A professionally nondescript Secret Service agent on break began snoring softly on a couch beside me as I watched CNN natter and flash on a TV bolted to an upper corner of the room. There were a lot of stories about the animal attacks, but nothing about the military response that had just been ordered. I wondered if that was because it hadn't happened yet or because there was some kind of government news blackout.
That might be possible now, I thought, glancing at the throng of soldiers and government officials around me.
I tried to call Chloe several times to tell her what was going on, but the phone would only ring twice and go to voice mail, a sign I decidedly did not like. Text messages didn't seem to be working, either. My guess was that it was probably circuit overload due to high call volume. That was my hope, anyway.
Leahy came back for me in the early afternoon and ushered me through the crowd out into the hallway.
"Unfortunately, no Gulfstream jet this time, Oz, but I did manage to get you on a military C-130 cargo plane heading out of Reagan National to New York in about two hours."
"How's the military response going? Any word?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," Leahy said. He led me down some stairs into a utility corridor. "They're still keeping me in the dark."</ol>
We passed stacks of K rations and a chef in crisp whites cussing a blue streak into a cell phone on the way to the door. At the bottom of some steps was a small parking lot crowded with Town Cars and military vehicles. At the edge of the lot, standing beside the black Suburban that had brought me in, Sergeant Alvarez waved at me cheerily, as if the world weren't ending.
"I'll keep plugging away on this end," Leahy said, shaking my hand and giving it a warm paternal squeeze that was meant to be reassuring and wasn't. "In the meantime, when you get back to New York, prepare a presentation to explain the science of this to the president and her staff when they're ready to listen. That would be extremely helpful. I'm going to try to arrange a teleconference for this evening or tomorrow morning at the latest."
A teleconference? Splendid idea. Now, why didn't I think of it? Oh, wait: I had. I wondered how many thousands of tax dollars had been wasted on my useless trip down here. Then I made the decision not to care. Getting home to my family was my priority now.
"Will do, Mr. Leahy," I said, making my escape.
Chapter 79
SERGEANT ALVAREZ WAS sitting in the driver's seat, locking and loading an M16, as I opened the passenger-side door and climbed into the SUV. The VIP treatment was over. He was wearing Kevlar body armor now, and a grenade vest.
He didn't have to explain to me that things were even worse now on the streets of D.C. I thought about Chloe and Eli back in New York, and wished I was already airborne.
We were two blocks south of the White House, about to make the left onto Constitution Avenue, when we heard music.
Ani DiFranco yodeled from the cranked speakers of a car parked at the corner of President's Park. Around it stood thirty or forty young people, many in hoodies bearing their college insignias, drinking beer. Some of them had painted their faces to look like animals. I smelled pot. They had handmade signs that read
MEAT IS MURDER! AIN'T PAYBACK A BITCH!!!?
HI HO! HI HO! IT'S BACK TO NATURE WE GO!
Everything has gone nuts, I thought, shaking my head. Animals, the president, college kids.
When we rolled past the National Mall again, I thought of all the noble historical assemblies the area had been host to. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the "I Have a Dream" speech there, the presidential inaugurations. Now there were dead dogs floating in the reflecting pool.
We took the Arlington Bridge back over the Potomac for the airport this time. About a half mile inbound, we came toward an overpass; standing on it were what looked like more deluded young protesters. The college kids we'd seen back by the White House had been mostly harmless, but these guys looked more sinister in their ski masks and black bandannas. They were waving black flags.
Then there was a flash of darting movement in front of the SUV, and the windshield caved in.
Glass dust stung my eyes as the joint-compound bucket somebody had dropped from the overpass whipped just past my head into the backseat.
The SUV accelerated and veered to the left. I turned and saw that Alvarez's face was covered with blood. He was slumped over the steering wheel, motionless.
I reached for the wheel, tried to right the vehicle. The car slid into the Jersey barrier at around eighty. Metal shrieked and showered sparks as we lurched up and rode the barrier for fifty feet before the momentum flipped the truck.
Chapter 80
DARK. AT FIRST I thought the rhythmic thump-thump-thump was my heartbeat. Then I opened my eyes. I realized the noise was the windshield wipers beating uselessly against the shattered windshield.
The truck's upside-down shattered windshield.
