingertips gripped the thin edge. She pushed up to the next tiny ridge, looking for toe holds in the slimmest rim where glass window plates had been fitted together. Creeping up the side of the building as if it was laid horizontal and she could simply push with her legs and reach with her arms, she crawled across its surface section by section. It was less than a quarter of a mile to their destination, a distance she could do in under a minute running on the ground. All thought fled.