Long Mile Home by Scott Helman

Author:Scott Helman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

DISQUIET

In a silent city, the hunt begins anew

Dawn broke Friday on a still-life city. Streets empty. Sidewalks lonely. Stoops vacant. Businesses dark. Houses closed up. A transit system shut down. The clamorous night, with the frenzy over the terrorists’ photos, the killing of Sean Collier, and then the clash in Watertown, had given way to a silent morning, eerie and frightening in its tranquility. It was the last day of school vacation week. The weather looked promising. A perfect day to hit the playground, to ready a backyard garden for spring. Vacationing families were on their way home, their fridges empty, planning to pick up takeout for dinner. But this was not that kind of Friday. At daybreak, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his name now becoming known to the public, was still unaccounted for. With the strain of the week’s drama weighing heavily, and conviction mounting that the crisis needed to end, authorities turned to a radical plan: locking the whole city down until the second suspect was in custody. They knew the idea would be controversial—a major American city going dark to smoke out a wayward nineteen-year-old. Who had ever considered such a thing? Could it even be done? And yet no one would accept Dzhokhar slipping away again. No one could abide more violence.

From the first moments after the shoot-out, as Dzhokhar’s trail went cold, Governor Deval Patrick conferred hourly with aides about the status of the hunt. By about 4:00 A.M., with no arrest at hand and the MBTA bus and train system about to start up for the day, Patrick and top law enforcement officials had a decision to make. Having ditched the Mercedes SUV, Dzhokhar was believed to be on foot. Watertown was now overrun with cops, so it was all but impossible for him to escape by car. That left public transportation: What if he managed to sneak onto a bus, or a train? Then he could get anywhere he wanted. Police had established a security perimeter in Watertown, around the area where Dzhokhar had slipped away. Patrick and law enforcement leaders devised what seemed like a prudent plan. They would ask residents within the perimeter to “shelter in place” while SWAT teams conducted house-by-house searches. They would suspend T service through Watertown. And they would ask people in surrounding communities to remain vigilant.

But as the governor was on his way to make that announcement, he began receiving reports of suspicious activity elsewhere: a taxi suspected of carrying explosive devices that had reportedly come from Watertown and been stopped in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood; a police pursuit at South Station, a major transportation hub, and another at the federal courthouse nearby. Even though the FBI had zeroed in on two suspects—and one of them was now dead—the full complexion of the terror plot was still unknown. Were other accomplices out there lurking, waiting to strike again? “There was a high level of anxiety about, frankly, how much we didn’t know, and how big this might be,” Patrick said.

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