Nightmare in Manhattan

Herald correspondent ROGER FRANKLIN was in New York as the terror attack everyone predicted finally struck.

New York woke up screaming.

After years of false alarms and close escapes, the long-expected nightmare - the one everyone in the darkest corner of their hearts knew could happen - finally came true.

The city has long been told it was a terrorist target. Anthrax attacks. Suicide bombers. All sorts of diabolical assaults on this tight little island's arrogant sensibilities.

But we had shrugged it off, as a smoker might dismiss the possibility of cancer, with a cavalier shrug.

It was our duty as New Yorkers, the cool sang froid of a city that regarded itself as beyond shock.

Until yesterday.

"I saw it. I saw it happen," gasped podiatrist Helen Manno, who works at Gouveneir Hospital, a five-minute walk from the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

"We heard the first plane, such a loud explosion, and went out on the balcony to look.

"Then, it couldn't have been half an hour later, we saw the second plane. It dipped straight in, never deviated at all."

And then, like so many other New Yorkers, she surrendered again to her tears.

"I've got to go. We have bodies everywhere."

From Harlem, through the eight teeming miles south to Wall St, the clogged streets of the city on the Hudson became an instant, bawling Bedlam of sirens, thousands of them bellowing and whooping and going nowhere.

They came in waves as emergency-response controllers tried to get a handle on the havoc.

One wave of shrieking sirens would scream south, and then would come a relative silence as the same emergency officials tried to find more ambulances to direct toward the carnage.

Then another wave of ambulances would come and go, shuttling by ones and twos the injured and dying to hospitals that are too few, too unprepared, too swamped to cope.

And behind them, a black funeral pyre roiling against an azure blue sky raining, raining its soot all over the lower half of the island.

As the minutes grew to an hour, the stories - some of them true - spread, and so did the panic. The Pentagon had been hit in Washington. True.

A truck had been detonated in the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey. False - so far.

Another jetliner had gone just south of Pittsburg. Also true, but no details.

Who can be sure in a city where the concrete certainties of tall buildings are crumbling and falling.

Who can be sure of anything but that the old certainties, the assumption that a Divine Providence guarded this city, have been shattered .

Bombs, huge carnage - they were things other, lesser cities had to live with.

New York, until yesterday, had been lucky. True, there was the truck bomb attack on same WTC in 1991, but the damage was relatively slight.

And after that, our luck held.

Somehow, even as the news magazines ran their periodic scare stories about what would happen if terrorists released anthrax in the subway, we ignored it. It wouldn't happen here. Couldn't happen, not here.

And now it has.

Outside the polling booth in Tudor City, a leafy enclave near the United Nations, the young cop assigned to protect the democratic process of the city's mayoral primaries had fury in his eyes.

Around him crowded a knot of average citizens drawn by the uniform.

Where do you turn when the certainties of life are shattered?

Even a pimply kid, for that was all the cop was, provided some sort of pillar around which to cluster and cling.

In his hands, he held the walkie-talkie linking him to emergency control operators and the racket coming over the squawking speaker beggared belief.

Little, crackly snatches of mounting chaos.

"That hospital is full," a voice said as it directed an emergency vehicle to another refuge. "That one is overloaded."

On the periphery of Manhattan, all was gridlocked as every bridge and tunnel leading into the city was shut.

Isolated, alone and overwhelmed, Manhattan's nightmare was complete and total.

The horror of it was total.