“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I butted in angrily. “You knew we were looking for a way to get in, Nardy.”

“I thought things could be resolved peacefully,” the caretaker said quietly. “Now I know otherwise. Poor Father Miller. He was a good soul.”

One thing I loved was when citizens decided to manipulate the police for their own political reasons. I was about to tear into the old man for obstructing justice when Oakley cut me off with a shake of his head.

“Do you think you could show us the way in, Mr. Nardy?” Oakley said calmly.

“Absolutely,” the caretaker said.

Oakley called into his radio and ordered half of his commando team to the command center.

Finally some action, I thought. Finally a break for the good guys.

I was sick of talking, too. Just like Jack.

“Going somewhere?” Oakley said, eyeing me with surprise.

“With you,” I said with a tight smile. “You never know when you might need to negotiate.”

AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of weapon loading and intense strategy briefing, I joined a dozen joint task force FBI and NYPD commandos. We followed the caretaker, Nardy, into 630 Fifth Avenue.

I was all but swimming under a borrowed night-goggle headset, heavy vest, and tactical shotgun. Only the occasional creak of a combat boot could be heard as we moved quickly through the red marble chamber of the Art Deco lobby and down the stairs.

Commander Will Matthews had cleared the street concourse below at the beginning of the siege, and it was a little creepy as we trooped through the silent, deserted mall-like corridor. There were Christmas decorations and lights blinking through the plate glass of upscale clothing stores, toy shops, and a food court, but the aisles and the tables were empty.

It reminded me of an old horror movie my son Brian had made me watch with him the Halloween before about people running away from zombies in a mall. I quickly dispelled the déjà vu when I remembered the title.

Dawn of the Dead.

Nardy stopped at an unmarked steel door beside a Dean amp; DeLuca gourmet food store. He removed a prodigious ring of keys from the pocket of his rumpled slacks. His lips moved as he sorted through them, in prayer or counting, I wasn’t able to tell. He finally selected a large, strange-looking key from his ring and handed it to Oakley.

“That’s it,” he said, crossing himself. “God bless you.”

“Okay, everyone,” Oakley whispered. “Radios off and my team in front. Make sure the suppressors are screwed down tight. Have your night goggles ready for going in lights-out. Single file, space yourselves out. Listen for my signal.” He turned to me. “Mike, last chance to go back.”

“I’m all in,” I said.

THERE WERE METAL flicks of weapon safeties being released and then a slightly louder one as Oakley turned the lock.

The door made a loud creaking groan as it swung in. We stared over the barrels of our weapons into an unlit concrete-lined corridor.

“Mom always said if I played my cards right, I’d make it to Fifth Avenue,” Oakley whispered as he flipped down his night goggles and stepped into darkness behind his MP5.

When I turned down my goggles, the lightless tunnel went to an eerie lime green. Twenty feet in, we had to duck under a thick bank of rusting iron cable ducts. Another thirty feet after that, we passed along a teakettle-hot steam pipe that was as big as the side of a gasoline truck.

The grade of the tunnel took a sharp pitch downward, and we arrived at a long set of spiraling iron stairs also heading down.

“I always wondered what they spent the second collection on,” Oakley said as he descended. “Anybody who spots a dude with horns and a pitchfork has standing orders to squeeze until he hears a click.”

At the bottom of the two-story staircase was a riveted metal door with what looked like a steering wheel in its exact center. If I didn’t know better, I would have said we had somehow arrived at the engine room of a ship.

The door moved inward as if it were on oiled hinges when Oakley put his hand to it. Suddenly, we were in a small, odd concrete room. It was a church, with painful-looking concrete pews and a cement altar. The only thing not made of concrete was the crucifix that had been fashioned of a dull gray metal that might have been lead. To the right of the crucifix was an iron ladder heading up into a kind of chimney in the ceiling.

Oakley motioned for silence as we moved toward the ladder.

The vertical passage was about two stories high, like some strange silo built underground. I don’t know if they trained in ladder racing at the FBI, but if there was an Olympic event, the Hostage Rescue guys would have gotten the gold.

From the bottom of the ladder, I could make out another steering wheel opener at the roof of the chimney above the commandos’ heads.

Then I saw it spin with a screech.

A few seconds later, I couldn’t see anything because a circle of light burned down from above, and I was blinded-blind and then deaf as the world around me shattered with the crackle of gunfire.

Jack was onto us.

I REARED BACK from the chimney. I tore off my night-vision goggles. Bullets pocked holes in the concrete floor as gunfire rained down into the cramped slot.

It was a miracle I wasn’t hit as I pulled the jumping, falling, and sliding members of the retreating tactical team away from the kill-zone base of the ladder.

The blue-white flashes from the continuing gunfire pulsed like strobe lights as team members performed CPR on their fallen brothers.

I heard Oakley swearing and counting heads as I flicked my MP5 to auto and jogged back to the chimney.

Then I shoved the machine gun up into the hole beside the ladder, one-handed, and pulled the trigger. The MP5 jumped like a jackhammer in my hand until I heard a click. I didn’t know if I’d hit anything, but it seemed to momentarily stop the attack.

A second later, there was a loud, whistling clang, and a smoking canister landed at the base of the ladder. Then another. I pulled my Windbreaker up around my face as acrid smoke burned my eyes and lungs.

“Tear gas!” I shouted. “Fall back!”

I almost tripped on a fallen cop behind me. “Hit,” he said in a whisper. I lifted him up into a fireman’s carry and headed back for the door we’d come in through. I banged one of my shins on a stair of the spiral staircase and felt blood seep down into my boot.

I nearly brained myself, and the cop I was carrying, when I ran into one of the iron ducts near the tunnel entrance.

It was surreal back out in the corridor of the mall. Under the blinking red and green holiday lights and sappy Christmas Muzak, the blood and filth on our guys looked like makeup.

I laid the man I had carried out onto the polished marble floor of the concourse. Then I gasped as I stared into his lifeless blue eyes. He was a burly, black-haired NYPD ESU cop, no more than twenty-five.

Now he was dead, gone while I’d tried to carry him to safety.

Oakley was putting a helmet over the face of a fallen FBI commando to my left.

What had happened? Two good men, good cops. Down.

I looked around, stunned. There was an advertisement for a clothing store through the plate glass above the cop’s corpse. Some laughing teenage blonde in a Santa hat and red cat suit sandwiched between a couple of shirtless male models on the hood of a vintage car.

That absurd tableau, coupled with my shock, snapped something inside of me. A rattling burglar alarm went off as I shattered the store window into a million pieces with the butt of my MP5.