A Time for War (17 page)

“What the hell?”

He extended his left arm toward the hole, wincing, his hand trembling. He thought, absurdly, that he'd been bitten by a bug or a seabird or that he had somehow caught the hook on his leg without realizing it.

Then he remembered the sharp report he'd heard. He looked through the port side railing, saw someone running toward him. It was a man in a blue wetsuit. He was carrying a rifle in his right hand, a pistol in the other. It made no sense. Someone had
shot
him?

“Hey!” Abe said, intending to shout, but his voice sounded like a rough whisper.

His vision started to swim. Blood continued to flow from the wound. He pawed at it, had an idea that he'd better staunch it with a handkerchief or maybe a sleeve or a sock—

The man was on board now. He went below. Abe's head was lying on the deck. He heard the man's footsteps through the flooring. Then they were on deck and coming toward Abe. He looked at the interloper. The man was Asian. He was still carrying the weapons. He set them down near Abe, then knelt beside him. Abe smelled gunpowder.

OK,
he thought.
I've been shot. By accident. The man's going to help me.

Abe cried out in pain as the man picked him up roughly under the arms.

“C-care … ful…” Abe croaked. His head was swimming now. The stabbing, hot pain in his leg was all that kept him awake.

He felt himself being hoisted up. Pushed against the railing. He thought the man was trying to get him onto his feet so he could take him below.

The world turned round as Abe was pitched headlong over the rail. He splashed hard on his back, in the water, the sea filling his lungs as his arms made a brief, spastic effort to keep him from sinking.

His eyes were open as the blue-green darkness was tinged with red. He sank, thinking he should text Doc about this, wondering where his phone was, his fingers clutching for it, and then the water suddenly feeling very, very solid.

He was being pushed against something, sideways. Someone was holding his leg, trying to pull him out. Then he spun and was facing down, the pain in his leg spreading to his waist. He felt a sharp, electric jolt across his belly and right thigh.

Abe did not know he was dead below the waist. Mercifully, he did not feel the shark muzzle that buried itself in the cavity of his lower body, eating him from the inside. He did not feel the other sharks close on him, tearing at his arms, his torso, his face.

Abe Cohen was already dead.

*   *   *

The Chinese spotter went below and stomped the heel of his
tabi
boot on the floor. The flexible knee-high boot had a ribbed rubber heel for maximum gripping on the shoreline rocks slick with saltwater, animal waste, and blood from combat between the bull seals.

The hull was solid fiberglass.

The young man quickly checked the pilothouse for any kind of log, any indication that someone knew where he was. There was nothing. The spotter wasn't surprised. The American had looked like a rogue, someone who did not live a structured life.

He went back to the ladder, climbed into his motorboat, left the long-range rifle and pistol, and opened a backpack. He removed a brick of C-4 explosive, used a pocketknife to cut a piece from the corner, selected a timed detonator, and returned to the stateroom. C-4 cannot be detonated by a shock or bullet and will not explode when set ablaze. It can only be triggered by a combination of the simultaneous heat-flash and concussive force of a detonator. Flame alone will simply cause it to burn; the spotter used small quantities of the plastic explosive for heating his meals in the small, camouflaged tent he had on this desolate rock. That was a trick he had learned during survival training as a commando in the People's Liberation Army Ground Force. Though he knew it was a possibility, the young man did not expect to have to shoot any of the boaters who came by or use the C-4 to sink ships. If the American had not found the remains of the former cell leader, this would not have been necessary.

With his motorboat lashed to the ladder, the spotter steered the larger vessel to deeper waters some two hundred feet to the north. He would set the timer on the detonator and head back to shore. Below deck, the explosion would not cause a flash that could be seen from shore or by satellite. The influx of water would quickly put out any fires, smother any smoke. The boat would sink quickly.

