The Detachment (25 page)

“That’s what they’re calling military action these days,” Dox said. “Justice. I guess it has a better ring to it than invasion, bombardment, and slaughter.”

“Shh.”

“Now, I want to address a rumor,” the president went on. “First, that before blowing himself up, the terrorist shouted,
‘Allahu Akbar,’
which means ‘God is great’ in Arabic, and is a common Islamic invocation and sometimes a war cry. We don’t have confirmation of this, and it is irresponsible of the media to report it as though it has in fact been confirmed.”

“Rumor?” Dox said. “Who started the rumor? Sounds like the president is starting it himself!”

“That’s exactly what he’s doing, either deliberately, or because it’s being fed to him.”

“Well, how the hell—”

“Shh. He’s talking again.”

“Our task tonight,” the president went on, “is to pray for the victims and their families. And to thank the men and women of our armed forces and intelligence services, who, even as I speak, are risking their lives to protect our homeland and our liberties. Let us pray for them, as well.”

There was the clamor of reporters trying to ask questions, and then the announcer was back on, explaining that the president had left the briefing room.

Dox glanced over at me, then back to the road. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean it, John. I mean…this is some top level shit we’re mixed up in here.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, false flag terror attacks? And we’ve been fingered for it? Forgive me if I sound gloomy, but I don’t see a clear way out of this.”

“You do sound gloomy.”

He laughed softly. “Well, cheer me up then.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Not to mention—”

“I know. We cleared the way for it.”

We didn’t stop again until Roanoke. It was nearly midnight and we’d been driving for over eight hours. Dox and I briefed Treven and Larison about the incident outside the White House. No one said anything, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing: we were fucked.

We picked up fast food, gassed up again, and agreed to change positions. “It’s not that bad,” Treven said. “A lot cooler than before, and your friend was smart to pick up that bubble wrap. It’s actually pretty comfortable, if you’re lying down on it.”

Dox and I had discussed our discomfort at the prospect of being closed up in the cargo area, helpless and blind, while Treven and Larison drove. If someone put a lock on the exterior, the truck would be turned into a prison. Not that anyone was carrying a lock or had time to buy one, but still. But in the end, it didn’t matter, because what choice did we have? None of us could risk public transportation. Dox had been right about our odds of hiding from the modern surveillance state. And Larison had been right when he’d told Treven that going off alone meant being the first one picked off. If we were going to resolve this, our best chance was to stick together, and to find a way to attack back.

Treven and Larison were indifferent about what we ate, so I was glad when, on the morning of the second day, Dox insisted we stop at a Whole Foods outside Nashville. We loaded up with enough chow to see us comfortably all the way to the Pacific, then found a Wal-Mart and threw a couple futons and sleeping bags in the back. The futons were something, but Dox had been right, it was a damn sauna back there when the sun was high, and there wasn’t any good way to cool it down. We considered buying bags of ice but then decided against it. We didn’t want to take a chance on the melting runoff attracting the attention of some highway patrol.

We also stopped at a Starbucks so I could access their free Wi-Fi, and I checked the secure site. I half-expected a message from Horton, trying to explain away the unexplainable. But he must have known how useless that would be under the circumstances. He’d used us, then tried to clip us like the loose end we now represented. We knew he would try again, just as he knew we’d be gunning to get to him first. The state of play was so clear that anything anyone might have said would have been useless, even absurd.

There was a message from Kanezaki, though. He described the attack at the White House, which the media had gotten more or less right after the initial, confused reports. And he said the NSA was picking up chatter about more attacks coming. There were rumors about the president considering a major response. Kanezaki wanted me to call him, and I wrote that I couldn’t, not for another day or two. After the ambush at the hotel, my paranoia was at a full simmer. Maybe Horton had managed to stitch together enough data from airport surveillance cameras and satellite imagery to track us to the Hilton. He’d been expecting us in the city, after all. If so, and if he’d lost track of us after the hotel, then even with all the technology in the world, for the time being we’d be the proverbial needle in a haystack. I didn’t want to take any chance at all about a call being traced to a location this far west, from which the opposition might predict our further trajectory. From which Horton might even guess where we were ultimately heading, and why.

