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: