By ROGER FRANKLIN in New York
So, how will it happen?
Will we see more falling masonry, like the 200 floors of concertina concrete that buried the thousands of innocents they have only just finished digging out of the crater where the World Trade Centre once stood?
Or perhaps the crazies will switch tactics this time - perhaps some human bomb in the front row who cries "Allah Akhbar!" and perpetrates mass murder at the matinee screening of Spiderman, the same movie my son stood in line to see.
Or maybe megadeath will ride the subway. The trains plunge like pistons through those tunnels, each one pushing a wave of metal-scented air that announces the rattler's imminent arrival at the platform. As the CIA confirmed with a series of inert tests back in the 1960s, those gusts have no equal for spreading spores or gas or viral agents all the way from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
Pardon the paranoia, but once again, it's getting hard not to dwell on the unthinkable. There we were, eight months or so after the Twin Towers came down, and just beginning to enjoy a newly refurbished innocence when the fear returned.
The New York mindset had almost returned to normal. Wall St has recovered from the lows it plumbed after September 11, and the economic news has been reasonably cheerful of late. Tabloid reporters have stopped covering funerals and returned to their standard fare, this week probing the sexual preferences of the star slugger with the Mets baseball team.
Meanwhile, downtown's big dig was ending and the wrangling about what would go up in place of the Twin Towers had started in earnest - a reassuring sign that New York's city fathers were back to their customary business of soliciting donations and auctioning favours.
The Taleban had been toppled and, if Osama bin Laden was not already dead, it was reasonable to assume that his rheumy eyes must have been casting many wary glances at those who share his cave. With a US$25 million price on his head, how many people could he really trust? Surely not enough to concentrate on laying plans for another round of mischief in the Big Apple.
No more news in the papers about FBI roundups of suspected terrorists and their allies. The "threat horizon," as they say at the Pentagon, had receded far enough into the indeterminate distance for the Federal Aviation Administration to lift its ban on plastic scissors and cigar cutters. How much longer before little old ladies would be permitted once again to fly with their knitting needles?
Now, almost out of the blue, we are being told that further terrorist attacks are not merely likely but "inevitable."
If the alarms had been rung by one of those frothing faces on the nightly talk shows - the sort who advocate closing the borders, sealing the mosques and arresting their congregants - the predictions could have been shrugged off. But not this time, not when the grim word came from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who each observed that the next assault was not a matter of "if" but "when".
They were but two sources of the deeply unsettling predictions. Over the course of the week just passed, it seemed the entire Bush cabinet was jostling for a place in the chorus. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice spoke of America's "vulnerabilities". Vice-President Dick Cheney shared his certainty that, sooner or later, another massacre was coming. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer addressed the prospect of attacks on the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, apartment buildings, banks, bridges and office complexes.
We New Yorkers didn't have to look far to see how those words hit home. On the front page of the New York Post, there was no story on Wednesday morning, just a tiny, upbeat editorial beneath a sprawling, white-on-black headline. "We Have Nothing to Fear," it hollered, "But Fear Itself."
At an East Side diner that morning, an ad agency copywriter looked up from the paper between bites of a breakfast bagel to detail her own preparations and precautions. "I'm stocked up with water and canned food," she explained.
"And now that the weather is warmer, I'll ride my bike and stay out of the subway."
Friends and colleagues, she said, were trading survival tips again. This is not to say that New York is gripped by panic. That was never the case, not even in the haunted days immediately after September 11, when the reaction was numb shock rather than runaway terror.
But the fear is there, just beneath the surface and ready to rise at a moment's notice - as it did for an instant on Thursday, when one of the few jetliners now permitted to fly over Manhattan rumbled westward above the brown-baggers who were grabbing some sun in a little midtown park.
Sandwiches and sodas paused halfway to mouths and perhaps 500 faces turned anxiously to the skies.
The jumbo passed. Even above the traffic, you could almost hear the sigh of relief. Not this time. Not today.
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Just when New Yorkers thought it was safe again
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