On the afternoon of the second day, Treven was driving while I rode shotgun. Mostly the roads were eerily quiet, but periodically, the quiet would be shattered by a passing military convoy, after which, the absence of traffic would be more spooky still.

I asked Treven the same security questions I had put to Dox, but got no additional insights. If he was hiding something, he was hiding it well. He told me a little about himself. Cut his teeth in Mogadishu. Climbed the ops ladder from Airborne to SF to ISA. A very competent man, no doubt, both from the resume and from what I’d seen at the hotel. But I didn’t feel the kind of connection with him that I’d started to feel with Larison. In Larison, I sensed turmoil, but also purpose. In Treven, what I sensed felt more like…confusion. And compensation. For what, I didn’t know.

We were listening to a country music station when, just as a day before, the deejay’s typically smooth and soothing voice cut in high-pitched and earnest after a song.

“Following on yesterday’s attack on the White House,” he said, “we have another horrifying report. A suicide bombing in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Reports of a truck driven into the building, and a partial structural collapse. I know you can’t see it, this is radio, but I’m watching the video now and I have to tell you, my God, my God, it’s unspeakable. It’s like the twin towers again…Folks, I’m sorry to tell you, but yesterday was not a one-off. These have got to be coordinated. Let’s pray the government is doing something to protect us.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Treven said, and that was all, there was nothing else to say. We drove grimly on, listening for more, dreading that we’d hear it.

Outside of Memphis, we did. Two more suicide bombings: one at a Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco; the other at a church in Lubbock, Texas. More mass casualties. Lurid descriptions of victims, the burned and buried and blinded. Reporters interviewing dazed survivors, hysterical people trying to find their family members, wailing parents clutching the mangled bodies of their daughters and sons.

“Country’s going to go mad from this,” Treven said grimly.

I nodded. “That’s exactly the idea. If nine-eleven, plus a little anthrax afterward, could make the country mad, imagine what you could get away with if you could increase that kind of fear. And sustain it.”

We drove on. The radio was nothing but special reports now. The attacks had driven everything else off the air. When the shows got tired of recycling the same news, they took to interviewing people in the streets. It was hardly a random sampling, and maybe there were some hardcore pacifists out there who were getting overlooked, or who were afraid to speak up, but the impression I was left with after hours of nonstop radio was that the country was in the grip of atavistic rage. There were calls to intern male Muslims, to close the borders, to nuke Mecca and Medina.

“I’d feel the same way,” Treven said. “If I didn’t know what was really going on.”

“Doesn’t matter who’s behind it. Either the response is tactically sound, or it’s not.”

“I’m not talking about tactics. I’m talking about how I’d feel.”

“I get it. And that’s the beauty of what they’re doing. Think about it. Four attacks so far. The White House—a key symbol of the nation. The biggest mall in the country—a key symbol of consumer shopping and the economy. A church—to make people feel their religion is under attack. And an attack on sports—the country’s secular religion. Everything the culture identifies with and holds sacred, and distributed all over the land. There’s only one thing missing so far to make the country lose what’s left of its reason, and give in entirely to the kind of feelings you’re talking about.”

“What?” Treven said.

“A school. One, maybe more.”

He glanced over at me. “Christ.”

“Yeah. My guess is, if they can’t get what they want based on what they’ve done so far, they’ll ratchet it up. Schools would do it. Think Beslan. Or that camp in Norway.”

“You think they’d go that far?”

“You see any indications otherwise?”

We drove on to the hysterical cadences of the incessant recycled news stories. I watched the country going past, green hills and forests and terraced farmland, towns with names like McCrory and Bald Knob and Judsonia. The sky was an absurd, bright blue. The road was gray in the shimmering heat and looked like it might stretch on forever.

