A Time for War (37 page)

“While
we
go in on the Novurania,” Jack corrected him. Doc eyed him, but what he saw there kept him from contradicting. Jack turned to Dover. “Will you be all right minding the
Sea Wrighter
while we're gone?”

“As long as I've got Eddie,” she smiled. “Don't worry, I've steered a few boats around the Chesapeake.”

“The water's a hell of a lot rougher around the Farallons,” Doc said. “If you can't stay in one place, keep the throttle forward, 1,000 RPMs, and just circle. And watch the radar so you don't hit anything.”

“I'll be all right,” Dover said, “but it's sweet of you to worry about me.”

Jack patted the boat. “She doesn't understand,” he said to the
Sea Wrighter
. He grinned at Dover and she winked at him.

Doc handed them two pairs of night-vision glasses, a third for himself.

“Are we going to be commandos, too?” Dover asked jokingly.

“Not unless you have to be,” Jack said. “If somebody gets past Doc and me, you'll need to know how to use these.” He didn't mention that if somebody got past Doc and Jack, Dover didn't stand much of a chance. He didn't have to. They kept up the pretense. “These binoculars can be disorienting if you're a novice.”

“When and where did you learn?” she asked.

He answered, “I once spied on my ex. Long story.”

It was a commercially available model, not military, which was the only kind Doc wanted to be caught with abroad. Soldiers might not believe he was owl-watching with these, but he might buy himself a few minutes to get away while they called their base for instructions. In many countries, mercs were shot on sight.

The unit was a pair of binoculars with a large, cyclopean infrared generator in the top, center.

“There are five AA batteries in back. You just slide this switch—” Jack showed her the plastic tab on the side “—and nothing happens … unless you're looking through them.”

Jack pointed her away from the shore so the lights of the city didn't blind her. She switched them on.

“It's surreal,” she said, gazing across the ocean waves. “Like the surface of another planet.”

Jack made no comment. There were times he felt that way about everything outside of San Francisco. Even Carmel had seemed strangely foreign, made unfamiliar by the hard, unpleasant truths he'd been contemplating there and back.

Dover was about to say something but Jack turned her to look at the Golden Gate Bridge. She fell silent. Jack put on his own binoculars and the world turned into a green nebula. The towers of the bridge he loved, the bridge he had saved, looked like cuts of old camera film in a haze of phosphorescence.
Remember,
he thought.
Remember.
He was overwhelmed by emotion for his city, his home. The sight was both beautiful and—because of all his associations with that color of green, courtesy of Iraq—a threat.

*   *   *

About five miles past the bridge, the lights of San Francisco disappeared. The
Sea Wrighter
was now in a black ocean, or green for Dover, who was still wearing her night-vision binoculars. The big Grand Banks yacht was as steady as a locomotive. Her deep keel and Naiad stabilizers kept her tracking without much roll. About an hour later they reached the islands.

Doc had gone wide to bring the yacht in so they were blocked from moonlight. With black ink he marked on a shoreline chart the point where he had seen the tarp and where he felt it was best to make landfall with the dinghy. There were two other marks, one in red, one in green.

“There's about five hundred feet of rock that will be slippery with sea water and guano,” he said. “Slip on the galoshes I brought,” he said, pointing to a locker. “You'll need them.”

“What's the drill?” Jack asked as they pulled them on.

“Three minutes after I go ashore you steer the launch here,” he pointed to the green mark.

“What if he's armed?” Dover asked.

“I will already be here,” he pointed at the red mark. “He shows himself, I take him.”

Jack studied the shoreline chart as Doc and Dover maneuvered the launch into the water. Dover noticed the Walther P99 semiautomatic in Doc's belt holster on his right and the drop point hunting knife in a sheath on his left side. He winked at her as he took a length of nylon rope from a locker and wound it around his arm. Dover grinned.

“We have a saying in the Spec Ops community,” he told her. “If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.”

