only for two hours, with at least two more hours to go—it would only get worse. Howard believed they’d have to go to at least one inspection every twenty trucks to get through this mess quickly enough.
Of course, he thought, these folks could help themselves by carpooling. At least 90 percent of the private vehicles in this huge traffic jam were driver-only. Commuters too stupid to use BART or carpool deserved to sit in line like this.
The traffic inched forward less than a car-length. The ninety minutes his ops officer mentioned was ninety minutes to go two stinking kilometers—God, getting caught in this mess would drive him absolutely bonkers, as he was sure it was doing to most of the drivers trapped here. The cars he was walking near had already cleared the tollbooths, which made most drivers think that the congestion was over and it was clear sailing from here on out. No such luck.
Time to do another inspection. Although he had lost count of how many trucks it had been since he last did an inspection, the National Guard specialist eyed his next target: a five-ton plain white local delivery truck, with two guys in the cab, that had just pulled out of the toll plaza and was in the section of the bridge on-ramp where it started to narrow from twelve lanes to four. He liked to pick the trucks without logos or advertisements on them, because that meant the drivers were usually nonunion, and Howard was a die-hard third-generation Teamster. As he approached the truck it seemed to him that the men inside were looking a little nervous—and then he saw one of them, the passenger, reaching down under his seat for something. He was desperately trying to remain upright, not bending over but staying upright, but he was definitely trying to get his hands on…
“Hey, bub,” he heard a gruff voice beside him yell. The sudden sound startled him, and he jumped. The driver of the red Ford compact car, about three cars ahead of the white truck, seemed to take some delight in seeing the soldier jump like that. “Hey, what’s the problem here?” he asked. “I haven’t moved one freakin’ foot in ten minutes!”
“Security inspections, sir,” Howard said, keeping his eyes on the men in the white panel truck. Keeping his right hand on the hand grip of his M-16 rifle, he reached up to key the mike button on his headset transceiver. “Senegal, Echo Eight…”
“Hey, soldier, I’m askin’ you a question,” the driver of the red Ford shouted. “I’m gonna be fuckin’ late for work if we don’t get movin’ here, and I’ve been sittin’ here for thirty minutes already!”
“Senegal Echo Eight, Senegal, go,” came the reply.
“Excuse me, sir,” Howard said to the irate driver. “Senegal One, be advised, I’ve got sierra-alpha, two white males in a white GMC five-ton panel truck, license number…”
“Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!” the driver of the Ford shouted. “I paid my damned ten bucks, and I need to get goin’! Why are you on this side of the tollbooths anyway? This is a pretty stupid place to be!”
“Sir, please lower your voice,” Howard said. “I’ll get to you in a minute. Thank you.” Howard took a few more steps toward the truck. The passenger was scrunched way down in his seat, with only his head and shoulders visible now; the driver was making nervous glances down at the floor between their seats. He keyed the mike again: “Senegal One, Echo Eight, request backup on my pos.” The code phrase “sierra-alpha” meant “suspicious activity” in their parlance, and the phrase certainly fit in this case. He could practically see the sweat pouring out of the guy in that truck.
“Echo Eight, Senegal, say license plate number for that vehicle.”
“Senegal One, Echo Eight, target vehicle has California plates, one-six-delta…”
Suddenly he heard, “Fuck you, asshole!” and he felt a sudden burning sensation on the back of his neck. Howard reached up with his left hand as the burning intensified and started creeping down his back. He looked at his gloved hand and found some sort of dark liquid…coffee! The driver of that red Ford just threw coffee on him!
Something exploded in Howard’s brain. Without thinking, he whirled and raised his rifle, pointing it at the driver. “You! Let me see your hands!” he shouted.
“Don’t point that thing at me, asshole!” the driver shouted. “Back off!”
“I said let me see your hands, now!”
“Fuck you! You can’t do anything to me!”
A fuse blew in Howard’s head. He raised the muzzle of his rifle above the roof of the red Ford, flicked the selector switch on his M-16 from Safe to Single with his thumb, and fired one round. The driver—and every other driver within twenty meters—jerked in surprise. “One last warning: let me see your hands!”
