FIFTY-NINE
WHERE ARE THEY?
Daniel scanned Spring Garden Road, which carved Victoria Park off from the Public Gardens. Dozens of locals, wrapped in thick coats, raised their arms to shield their eyes from the February gusts whipping up snow. Others held signs. All wormed their way along the sidewalks on both sides to assemble at the statue across the street. He stood under the traffic light where the avenues crossed. He looked at each approaching face, searching for telltale signs of pent-up aggression.
They have to be here.
Lloyd had said as much to MacKinnon. Garth, the person all agreed was probably on the other end of Larch’s cellphone, had texted to stay away from Victoria Park. Lloyd thought it was to warn him of the Yes demonstration planned for noon. Coupled with the cryptic message sent to Larch, Claire and the cops agreed the most likely meaning of “action” was a violent counterdemonstration. It wouldn’t be the first time. Daniel remembered his brush with another one days earlier. That man had been sent by the Yes campaign to start a fight with the No supporters. And it had worked, grabbing headlines across the country. Daniel grimaced as he recalled the photograph of him and Claire on the news site.
This time it was a show of support for the Yes side. Daniel had lingering doubts. Would Garth rough up some of his own supporters to get sympathy from the press? A few people could do the job, especially if they were eager to use violence to intimidate demonstrators. MacKinnon had refused to take them to the scene. It was a police matter. Daniel and Claire had leaped out from their taxi and rushed to the park entrance, covering the access from the north and west.
Now, with a growing sense of unease, Daniel inspected the gathering crowd spilling along Spring Garden Road. He didn’t know who to look for. He guessed it would be another Amoeba Man, someone large, muscular, and threatening. Through the snow that slashed by in horizontal strokes, he noticed a banner that read “Hands off my country!” It reminded him of the earlier demonstration that had trapped him on his way to the police station. He remembered the biker, huge, aggressive, and distracted long enough by a can of tomato soup. He smiled at a surprising sense of irony that enveloped his thoughts.
Do I have Garth and Lloyd to thank for introducing me to Claire?
He shook away the happiness he must have shown on his face and returned to scanning the multitude of parkas, hats, and signs.
How many are there?
Daniel started counting and realized that he was a poor judge of crowd size. There could have been two hundred or four. He couldn’t tell by guessing. A thump of frustration hit as he realized his margin of error was 100 percent. He had to admit he could only say that the crowd was big and growing bigger.
Which ones?
“They all look the same,” Claire called from behind. He turned to see her watching people surging from the north along South Park. “I can’t tell who it might be.”
She had a point. Only noses or pairs of eyes peeked out of the mass of parkas, toques, and scarves. The faint light didn’t help.
“Are we sure this is their plan?” Claire approached.
Daniel brushed the snow off his watch. Seven minutes before the planned start of the demonstration. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
MacKinnon’s cruiser screeched to a stop in front of Daniel. He opened the door, stood, and pointed at him to leave. Then he pointed at Claire.
Daniel snapped his head around to face the statue across the street. He focused on the sculpture of Robbie Burns that crowned the main entrance to Victoria Park. At first, he didn’t know why his attention had been drawn in that direction.
The unnatural disturbance in the flow of the crowd?
The sudden silence?
The collective holding of breath?
Or perhaps a flash of intuition that something didn’t belong in the scene?
MacKinnon was first to express it. “Looks like it’s about to start.” He pointed across the street.
Daniel and Claire continued searching for the expected fight between the agent provocateur and members of the demonstration.
“Something feels wrong.” Claire lunged ahead, closing the distance to the crowd in only a few strides.
“I don’t see what’s going on.” Daniel was startled at Claire’s evident ferocity in the face of potential violence.
Sound returned to the crowd as it began to disperse, people scattering and running in random directions.
Then the source of the commotion came into view. A garbage can had been tipped on its side. Among the contents scattered on the snow and mud, a small grey backpack, partially open, lay on the snow; something grey-green inside shone in the weak noon light.
Then someone, stepping back from it, said, “It looks like a bomb.”
