The National Guard was there, trying to care for some of the injured and to keep a kind of order. But when, after nearly an hour of searching through the jostling crowds, through the reek of blood and piss, through the endless echoing wails of the injured, of men yelling in frustration and women holding children who wept or rocked and stared and scratched themselves in strange fevers, Shango and Czernas at last found the major in charge, it was clear that tallying the missing, rather than the wounded, dead and dying, was low on his list.
“Are you crazy?” he said, focusing bloodshot eyes on the two men. Soot blackened his face and his clothing; he was shaking with fatigue. “We haven’t even gotten all the survivors out of the wrecks! Twenty-four hours we’ve been working and there are still people trapped out there, and you’re asking me. . Okay, put ’em in the shuttle garages.” He turned to a worn and filthy captain, grim-faced and sickened. “See what else you can find for blankets and bandages. Start asking people for clothes from their luggage, anything. . Any word on the water yet?” This to another man, a civilian, dirty and beaten as all the rest.
The man shook his head; the major turned back to Czernas. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to commandeer those bicycles,” he said. “We haven’t had word from headquarters since midnight and. . ”
Silently, Czernas produced again the authorization McKay had written for them.
The major said, “God damn motherfuckers. How the fuck many of you spooks are coming in? We’ve already had the CIA and the FBI-What?” A heavy-set woman, in what was left of an Anne Klein suit and a pair of Nikes, had come up behind him with another request. “Well, what the fuck are they? Who are they? Gremlins hiding in the goddam baggage tunnels?”
He turned back to Czernas. “I gotta go have a look at this,” he said. “I put a guy on getting together a list of planes that aren’t accounted for. . Melker. Corporal Melker.” His brow squeezed as if only with the greatest effort could he recall the name. “Stuff was in the computer. Christ knows where the fuck he- What do you mean, hold back a reserve?” He swung around on a green-uniformed major of the regular Army. “What the fuck reserve are you talking about?”
“I have orders that water and food are to be rationed.”
“Well, I have fucking orders that water and food are to be given out to people who’re fuckin’ dying. .!”
Shango turned promptly away, and Czernas followed. Four feet from the crowd around the major, a big Lebanese businessman grabbed the handlebars of Shango’s bike, tried to thrust a handful of money at him; Shango shoved him and, when he wouldn’t let go, caught and back-twisted the businessman’s little finger. The man screamed and staggered into the crowd. “Let’s get up to the tower,” he said. “See what we can see from there.”
Squads of exhausted National guardsmen and civilian volunteers were carrying survivors in on stretchers. Soldiers shoved a baggage cart half-full of half-empty water bottles, and were stopped by another officer with conflicting orders or maybe just his own opinion about what was best to be done. Someone had designated one of the shuttle garages as a privy-huge hand-lettered signs pointed toward it and requested that it be used-but it was clear from the smell, as Shango and Czernas crossed from the terminal to the tower, that these were not being heeded. Small groups of men clustered around the officers and soldiers, men in white shirts and dress pants, shouting in frustration at the conflicting orders, the miscarried information-the fear.
Fear was in the air. Shango felt himself bristle and prickle, like a cat at twilight, sensing the rising rage as he sensed it sometimes in the bad neighborhoods of hopeless poverty around D.C.: danger. Rage that’s ready to strike out.
He’d been away from the White House, from the President, from his job for twelve hours now, with God only knew how much longer to go. God only knew what was going on in D.C. The same kind of rage, he thought. The same frustration edging toward flashpoint with every miscarriage of supplies, every fuckup.
McKay was sitting in the middle of it. Waiting for the piece of information that might save them all, if he could get it in time.
The door at the bottom of the control tower stood open and unguarded. Shango slid his hammer from its place in the backpack straps and carried it ready in one hand, hiked his bike onto his shoulder with the other hand, led the way up the darkness of the concrete stair. Czernas followed, bike on shoulder-good high-quality racing models, neither vehicle weighed above twenty pounds. Late-afternoon light filled the huge square room at the top from four walls of windows, and beyond those the runways spread like a defiled map.
Shango counted, even as he set his bike down, clamping his mind shut against the horror and the implications of the count. Thirty wrecks scattered across the two-mile runways of Dulles.
Eight were United flights.
More dotted the green countryside beyond, as far as the eye could see.
“There a guy named Melker here?” he asked the lookout reservist, a tough-looking little grasshopper of a woman scanning in all directions with binoculars. She shook her head.
“You guys got any kind of map going?”
The other occupant of the tower, a white male civilian with his left shoulder strapped tight and a bandage on his head, beckoned with his pencil and said, “Help yourself.”
It was an inch-to-the-mile scale map of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Prince William counties, and someone had meticulously calculated and plotted the probable locations of all wrecks visible from the tower. Shango could have embraced the gentleman with the broken shoulder, Secret Service or no Secret Service, and never mind what people would say if they saw him kiss a white guy. The wrecks that had been gotten to on the runways already had been circled, but no notation had been made about what flights they’d been or if there were survivors.
“Please don’t tell me you’re from the Bureau of Statistics,” said the lookout corporal, peering at Shango over the tops of her glasses, when he asked.
There was plenty of extra paper and pencils, to copy the map. Someone in the tower, thank God, had had the wits to install an old-fashioned manual pencil sharpener at his or her desk. Shango and Czernas started at opposite ends, marking every detail, not knowing what would be important to know later: Shango noted how neat Czernas’ copying was, as if he’d had drafting classes sometime in the past. The growing slant of the afternoon sun turned the young man’s drooping forelock to gold, glittered on the stubble of his cheeks.
Now and then Shango would get up, prowl to the windows, stand for a moment beside the silent reservist, edgy with the sense of growing danger. He noticed that not a wreck had exploded, and though many had caught fire and burned on the ground once the tanks ruptured, not one was burning now. Nor was there evidence of widespread fires, only sullen patches of ash. Was this something McKay would need to know, or had he heard already? Gremlins in the baggage system, the major had said. Toward the end of last night, rumors had filtered to the command post in the Treasury building about scrunched little mutants in the Metro, in basements, looting in the alleys in the rioters’ wake. Shango could imagine what the military boys were making of that.
Down on a runway, a gang of men-a couple of women, too-accosted a group of reservists pulling a cart of what might have been food: a dumb show of shoving, anger, cross-purposes and frustration. Up in the tower, only the soft scratching of Czernas’ pencil and that of the guy with the sling as he collated flight information and passenger lists.
The light was failing. Shango knew they’d have to spend the night at Dulles, guarding the bikes, guarding their water. Thank God he’d brought candles. He reviewed the buildings, what he could see from the vantage point of the tower, trying to find a place that wasn’t crawling with humanity but wasn’t so isolated they’d be trapped in a corner by scared or angry men, or by gremlins, whatever the hell the gremlins really were. Footfalls blundered in the dark stairway, and Shango had his hammer in his hand before a weary-looking guardsman appeared in the doorway: