“Um, driver,” Elsie ventured, leaned forward, “are you familiar with the term hydroplaning?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I’m young and beautiful and have everything to live for. I don’t want to crash and burn.”
The guy glanced over his shoulder, gave her a long, curling, easy smile, and promised to “take the corners nice and slow.”
We lurched to a stop in Madison Square, where Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue meet Broadway (which runs on a diagonal). The Flatiron District takes its name from the Flatiron Building, the famous wedge-shaped landmark on the square that points uptown like the prow of a twenty-one-story-tall ocean liner. The ornate structure was the world’s tallest building when it was completed in 1902, ushering in the beginning of New York’s skyscraper era. In the early 1900s, according to local legend, strong downdrafts from the building lifted young ladies’ long skirts, exposing their ankles and sometimes more. The crowds of young men who gathered in the area to catch glimpses of this forbidden flesh were cleared away with shouts of “Twenty-three skidoo” from the policemen directing traffic. The square is really nothing more than a giant intersection several blocks long. Off to one side is a little patch of trees and benches known as Madison Square Park.
We climbed out of the personnel carriers and found ourselves at the mouth of a subway entrance. Sergeant O’Neal quickly lead the group down the stairs and into the sprawling Twenty-third Street station.
Mendel sneezed. “Subways make me claustrophobic,” he told me as we marched down the stairs. “This cannot be good for my allergies.”
We hopped over the turnstiles and marched through the underground corridors of the station, listening to our footsteps echo off the walls. I’d been scared in New York’s subway system before, but it had always been a fear of other people. Now that we were the only ones down there, the place seemed spookier than ever.
We followed O’Neal down another flight of stairs to one of the northbound platforms. “Lieutenant Plyler and his men were searching the station late this afternoon,” he explained, “when they found this.”
“Oh, my lord!” exclaimed one of the generals.
“Damn it!” fumed Hicks.
“Uh-oh,” worried Dr. Chapman.
“Ah-choo!” sneezed Dr. Craven.
Through the murky fluorescent lighting, we could see that where there had been four parallel train lines moving through four separate tunnels, there was now only a single, very large passageway. Something with enormous power had pushed its way through, carving out a much-enlarged opening. There were claw marks scratched deep into the concrete. Shattered bricks and twisted steel rails were everywhere.
“Dr. Patapopolis, Dr. Craven,” Hicks said, staring with displeasure at the wreckage, “you should have told me lizards can dig.”
“They pretty much invented the process, sir. About sixty million years ago.” I didn’t correct his pronunciation.
O’Neal spoke up again, fleshing out his report. “When we learned he could burrow his way through the tunnels, we realized he could have escaped the quarantine zone.”
“Christ!” Hicks kicked an aluminum can halfway down the platform. “How many tunnels lead off this island, Sergeant?”
“Sixteen. Only sixteen, sir. We’ve checked them all. He hasn’t used any of them,” O’Neal said proudly, glad to have positive news for a change. But Hicks wasn’t satisfied.
“Seal them off. Seal every last one of them off.”
“And how do you propose we do that, sir?”
“How the hell should I know?” he exploded. “Fill them with cement, brick them up, put land mines in them, bombs, I don’t know. But you’d better make sure that goddamned lizard doesn’t leave this island! Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir.” At that moment O’Neal probably would have preferred to be facing the enormous lizard instead of his irate commanding officer. Cringing and saluting, he nodded rapidly. The colonel had made himself perfectly clear.
“You know,” I said about five minutes later, when Hicks’s blood pressure had returned to almost normal, “this creature, he’s not an enemy who’s come here to attack us. And right now he’s probably not even trying to evade us. He’s just an animal. Doing, you know, his animal thing.”
We were at the edge of the platform closest to the mouth of the newly enlarged tunnel. The colonel had sent a small group of soldiers into the opening and was monitoring their progress when I joined him. The men were forced to proceed slowly, because not only was the ground underfoot churned up, but the destroyed walls were full of jagged fragments poking into their path. Sparking electrical wires hung like deadly snakes from the ceiling. Hicks turned and glanced at me as though I wasn’t making much sense. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“When I need to catch earthworms,” I explained, “the best way isn’t to chase after them. Instead of digging them out, I make them come to me. I draw them to the surface.”
The colonel grunted as if that was an interesting idea. “And how do you propose to draw this particular critter to the surface?”
That was a good question—one I couldn’t answer at the moment. “All we need to do is figure out what it needs and he’ll come to us. The problem is, we still don’t know what he’s looking for.” Just then one of the men returned from exploring the first hundred yards of the tunnel.
“What’d you find, soldier?”
“Fish, sir. A couple of hundred of them.”
This news puzzled the colonel. “Fish?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hicks turned to me, trying to understand. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. A two-hundred-foot-tall radioactive mutant lizard swims halfway around the globe and comes to Manhattan because it wants—fish?” He was right. It didn’t add up. I was pretty certain the creature we were chasing had other reasons for making the trip, but we didn’t have enough information at the time.
