I approached the vehicles: a marked D.C. police car, a black Suburban, and another military Humvee.
A stocky marine in full camo shook my hand. He was Hispanic and his spiky high-and-tight made him look like he was wearing a hedgehog as a yarmulke.
“Mr. Oz?” he said with a slightly cockeyed grin. “You’re that animal scientist guy, right? I saw you on Oprah, man. Welcome to the war zone formerly known as Washington, D.C. I’m Sergeant Alvarez. But call me Mark. Do you have any bags or some beakers or something I can grab for you?”
“No beakers this time,” I said distractedly as he opened the door of the SUV for me.
“So what are you down here for?” he said, getting behind the wheel. “Lemme guess. Tour the cherry trees, a Nats game?”
We were rolling now. I was trying to think. I wished he’d shut up.
“Actually, I’m starting up a brand-new drug testing program for Marine Corps personnel,” I said. “In fact, when we get to the White House, I’m going to need a urine sample.”
A long silent minute dragged past.
“That was a joke.” I said. “Sorry, I have a lot on my mind.”
“No problemo, Doc. I talk too much. Ask anyone,” Alvarez said. “You sit there and solve the disaster. I’ll just button my lip and drive. This is me, shutting up. Zip.”
A few minutes later we were near the Pentagon, approaching the I-395 ramp before the bridge, when I heard what at first I thought were honking geese.
Then a mass of animals burst from the roadside trees. Body after furry body spilled out from between the tree trunks. Dogs. Dutch shepherds, caramel-colored mastiffs, foxhounds, bloodhounds, greyhounds, mutts of every conceivable coat and color and size. The dogs snarled and barked—a din of barking. Fur flew, spit sprayed up from the horde in frothy flecks.
Most of the animals were filthy, crazed-looking. They looked sick, starved, haunted. Many of them had hides that were mottled with that same white fungus stuff I’d seen under Bryant Park. It was horrific. I felt sorry for them.
The mass of dogs didn’t so much as hesitate as it approached our motorcade. The charging herd spilled right out into the road like lemmings off a cliff, right under the lead patrol car’s front wheels. Sergeant Alvarez came close to rear-ending the police car as it hit its brakes.
“The fuck are you assclowns doing?” Sergeant Alvarez yelled into his hands-free headset at the driver of the cop car. “Now’s not the time to be braking for animals, cockwaffle! Go! Go!”
There was a series of yelps and whines, and then sickening thumps under the wheels, as we ran over the dogs. Our car bucked and rocked over them like a rubber dinghy in a storm at sea. We thought it was almost over when an Irish wolfhound that looked like Lon Chaney Jr. in heavy makeup hurled itself onto the hood.
Sergeant Alvarez stomped on the gas, and the monster sailed over the windshield and tumbled over the roof. I turned in time to see it get run over by the Humvee behind us.
“Damn! Thing wanted to eat us for breakfast, huh?” Alvarez said, wiping sweat off his hedgehog. “You can take that urine sample from my pants now, Professor X.”
We glanced at each other for a beat, then exchanged a trickle of nervous laughter.
“Now I understand why the politicians are so concerned,” I said.
The marine nodded as he took his .45 out of his holster and put it in the beverage holder.
“Typical Washington, right?” he said. “A problem ain’t a problem until it happens in D.C.”
Chapter 75
D.C. LOOKED DESERTED. We passed an army checkpoint on the other side of the Potomac. There were dead dogs scattered pell-mell across the usually pristine National Mall, floating in the reflecting pool. The water was cloudy and dark.
I saw that there was a newly erected high electric fence surrounding the White House as we approached it. At each corner of the complex I noticed four Humvees kitted out with what looked like satellite dishes attached to their roofs.
“What are those?” I asked.
“ADS,” Sergeant Alvarez said. “Active Denial System. It’s a kind of microwave transmitter that heats up your skin. Hurts like a motherfucker. Supposed to be effective for crowd control. Fortunately, it works on man’s best frenemy, too.”
We got in line behind two other convoys waiting beside the White House complex on East Executive Avenue. Even when it was our turn, we had to wait for twenty minutes while the operation of ID checking and rechecking was conducted by the Orwellian assembly of security agents at the gate.
I spotted Mr. Leahy as a baby-faced army officer was at long last escorting me into the West Wing. At the end of a hallway, Leahy seemed locked in a heated argument with a staffer in front of a set of closed double doors.
A lot of military types kept coming in and out of the boardroom behind them. A lot of metal flashed on jackets. The staffer shook his head at Leahy emphatically and departed as I stepped up.
“Something heavy-duty is going on, Oz,” Leahy said, buttonholing me by the secretary’s desk.
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“They won’t listen,” the silver-haired NSA officer said, more to himself than to me. “I can’t believe this. They won’t even listen to me.”