“Echo Eight, Echo Eight, this is Senegal One! What’s going on? Report!”
“Jee-sus!” the driver said. He immediately stuck both hands out the driver’s window of his car, a stainless steel Porsche coffee mug still in his left hand.
“Senegal One, Echo Eight, request immediate assistance!” Howard radioed.
But the driver of the red Ford had stopped paying attention to what he was doing when the gunshot rang out, and his car crept forward as he unconsciously took his foot off the brake and hit the car ahead of him. Startled again, Howard lowered the smoking muzzle of his weapon back down to the driver. “Don’t you move!” he shouted, his eyes bugging in surprise. “Stop!” But the red Ford rolled about two meters forward and hit the car in front of him.
The sudden impact made the stunned driver drop his coffee mug, and it made a loud clattering sound when it hit the pavement. The driver unconsciously leaned out of the car window as if he was going to try to catch the mug in mid-air, arms flailing. Already hot-wired for extreme danger, Howard reacted…by pulling the trigger of his M-16 three times. The driver’s head exploded into a cloud of bloody gore, and the corpse was tossed into the empty passenger side of the car. Howard immediately raised the muzzle and flicked the selector switch to Safe, but of course there was no way to recall the bullets. Pandemonium immediately erupted. Car alarms and horns blared; men and women screamed and started leaving their cars in droves, running in all directions; more cars hit each other as panicked drivers fled, creating even more confusion.
In the white panel truck not far away, the two men in the cab nearly jumped right out of their seats, watching in horror as the soldier opened fire on the civilian. “Nu ni mudi!” the passenger swore in Russian. “He just shot that guy!” He looked around at the almost instantaneous confusion. “Shit, everybody’s panicking! People are getting out and running across the damned freeway!”
The driver of the white panel truck looked over and saw something even more horrible—several more soldiers running toward them, rifles at the ready. He made an instant decision. He picked up his walkie-talkie and keyed the mike button: “All units, this is Charlie, baleet zheeyot, repeat, ‘stomachache,’ ‘stomachache.’ Out.” He put the truck in Park, pulled a pistol from under his jacket, hid it in his front pocket, and got out of the truck. The passenger’s face was blank with surprise when he heard the order, but after a moment’s hesitation he too got out, his hands inside his coat pocket.
Hundreds of frightened people were running hysterically off the Bay Bridge toward the tollbooths—some so scared that they were throwing themselves over the side and plummeting several stories to the pavement below. The police were reacting quickly. “Stay in your vehicles!” they shouted from public-address loudspeakers. “Do not panic! There is no danger! Stay in your vehicles!” But after 9/11, when the rumor that loudspeakers in the World Trade Center towers were telling workers not to panic and to go back to work just before the towers collapsed, nobody listened—in fact, it only seemed to intensify the panic.
The two Russians walked quickly amid the crowds, walking quickly enough to not get trampled but not too quickly so as to draw attention to themselves. CalTrans officers were emerging from the toll plaza, arms upraised, urging folks to go back to their vehicles so they could be moved. As hard as they tried to avoid them, one CalTrans worker appeared in front of the lead Russian. “Sir, where the hell do you think you’re goin’?” the hefty woman shouted. “Go back to your vehicle, right now! You can’t leave your…”
“Yop tvayu mat!” the Russian said. He pulled his pistol from his pocket, keeping it low and as out of sight as possible, and put two bullets into the woman from less than a meter away. The new gunshots didn’t just create a new wave of panic—they created a virtual human stampede. Terrified drivers ran in every direction, trampling anyone who was unlucky enough to be trying to head in the opposite direction.
The two Russians followed the surging human tidal wave past the toll plaza, steering themselves toward the north side of the on-ramp where a new east span of the Bay Bridge was under construction. Stunned construction workers scrambled onto machinery and trucks as the mass of humanity surged closer. The Russians climbed atop an immense dump truck at the base of a concrete support structure. Moments later, several construction workers joined them. “What happened?” one of them asked.
