At eight-thirty, 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.

Green Band started savagely and suddenly, as if meteors had been hurtled down with malevolent intensity on New York City. It blew out two-story-tall windows, shattered asphalt roofs, and shook whole streets in the vicinity of Pier 54-56 on West Street between Twelfth and Fifteenth streets. It all came in an enormous white flash of painful, blinding light.

At approximately nine-twenty that morning, Pier 54-56 was a sudden fiery caldron, a blast of flame that raked the air and spread with such rapid intensity that even the Hudson River seemed to be spurting colossal columns of fire, some at least four hundred feet high.

Dense hydrocarbon clouds of smoke billowed over West Street like huge open black umbrellas. Six-foot-long shards of glass and unguided missiles of molten steel launched themselves, flying upward, in eerie, tumbling slow motion. And as the river winds suddenly shifted, there were other-worldly glimpses of the glowing, hot-metal skeleton that was the pier itself.

The blistering fireball had erupted and spread in less than sixty seconds.

It was precisely as the Green Band warning had said it would be: an unspeakable sound-and-light show, a ghostly demonstration of promised terrors to come…

Inside a police surveillance helicopter quivering and bumping on serrated upcurrents of hot smoke, New York Mayor Arnold Ostrow and Police Commissioner Michael Kane were shocked beyond words. Both understood that one of New York 's worst nightmares was finally coming true.

This time one of the thousands of routinely horrifying threats to New York was 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, and supervisors with bright-green jackets 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.

No doubt the original forebears, the first bulls and bears, had been ferocious negotiators and boardroom masters. Their descendants, however, their mostly thin-blooded heirs, were not particularly adroit at money changing.

The heirs were a strikingly homogenous group, for the most part smug and vainglorious bean counters; they all looked blood-related and tended toward red-faced baby fat or an almost tubercular gauntness. Their pale blue eyes looked like marbles, round and bulging, with a distant vagueness in them.

Moreover, the heirs were standing by helplessly while American business was losing “World War III,” as the most recent fight over the world's economy had sometimes been called. They were quietly, though quite rapidly, surrendering world economic leadership to the Japanese, the Germans, and the Arab world.

At 10:57 on Friday morning, the bell-which had once actually been a brass fire bell struck by a rubber mallet and still signaled the official beginning of trading at 10:00 A.M. sharp and end of trading at 4:00 P.M.-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 exchange floor.

Finally, there was the deep and resonant voice of the stock exchange manager blaring over the antiquated PA system.

“Gentlemen… ladies… the New York Stock Exchange is officially closed… Please leave the floor. Please leave the trading floor immediately. This is not a bomb scare. This is an actual emergency! This is a serious police emergency!”

Outside the heavy stone-and-steel entranceway to the Mobil Building on East Forty-second Street, a series of personal stretch limousines-Mercedeses, Lincolns, Rolls-Royces-were arriving and departing with dramatic haste.

Important-looking men, most of them in dark overcoats, and a few women hurriedly got out of their limousines and entered the building's familiar deco lobby. Upstairs on the forty-second floor, other CEOs and presidents of the major Wall Street banks and brokerage houses were already gathered inside the exclusive Pinnacle Club.

The luxurious main dining room of the private club, which was set up for lunch with crisp white linens and shining silver and crystal, had been commandeered for the emergency meeting. Several of the dark-suited executives stood before floor-to-ceiling nonglare windows, which faced downtown. They looked dazed and disoriented. None of them had ever experienced anything remotely like this, nor had they ever expected to.

The view was a spectacular and chilling one, down uneven canyons to lower Manhattan, all the way to the pencil pocket of skyscrapers that was the financial center itself. About halfway, at Fourteenth Street, there were massive police barricades. Police buses, EMS ambulances, and a paradelike crowd could be seen waiting, watching toward Wall Street as if they were studying some puzzling work of art in a midtown museum.

“They haven't even bothered to reestablish contact with us. Not since six this morning,” said Secretary of the Treasury Walter O'Brien. “What the hell are they up to?”

Standing stiffly among a small group of prominent Wall Street executives, George Firth, the attorney general of the United States, was quietly lighting his pipe. He appeared surprisingly casual and controlled, except that he'd given up smoking more than three years before.

“They certainly were damn clear when it came to stating their deadline. Five minutes past five. Five minutes past five or what? What do the bastards want from us?” The attorney general's pipe went out, and he relit it, looking exasperated. The closest observers noticed the nervous tremors in his fingers.

A somber-looking businessman from Lehman Brothers named Jerrold Gottlieb looked at his wristwatch. “Well, gentlemen, it's one minute past five…” He was about to add something but left it unsaid.

They were all in unfamiliar territory now, where things couldn't be properly articulated.

“They've been extremely punctual up to now. Obsessive about getting details and schedules perfect. They'll call. I wouldn't worry, they'll call.”

The speaker was the vice president of the United States, who'd been rushed from the United Nations to the nearby Mobil Building. Thomas More Elliot was a stern man with the look of an Ivy League scholar. His harshest critics carped that he was a Brahmin who was out of touch with the complexities of contemporary America. He'd spent the better part of his public career with the State Department, traveling extensively in Europe during the turbulent sixties, then in South America through the seventies. And now this.

For the next few minutes everyone was quiet, tense.

This tingling silence in the club's dining room was all the more frightening because there were so many highly articulate men in the room-the senior American business executives, used to having their own way, used to being listened to and obeyed, almost without question. Now they were virtually powerless, not used to the frustration and tension that this terrifying mystery had thrust into their lives. And their awesome power had distilled itself into a sequence of small, distinct noises: