by Tracy Walder
Back at the track again, we found two rows of beat-to-hell Crown Victorias and Buicks. It was like the parking lot for a meeting of eighties drug lords.
“Pick your car, keys are inside,” Buck said. “And there are no airbags to get in your way.”
I had fallen into a fun foursome with Annie and two guys: Nick and Danny. They all had a great sense of humor, and none of them was full of themselves, in spite of their impressive credentials. Annie was about to be deployed to Africa; Nick would soon return to the Middle East; and Danny was off to Latin America. We stood together, staring at four cars parked facing each other, two by two.
“I’ll be Starsky,” Nick said, and he pointed to the oldest of the four cars.
“I’m calling Hutch,” Annie said, and she walked to the car facing Nick’s.
“Bat Girl,” I said, and I went to the black car.
Danny looked at the last remaining car; it had a dent in the side the size of a turkey platter. “So who am I?” Danny asked. “Boy Wonder?” He pulled on the door but it wouldn’t open.
“Window!” Buck shouted. Danny looked at the open window, then climbed in.
For hours that afternoon we were to practice what is called pursuit intervention technique, or PIT. We’d already watched movies about it; discussed it with Buck and Judy, who also taught that day; studied charts of it on a whiteboard; and asked every what if question imaginable. And then Judy and Buck performed a version of it in the classroom with their bodies as stand-ins for cars. Now it was time to take everything that was in our heads and transform it into actions and reflexes.
I volunteered to be the first person pursued. It looked thrilling in the movies and only remotely dangerous. Nick was chosen to knock me off the road.
We stood outside our beat-up cars and Buck went over PIT one more time. I’d drive as fast as I could around the track. Nick would pursue me and then close in on my left. When he was close enough, he’d nip the back left corner of my car with his front right corner and send me spinning. It’s sort of like a game of human pool. Nick’s car was the rolling ball and mine was the one he was trying to hit into the pocket.
“Don’t hurt me,” I said, but I was smiling.
“You know I will.” Nick flashed a huge grin.
I took off first. This car was an automatic so I didn’t have to worry about shifting. Once I was going around 70, Nick drove onto the track to pursue me. My seatbelt was on, the back brace was corseting me upright, and my window was down, blowing my hair straight back from my face. It felt great, liberating. Thrilling.
Each time Nick got close in his Starsky car, I pushed a little harder on the gas just to give him a good chase. We went around the track at least three times before he was finally able to catch up. He swerved toward me once but didn’t knock me, and when he pulled away, he almost started spinning out. It took another couple of laps before Nick could catch up. When he did, I could sense that he had placed himself properly. I knew exactly what was coming. The bang was nearly soundless, but the impact felt noisy. I screamed, mostly in joy, as I spun around twice and then landed like a dead bug at the side of the track. Nick had executed a PIT perfectly.
It was even more fun being the person pursuing the runaway car. I chased down and hit a guy named Bill in the first lap around the track. When I backed up to check on him, he leaned out the window and said, “Let’s do it again. I’m going to try to outrun you.”
He tried. But he couldn’t.
By the time it was getting dark, we were practicing two-car tag teams. The first car would knock on the left side and get the pursuant spinning to a stop. The pursuant would then gun the engine again and keep going, only to be knocked on the right side from the second pursuer. When it worked perfectly, the pursued car ended up sandwiched between the two cars, stopped dead on the road.
The coordinated work felt a little like my old dance team. There was a certain choreography and rhythm; you had to sense the bodies—the cars—around you and match yourself to them, synchronize with them. By the end of the day, after hitting and being hit by just about everyone in our group, we’d bonded into a cohesive unit.
I drove my Bat Girl car many times over the week. I finally had to say goodbye to her the afternoon when we practiced driving our eighties drug lord cars into a cement wall that stood at the long end of the track. If the car could still be driven, you did it again. If you totaled it the first time, your job was done.
Near the close of that day, I stood beside my car at the end of the track waiting for my turn to go again. Frankie, a Twizzler-skinny guy with red hair, had just driven into the wall at such a high speed that his Buick had accordioned to the point where he couldn’t get out. Buck appeared to be pulling the door off with his hands, ripping the car open like a superhero. When Frankie finally emerged, we all clapped and cheered, and Frankie took a dramatic bow.
I opened my back brace and retightened it. Like the day when we were practicing T-boning parked cars, this exercise worried me a little more than the others. At least when we drove straight into cars, there was give, movement on the other side. But a cement wall? I ran through Newton’s three laws of motion, the first being that an object continues to be in motion unless acted upon by a force. The second being that the amount of force is equal to the mass multiplied by the acceleration—so, me and the Bat Girl car, times whatever speed I hit, would decide how much force would be exerted. And the third being that when one body (me and the car) exerts force on a second body (the cement wall), the second body (the wall) exerts a force equal in magnitude and the opposite direction of the force (me and the car). In other words, my guts, my heart, my organs, and my two-year-repaired spine would push back in my body with the same force as I pushed forward into the wall.
I unwrapped and retightened the back brace once more. No matter what Newton had proven, I wasn’t going to slow down and give anything less than my best.