Claire sliced through the crowd until she kneeled beside the bag, careful not to touch it. She looked up at Daniel and snorted. “Fucking C-4.” She pointed to the Mylar wrappers.
“Are you serious?” Daniel had never seen the plastic explosive up close. Garth’s plan materialized in his mind. They had misjudged him. Garth isn’t going to disrupt the protest with another thug to stir things up. He’s going to kill or maim whoever shows up. He nodded silently to himself. Would he kill his own supporters to get what he wants? Daniel grudgingly acknowledged the logic behind the brutal move. Of course. Better carnage. Better headlines. More outrage.
Claire was examining the bomb as if it were a miniature crime scene. “Look. It’s complete. See the wires, the detonators. How the fuck did they get this?” She positioned her finger close, but she was careful to avoid physical contact. “I don’t know how to defuse it.”
MacKinnon had already used his radio to call it in. He said, “Bomb squad is on its way. We have to evacuate the area.” He looked at Claire. “Can you see the timer?”
The firefight in the bay flashed in her mind. The prisoner. The military hardware in the crates. Clearly they had missed something. “I bet this was part of the shipment I intercepted yesterday. These people are serious.” She looked closer at the small digital display connected to one of the wires. “It’s set for noon.” She leaned back.
Daniel looked at his watch. “That’s only a couple of minutes away.” He looked at her again, impressed with her calm and methodical approach to a potentially lethal problem. She always seemed to run toward danger.
“How big of a blast will it be?” MacKinnon said.
Daniel pulled Claire up. She brushed the snow and dirt from her jeans. “I saw eight plastic blocks. I’d guess three or four kilos. Anyone in this intersection is in danger.”
MacKinnon was back on his radio. “We need to evacuate everyone in a two-block radius. We only have a couple of minutes. Hurry!” He turned to Daniel and Claire. “There’s not enough time. It’s up to us.”
Daniel took in Claire’s searing brown eyes, sealing an unspoken bond, as police cruisers with their lights flashing screeched to a halt in the out-of-focus background. In moments, cops were deflecting traffic two blocks away.
Only a few stragglers remained in the park. They appeared confused, expecting a large crowd and finding only a few people running away, abandoning their signs in the snow, while a cop and two strangers stood alone at the demonstration site.
Police were clearing out the local café, the Smitty’s across the street, and the high-end hotel at the opposite corner. A pair of officers gathered the small crowd’s attention. MacKinnon ran to his cruiser, popped the trunk, and grabbed a megaphone.
As he ran back to the statue, he waved his free hand at any people still in the area. “This demonstration has been cancelled. Please leave for your own safety.”
The new arrivals reacted poorly, catcalling, jeering, and refusing to budge from their constitutionally protected right to protest. No one was going to prevent them from telling the world that they wanted their own country.
Daniel checked his watch. “One minute.”
Claire nodded. “We can’t assume that the timer is set
to the same time as your watch.”
MacKinnon said, “Good point.” He raised the megaphone and began to run back to his car. “Run. There’s a bomb. Take cover. It’s set to go off any second.”
The latecomers scattered. No one screamed, as if the effort to do so would sap their ability to speed away from the epicentre of the expected explosion. MacKinnon quickly shepherded a few protesters along Spring Garden.
Then Daniel saw another protester, a young man, emerging from some trees behind the statue, looking surprised at the emptiness before him.
Daniel ran over to him. He saw Claire do the same from the corner of his eye.
“Get out of here. There’s a bomb,” she yelled.
The man turned and began to run.
Daniel grabbed Claire’s hand. They turned to flee.
It would be the absence of sound that surprised him when he retold the story to MacKinnon.
He saw the flash first.
A bright burst of white orange tore at the base of what used to be the Robbie Burns statue about twenty metres away. The park vanished in a blinding fireball. Then the pressure wave punched Daniel, ripping Claire’s hand from his grip. A deep, deafening roar scooped him up from the street and shoved him through a large window. He bounced off the edge of a counter, showering straws, napkins, tables, and fragments of concrete throughout the room.
