Maybe they’d find out tonight. It was just too bad that a journalist’s dream was often indistinguishable from the stuff that nightmares were made of.

“You alive over there?”

Jack smiled. “Sorry, Tom. I was off in the woods.”

“Hunter or stag?”

“Hah. Good question.”

“Well, come back home, Jack. We’ve gotta stay focused, top of our game. If something goes wrong, you need to know right away.”

“Why? You ever see anyone outrun an explosion?”

“Of course not,” Drabinsky said. “The survivors are the ones who smell things before they go bad. Any dope can run when it’s too late.”

Jack nodded. The commander wasn’t talking out of his ass. In his nearly forty years, he had known soldiers, cops, pilots who had the Spidey sense he was talking about, an instinct for things that were slightly off center. During a visit to southern China, Jack had seen a demonstration in which a blindfolded Shaolin kung fu master defeated two much younger men because he felt what they were about to do. When Jack asked the sensei, through an interpreter, how he did that, the man replied with a smile, “The gray hair.”

Experience. There was nothing like it.

***

As Drabinsky pulled up to the nearest barricade, Jack raised the Steiner Marine Binoculars he’d brought. It was an ugly, surreal, yet strangely tranquil sight.

Big flatbed-mounted spotlights towered twenty feet on either end of the street and illuminated the scene. The bread truck lay angled toward the sidewalk. It rested against a streetlight, half of one of its panels caved in. Bisecting it was an overturned Land Rover, its roof crumpled under its weight.