Ever vigilant, police found quiet

The loud crackle from Fire Commissioner Paul Christian's emergency phone brought the early morning meeting among Mayor Thomas M. Menino and his top deputies to discuss final preparations for the Democratic National Convention to a sudden halt.

Something had just exploded in Copp's Hill cemetery in the North End, shattering windows in a nearby building. A sense of dread filled the room, as Menino huddled quickly with Christian and Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole.

"Was this the first shot in what was going to be a very long week?" Christian recalled thinking when he heard the report of the explosion. "We knew we had prepared for every imaginable disaster, and we were beginning with a bang."

But as Christian learned on arriving at the scene, the feared attack turned out to be nothing more than an M80, a large firecracker, that had been placed in a bottle and ignited.

It would be the first of several reports of frightening occurrences received by Boston Police and public safety officials during convention week. All turned out to be false alarms, but they triggered massive responses, based on months of preparation for any number of potential disasters.

Among the fearsome scenarios that commanders considered and planned for: a terrorist exploding a tanker truck inside the Sumner Tunnel; the release of a chemical spray inside the FleetCenter while the convention was underway; and a sudden attack by radical demonstrators in a business area, like Newbury Street.

What was never considered, however, was that terrorists would descend on the FleetCenter via parachutes. But shortly after midnight last Monday, the Unified Command Center at Boston Police headquarters received a report that three or four people in parachutes had been seen by a member of the National Guard, which was patrolling around the FleetCenter. descending toward a nearby building.

Squads of Boston and State Police officers were quickly dispatched to search the roof of the O'Neill federal building, adjacent to the FleetCenter, and other neighboring buildings. Because there was a no-fly zone around the FleetCenter, one commander speculated that perhaps the parachutists had taken off from a taller building on Beacon Hill and used the wind to carry them toward the FleetCenter.

Using property maps provided by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and meteorologists from the National Weather Service, police searched two buildings on Temple and Somerset streets, both owned by Suffolk University. Nothing was found.

By daylight Monday, Boston and State Police officials were sufficiently convinced that the parachutist report was unfounded. However, members of the National Guard were sticking by their story. At least three guardsmen, deployed in separate locations on the elevated tracks in front of the FleetCenter, were convinced that they had briefly seen a billowing fabric headed westerly over the O'Neill building, said one state official.

Maybe the parachutists weren't terrorists at all, the official speculated, but thrill-seekers engaged in the sport of BASE jumping, adventurers trying to scare law enforcement by jumping off a nearby building and floating near the security "hard zone" around the FleetCenter.

A more likely explanation, said a law enforcement official interviewed the next day, was that the guardsmen had seen flapping material from a tent atop the O'Neill building to measure the velocity and direction of wind currents in and around the FleetCenter.

With only a few terrorism scares to deal with, the 15 or so officials in the Unified Command Center and 5,000 police and law enforcement officials deployed spent most of their time concentrating on demonstrations and parades by several protest groups, most notably the Bl(A)ck Tea Society, an antiauthoritarian organization.

However, far fewer than the 10,000 expected protesters showed up for the demonstrations, with police outnumbering protesters at many of the marches.

On Tuesday night, the Unified Command Center received information that a small group of individuals intended to show up in the early morning hours on Newbury Street and begin breaking windows.

Several platoons of Boston and State Police officers were dispatched to patrol the neighborhood, and there was no trouble.

Steve Kurkjian can be reached at kurkjian@globe.com.