Eddie knew when Jack was about to climb into the launch. The little guy had read his people and knew something serious was going on so he didn't protest, just licked Jack's hand. Dover gave the men a thumbs-up, but Jack saw how tightly she was hugging herself; he knew she wasn't that cold. He gave her a big smile and she visibly relaxed. Then he climbed aboard the launch.

“Remember,” Jack said to Dover, “if we don't return within two hours, turn her east and head toward the Bridge. You can call the Coast Guard on Channel 16 with a ‘Mayday' and they'll come get you in.”

It was a choppy ride around to the target side of the island. The throaty throb of the yacht's big diesels drowned out any noise from the launch for quite a distance, and even away from the boat the Yamaha motor was beautifully quiet. But the slap of the waves sounded like
ka-chunks,
heavy as footsteps in a horror movie. Jack cut the engine as they neared the shore. There were no seals here and it was as desolate a spot as one could find in the Farallons. Slipping on his night-vision glasses, Doc jumped out when they were still a few feet away. He landed panther-like on a small, flat rock and hurried inland. Jack steered away and headed for his own target. He was there in just under three minutes. Sometimes Doc's sense of time and space bordered on the supernatural.

Jack hooked his night-vision binoculars around his neck, stopped the inflatable boat, grabbed a flashlight, and went ashore. Doc had assigned him to a short stretch of what passed for beach, five yards of granite that sloped gently toward the sea. The smell of the seals thrust into his senses but his eyes were on the surrounding slope, watching for any sign of movement.

Then he saw it. A dark shape in motion, fifteen feet up.

It fascinated Jack how everything was relative. San Francisco seemed windy until you were twenty-five miles out into the ocean. The old fish market used to smell until you came to a place like this. And the sky appeared very dark until something darker moved against it. Only one figure, and it wasn't Doc because Doc would never have let Jack see him.

The fact that that wasn't Doc meant that whoever was up there would soon be down here. It was all a question of how he'd be coming. Either he was going to investigate the launch or—

The figure fell—sort of. He descended a yard to Jack's left, gagging into his balaclava mask, clawing at a length of rope around his throat. There had been no drop so his neck hadn't snapped. Doc must have noosed him from behind, kicked his legs from under him, and lowered him over the side.

As soon as the man touched down, Jack went over and punched him in the face. Then again. Choked and dazed, the man fell in a heap.

“We good?” Doc shouted from above.

“We're good,” Jack answered.

Doc let the other end of the rope drop. Jack turned the flashlight on. He flipped the man on his belly, checked the man for weapons, found none. Then he picked up the other end of the rope. Without removing the noose, Jack tied the man's hands behind him—tightly, so there was still a tugging pressure on his throat. Then he removed the mask.

“Why am I not surprised?” he said as he looked down.

The man was Asian. His eyes were narrow and his mouth was taut as he struggled to breathe.

Doc joined him, following a ridge that let him off in a pile of rocks to the west. He was holding his night-vision glasses in one hand and a Remington 700 tactical rifle with a night-vision scope in the other.

“Guess what he planned to do,” Doc said. “I just took a quick run through his tent. He's got rations, a radio, and other electronics. He's also got a lunch box full of C-4.”

“Another Chinese,” Jack said. “Our girl talks his lingo.”

Fifteen minutes later they threw the man on the deck of the
Sea Wrighter
.

“Oh, honey, you brought home a guest!” Dover grinned. “You should have warned me.”

“No friend of mine, honey,” Jack said. “Care to do a little interpreting?” Dover nodded. “Ask him if he's used the C-4 on any boats in the last twenty-four hours,” Jack said.

Dover look shocked but just turned and spoke to the man. He didn't answer. Doc dragged the man to the edge of the boat. Keeping the man half on the boat, he kicked the man's legs out over the edge, took out his knife, and ran it across one of his calves.

“Tell him that any shark within a quarter mile will be having dinner if he doesn't talk,” Doc said.

The man didn't need a translation. He started chattering.

“He says he sank a boat on standing orders from his group leader,” Dover said.