Most of the airtime was filled with speculation. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Iran. Libya. The Muslim Brotherhood. Sleeper cells in America, and how many more there could be. Why they hated us, why they loved death more than life. The topography outside the windows was indifferent and unaltered, but I felt the country we were driving through had changed irrevocably since we’d begun this journey, a time that itself already felt improbable, distant, surreal. I imagined the four of us in the truck as some sort of germ, silently delivered into America’s arterial system, hunted by rogue T cells even as the unseen body politic around us convulsed in fever and delirium.

I hated that we’d been part of the horror we listened to over the radio. But what could we do, except try to protect ourselves?

Periodically, we stopped for bathroom breaks and provisions. There was panic buying everywhere: duct tape, plastic, canned food, bottled water. Iodine tablets were impossible to find, and apparently there was a thriving black market for Mexican knockoff Cipro, the anthrax treatment. We saw Wal-Marts being emptied of water purification and camping supplies. Gun sales had gone through the roof, and ammunition was sold out.

We kept driving in shifts: two in the front to make sure no one fell asleep at the wheel; two in the cargo area getting some rest, at least theoretically; our only breaks at highway rest stops, where we parked far from other vehicles so that whichever two of us were riding in back could get in and out without being noticed.

I was dozing in the back with Treven when I was awakened by the feel of the truck coming to a stop. There was no light leaking into the cargo area. It must have been night.

There were three knocks on the door outside—the all-clear signal we’d been using to prevent misunderstandings. I had already accessed the Supergrade, and kept it in my hand anyway.

The door opened, and I saw Larison and Dox. It was twilight outside, not yet dark. I could hear crickets in the grass, but, other than that, the evening was silent. The air on my skin felt wonderfully fresh and cool. The air on my skin felt wonderfully fresh and cool.

“Where are we?” I said, getting out and sliding the Supergrade into my waistband. My legs were stiff and I did a few squats to loosen up.

“Lavaca, Arkansas,” Larison said. “Just south of the Ozark National Forest.”

Dox stuck his head inside the cargo area. “My lord, is that what it smells like back there? I guess I got numb to it when it was my turn. Think we all might want to find a place to shower when we get to L.A.”

I swung my arms around and shook them out to get the blood moving. “We’re not even out of Arkansas yet? Jesus, this country is big.”

Larison started stretching, too. “We’re just a few miles from the Oklahoma border. Almost halfway there.”

I looked around. We were on a dirt road. An old barn stood to our left, looking deserted, a small reservoir beside it. The sky, indigo overhead and behind us and deep blue fading to pink in the west, was clear. A crescent moon was already up, and the first stars were out.

“Why are we stopping?” I said. “You ready to change up?”

“I’m good either way,” Larison said. “But the president’s doing another prime time speech. Thought you might want to hear it.”

I looked around again. It was a deserted enough place that I thought we could risk a break. I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before eight—almost nine o’clock in Washington.

We all pissed at the edge of the nearby woods, then rolled down the truck windows and stood outside the cabin, Dox and Larison on the driver’s side, Treven and I opposite, listening to the announcer uselessly reminding us about the day’s events, and speculating on how the president might address them. Once again, I was struck by the feeling of being part of what was happening, and yet also distinct, isolated, remote from it.

At nine o’clock sharp, the president spoke. His tone was measured and grave.

“Today our nation suffered an unprecedented string of horrific and cowardly attacks on civilian targets. We have evidence that some of these attacks have been carried out by sleeper cells of Islamic fanatics. Others have been committed by individuals who we believe to be self-radicalized.”

“‘Self-radicalized’?” Dox said. “What the hell does that even mean? Some guy’s sitting there minding his own business, and he just radicalizes himself?”

“Today I met with leaders of Congress,” the president went on. “We discussed new legislation that will ensure I have the appropriate tools to fulfill my obligation to keep the nation safe in the face of this unprecedented threat. I was very pleased at the impressively bipartisan nature of our discussions. No one is playing politics with the safety of the American people. We will announce new measures based on these discussions very soon. I will also announce a reshuffling of certain key positions in my administration intended to ensure that we have the most flexible, streamlined, and effective team possible to keep the American people safe.