“Colonel, I don’t understand it, either, but this is our chance to lure him out in the open. If it’s fish he wants, let’s give him fish.”
I could tell he wasn’t crazy about the idea. He stood there staring at me for a minute trying to decide if I knew what I was talking about. Either he came to the conclusion that I did or else he simply couldn’t think of anything better to do. Five minutes later we were upstairs again, standing in drizzling rain. Hicks used a mobile telephone to order the bait.
Within minutes the square began to buzz with activity. Dozens of army trucks rolled in and dropped off reinforcements. Too many of them, I thought at the time, probably five times the number of soldiers the situation seemed to call for. Rifle crews took positions on several of the surrounding rooftops. Heavy artillery units arrived and positioned themselves strategically about the square. You would have thought a war was about to break out.
In addition to the military, there were scads of firefighters, paramedics, and teams of construction workers sent out to do emergency repairs. A handful of reporters were on hand to cover the situation, but there were only about twenty of them and they were kept tightly corralled inside a small area a block and a half from our position. All together, there must have been two thousand people working to prepare the trap. The noise level was kept to a minimum, however, as everyone concentrated on completing their tasks.
When the groundwork had been laid, Hicks announced that he was headed back to the command center. He would command the operation from there, and invited Elsie, Mendel, and me to come along. “It’s not going to be pretty,” he told us. “We’ve got a lot of firepower out here, and the moment the lizard shows itself, we’re going to chop him up pretty bad. You’ll be able to see everything just as well via the remote monitors.”
All three of us quickly refused his invitation. We were curious to see the creature with our own eyes. You don’t get very far in the world of professional science unless curiosity rules your life. And after chasing him nonstop for the previous three days, we were determin
ed to observe him—even if just for a moment or two. Hicks could see that we weren’t going to budge. “All right, you can stay here and observe so long as you stay out of the way.” Soon after that he climbed into a helicopter and lifted away, leaving Sergeant O’Neal in charge of the site.
Then we waited for the fish to arrive.
The amount of fish the colonel had ordered involved more than a trip to the supermarket. It required seizing the entire contents of three local canneries, then arranging the men and machines to transport it all. Given the size of the task and lateness of the hour—it was after ten o’clock at night when Hicks flew away—it’s amazing how quickly everything happened. But sitting out there in the rain waiting for something to happen made it feel like an eternity.
We three scientists were essentially superfluous to the proceedings. But that didn’t keep us from grabbing the best seats in the house. At the end of the square opposite the Flatiron Building there is another roughly triangular building. On the sidewalk at the base of this structure, a field communications post had been established behind a wall of sandbags. It was filled with electronic equipment and about twenty soldiers to operate all of it. To protect it from the rain, a waterproof tarp had been pitched, supported by metal poles. There were folding chairs, video monitors, radar equipment, and radios—it was definitely where we wanted to watch from. As we sat there waiting for the bait to be brought in, the mood under the tent was a mixture of tension and boredom.
No one was more tense than Mendel, and no one was more bored than Elsie. He was driving her up the walls with his continuous verbal hand wringing.
“Ironic, don’t you think? I’ve written all these books about deadly viruses, lethal solar flares, and pernicious proteins introduced by extraterrestrial species. I’ve imagined a hundred ways the world could end. I just never thought it would be at the hands of an overgrown iguana.” He had armed himself with a pen and yellow notepad but was too jittery to write.
“If you’re so scared, why don’t you head back to the command center?” she asked. “There’s still plenty of time.”
“What? And miss this?” He looked at her as though she’d flipped her lid. “Do you know what kind of a book I’ll be able to write when this is all over?”
“Well, I think the whole situation is surreal,” Dr. Chapman declared, making meaningful eye contact with a boyish-looking technician who was manning the sonar detection scanner. “It’s like being invited to a dinner party hosted by Salvador Dali.” She reviewed the action up to that point. “A man in a uniform picks up a telephone and tells the person on the other end of the line that he wants a quantity of fish delivered immediately to a public place. He says he will need several tons of fresh raw fish. The person on the phone agrees, as if this request is the type of thing he handles every day. They say goodbye and hang up. Then the table must be set, so all vehicles and personnel are cleared from the center of the square. The dinner guests—that’s us—take their seats behind sandbag barricades and wait patiently for the meal to be delivered, a meal none of us intends to eat.”
“I don’t get it,” said the soldier.
“I could learn to live with that,” she told him.
The chilly rain showed no signs of letting up, but I wanted to get out from under the low tarp of the communications post and stretch my legs. I strolled over to a bank of sidewalk vending machines and bought myself a refreshing Mountain Dew. As I sipped I pondered. And soon I found myself wandering absentmindedly down an empty side street.
Something continued to bother me. Why, I asked myself over and over, did the creature come here? Not to Manhattan necessarily—that part was easy. The skyscrapers were taller than any forest, and there was an extensive system of tunnels below the ground for him to dig through. He could have searched the world over and been hard pressed to find a better place to hide himself. But that answer wasn’t enough.
