- Oct 3, 2018
- 3,820
Aska left the apartment at half past eight. The street was ordinary. A fruit seller arranging crates. A tea house, plastic chairs still stacked from the night before. A man with a hose working the pavement outside a butcher's, the water running dark into the gutter. She walked east. The bag strap had been cutting into her shoulder since she left. She hadn't adjusted it.
Ulus opened up ahead. Wide pavements, older stone, the kind of street that moved people in one direction whether they intended it or not. She had walked the route twice before. Both times without the bag.
At the corner of Anafartalar she stopped at a cassette display. Her eyes went to the glass front of the stall. The street behind her, bent and compressed in the reflection. A woman. Two men. A boy on a bicycle. She looked at her watch and realized she needed to move on.
The shopping centre was four minutes away at this pace. Just as she looked back up a woman with a pushchair cut across her path. Aska stopped short. One hand went to the strap. She let it go and kept walking.
Near the underpass the foot traffic thickened around a bus discharging passengers. She moved through them. Her right hand had gone numb and she flexed it once at her side, slowly, without breaking stride. She was worried she’d miss the target position. Their insider said the convoy would only pass once within a 10 minute period.
Just then a squad car came from her left. No siren. It decelerated and pulled to the kerb fifteen metres ahead, directly on her approach, and sat there with the engine running.
Aska almost paused but her training kicked in. She walked three more steps. Four. Then she turned left.
A narrower street came in front of her Hardware shop. Shuttered clothing stall with a broken shutter rail hanging loose. She did not increase her pace. She made herself believe that.
Two more turns. South. Then west.
She stopped inside the entrance of a covered market and put her back against a stone pillar. Around her the stalls ran deep into the building, loud with vendors and transistor radios and the smell of cardamom and burnt sugar. She set the bag down between her feet and stood with her arms loose at her sides.
She stayed there. Eight minutes. Maybe nine. The convoy should have come by now. She began to panic.
The two officers came up the far pavement in a loose spread, not quite side by side, checking faces as they moved. No urgency to it. The near one wore his weapon low on his hip. They reached the end of the street, turned, and were gone.
Aska did not move. Fuck she thought. She felt her body getting warm as the convoy hadn’t appeared. The police officers were getting closer. Aska looked around and moved her leg.
A loud explosion erupted from her bag. The explosion took out the facing wall of the shopping centre.
The glass around the stores cracked open sending the whole frontage outward in the street. Shrapnel hitting dozens nearby. A woman next to Aska was blown immediately from the blast. A man against the far wall of the street sat down hard on the pavement and did not get up. The fruit stall on the corner ceased to exist. A puff of red mist whether of the fruits or people popped like confetti. Where the seller had been there was wreckage and a red smear across the lower half of a concrete pillar. Three others nearby had their limbs thrown apart as the force from the blast threw them against the walls.
The sound rolled out and bounced off the surrounding buildings and then there was a moment of total silence before the screaming started. Car alarms up the length of Anafartalar. A fire began somewhere inside the center with black smoke beginning to climb. Dust still moving in the air, pale and granular, settling on the bodies in the street. People rushed in to help as they found a dozen or so injured people.
The first ambulance arrived in eleven minutes.
The crew worked fast. The paramedic triaged by moving, crouching, moving, crouching again, touching throats, checking pupils, marking the unconscious with a strip of tape on the wrist. Her partner bagged a man whose face had been opened by glass. They loaded three in the first run.
The fire brigade arrived and ran hoses into the center’s ground floor. The fire was small. It mattered less than the structure, part of the frontage had come away from its frame and was leaning at an angle that would not hold.
The jandarma sealed the perimeter in sectors allowing emergency workers to operate but keeping the public out.
They worked outward from the blast point, forty metres, then eighty, pushing civilians back with arms spread, not shouting. A sergeant coordinated by hand signals from the centre of the intersection. His radio was going constantly. He answered in short bursts and kept moving.
By the time the perimeter was set, six of the wounded had been moved to Ankara Numune. Two others were on the ground still waiting. A third had been covered with a coat by a civilian and left where he was.
Detective Yılmaz got the call at his desk.
He drove himself. No blues, no siren. He parked on a side street three blocks out and walked the rest of the way, badging through the outer cordon to a growing crowd of onlookers.
At the blast point he stopped.
He stood there for a moment, hands in his jacket pockets, and looked at it. The pattern of the debris. The direction the glass had blown. The scorch mark on the pavement — not large, not the crater you got from a vehicle device or a planted charge. Compact. Central.
A jandarma captain named Demir came and stood beside him.
"The sense we are getting is this was a gas main going off," Demir said.
Yılmaz looked at the scorch mark. The radius of it. The way the damage concentrated outward from a single low point at street level rather than upward from below.
"No," he said. He walked around.
Demir was quiet for a moment. "The shopping center’s management is saying a boiler. It was supposed to be repaired but the guy never showed up."
Yılmaz crouched down. On the edge of the scorch, half-buried under a piece of shop frontage, there was a piece of material. Dark fabric, fused at one edge. He didn't touch it. He looked at it for a few seconds and then stood back up.
"Where's your forensics team?" Yılmaz asked.
"Twenty minutes." Demir responded looking down at his radio.
He looked up the street, then back at the blast point. "And nobody moves anything."
