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SOPHIE STITCHED together most of what happened by interviewing McAfferty, Dionne and Patera. But no matter how much she heard it still didn’t add up, exactly, as if somewhere in this chain of events the reaction had been cubed.
The park evacuation actually went astonishingly well, considering that thousands of children had to be rushed from the grounds. Fortunately, the festivities were in their final hour and most troops were ready to leave anyway, especially once the curtain of rain started falling, which also helped the Blaine firemen extinguish the blazing house on Harvey Street.
Patera was in the park, speed-talking on two cell phones long before the ATF finally showed up in matching jackets, looking like some aging softball team. “This is our release,” McAfferty heard the chief shout at one point. “Our agent found it.”
Mac’s take was that Patera’s judgment had been warped by adrenaline. What amazing luck to have a bomb found by his very own crackerjack female agent—at a Girl Scout festival! You mean your agents aren’t all men? That’s right, folks. And not just any woman agent, but the mother of an innocent little scout at the exact same park that very afternoon!
Unfortunately, the story wasn’t that simple. A lot was going on at once, and the potential connections were alarming if unclear. Everything was further complicated by early television deadlines and the time it took for the bomb squad to get there from Seattle.
And while Patera did eventually admit to one small and two large mistakes, he swore he never intentionally misled anyone. He simply tried to keep everyone as informed as possible. The problem was the urgency of local TV reporters. One such rushed conversation, according to the chief, went like this:
Has there been an evacuation?
Yes.
Why?
A bomb threat was called in to the Blaine sector.
What kind of bomb?
A dirty bomb.
A dirty bomb?
Yes, which would typically mean explosives tied to radioactive materials.
Has there been any confirmation of an actual bomb?
This, Patera told Sophie, is where he committed one of his two large mistakes. He should have just said, no—or “Hell no!” as McAfferty later suggested. But what he said was, border agents have confirmed some radioactivity in an ice chest of interest in the park.
What does the squad say?
Nothing yet.
And was there a firebombing of a nearby home?
The local station did respond to a house fire, yes. It’s not clear whether it was arson.
And that’s when Patera made his second big mistake, mentioning to a Seattle reporter that there was a simultaneous investigation—based on a panicky voice message from veterinarian Eugene Stremler—into the possible poisoning of several American dairies along the border. Patera’s third, considerably smaller, blunder was speculating aloud on the possibility of a curfew.
A dirty-bomb scare that caused the evacuation of eight thousand Girl Scouts at Peace Arch Park was enough to lead a slow news day, especially with the kickers of dairy terrorism, a firebombing and an impending curfew. A war of sorts—what else could you call it?—had seemingly rolled over the Canadian border into the Pacific Northwest.
Meanwhile, the bomb squad treated the picnic cooler as if it were about to explode. Nobody else peeked inside, as Dionne had, or even approached it at all. They taped off a quarter-mile perimeter, then rolled out a wheeled robot outfitted with a video camera and remote-controlled hands. It had a hell of a time with the cooler latch, which gobbled another ten minutes, while Patera fielded more frantic questions right before the coverage went live. It was almost an hour before the deliberative bomb-squad commander blandly declared that the “dirty bomb” amounted to two six-volt batteries, some unconnected wires and a sack of kitty litter, which was emitting enough trace amounts of uranium and thorium to trigger sensors. There were no explosives in the cooler.
By then Patera had retrieved Stremler’s sheepish follow-up message that the cattle fatalities appeared to have been caused by excessive fermentation in bad feed. The torched house, the chief was belatedly informed, had been abandoned and condemned for years. Not a single town council along the border was discussing curfews.
Bad news, though, spreads faster than good, so it took deep into the night before the truth began to cool the fear and confusion in the valley. There was a run on canned goods and ammo, and Tom Dunbar later admitted that he spent the night in a bomb shelter he’d built in the seventies. Others fired up ham radios and hid in basements, contacting one another and awaiting instructions. Many more went to bed numbed by the sensation that their country, their county, even their neighborhood, was under attack. And even those who got the full story before going to bed still found it hard to turn off the trepidation.
Daybreak arrived with a blinding fog that lowered the sky to the tops of the silos and steeples, which might have gone unnoticed if not for a raucous, low-flying flock.
Madeline jolted upright to what she assumed were Fisher’s guard ducks alerting her to an ambush. Norm awoke furious that the goddamn EPA was buzzing his farm again. Dirk fumbled for his bedside .357 with one thought: air raid. Wayne dreamt through the bedlam, sharing a joint with Franklin and van Gogh. Sophie reached for her camcorder and shuffled to the window. And Brandon lay in bed marveling at the loudest skein of Caspian terns he’d ever heard, picturing its loose formation plunging through the whiteout, the agile, black-masked, white-winged birds held together by sound and faith.