The spotter stopped the boat and scanned the horizon for any vessels close enough to see it; if there had been any, he would have waited. There was nothing but a tanker some forty miles distant and moving away. He pressed the small triangle of plastic explosive to the floor, far enough from the fuel tank so there wouldn't be an oil slick on the surface, something that might draw the attention of one of the Coast Guard vessels, tour boats, or environmental study ships that came by every day or so. Then he set the detonator for five minutes and hurried back to his idling motorboat. A Great White, drawn by the few drops of blood that had dripped from the main deck, nudged his little boat as he was about to enter. The spotter waited until the shark passed. The eleven-footer might not intend to knock the boat over, but there was no reason to risk it. Not that there was a lot of time to waste. He had to be back on shore before the C-4 exploded. The shock wave would travel through the boat to the water; moving perpendicular to the existing currents, it would give the motorboat quite a rattling.

The motorboat was already hidden in its cove on the windward side of the eastern island, the spotter safely ashore, when he heard the deep, muffled pop of the explosion. The sounds of the sinking boat were lost among the breakers crashing along the rocky coastline and the trumpeting of the elephant seals. It wasn't until he had reached a small promontory that he saw the last of the flybridge going under. As he had calculated based on his study of local nautical charts—there was precious little else to do on the island—the water was deep enough to swallow the boat entirely. And the sea was murky enough so that, unless an aircraft was looking for it, they might not see the pilothouse.

At least, not within the few days needed to finish the mission. Even if they found it, the wreckage would tell them nothing.

Feeling good to have served a purpose to the great Jintao and his cause, the spotter returned to his tent to contact Sausalito on his high-end encryption
ying xiong
“hero” radio. He briefed one of his comrades, then went back to the rock where he had left a pair of high-powered binoculars and watched the distant city, a city that would soon be as vacant and dead as it appeared through the haze.

Blaine, Washington

Located between Blaine, Washington, and Surrey, British Columbia, the Peace Arch State Park—the Peace Arch Provincial Park on the Canadian side—is the most heavily traveled U.S.-Canadian border crossing west of Detroit. It is named for the monument that stands in the wide grass median that lies between Interstate 5 and Highway 99, the north-south roads. Topped with the flags of both nations, the sixty-seven-foot-tall ivory-white arch was built in 1921 to commemorate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812—the last conflict in which the two nations were adversaries.

The crossing never closed and the noncommercial traffic tended to move quickly with an average wait time of five minutes.

Liu Tang lit a cigarette as the car neared the border crossing. The other men in the car did likewise. They kept the windows rolled up. The fan was turned on, spreading the smoke through the vehicle. As they slowed and joined the southward-headed queue, Liu drew heavily on the cigarette to calm himself.

This was the last possible impediment. The Canadian cell was to bring him legally across the border where he would be turned over to members of the American cell. From there, it was an easy drive to San Francisco. The Canadian cell would stay in Seattle for two days, so as not to arouse suspicions by an immediate turnaround.

Liu opened his plastic chess set and handed the strategy book to the man sitting next to him. The base of each chess piece had a magnet that covered a carefully drilled hole in the plastic. The board was arranged in the penultimate set-up of the Kasparov-Topalov match from 1999. Liu's companion knew nothing about the game in general or that match in particular. Only Liu was aware that, fittingly, this was considered the greatest attack match in recorded chess history. As they had planned, the two commenced a spirited argument about the game in Chinese.

Driving through the border, overt security consisted of guards checking vehicular undercarriages and trunks, primarily for nuclear devices. Because explosives were easily manufactured in terrorist kitchens, agents did not spend a lot of time on each car, van, or truck. Especially if the license or make was not on a watch list. Guards looked in the windows on both sides. Occasionally they asked to check random, specific items in the vehicle like dolls or computers or cups that might have false bottoms.