Demir followed his eyeline. "You think…"
"I think nobody moves anything." The detective said, taking in the whole situation.
Ulus opened up ahead. Wide pavements, older stone, the kind of street that moved people in one direction whether they intended it or not. She had walked the route twice before. Both times without the bag.
At the corner of Anafartalar she stopped at a cassette display. Her eyes went to the glass front of the stall. The street behind her, bent and compressed in the reflection. A woman. Two men. A boy on a bicycle. She looked at her watch and realized she needed to move on.
The shopping centre was four minutes away at this pace. Just as she looked back up a woman with a pushchair cut across her path. Aska stopped short. One hand went to the strap. She let it go and kept walking.
Near the underpass the foot traffic thickened around a bus discharging passengers. She moved through them. Her right hand had gone numb and she flexed it once at her side, slowly, without breaking stride. She was worried she’d miss the target position. Their insider said the convoy would only pass once within a 10 minute period.
Just then a squad car came from her left. No siren. It decelerated and pulled to the kerb fifteen metres ahead, directly on her approach, and sat there with the engine running.
Aska almost paused but her training kicked in. She walked three more steps. Four. Then she turned left.
A narrower street came in front of her Hardware shop. Shuttered clothing stall with a broken shutter rail hanging loose. She did not increase her pace. She made herself believe that.
Two more turns. South. Then west.
She stopped inside the entrance of a covered market and put her back against a stone pillar. Around her the stalls ran deep into the building, loud with vendors and transistor radios and the smell of cardamom and burnt sugar. She set the bag down between her feet and stood with her arms loose at her sides.
She stayed there. Eight minutes. Maybe nine. The convoy should have come by now. She began to panic.
The two officers came up the far pavement in a loose spread, not quite side by side, checking faces as they moved. No urgency to it. The near one wore his weapon low on his hip. They reached the end of the street, turned, and were gone.
Aska did not move. Fuck she thought. She felt her body getting warm as the convoy hadn’t appeared. The police officers were getting closer. Aska looked around and moved her leg.
A loud explosion erupted from her bag. The explosion took out the facing wall of the shopping centre.
The glass around the stores cracked open sending the whole frontage outward in the street. Shrapnel hitting dozens nearby. A woman next to Aska was blown immediately from the blast. A man against the far wall of the street sat down hard on the pavement and did not get up. The fruit stall on the corner ceased to exist. A puff of red mist whether of the fruits or people popped like confetti. Where the seller had been there was wreckage and a red smear across the lower half of a concrete pillar. Three others nearby had their limbs thrown apart as the force from the blast threw them against the walls.
The sound rolled out and bounced off the surrounding buildings and then there was a moment of total silence before the screaming started. Car alarms up the length of Anafartalar. A fire began somewhere inside the center with black smoke beginning to climb. Dust still moving in the air, pale and granular, settling on the bodies in the street. People rushed in to help as they found a dozen or so injured people.
The first ambulance arrived in eleven minutes.
The crew worked fast. The paramedic triaged by moving, crouching, moving, crouching again, touching throats, checking pupils, marking the unconscious with a strip of tape on the wrist. Her partner bagged a man whose face had been opened by glass. They loaded three in the first run.
By the time the second unit arrived there were already civilians in the street doing what they could, which was not much. A shopkeeper had torn his apron into strips. An older man was holding a boy's hand and talking to him steadily about nothing as the kid cried from the piece of glass stuck in his leg..The fire brigade arrived and ran hoses into the center’s ground floor. The fire was small. It mattered less than the structure, part of the frontage had come away from its frame and was leaning at an angle that would not hold.
The jandarma sealed the perimeter in sectors allowing emergency workers to operate but keeping the public out.
They worked outward from the blast point, forty metres, then eighty, pushing civilians back with arms spread, not shouting. A sergeant coordinated by hand signals from the centre of the intersection. His radio was going constantly. He answered in short bursts and kept moving.
By the time the perimeter was set, six of the wounded had been moved to Ankara Numune. Two others were on the ground still waiting. A third had been covered with a coat by a civilian and left where he was.
Detective Yılmaz got the call at his desk.
He drove himself. No blues, no siren. He parked on a side street three blocks out and walked the rest of the way, badging through the outer cordon to a growing crowd of onlookers.
At the blast point he stopped.
He stood there for a moment, hands in his jacket pockets, and looked at it. The pattern of the debris. The direction the glass had blown. The scorch mark on the pavement — not large, not the crater you got from a vehicle device or a planted charge. Compact. Central.
A jandarma captain named Demir came and stood beside him.
"The sense we are getting is this was a gas main going off," Demir said.
Yılmaz looked at the scorch mark. The radius of it. The way the damage concentrated outward from a single low point at street level rather than upward from below.
"No," he said. He walked around.
Demir was quiet for a moment. "The shopping center’s management is saying a boiler. It was supposed to be repaired but the guy never showed up."
Yılmaz crouched down. On the edge of the scorch, half-buried under a piece of shop frontage, there was a piece of material. Dark fabric, fused at one edge. He didn't touch it. He looked at it for a few seconds and then stood back up.
"Where's your forensics team?" Yılmaz asked.
"Twenty minutes." Demir responded looking down at his radio.
He looked up the street, then back at the blast point. "And nobody moves anything."
Demir followed his eyeline. "You think…"
"I think nobody moves anything." The detective said, taking in the whole situation.