“Who won’t listen?” I said.
Leahy tilted his head toward a nearby door. “Step outside?”
On the White House colonnade, Leahy shook out a pack of Marlboros.
“I haven’t smoked in ten years,” he said. He popped a match to life and held it to the tip of his cigarette.
I wanted to shake him by the lapels. “You wanted me here. Now I’m here. What’s the problem?”
He didn’t answer. He took another drag, held the smoke in for a beat, and leisurely exhaled it from his nose in twin gray streamers of smoke.
Back in New York, my family was in jeopardy while this jackass pulled my chain. As Leahy put the cigarette to his lips again I smacked it out of his hand.
“Stop fucking around with me!” I said. “What. Is. The. Problem.”
“The military managed to convince the president that this thing can be taken care of with conventional weapons. They have satellite imagery of some animal nesting sites, and they want to use napalm on them. Imagine. They think they can bomb all the critters to kingdom come. They don’t want to listen to reason anymore, Oz. They just want to trot out their toys.”
He shook out another cigarette. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said, and lit the cigarette.
“But that’s nuts, Leahy. Isn’t President Hardinson known for being a moderate? A pragmatist? Mrs. Reasonable?”
Leahy looked around the colonnade.
“We’re probably bugged. I should know, shouldn’t I? But screw it. Who’s around to listen? This is top secret, Oz. Mum’s the word, understand? The president’s daughter is dead.”
Huh? I did a double take.
“What?” I said. “Allie?”
Leahy nodded.
“It’s being kept out of the press for now. The way I heard it, she told the president that Dodger had run away. But he hadn’t. She’d hidden him in a crawl space above the family’s quarters. That’s where they found her. The dog had…well. You can guess the rest.”
“Who found her?”
“Secret Service. The president borrowed a gun from an agent and put the dog down herself. She’s just not herself right now. She’s signing everything the military puts in front of her.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Shit is right,” Leahy said. “A shit is what they don’t give about the fact that this is an environmental issue. They don’t want to hear from any more scientists. They want blood, and they’re going to get it.”
Chapter 76
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE
FOUR MILES SOUTH-SOUTHWEST OF TAMPA, FLORIDA
AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL officer Lieutenant Frank White stirs milk into the first coffee of his shift with studied nonchalance as he steps onto the main floor of the cont
rol tower. As he crosses the room to his station, the lanky thirty-year-old is thinking ruefully about the fishing trip he was planning on taking this weekend before the airwaves became a network of doomsday theories. He’s focusing on trying to keep his eyeballs from rolling out of their sockets.
MacDill is a backwater air refueling base, and his job is usually a cakewalk. The hardest part is trying to keep twenty-three-year-old recruits with thirty hours’ flight time behind their wet ears from coming in too hot and turning the tarmac into a pizza oven.
White blinks down at runway 1, where, for some reason, two dozen F16 Falcons are powering up along the taxiway.
He gawks as a black B2 stealth bomber touches down on runway 2.
This is no fucking joke, he mumbles as he stands, still absentmindedly stirring his coffee.
All the fighters are bristling with underwing ordnance. One of the aircraft maintenance engineers in the locker room swore that they are all incendiary in nature—powdered-aluminum thermite bombs, magnesium, white phosphorus. Said he couldn’t be certain, but the B2s looked like they were carrying thermobaric daisy cutters.
Shit, White thinks. They could be goddamn nukes for all he goddamn knows.
The encrypted chain-of-command phone by his radar station rings twenty minutes later. He’s been drinking the coffee and is almost feeling half conscious now. The orders he receives from the phone are choppy and quick with terse military precision. They seem to have not the slightest whiff of bullshit in them.
“This is NORAD command at Cheyenne. Who am I speaking with?”
“Lieutenant Frank White.”
“Listen up, White. I don’t have all the coordinates in front of me, but you are to clear all civilian aircraft south of Tampa and north of the Keys. Clear the deck up to a ceiling of eighty-five thousand feet.”
White looks at his shadowy reflection in the control-tower glass and squints for a moment, picturing the area in his mind.
“Isn’t that Everglades National Park?”
“Didn’t hear that last transmission, son. What did you just say?”
Oh, shit, Lieutenant White thought. What is this? What’s going on?
“I said of course, sir. South of Tampa and north of the Keys.”
In a moment he is at one of the radar stations, working on carrying out the orders. The two-way crackles in his earpiece.
“Tower, this is two-five-three. Our preflight is complete. Are we clear for takeoff?”
White sits up. Two-five-three is the call sign for one of the B2s.
“Yes, two-five-three. You are clear on runway one.”
Clear for what, I don’t know, Lieutenant White thinks, slurping the dregs of his coffee as the massive aircraft begins to roll onto the airstrip.