Buck pointed at the bare area of the wall next to Frankie’s wasted heap of metal. I got in my car, started it up, and focused on the open spot. Buck trotted to the side of the track, and then I took off. I wanted to smash into that wall at a speed somewhat less than what Frankie had done, but more than my last run, which left my front bumper barely scraped.
When I hit the cement, there was a wonderful metallic, crunching sound. I flew forward. I flew back. I settled into my seat. Everything felt fine. I had nailed it.
* * *
One evening, Buck, Judy, Larry, and Mo showed up at the dorm. A few of us were in the sitting area watching The Bachelor on TV and heckling the contestants. We weren’t drinking, but we were pretending to, taking pantomimed shots each time someone said the word “journey.” We all looked up when the instructors walked in. Annie picked up the remote and muted the TV.
“Meeting down at the mess hall,” Buck said. Then he turned to me and said, “Tracy, I’ll ride with you.”
The keys to the Ford were in my pocket. I pushed myself off the couch and walked out of the dorm with Buck.
The darkness was astounding. If it weren’t for the sheet of white stars, I would have thought I was in a sealed velvet bag. There were no streetlights at The Farm. No city lights. No empty buildings lit up. No sirens throwing sound and light out into the landscape. It was just thick blackness with the eerie sense of the trees closing in around you. And above that was only sky—that beautiful, vast, and starry sky.
“It’s not like this in D.C.,” I said. Part of my chatter was to make up for my nervousness. The day we’d been handed the keys to the Fords we’d been instructed to always park “ass-in.” This allows for a quick getaway, of course, but it also requires that you use reverse, which remained beyond my abilities. I’d figured out about eight different ways to get ass-in to most spots at The Farm, all of which required circling other parked cars, driving over rocks, dirt, and grass, and banging over parking bumpers so that I’d end up face out. My circle and drive-over technique proved hardest at the dorm, however, where the buildi
ng position, along with the small parking lot, led me to usually park at some strange angle that made it look like I’d been drinking.
Buck looked up at the sky, moved his chin as if he were outlining the Milky Way, and then nodded at me. “Yeah, we’re all alone out here. Not a soul other than the people in that building right now.” Buck pointed at the dorm. No one else was coming out, so I figured they all had to fetch their keys from their rooms.
We got in the Ford. I was relieved that Buck had said nothing about the crooked-tooth angle in which I was parked. Buck rolled down his window and hung his arm out. I laughed.
“I was hit by a car speeding in the opposite direction,” he said, shaking his arm and then letting it dangle. “But that’s impossible right now. Even the cleaning crew isn’t here. Even Bernetta, that woman who checked you into your room, isn’t here. It’s just us and the stars.”
I put the car in first and did the usual high-propulsion takeoff over the lawn and out of the parking area.
Buck gave a closemouthed smile. “I guess no one will get you like that,” he said.
“Mess hall, right?” I was avoiding conversation about my parking position, lest I had to admit my handicap.
“Yeah,” Buck said. “Take a left up at the fork, we’ll follow the scenic route.”
“Nothing really to see,” I said as I veered onto the left fork. “Just another mass of darkness with all those looming trees.” I went fairly fast even though I could only make out the road as far as my headlights.
“Yup,” Buck said. “Not even a moon tonight.”
“Do you ever look into the woods,” I asked, “and wonder how many pairs of eyes are looking back out at you?”
“Of course,” Buck said. “I’m in intelligence. Like you.”
Something scurried in front of the car, and I slammed on the brakes.
“Tracy!” Buck said. “You’ve learned how to drive straight into a cement wall, and you’re braking for a—” Buck paused; he looked like he was trying to find a word.
“Yeah, what was that?” We were moving again, and I quickly picked up speed.
“I don’t know, maybe a badger?” Buck said.
“What even is a badger?” I shifted into fourth gear. “I mean, I know the word, but, like, I can’t quite picture a badger.”
“I think that was a badger,” Buck said. “But listen, rule number one, if it’s the size of a goat or smaller, hit the damn animal! You put yourself in greater danger braking or swerving around it than you do when you just—”
I slammed on the brakes again. In the light of my beams was a roadblock. Two cement posts with a rail crossed between them. I no sooner had registered this odd sight when a man dressed in black, with a ski mask pulled over his face, slammed a pistol into the window, pointing it right at my head.
Before he could speak, I threw the car into first, stomped on the gas, and drove straight through the barricade, smashing it with a satisfying pop as I shifted higher and higher until I was racing down the black, bumpy road in fifth gear.
Buck smiled and nodded. “Pull over, pull over,” he said.
I shifted down and then threw the car in neutral to stop. I turned and looked at Buck.
“That was perfect,” Buck said.
“You planned that?” I hadn’t even had time to be afraid. It was a moment of pure reaction. And I think, really, with Buck in the car, I simply wasn’t going to be afraid. I mean, the man was missing a chunk of his arm, and he regularly joked about it.
“Yeah. And you passed perfectly. That is exactly what you were supposed to do.”
