A Time for War (31 page)

“We have fielded enough vehicles now to spot those that are routinely following us,” Jintao had told him. “We have engaged an outside resource to make sure the car en route to you is delayed several minutes.”

“I need no more than three minutes to make the switch,” Sammo had told him.

“You will have that,” Jintao had promised.

Sammo almost felt bad for the FBI agent who had remained in the lobby. He was a dedicated man who was clearly surprised by a maneuver that was old when the Chinese nation was young: Sammo switching places with a secretary he had met at acclimation classes in Beijing. Sammo liked winning, but he enjoyed it more when it was a challenge and not a simple exercise. In this case, he had left himself several options.

He had made reservations at various tourist attractions in case the FBI tracker car made it across the bridge and it was necessary for the consular car to tie them up. Sammo had watched YouTube videos of the stunt plane ride and the hot air balloon trip. Both operated just north of the base and would have afforded Sammo proximity and an elevated vantage point from which to hit his target. The plane would even have given him a route of escape. He carried a small knife hidden inside a key, which had never been detected in any security checkpoint he had passed through. A blade to the pilot's neck would have given him a ride to any local airport of his choosing.

“There is confusion ahead.”

The voice of the driver drew Sammo to full alert. He looked down the wide road. Vehicles were slowing. It appeared that foot soldiers were leaving the base. He lowered the window and looked out.

They were armed soldiers, not vehicles. And they were apparently blocking the road. With the window down, Sammo heard the distinctive
rap-rap-rap
of a helicopter coming along the thoroughfare from behind.

Perhaps he had congratulated himself too soon.

The car stopped along with the rest of the traffic. Sammo opened the door and stood on the seat so he could see ahead. Traffic was being stopped in both directions. No one was being permitted past the air base. He shielded his eyes and looked up. Air traffic seemed to be holding above the base.

So,
he thought.
They had figured
something
out. Something close to the truth.

This was the challenge he had wanted. He knew it would not be long before his clumsy but obviously dogged adversary was upon him.

Other motorists were getting out of their cars, trying to find out what was going on. Sammo got back inside. He raised the window.

“Leave the vehicle,” he told the driver.

“Sir?”

“Get out and go anywhere, it doesn't matter—just away from here. Leave the engine running.”

The driver acknowledged and got out. He walked toward a shoe store at the side of the road. Sammo took out his key knife and began ripping up the seat. He pulled the padding out, strewed it along the floor. Then he gutted the back of the seat, tearing out as much of the padding there as he could. He took his cigarette lighter from his pants pocket and broke it, spilling the contents inside the gutted backrest. He squeezed into the front seat, cut the cushions there, and pushed in the cigarette lighter. He turned the fan on full and directed the vents toward the back. When the cigarette lighter popped out, he ignited the padding front and back then flipped it into the hollowed-out seatback in the rear of the car. The lighter fluid ignited with a breathy sound.

Flames rose quickly and the fans blew them toward the back. Sammo exited the car and headed in the same direction as the driver. Other motorists began to notice the charcoal-gray smoke curling from the sedan. They shouted, left their cars, and ran in every direction. Sammo turned as he reached the shoe store parking lot, saw the helicopter coming closer to investigate. It crept ahead cautiously, not wanting to get too near the burning car. Sammo figured it would be another minute or so before the fan-blown flames reached the fuel tank.

Sammo walked on, toward the helicopter, as a thickening crowd of people raced around him. There were words he couldn't understand, cries that were universal. He looked behind him, saw soldiers on the edge of the line straining to see what was causing the smoke.

Sammo looked back at the helicopter. It was inching forward.

With a sense that his personal journey had come full circle, he raised his right arm toward the single-rotor aircraft.

He pressed the button on the device he wore.

*   *   *

“Mr. Fitzpatrick? We're all stuck in traffic.”

The voice of driver Eric Enslin of Fairfield Livery and Limos reached Al Fitzpatrick as the agent was running along Suisun Valley Road headed toward Interstate 80. Fitzpatrick was not surprised by the message.

He had phoned the police department to request transportation to Travis, which was about seven miles away. He was told there were no cars available, that they were all headed toward Air Base Parkway. With traffic going northeast already starting to back up near the entrance, there was no point commandeering a vehicle. He reached the on-ramp and started running around the slowed traffic.

“I see smoke,” the FBI agent said into the phone.

“Sorry? Can't hear you—”

“Smoke!” Fitzpatrick shouted, wishing he had brought his Bluetooth. He slowed to a brisk walk so he could be understood. “Do you see smoke?”

