I never saw a truck melted to the height of a card-table before, but I did yesterday.

I was in a high state of agitation anyway, having wasted an hour in the visitor’s center in front of CIA. I was not able to work the security system, which is apparently fairly simple but only if you understand the secret. ”Sorry, Sir,” said the armed kid at the desk. ”Your visit request expired on the 6 th .”

Somebody had failed to pass my clearance. I was directed to the plain black phone on the wall to see if I could figure it out on my own.

The Visitor’s Center is an intimidating place. The guards wear plain black and carry automatic weapons. It is a little spooky out there in the placid woods where the campus is located.

But I suppose that is the point. They want the perimeter to look ominous. The real spooks whizzed up and through the gates in their BMWs. I thought wistfully back to the time when I did that, too.

By the time the moment appointed for my lunch data had come and gone, and the executive assistant informed me that the calendar had changed and my subsequent appointment had migrated to some other day, I gave up. I retrieved my identification from the nice man in black at the desk and walked back out into the sunlight.

It was unseasonably warm, almost sixty degrees, and for a moment I contemplated putting the top down on the car. There is bad weather coming, two feet of snow in the Midwest, and it was below zero to start the week. Maybe this little gift of warmth and sunlight is a Christmas present. I considered the mystery of Washington weather as I cut a u-turn in front of the gate and the men with the sub-machine guns watched me impassively.

They are fortified well enough to take a major hit at the gate. I was in a sour mood, the trip up the river wasted and nothing productive to do except wrap presents. I could have gone downtown to the office, but I was concerned about the wreckage from the tank truck that blew up on the exit that leads round about to Big Pink. I needed to know how it was going to affect my commute, and this off-peak hour with nothing productive to do was an opportune time to conduct a reconnaissance mission.

Between the weather and the traffic the capital is always on the brink of catastrophe. A single broken-down auto can produce grid-lock of almost unimaginable proportions. My Mother once told me never to live on the other side of a bridge from where I worked, and not to drink anything green.

She was right on both counts. I gave up on green beverages, but I have not been able to shake the bridge thing.

In a contemplative mood, I drove down the George Washington Parkway to the junction that splits around the bulk of the Pentagon. I took the exit that connects to the interstate, and passed the heliport where the jet went into the building. The Navy Annex loomed on the hill to my right, past the part of Arlington Cemetery they have reserved for the dead coming home from Iraq. There are over a hundred interred there already, not far from where the Pentagon casualties lie.

The traffic was still snarled on the exit ramp. The fuel truck had apparently come into the exit way too fast. As it jack-knifed and rolled, the steel on pavement shot up a rooster-tail of sparks. The tank lost integrity and hemorrhaged high-octane and then a gigantic fireball went into the heavens.

I don’t know what they thought about it at the Pentagon, just a half-mile away. I know the First Responders had some anxiety on their way to the scene. Was it the start of another attack? Was this just the beginning of some awful slow-motion catastrophe?

It wasn’t. The only one who died was the driver, and on any given day in bustling America there are more than a hundred people who die on the roads. In Tennessee alone there have been more than a thousand people killed this year, almost as many as have died in the entire Iraq operation.

The wreckage was barely recognizable, melted right down to the nine axels and connected only by remants of twisted steel. There was concern that the overpass might have lost integrity, something I thought about as the cars whizzed overhead.

What would it be like if someone grabbed a dozen fuel trucks and did something with them? We had thought about that contingency when I was with the emergency response unit downtown. As I sat in the snarl, I listened half-way to the press conference that was being conducted a half mile away. I used to present a grim professional visage there when the Grownups made their prepared remarks, moving the briefing board on the easel in front of the working press.

Secretary Rumsfeld was taking some heat. “Someone who’s attacking can attack at any place at any time using any technique, and it is an enormous challenge to provide force protection, something that our forces worry about, work on constantly.”

I had to agree with him. You can’t protect everything all the time. I wished the top was down, and I wished that there was no news about belt-bombers. It had apparently not been a rocket that hit the mess tent in Mosul. It had been a suicide bomber. How he got there was anybody’s guess, and the Secretary was getting blamed for it.

I stabbed at the button on the radio to change channels to WTOP, the all-news channel. ”Traffic and Weather on the 8’s!” was jammering about the big arson case over in Maryland.

Persons unknown had torched ten McMansions in a huge development called Hunter’s Brook. Hundreds of spacious homes are being erected on former farmland adjoining a precious wetlands bog. The fire was spectacular. No one died, since the houses were only in the late construction stage. But it was a big story. There was early conjecture that the Earth Liberation Front was responsible, the same ones that spikes the trees in the Pacific northwest and attacked SUV dealers in LA. The possibility that Eco-terrorists were abroad in the land, firebombing construction sites, was unnerving, and brought back the edgy feeling we had when the snipers were roaming the region two years ago.

There were possible racist overtones, too, since the urban middle-class is fleeing the District for safety and serenity, and African-American families are pushing into historically white Calvert County.

I had absently looked at property down that way myself. It is much more affordable than the Virginia suburbs, and I daydream about getting the hell out of town and spending the day in my bathrobe in a double-wide near the Chesapeake. The idea that domestic terrorists were conducting operations down there cooled my ardor quite a bit. My apartment in Big Pink may be in-close to the city, but it is still upwind and even a one-megaton blast downtown will probably leave the building standing.

Unless I am downtown, of course, but that is life in the big city for you.

I listened with amazement to the radio as traffic inched by the blackened wreckage. The Cops had cracked the arson case. The ring-leader was a fellow named Patrick Walsh. He apparently concocted the plot in a Denny’s restaurant in Waldorf, deep in the heart of Calvert County. He was the leader of a group of car enthusiasts called the Unseen Cavaliers. Apparently it was not a reference to the famous Virginia cavalry solders like J.E.B. Stuart and John Singleton Mosby. They terrorized the Union during the Civil War, the original Grey Ghosts.

Apparently Patrick owned a Chevy Cavalier, which I vaguely recalled was an entry-level econo-box. There is quite a culture of hot-rod treatment for little Hondas around here, making the sensible little cars into pocket rockets. But I never heard that about the Chevies.

One of the other Cavaliers ratted Patrick out. He said that Patrock had finished his hamburger and announced that he was ”just going to go off and blow something up.” He enlisted several of his comrades to help. Although the media is trying to paint this as a hate crime, it doesn’t seem like it is going to work out that way any more than the sniper case was. Hate, certainly, but not racist at its core. In its way, it is more troubling that way. Reports say that Patrick just wanted to make his group famous.

It appears that he has.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

Go Back