“What is the group's mission?” Jack asked.

Dover asked.

“He says he doesn't know,” she told them. “He says he is here to arrange a rendezvous.”

“With whom?” Jack asked.

There was motion in the water less than two hundred yards away, and a fin. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that a shark could take a leap and catch a leg. The man realized that and talked faster.

“He says he was supposed to coordinate a top-secret emergency departure of a contingent of fifteen people from this spot.”

“Names?”

“He's just getting to that,” Dover said. “He swears he doesn't know any names. Only code names. And a company name.”

“What company?”

“Eastern Rim Construction,” she said. “He heard it mentioned. It sounds like a front to me. And he begs you, please, to pull him from the water.”

Doc yanked him up. A few moments later a shark swam by, snapping at blood that had dripped into the waves.

“They're brave in the collective sense,” Jack said. “Not so spunky flying—or dying—solo.”

Doc raised the rifle and held it to the man's head. He screamed and gagged simultaneously. Dover gasped and half-turned.

“Find out what he did to Abe,” Doc said.

Dover asked. She moaned as she listened.

“What?” Jack asked.

“He said he found something—he couldn't let the man leave. He shot him and he went in the water.”

“Eaten?” Jack asked.

She nodded.

“The boat?”

“Sunk with explosives. About fifty yards to the east of here.”

Their prisoner was writhing, crying, trying to bend his hands in a direction they wouldn't go to release the pressure on his windpipe. Doc stood where he was, the gun barrel pressed to the man's skull.

“He still may be able to tell us things,” Jack said.

“I'll talk to him on the way back,” Dover said. “He may be able to identify other members in his group, or testify against them in a trial.”

Doc remained there a heartbeat longer, then fired into the sea at the shark.

“That's for Abe, you dead-eyed SOB,” he said as he shouldered the rifle.

Fairfield, California

It had been a long and soul-wrenching day for Al Fitzpatrick.

He had remained in Fairfield in case there were any clues to help with the search, or in the event the man had not fled the scene at all. There were enough hands in the field to grab the target if he showed up.

The office of the hotel manager was a small, mostly insulated pocket from the larger chaos of sound and destruction in Fairfield. But there was still the sobbing and angry oaths of those who came in and out of the lobby, both guests of the hotel and passersby who sought haven from the smoke and ash that still drifted from the sky. The explosions had melted the asphalt, adding the stench of melted tar to the noxious smell of burning rubber and plastic. Even in the lobby, there was a fine mist of particulate matter.

During one of his many short bathroom breaks, Fitzpatrick wondered how many of those motes had once been parts of human beings.

There was still no death toll, but estimates were placed at a minimum of seventy—which included those who were killed immediately after the blasts when pieces of automobiles and helicopter fell through stores and other vehicles.

Fitzpatrick spent the day monitoring feedback about the image of the terrorist. There were several false alarms. In a series of incidents that were disturbingly similar to the internship of Japanese-Americans during World War II, nearly two dozen individuals of Asian descent who were tagged by the surveillance cameras at bus stops, train stations, banks, service stations, airports, and in cabs were tracked and interviewed by law enforcement personnel. The number increased exponentially as the day wore on.

The facial recognition software was calibrated to expand its circle of activity with every passing minute. Using Fairfield as ground zero, it added forty miles every hour, assuming the average rate of road travel by someone trying to escape the hub of a terrorist attack.

It was nearly seven
P.M.
, when Fitzpatrick was on his fourth pot of coffee, that they got the first hit with a probability factor above eighty percent. It was at San Francisco International.

In less than three minutes of getting the HUA—heads-up alert—Carl Forsyth called Fitzpatrick.

“I think we have your man,” Forsyth said. “He bought a ticket on Lufthansa and just showed diplomatic credentials at security. That's where we got the ping. He passed the X-ray screening but they took his word on the contents of his bag, as required.”

“He didn't wait for a Chinese carrier,” Fitzpatrick said. “In a hurry to get out?”