A Time for War (26 page)

Jack felt he had an answer, of sorts, in the Hawke employees he had met so far: Bahati, an Egyptian. Utako, a Japanese. Martina, an Austrian. Pierre, a Frenchman. It wasn't just an eclectic group, an enthusiastic young rainbow culled from his offices around the globe. To Jack, it said something more.

It said all nations made one.

Under Hawke.

 

2

Fairfield, California

Sammo returned to his hotel after stopping to purchase a pizza. He went to his room and changed into jeans and a Travis AFB sweatshirt he had acquired in the hotel gift shop. Then he went to the hotel counter, carrying his box of pizza. The lobby showed no sign of the man Sammo had encountered on his walk. Sammo said one word to the night receptionist:

“Bicycle.”

“Yes, sir, there are a number of places you can go,” she said before Sammo shook his head to indicate he didn't understand what she was saying. Nodding, the woman held up a finger then began typing on her computer. When she was finished, she rotated the flatscreen monitor toward the guest.

“Bradbury's Bike Shop,” she said. “The address is 2222 Rockwell. They are open until eight.” She brought up a MapQuest route and pointed to
B.
“It's a little over two miles. Do you want a cab? A taxi?”

“Yes, please,” he said.

While the clerk made the call, Sammo reflected on the wisdom of having been taught just a minimal amount of English. He knew the key words and phrases, could recognize enough writing to read signs and enunciate the names of roads and cities. But brainwashed American liberals became more solicitous, embraced you more readily, when they thought you needed help. It was much easier for an agent to enter a society when he was invited by “nice” people.

The clerk printed out the map and circled the destination for Sammo. She made sure he had bills small enough to pay for the ride. It made him feel all-powerful to know that in just a few hours this woman would be broken with horror, awash with tears and a crushing fear for the future, that her life would never again be safe and normal.

Sammo gave the map to the driver and sat back, the pizza box on his lap. He was reminded, as the cab passed a church, of the ancient god Tian, who was synonymous with the greatness of the cosmos. The deity was depicted in writing with the script character
that resembled the Christian cross he noticed atop the steeple.

We are all one in every way, from our basic faith to our instinctive terrors,
he thought. Our basic needs are the same as well, though Americans have never understood that. He had learned how the nation was built, by individuals in wagons, on homesteads, panning for gold. Despite the name, they had never truly united except to fight wars. Sammo felt the kind of pride and sense of belonging that were worth any sacrifice, any risk.

Mao's Revolution made us communal in nature, equal in purpose and resolve. We move as an unstoppable mass and not as arrogant, aggressive individuals.

That was why the Chinese would always be victorious,
he thought.

Traffic was still heavy and Sammo probably could have walked the distance in the time it took to drive. The box on his lap was beginning to cool but that didn't matter. The contents didn't matter. It was merely a prop.

He could not tell if he was still being followed. He could not see a taxi behind him, though he noticed that the driver had a GPS computer. Presumably law enforcement could follow Sammo that way.

Those efforts wouldn't matter, either. All he needed was proximity and his cell phone.

Renting a bicycle required more time and documentation than Sammo was prepared to give, so he simply purchased a used model for cash, one with a wire-frame basket in front. He also bought a helmet and a large canvas notebook bag. The shop was empty and the sales personnel ignored him as he crouched on the floor and put the takeout inside the bag. The edges of the box stuck out. That was fine. He wanted the contents to be visible.

Donning the helmet, he pedaled south along Rockville Road to Rio Vista, which ran east and west. He took it east, hearing the distant drumbeat of the powerful transport engines and the occasional whistle of a fighter. He was enjoying the exercise, the way it reminded him of getting around Beijing, and was grateful his original plan had not worked out.

This was a better one.

It was nearly nine
P.M.
by the time he reached his destination, the southern entrance to Travis Air Force Base. The guard post was unexceptional-looking: a booth, mostly glass, with a large framework that covered the two-lane road. An iron gate-arm blocked the way. None of that mattered to Sammo. All that concerned him was the floodlit structures beyond.

He parked his bicycle outside the gate and walked toward the booth. There were two uniformed young men inside. Both wore disinterested expressions. One pressed a button.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Sammo held the black notebook bag with the edge of the box facing the guard.

“General,” Sammo said.

The young man asked. “General who? Are you saying a general ordered a pie?”

The two airmen laughed.

“This has got to be a gag,” one of them said. “What's the general's name?”

Sammo appeared confused. He held up a finger and laid the bag on the bicycle basket. He took his cell phone from his pants pocket and pretended to make a call. He spoke in Chinese, loudly and with agitation, all the while watching the two men. And as they watched him back, amused by his flustered chatter, he was busy snapping flashless pictures of the base. He faced one way, pacing, then turned the other way. Then he stopped and faced forward. When he was finished, he shut the phone, shoved it in his pocket, apologized with a few words and bows, then rode off.

Back at the hotel, Sammo checked the hotel lobby again. There was a man nodding off in one of the out-of-the-way corners. He might have been the same man who had interfered with Sammo's earlier plans, but it didn't matter enough for Sammo to check closely. Sammo had alternate plans now.

