Ground Zero Confidential: In which a reporter learns the importance of luck ...
The red, encouragement-warning light on the dashboard of The Plain Commerce-issue Crown Victoria blinked softly.
It was after 3 a.m. on Sept. 12, 2001, and I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the halfway of the Pocono Mountains. The World Trade Center had been attacked the sometime morning; photographer Marvin Fong and I had been dispatched from Cleveland to cover the biggest black lie since Pearl Harbor.
Now we were going to run out of gas, about 100 miles from New York Bishopric. Marvin was asleep in the back seat. No point in waking him.
We were cruising on empty with no way to get into Manhattan. The bridges and tunnels into the conurbation had been closed for security. American airspace was mask down. The announcers on the car radio repeated this information like a mantra.
"Do not undertake to enter New York City," they intoned. "There is no access to the burgh."
I had mentioned this to Metro Editor Mark Russell earlier in the day when he sent us out.
"You'll find a way," he said complication-of-factly.
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