Liu knew that the real work at this and many international border crossings was “extreme racial profiling.” Unofficially and illegally, more and more checkpoints had adopted the approach of Israel's El Al airline, which, despite being a prime target, had been free of terrorist attacks for three decades. Encountering a person trying to enter the United States who was of Middle Eastern, East African, or Indonesian descent, agents would follow the Israeli model. They would ask personal questions drawn entirely from passport, visa, and driver's license data. If a person knew the serial number of the document or instantly recalled the second or third or tenth stamp in its pages, chances were good they'd stupidly memorized a fake passport. Most terrorists were uneducated, living puppets given a seductive sense of importance by attentive radical leaders. These individuals were not capable of extemporizing. They had to commit data to memory. Guards also acted like human lie detectors, asking a series of innocuous questions peppered with pointed inquiries about social and political beliefs. Most people hesitated, crafted a careful response, said something personal but innocuous about party affiliation or support of a particular candidate. They tried to be truthful but safe. Terrorists, on the other hand, tended to have quick, rehearsed responses. Queried about militant movements, most passengers disavowed them. Radicals did so immediately and almost always with a dismissive little laugh. Personnel were trained to notice not just the speed of a response but changes in expression, a rise in the voice, sudden hand motions, nervous swallowing indicated by movement of the Adam's apple, averting the eyes, or an unblinking stare to avoid the appearance of anxiety. That earned follow-up questions that were harder, more aggressive, and invariably earned the subject of the interview a strip search and complete baggage deconstruction.

Crossings at the Peace Arch rarely reached that level of engagement. Moreover, no one at the border spoke any Asian languages. The cell had checked. They had also profiled several shifts of personnel. The Chinese all smoked because these dry runs had proven that the younger guards in particular didn't like it. That made the process go very, very quickly.

And, of course, there was the unspoken belief that China would not attack the United States. They had too much invested in the nation to want to see it brought down.

That was the problem with people who thought fiscally instead of ideologically,
Liu thought, as he faced the chessboard but watched their approach from the corner of his vision.

The van reached the border. Guards approached from the front driver's and passenger's sides. They motioned for the driver's window to be rolled down. A third guard examined the outside of the vehicle.

The agent on the driver's side was of Asian heritage: Japanese, from his rigid bearing and humorless expression, Liu guessed. He didn't flinch as the cigarette smoke rolled out.

“Passport, please,” he asked, pointing at the driver.

The driver had been holding his cigarette. He jabbed it in his mouth and removed his passport from his shirt pocket. He handed it to the agent. The young man examined it. He looked at the driver. The driver smiled thinly, nodded politely.

The agent flipped through the passport and handed it back. As he waited for the guard inspecting the vehicle to give it an all clear, he peered through the back window. Liu made a move on the chessboard. His opponent sat back, bemoaning his situation.

“Checkmate,” the border agent said.

Liu looked at him. Slowly, he took the cigarette from his mouth and smiled. The agent smiled back and waved them on. The men in front rolled up the windows. The van entered the United States.

Liu did not realize how tense he had been until the constriction suddenly lifted from his chest. He finished his cigarette and ground it in the ashtray. It was luck. Maybe fate was with them. In any case, they were here and there was nothing to stop them. What had taken place back in the Vancouver Customs building would soon be enacted on a massive scale.

Distraction—followed by an attack that would collapse a nation.

Fairfield, California

The consulate car reached the hotel just as Sammo was finishing his lunch. He had been watching for it through the amber-tinted window. As instructed, the car just pulled to the curb and waited, a spotlight of sun bouncing from its black roof. It was in plain view of the traffic on Central Place.

And the traffic was in plain view of Sammo.

Less than three minutes after the consulate car arrived, Sammo saw a particular vehicle drive by in the steady traffic. It was the same make of car as the one he'd shut down outside of San Francisco. He watched as the vehicle swung past again less than two minutes later at a modest rate of speed. He leaned toward the window for a better look. He saw the car make a right onto Lookout Hill Road. That was a dead end. They weren't making another circuit. Sammo went to the pool, which faced the side street. The car had turned around and was parked facing Central Place, ready to move.