If he was hungry for fish, why would he have left the South Pacific for the cooler waters of the North Atlantic? Was he looking for something more than a hiding place? What instinct had induced this sudden migration? I reminded myself that lizards are not particularly intelligent animals. Although I’m not a herpetologist, I’ve read enough about them to know they carry many diseases, become docile in captivity, and seem incapable of higher mental functions—rational thought, planning, and emotion. I needed, therefore, to find an extremely simple explanation. The farther I meandered away from the square, the clearer my thinking became. Eventually I hit upon a theory: The reptile had outgrown his natural habitat. His own sheer magnitude had flushed him out into the open. He was a pretty large lizard, and humans must have begun to stumble across him in his island home (and I wonder what happened to them). It had become obvious—even to an animal with a prehistoric IQ—that he needed a better place to hide, somewhere he could keep out of sight while remaining close to his source of food, the sea.
Given the information available to me at the time, it seemed like a plausible theory: His instinct for survival told him he’d outgrown all the hiding places on his island and needed a new home. I still believe that’s partially true. Size does matter, as they say. But, as I was soon to discover, there was more motivating this remarkable saurian than size alone.
When I made my way back to the command tent at about eleven-thirty that night, things were starting to happen. We got word that the delivery vehicles were approaching. The sound of distant helicopters echoed through the canyons of skyscrapers. Hicks’s voice came over the radios, demanding constant updates from the harried communications experts.
“Where are they now?”
“Delta Niner, this is Flatiron,” the soldier murmured into his headset microphone. “What is convoy position at present?”
“Sit tight, Flatiron, they’re just entering the city. You’re looking at an ETA of approximately ten minutes.”
Just about then, on a rooftop in New Jersey, a nondescript man in blue overalls was finishing a “repair” to a satellite dish. He was on the roof of a seedy hotel that overlooked the army’s command center. The “repair” he made involved attaching a boxlike device to the side of the satellite dish. The box was connected to a cable that disappeared over the retaining wall, ran down the outside of the hotel, split off into one of the rooms, and continued down to street level. From there, the cable ran across the busy roadway, under a chain-link fence, and directly into the command center itself, where it became invisible among the thousands of similar cables. This man on the roof repacked his tools and, before standing up to leave, tapped at his earpiece and spoke into his own lapel. Let us call him Jean-Claude.
“C’est bon, n’est-ce pas?” he asked, reaching out and flipping a switch on the device.
“C’est bon,” a voice answered. “C’est okay, très bon.”
The voice belonged to Phillipe Roaché, who was two stories below, sitting inside one of the hotel’s dingy rooms. As soon as the device was activated, he could hear and see everything Hicks saw and heard. The crafty team of “insurance agents” had turned the hotel room into a mini command center of their own. Roaché sat at the foot of the lumpy bed watching live aerial pictures of Madison Square. The static disrupting the broadcast was the result of the hotel’s TV being so old and decrepit. The whole beige room was ratty, faded, and dismal in every way but one—it came with a Mr. Coffee machine. Jean-Luc, who must have been special agent in charge of refreshments, poured some of the fresh brew into a flimsy plastic cup and handed it to his boss. This time Roaché had a trick up his sleeve. Out of nowhere, he produced a handful of sugar packets and poured the contents of several into the cup before he dared bring the suspicious liquid to his lips. He stirred the scalding coffee with his bare pinkie and looked up at the television. Quite pleased with the sight of the stolen video feed, he sipped. The taste of the coffee peeled his lips back as though it were paint remover.
“You said this was French roast!” he complained loudly.
Jean-Luc, defeated, held up a
bag labeled French roast. “Plus de crème” was the only thing he could suggest.
Every muscle of every person in Madison Square tensed the moment we heard the sound of the approaching dump trucks rumbling through the abandoned streets of the city. I was under the tarp roof of the communications post, watching the technicians run through their systems check. O’Neal stood in the rain atop the sandbag barricade in front of the post, directing the last-minute preparations. The only job Elsie, Mendel, and I had been given was to stay out of the way, which was a little frustrating. There we were, a trio of scientists on the verge of witnessing one of the most spectacular events in the entire history of the biological sciences, and we had nothing at all to do. Although there were video cameras positioned around the square to record the scene, I decided to prepare myself in whatever small way I could. I walked back to the vending machines where I’d bought the soda awhile earlier and spent a few bucks on a Kodak Fun Saver, one of those disposable cameras, before jogging back to our outpost.
Hicks was definitely running the show. Although he had returned to the command center, he kept an eye on the preparations via a closed-circuit video feed and had the ability to override all radio frequencies. Whenever he did this, his commands were picked up on all the hundreds of radios and walkie-talkies scattered around the square, and his voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, like the invisible ringmaster of a strange circus.
At last the sixteen dump trucks came thundering around the corner, each one filled to the brim with two tons of fish. The soldiers led the vehicles through a complicated automotive ballet until they were arranged in a circle, their tailgates facing the center. The pungent odor of fish was so thick in the air that our eyes began watering. Mendel was probably the only person who welcomed the overpowering aroma. He reported that it was helping to clear his sinus passages.
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