Daniel slammed into the far wall. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel anything. His ears throbbed with a sharp pain. He heard no sound. Lying on his back, he saw the ceiling scorched with streaks of black fanning away from the front of the café. Smoke swirled in the air above him. He tried to raise his head to see his surroundings. He nearly passed out from the effort, but he turned his head to the right and couldn’t believe his eyes.
The entire front of the café was gone, the window obliterated. Shards of glass covered the floor, tables were snapped in half, and people lay on the ground. There was no movement outside. He saw people sprawled and immobile on the street, too.
Claire! Where’s Claire? An arm moved to his right, only a short distance away. The arm, dark, covered in charcoal, pushed a person up until he saw Claire’s blackened face. He strained to slide toward her. He tried to say something but couldn’t.
He looked at his own body. Was he injured? Did he still have his legs, his arms? An odd question to be asking myself, he thought. He flashed back to a grisly image of the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing — small, stunned children scattered among the explosively detached limbs of the people unlucky enough to have been standing within the blast radius of the two homemade bombs. But he was all right — well, at least he hadn’t lost limbs. Adrenalin powered his body now. Only when its effect wore off would he know what damage had been done to him.
A sea of faint moans surrounded him. He heard a muffled scream from outside. Only low, bass frequencies at first, but soon he could hear the tinny whine of a woman in pain as some of his hearing returned. He felt something in his right ear, stuck in a finger to dig it out, and saw blood on his finger.
“Daniel. You okay?” Claire kneeled beside him, looking worried.
He sat and looked at his hand; bloody, covered with wood splinters and stained with black. “Don’t know.” He pushed himself up with both hands and, straining, heaved himself upright. His head throbbed. He fell back, faint. After a few seconds, he raised his head again, this time more confident. “Good enough.”
“You’re hurt.”
She seemed in better shape than he was, but her hair was singed on one side, the side that faced the blast wave. Her face was blackened with soot and sparkly flecks, her eyes betraying concern.
“So are you,” he said.
He waited until he felt his blood pressure had steadied, and then he tried to stand. At first he wobbled, but Claire held his left arm, gashed and bloody but still intact.
“There must be others who are hurt over there.” He extended his right hand toward the direction of a column of black smoke that now replaced the missing statue. “Over there.”
“We have to help.”
“Right.”
“I’ll see what I can do here. Can you go outside?”
Daniel nodded. He stepped over people who, like him, were now beginning to move and assess their own mortality. He started with the first person on the road directly in front of the café. A man in his early twenties. The young protester who had emerged from behind the tree. The man was still breathing. He groaned as he moved his arms. Daniel helped him, steadying him as he sat up. There was blood on his head, on his arms, and in a small pool near his feet. His right leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. He screamed at the effort to move. But he was conscious.
He stumbled awkwardly over the debris, heading toward Claire’s voice. She hadn’t gotten far. She was kneeling beside a woman who didn’t move, a small puddle of blood beside her. Claire took a tablecloth, ripped it lengthwise into three strips, and wound it around the woman’s head as a tourniquet.
“Can you hold the leg?” she said.
He held it gently but firmly, ensuring that it didn’t move as she wound the strips around the leg. “You know first aid?” Daniel said.
“I’m a sailor, remember?” She tied another tourniquet in a tight knot. “What about you?” She flicked a glance his way before returning to the woman on the ground. “Is first aid part of every professor’s training?”
“I had to protect myself in China.”
“Like knowing how to use a gun and drive evasively.”
“I also used to give tours to remote parts of the world. Sometimes the nearest hospital could be days away by foot. I had to learn the basics.”
“Like one of Mao’s barefoot doctors.” She focused on the woman’s leg.
Daniel turned to look at her with a new layer of respect. “How did you know that?”
“History major.”
Daniel nodded then returned his focus to the leg Claire was bandaging.
She tugged on the knot to be sure it would hold. “You’ve used those skills before, haven’t you?”