He went up to his room, parked the bicycle against the foot of his bed, and used a digital ruler to measure it from front to back. Then he ate the cold pizza while he booted his computer. He loaded the photos from the phone's memory stick; he did not dare e-mail the images over the wireless network in case the FBI was monitoring his activity.

He brought up the photos and dropped them into a 3D modeling and analysis program. The spatial point orientation function allowed him to accurately measure distances in two-dimensional images. This was achieved by measuring the lines of perspective in relation to a known object: in this case, the bicycle that Sammo had placed against the gate. He input the size of the bicycle into the computer and the program did the rest.

The main area of interest was the control tower. If that was within range of the gate he could return with the EMP device and shut the tower—and whatever aircraft were within range of his device—down during peak traffic hours.

The initial findings were not promising. The top of the tower was just under two hundred feet but it was set back a half mile—too far from the gate. He went to the online map of the air force base and examined the perimeter. He needed a direct line of sight or ran the risk of the electromagnetic pulse being disbursed or absorbed by any number of dense materials, from certain types of wood to iron.

The northwest region looked promising. He enlarged the image and studied it more closely. The juncture of streets labeled Peabody Road and Air Base Parkway put him at a point that was slightly out of range of the tower—but only just. He could not tell from the map whether there was a military fence at that corner. He couldn't take the chance.

But it appeared to him that if he traveled east along Air Base Parkway he would pass close enough to the tower. He wouldn't be able to stop there, but he wouldn't have to. All he needed was a clear shot at the tower.

I will require a vehicle for that.

Sammo felt he was still safe from personal interference, having done nothing to justify a move against him. If the man who had been following him felt a threat was imminent, he would have done more than simply show himself. Still, summoning a consulate car would only bring more American agents to the area, agents who might decide to detain them on some pretext. Sammo had to find a way to swing past the base without attracting attention. Since Air Base Parkway was a main thoroughfare, the bicycle was not an option.

He could probably take a bus that traveled that route, but his route would be known and, if they saw him tonight, the FBI might not want him near the air base a second time. Moreover, he would be trapped in a bus or even a taxi after the event, easily captured.

But there may be another way to go about it,
he thought, remembering the display case in the lobby. Deleting the photographs from his computer and camera, Sammo went to the lobby and selected several brochures. He glanced around the room, saw a number of guests, none of whom resembled the man he saw. That meant nothing. The agent could be out front smoking a cigarette, in the parking lot watching his window, or even in the room next to his eavesdropping. He would learn nothing from that or from the brochures Sammo had selected. Sammo chose several so the agent would not know which—if any—was the one that was important to him.

He spread the brochures out for the young woman behind the desk, who dutifully called the numbers and made the appointments.

She started with the only one that really mattered to him. “Is eight o'clock in the morning all right?” she asked Sammo.

“Yes,” he replied.

She booked the appointment and looked at the next brochure.

When Sammo returned to the room he sent an e-mail asking for a car to come for him at seven
A.M.
He requested a driver and a male secretary of his acquaintance. It did not matter who might intercept the message. It wouldn't do them any good.

San Francisco, California

The excavation at the bombed-out clinic proceeded slowly.

The location and force of the blast did enough damage so that engineers with the Department of Building Inspection demanded that the remaining structure be torn down. That had to wait for the inspection and preliminary report from a team of structural analysts with the insurance company.

While that was going on, the team from Eastern Rim Construction picked their way through the ruin, gathering whatever files and equipment could be salvaged for the temporary clinic that had been established in the Peter and Paul Church north of the site. Preceding them each step of the way was the robotic crawler, though the only data that interested the men was the subsurface data recorded by the radar system.

It was on the day after the explosion, when the building was still off-limits to everyone but the Eastern Rim team and the investigators, that the crawler found what they were looking for. In fact, it was the reason they had planted the bomb in the first place.

The spot was marked on the blueprints for the original building that had stood on this site, a boarding house that had survived the earthquake and fire of 1906. It was demolished in the 1950s to erect a small office building that became the clinic. The target was located in the records room—or rather, beneath it, under a layer of concrete that sat atop an old oak trapdoor. The small team made a point of informing the Department of Emergency Management liaison that they were going to focus on recovering the records for the doctors. He was very supportive of their efforts and impressed by their courage. His praise was the height of political correctness, a pat on the back for Chinese who were risking their lives to help their own kind.

Hu Kai and his fellow workers were not impressed. The patronizing attitude here—historic toward the native Chinese in San Francisco—was one of the reasons they were, in fact, putting themselves in harm's way to achieve their objective. Hu, a fifty-seven-year-old native San Franciscan, remembered the stories his grandfather used to tell, not just about the Angel Island Immigration Station that was opened in 1910 to process—and detain, often for months—Chinese immigrants. There was also the enduring injustice of the Federal Chinese Detention Act. It wasn't until 1943 that the laws were repealed, but even then the Chinese people were not as free as other Americans. Relaxed immigration laws allowed criminals to come to these shores, especially from Hong Kong, and that brought increased police scrutiny.

That brought tension,
Hu thought as he watched the laptop in what used to be an examination room.
It fostered resentment. It gave us the desire to fight for the same pride in heritage that was given so freely to African-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Gay-Americans, to every hyphenate that had done less to forge this nation than the Chinese who built the railroads and worked the silver mines and panned for gold and both planted and harvested crops across the plains.