Chapter 77
NORAD OPERATIONS CENTER
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AIR FORCE STATION
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO
WHEN THE ALL-HANDS-ON-DECK horn sounds throughout the compound that morning at nine in the a.m., it can be heard clearly all the way down the mountain, in the leafy suburbs of Colorado Springs.
The newer residents of the town who notice the braying alarm may idly wonder if the siren is for the volunteer fire department before going back to their newspapers and breakfasts. Those who have family members working at the station immediately leave their jobs and yoga classes and head to the schools to gather their children.
After exactly five minutes, the alarm ceases. Then the two twenty-five-ton steel blast doors that protect the supposedly nuclear weapons–proof military bunker begin to close for the first time since 9/11.
The corridors and rooms of the facility branch off a wide main tunnel, about as big as a train tunnel, that was bored almost through to the center of the granite mountain. The two-story glass-encased main operations center is at the end of the network of rooms nearest the mountain’s westernmost slope. In it, air force techs sit at cubicles, calling orders into headsets as they listen to the squawk and crackle of military radio traffic.
As one enters the room, the forward and right-hand walls are taken up with screens as big as the ones at the local multiplex. The forward screen shows computer maps and blinking radar scopes. The one on the right displays a flickering patchwork of multiple real-time feeds, a montage of ground-level images taken by the cameras mounted on unmanned aircraft and warplanes currently aloft.
Leaning against the stair rail outside the door of his fishbowl office, lofted above the operations center floor, NORAD commander Michael McMarshall stands listening to the staff trading codes and coordinates back and forth. He whispers a furtive Hail Mary for his men and dry-swallows the last three Advil out of the plastic bottle in his hand.
McMarshall had been the CO during the first chaotic hours of 9/11, and this ball of wax is looking like it’s going to be a mite bit worse.
He returns to his office and stands behind his desk, an architect’s drafting table ratcheted up to midriff level. At work, he always stands, due to a training-flight crash that injured his back thirty years ago.
He flips through a stack of photographs. The images are from the military’s most advanced Lacrosse satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Ground-penetrating radar and thermal infrared sensor systems have picked up some very disturbing data. Shockingly large pockets of animal swarms, as they are now being called, have aggregated in virtually every corner of the country.
The initial wave of bombings has been ordered on the largest nests near densely populated areas. Miami, Chicago, and St. Louis are first on deck. If there’s any good news at all, it’s that the animal aggregations seem to be situated mostly in parklands: the Everglades, near Miami; Lincoln Park, in Chicago; Forest Park, in St. Louis. They have been working with ground forces for the last two days, pulling evacs out of their target zones to limit collateral damage.
So, then. McMarshall pauses a moment to reflect. The United States has just begun a bombing campaign on itself. This is some Catch-22–type shit.
It’s not just the United States, he knows. Russia, several European countries, and China are now working in sync, conducting their own campaigns against the animal swarms devastating their countries.
They have to do something. Though people are being kept in the dark, the attacks have become rampant. In affected areas, which is pretty much everywhere now, the hospitals are full. People are holing up in their homes as though there were a plague afoot. Shipping, the airlines, the stock markets have all closed. The entire industrialized world is grinding to a halt. And it isn’t going to be starting up anytime soon, if everyone on earth is in fear of being torn apart by dogs 24-7.
McMarshall hears a polite knock on the glass.
“The B2 out of MacDill is about to deliver its payload, sir,” the spry young officer says with a gung ho grin that’s actually quite irritating under the circumstances. McMarshall’s shoes clang on the metal balcony overseeing the operations room.
The entire forward screen is filled with the image by the time the general arrives at the stair rail. Though it’s a black-and-white thermal image, the clarity is startling. Why, look—there’s Florida. McMarshall can make out palm fronds, a dock, an old car.
“We are changing our heading for our final approach,” the B2 weapons officer says over the staticky military channel.
“And we are away,” the weapons officer announces.
And the screen goes white. The boom of the daisy cutter through the pilot’s open mike a moment later is a jagged roar that starts and then just keeps going on and on. The screen stays white as the Florida swampland burns.
“Get some!” McMarshall’s aide shouts. He whistles through his pinkies and starts to clap. Some of the other personnel join in tentatively.
McMarshall pivots on his heel and heads back to his desk. There’s an emergency bottle of Advil in the bottom drawer.
Chapter 78
WHILE LEAHY WAS arranging transportation for me back to New York, I spent the rest of the morning in a cra
mped, crowded, and distinctly unpresidential staff room in the back of the White House’s East Wing.
The whole place was in a full-tilt frenzy with the military actions underway. All around me, and even bivouacked out in the hallway, clustered by the electrical outlets, air force officers and politicos were working their smart phones and laptops. Above their frantic murmur was a constant low thrumming—the rotor chop of helicopters landing and taking off in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. It was like my head was stuck in a beehive.
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.”
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.