He nodded, but he didn’t volunteer any details. He set the limb as straight as possible without seeing any signs of pain from the woman. He took a plastic cafeteria tray that lay nearby and snapped it lengthwise into two oblong pieces, which he placed on opposite sides of the leg. He secured the plastic to her leg using two of the tablecloth strips, forming a simple splint. The woman grunted either in delirium or appreciation, but otherwise she didn’t move. There wasn’t much more that could be done for her before the paramedics came.
As he fully concentrated on the wounded, he didn’t hear the sirens or notice the blue and red flashes of emergency lights.
“Who’s in charge here?” someone yelled from behind.
Daniel looked around to see an older woman, dressed in an EHS jacket and holding an bright red trauma bag.
“Don’t know,” Daniel said. “You a paramedic?”
“We were just leaving the Infirmary.”
He knew that the Halifax Infirmary was a few blocks away. Lucky for the wounded. He pointed to his splint, and to the woman Claire had bandaged. “She’s got a fractured leg, the other one has a head wound. We put pressure on the wounds, but you need to see them first. They’ve lost a lot of blood.” The paramedic hopped over to the women and examined their injuries. She surveyed the depressing landscape and got to work.
Daniel and Claire stood a few feet apart, stunned, watching the medical professionals take over. Five ambulances appeared, and dozens of people in EHS outfits rummaged through the debris to locate and treat the wounded.
The paramedics bandaged Daniel’s hand and treated his legs with antiseptic. They worried about his head, suspecting a concussion. They warned him that he needed to go to the hospital for tests.
Claire sat beside him. “It’s a good idea, Daniel. You need to be checked out.”
They walked the few blocks to the hospital since all ambulances were busy with victims i
n more desperate states. He stumbled often, Claire holding him up. What should have been a short stroll became a ten-minute effort.
The doors parted in front of them to reveal a scene from a war zone. Dozens of people lay on the floor along the right wall, some screaming, others unmoving, while nurses fixed saline drips, made assessments, and applied bandages.
As one of the nurses whizzed by, Claire flagged her and pointed to Daniel. “Concussion,” she said.
The nurse barely slowed down. She pointed to the back of the main entrance hallway, saying, “See triage.” There, a man in a white medical gown pointed and wrote something on a pad he cradled in his arm.
Daniel limped over to a young woman with a long ponytail. Her tag read Jacqueline, RN. Claire explained about the concussion worry.
The nurse scribbled down Daniel’s name on her pad. “Put him down over there.” She pointed to the wall where other patients were already lying down — some yelling in pain, others numb in silence. A spot had opened up. Meanwhile, a stream of gurneys rolled down to operating rooms, carrying the most seriously injured. Paramedics and hospital staff, shock and futility scarring their faces, wheeled one person by after another. Daniel caught sight of a man clearly missing a leg under sheets stained red and black.
He understood that he was low priority until the worst cases had been treated.
The entire room quieted for a few seconds. Daniel and Claire turned to see four soldiers, in full winter battle gear and holding C7 rifles, take positions in front of and immediately behind the sliding doors outside. A fifth soldier was instructing them where to stand.
Daniel turned to Claire. “What are they doing here?”
Claire whispered, “Must be a general mobilization.”
“At a hospital?”
“Protect the critical public infrastructure and ensure that the government continues to function. Those are the first priorities when confronting a natural disaster.” She stopped and looked at the soldiers with new eyes. “Or a terrorist attack.”
SIXTY
TWO HOURS LATER, Daniel and Claire sat silently, sipping their coffees at the Tim Hortons that was crammed into one corner near the hospital’s main entrance. The doctors told Daniel to wait a bit to see if he suffered any other symptoms of a concussion before leaving. In his mind, he replayed the last seconds before the explosion. He tried visualizing the explosive device. It was tucked into a small bag in a garbage can. Hidden from view. No one noticed it there. Probably a bag with some cute logo, people walking right beside it. Until someone opened the lid and glanced in before tossing their trash into the can. Claire had spotted it with only minutes to spare.
True Patriots Page 23