“Cool.” I smiled.
“Yeah, cool,” Buck said. “Now get us to the mess hall.”
Over the next hour or so, the rest of the group filtered into the mess hall. Most people grabbed a beer from the fridge as they clearly needed a little help to decompress. People were laughing as each one of us shared the story of what he or she did when held up at gunpoint at the roadblock.
“I swear I almost shit my pants,” Frankie said.
“I peed a little,” Nick admitted. “I know that’s something women usually do, but it just leaked out of me.”
“Maybe everyone does it, but women are the only ones who admit it,” Annie said.
More than one person had rolled down the window and tried to negotiate with the gunman. A few people had thrown the car in reverse and backed up. As a group, we had covered almost every option to save ourselves. After the initial couple seconds of shock, no one really thought they were being held up. We each had been in the car with an instructor, and none of those instructors had screamed or reacted as if it were a holdup.
Once we’d all told our stories, Buck gave the entire holdup lesson in just a few sentences.
“You all should have done what Tracy did,” he said. “Drive forward. Crash the gate. Run over anyone who’s in your way. And get the hell outta there. The second you stop, the second you try to negotiate, the second you take off in reverse, the second you try to drive around the barricade and through the trees … you are dead. Bang. Bang. Dead. If that had been real, only one of you would be alive right now.”
Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder: if I had known how to shift into reverse, would I have simply backed up?
* * *
Surveillance was an ongoing part of the course that week. We were required to continually use a surveillance detection route—SDR—every time we drove from one place to the next on The Farm. This meant we could never take the same route twice. And each time we went anywhere, we were to make false turns, start off in the wrong direction, circle around, enter from different angles … you get the picture. It’s driving in a way that makes following nearly impossible.
There were multiple roads, multiple turns, and a few dead-ends to help facilitate SDR. I’d pretty much memorized the map I’d been handed the first day and usually had an innate sense of where I was and where I was going. Of course, I was the only one who had trained for a year in map reading, so maybe I had an advantage over the others. Also, with my usual diligence, I looked at the map before bed each night and planned all my routes for the next day. Others may have done this, too. When anyone was caught taking the same route twice (most people claimed it was by accident), they were ambushed by people—instructors and their assistants—who shot at them with what are called Simunition rounds. Simunition guns are fake semiautomatic weapons that look real and require the same shooting skills as a working gun. Instead of bullets, they release paintballs. By the end of each day, some of the white Fords were as speckle-colored as an Easter egg. Mine, and Annie’s, remained “pure as the driven snow” throughout the week.
* * *
Before I’d arrived at The Farm, I’d thought the Bang part of Crash and Bang was what we’d feel each time we smashed the cars into something. It turned out, the Bang was about BANG! Explosives.
The first day of Bang I drove a new circuitous route that led me across a low gurgling stream to the explosives building. It was the most peaceful entrance to a place that would be anything but.
At the start of each class we were issued goggles, a vest, and gloves. There were fewer movies and discussions than there had been in our Crash lessons. Instead we focused on lab work. Like poison school, there was a lot of chemistry involved and a whole lot of focus. One slipup, one serving of too much picric acid or nitrogen trichloride, and the building could be brought down.
Our failures or successes in the lab were tested at the end of each day just a short walk outside the building. The 12 of us, along with some of the instructors, stood in a half-buried, fortified bunker with an impenetrable plexiglass window. From this viewing post, we’d look out to the field, where old, inoperable cars had been lined up. Sometimes there was a dummy sitting in the driver’s seat. Someone had a sense of humor and usually put an unlit cigarette in the dummy’s mouth, or a beer bottle in his or her hand. And there was always an arm hanging out the window, waiting to be skinned.
It seemed to take forever between the time the explosives were set up and the time we watched them blow. No matter how many times we did it, the sound of the bang always surprised me. And there was an eerie satisfaction in seeing something almost disappear. Was this human nature? The urge to want the power of destruction equal to that of the power of creation? I couldn’t watch those explosions without thinking of terrorists, al-Qaeda, the perverse joy of those who were on the sidelines as they witnessed the creation of ash and rubble through the decimation of people and the buildings that held them.
Of all my visits to The Farm, Crash and Bang was, admittedly, the most fun. But there wasn’t a moment that went by when I didn’t connect what we were doing to what I was, and would be, doing out in the field. Drive a serpentine, backward route so that no one can follow me. Park ass-in so I can get the heck outta there. Crash the barricade and kill the badger so that no one can kill me first.
And understand that if I end up in the explosion zone, I better hope my affairs are in order.
NINE
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Langley, Virginia, and the Middle East March–May 2003
Johnny Rivers, from the office of the president, made regular visits to my cubicle, looking for a connection between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi’s chemical terror group. I’d eye him from across the room, his tie knotted too high on his neck, gamboling toward me.
“Anything?” he’d ask.
“Nope,” I’d say, and I’d point to my cubicle wall where I had taped up the latest copy of the al-Qaeda poison chart, which clearly laid out who was leading what poison cell and where. Not one person on this chart was connected to Saddam Hussein.