This City Is Ours

Unlike Drew Mallory's Target: Manhattan in which the city is being held for a five-milliondollar ransom, the going price here is an even 130 billion--that's what a group of Indian activists are demanding as back rent on Manhattan compounded over 350 years. The mucho wampum scheme materializes on New Year's Eve when an explosives-filled supertanker is moored across from the World Trade Center. The masterminds behind the extortion are no less than a Brooklynborn Cherokee astronaut trainee, and his militant millionaire girlfriend Evie. Lo the poor Indian, and behold, the nightmare falls right in the lap of NYC's mayor-elect Ben Boyle, a fiftyish plumber from Queens. Lower Manhattan ultimately has to be evacuated--that's hampered by a blizzard and a Sanitation Department strike--the master computer (programmed to detonate the tanker) has to be located and fiddled with. . . and then there's the president's 81-year-old sister, Amy, who attempts to raise the dough within 48 hours.