The SUV had come to rest on its roof in the left lane. I was being held in place by my shoulder belt, dangling like a bat. I felt hot blood from my nose dripping into my hair. I sneezed and sprayed a mist of blood onto my one good suit. I blinked, staring out through the hole in the windshield. My thoughts were slow and oozy.
Hmm. So what now?
I turned toward Alvarez. He was upside down, like me, still unconscious and bleeding steadily from a gash in his temple.
I reached out for his seat belt and was stopped when I looked out the window. In between the steady slap of the wipers pushing glass crumbs into the car, I heard a strange huffing sound. Outside the passenger-side window, something was moving.
I squinted at it. Brown. Brown. Brown.
A enormous muzzle and small beady black eyes appeared in the window.
Oh, okay, I thought. That's a bear.
It gazed through the window at me with an almost quizzical expression. What I was feeling wasn't even quite fear. What I was feeling was the fear equivalent of when you're so sad you laugh. The wheel of fear went around a whole turn, came out the other side. I thought, well, this is it.</ol>
How a grizzly bear had gotten here on this strip of road beside our wrecked truck was unclear. What it was doing in Washington, D.C., was unclear. Escaped from the zoo? I had a feeling that it didn't work for AAA.
It made its choppy huffing sound again and pressed its moist black snout against the glass of the car window. It sniffed at the glass and then made a low throaty moan as it scratched at the window with a paw twice the size of a catcher's mitt.
The screech of the bear's claws on the glass snapped me out of my little absence seizure. Fumbling with my seat belt release, I stretched an arm into the backseat, feeling for Sergeant Alvarez's rifle.
I abandoned my search for the rifle as the bear moved from the passenger side to the front. I felt the truck lurch upward as the bear began squeezing himself under the upside-down hood.
So this is how I will die, I thought. Eaten by a grizzly while hanging upside down in a car wreck. Interesting, at least. If, years before, you'd gazed into a crystal ball and told me that was how I'd go, I genuinely would not have believed you.
I turned to Alvarez and tried to shake him awake. For what reason I didn't know. To wake him up for his death? I wasn't sure. I guess I didn't want to die alone. In any case, he was out for the night.
The bear had shimmied its mass under the hood, and was now nosing the hole the compound bucket had made. It sniffed and huffed as it began peeling back the shattered glass. The bear ripped at the glass as though it were a kid tearing into a stubborn candy wrapper.
Then I remembered the grenades that dangled like avocados from the sergeant's vest. I unclipped the first one I could reach. I bit out its pin and tossed it at the bear as hard as I could as it poked its head in below the upside-down dashboard.
The bear roared and reared back as the hissing canister clanged off the side of its head. Interesting experience, having a bear roar in your face. The bear shook his head as if he'd been slapped.
Instead of exploding, the canister came to a spinning stop on the asphalt under the hood and began pouring out canary-yellow smoke. Roiling, acrid fumes burned my eyes. The smoke stung like a wasp stings. I covered my mouth as I coughed.
I reached over to Alvarez and managed to wrench another grenade free from his vest. But by the time I was ready to throw it I could see I didn't need it. Beyond the window, I saw the bear in retreat, bounding over the grass beyond the shoulder of the road.
When the air cleared, a long minute later, I finally disentangled myself. Alvarez was hacking up a lung by the time I got him out of his seat belt as well. We crawled out of the wreck. The SUV looked like John Belushi had crushed it against his forehead.
"What the hell just happened?" Alvarez said, slouching against the Jersey barrier, touching his face and inspecting the blood on his fingertips.
"It's just like bees," I said to myself, looking at the smoke billowing from beneath the truck.
"What bees?" said Alvarez, rooting around in the wreck for his rifle. "You okay, Professor? You bang your head?"
"When the animals smell us, they want to attack us," I said, crouching with him behind the overturned truck. "Anything that masks our scent makes us invisible. That's why the smoke drove off the bear. It knocked our scent out of the air."
"No shit," Alvarez said absently, shouldering his gun.
"It makes perfect sense," I said. I was thinking out loud. "Beekeepers use smoke in the same way. When the keeper shakes up a nest, the bees produce a pheromone that signals a mass attack. Except nothing happens because the smoke disperses the signal."