Black Friday Read Free Page A

firelight that would be coming down here at five o’clock.
    At 0830, Calvin Mohammud carefully wound a tattered strip of cloth around a polished brass door handle at the back entrance of the all-powerful New York Stock Exchange—
a proud, beautiful green band.

Chapter 4
    GREEN BAND STARTED savagely and suddenly, as if meteors had hurtled themselves with malevolent intensity against New York City.
    It blew out two-story-tall windows, and shattered asphalt roofs, and shook whole streets in the vicinity of Pier 33–34 on Twelfth Avenue between 12th and 15th streets. It all came in an enormous white flash of painful blinding light.
    At approximately 9:20 that morning, Pier 33–34— which had once hosted such regal ships as the
Queen Elizabeth
and the
QE II
—was a sudden fiery cauldron, a crucible of flame that raked the air and spread with such rapid intensity that even the Hudson River seemed to be spurting colossal columns of flames, some at least four hundred feet high.
    Dense hydrocarbon clouds of smoke bloomed over Twelfth Avenue like huge black umbrellas being thrown open. Six-foot-long shards of glass, unguided missiles of molten steel, were flying upward, launching themselves in eerie, tumbling slow motion. And as the river winds suddenly shifted there were otherworldly glimpses of the glowing, red hot metal skeleton that was the pier itself.
    The blistering fireball had erupted and spread in less than sixty seconds’ time.
    It was precisely as the Green Band warning had said it would be: an unspeakable sound and light show, a ghostly demonstration of promised horrors and terrors to come …
    The dock for trie
Mauretania,
for the
Aquitania,
the
Ile de Trance,
had been effectively vaporized by the powerful explosions, by the sudden, graphic flash fires.
    This time,
one of the thousands of routinely horrifying threats to New York was absolutely real. Radio listeners and TV viewers all over New York would soon hear the unprecedented message:
    “This is
not a test
of the Emergency Broadcast System.”
    At 10:35 on the morning of December 4, more than seven thousand dedicated capitalists—DOT system clerks, youthful pages with their jaunty epaulets and floppy Connecticut Yankee haircuts, grimly determined stockbrokers, bond analysts, bright-green-jacketed supervisors—were busily, if somewhat nonchalantly, promenading through the three jam-packed main rooms of the New York Stock Exchange.
    The twelve elevated ticker-tape TV monitors in the busy room were spewing stock symbols and trades comprehensible only to the trained eyes of Exchange professionals.
    The day’s volume, if it was only an average Friday, would easily exceed a hundred fifty million shares.
    The original forebears, the first Bears and Bulls, had been ferocious negotiators and boardroom masters. Their descendants, however, their mostly thin-blooded
heirs,
were not particularly adroit at moneychanging.
    At 10:57 on Friday morning, “the Bell”—which had once actually been a brass fire bell struck by a rubber mallet, and which still signaled the official beginning of trading at 10:00 sharp, the end of trading at 4:00—went off inside the New York Stock Exchange. “The Bell” sounded with all the shock value of a firework popping in a cathedral.
    Absolute silence followed.
    Shocked
silence.
    Then came uncontrollable buzzing; frantic rumor-trading. Almost three minutes of unprecedented confusion and chaos on the Stock Exchange floor.
    Finally, there was the deep and resonant voice of the Stock Exchange Manager blaring over the antiquated p.a. system.
    “Gentlemen … ladies … the New York Stock Exchange is officially closed….
Please leave the Stock Exchange floor. Please leave the trading floor immediately.
This is not a bomb scare. This is an actual emergency! This is a serious police emergency!”

Chapter 5
    OUTSIDE THE HEAVY stone and steel entranceway to the Mobil Building on East 42nd Street, a series of personal stretch