The Fifth Horseman

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The rain, the bitter rain of winter, flayed the window with its silken lash, sending jagged rivulets coursing down its plateglass surface. The man peered out, across the empty canyons, into the black recesses of the night. He shuddered. No night to be on the water. His eyes strained for a glimpse of the familiar outlines of the harbor at his feet, the lowlying lights of the Jersey docks, the tip of Governor’s Island, the distant blink of West Bank Light out beyond the Verrazano Bridge.

Behind him a Teleprinter clacked. He glanced at his watch. It was a few seconds after midnight. Twenty miles out to sea, the first incoming freighter to enter the Port of New York on this Wednesday, December 9, had just arrived off Ambrose Light, passing as she did into U.S. Customs control. The man turned to his desk. He was, from his command post in Room 2158 of the World Trade Center, responsible for the Customs control of the harbor for the next eight hours. He opened the logbook on his desk to a fresh page and entered at its head the date of the new day beginning in the records of the Port of New York. Then he tore off the piece of paper spewed out by the Teleprinter and diligently entered the scanty information it provided on the 7,422nd ship to enter the harbor that year: her name, the Dionysos; the flag she flew, Panamanian; her destination, Pier 3 of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal.

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