“Yeah,” Enslin said. “Hold on, there's a chopper overhead. I can't hear a damn—”

The sound reached Fitzpatrick over the phone before it came rolling across the city. It was a crackling pop that accompanied a flash above the freeway. The flare came from the ground up, under the smoke. The sound he heard thundering down the road was an explosion.

Fitzpatrick was running again. He got onto the freeway, saw the helicopter in the distance and fire on the ground ahead of it.

“Mr. Enslin?” He looked at the phone. The call had not been disconnected. “Mr. Enslin?”

“
Jesus
! I'm gettin' out—that car just—”

The call ended suddenly. Fitzpatrick watched as hills of fire rose, one after another, from the site of the first explosion. The booms followed immediately thereafter, blending into a mass of sound as smoke, flame, and shards of metal tumbled skyward. He barely heard the screams of motorists around him who had stopped their cars, got out, and were watching the holocaust unfold.

Fitzpatrick was still moving forward, shouldering through cars and pockets of onlookers, when the helicopter went down. It was well above the smoke and flame, and did not appear to have been struck by debris because there was no struggle to control it, no lopsided moves of a rotor that had been struck and bent.

It just fell straight down.

There were more cries of horror from the crowd as the aircraft threw off a spray of yellow-orange flame that was quickly consumed by churning black clouds. It reminded Fitzpatrick of an upside-down atomic bomb, with the mushroom cloud on the roadway. It was difficult to gauge, but it looked to him as though a half mile or more of Air Base Parkway had been swallowed in the series of explosions.

Conflicting feelings of urgency and outrage, despair and guilt fought for control of Fitzpatrick's mind. He had to push them aside and focus on purpose. There was no question in his mind about what had happened to the chopper and who was behind this. The tracker car on the Bay Bridge hadn't been “killed” because the killer was here, waiting to strike.

Finding that man was his purpose.

There was no point continuing ahead. He turned back to get to a hotel landline. As he ran he thought of the cab driver he had inadvertently sent to his death—and of all the others who had died because of him. It was his caution, his passive surveillance, his falling for that simple bait and switch that had allowed the terrorist to get away.

This is on you,
he told himself.
You could have prevented it.

He ran harder, hoping the effort would somehow shut down his thinking. If there was any consolation, it was that they had apparently prevented a larger disaster at the air force base itself. He could not even imagine what would have happened if a huge C-130 transport—taking off, loaded with fuel—or a squadron of fighter jets or
all
of them had gone down over the city.

You did that much,
he told himself through a sudden rush of emotion.
You and Forsyth made the right call.

As he ran, Fitzpatrick tried to call Forsyth to report what had happened. His call did not go through. He wondered if the airwaves were jammed or if power to local towers had been cut to keep the perpetrator from communicating with
his
superiors.

It didn't matter. Forsyth would know soon enough.

As he raced back along Suisun Valley Road he flashed back to his college days, when he first learned of the 9/11 attacks and the immediate, temporary shutdown of American airspace. That enactment of SCATANA, the Plan for the Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids, lasted only until September 13.

Having a terrorist on the loose with the ability to bring down aircraft from the skies? God only knew the impact that would have.

Fitzpatrick's small, sole hope was that God would find time, among these larger concerns, to forgive him for the job he hadn't done well enough.

 

PART THREE

Counterattack

 

1

San Francisco, California

Doc Matson woke early after a restful night. He always slept well after biking, flying, and doing damage to bad guys.

He had planned to spend the day researching the U.S.-Mexican border outside of Victoria, Texas, where he'd be headed in a few days. But after checking his cell phone and computer and finding no messages from Abe Cohen, he decided to go out for an early morning ride to Abe's shop in North Beach.

The old wood-structure shop on the corner of Bay and Taylor was closed. That didn't surprise Doc: it was not quite six
A.M.
But the mail from the previous day was still lying on the floor where it had been shoved through the slot and the drain pan from his ancient dehumidifier was nearly overflowing.
What an environmentalist,
Doc thought as he emptied the pan.
The air's a little damp for Abe's taste and he slaps an electricity-sucking machine on it.

Doc went around back. Abe lived alone in a second-floor apartment. The mail was still in the box. No one answered the bell. Doc forced the door easily with a push. Abe didn't have anything worth stealing and didn't bother with security—or a lock that was younger than the sixty-seven-year-old door. Doc felt for the wall switch, turned on the light, looked around the apartment that smelled from a blend of weed, unfiltered Camels, and roasted Brussels sprouts. Abe was always igniting some leafy thing or another.

The bed wasn't made but Abe wasn't in it. Doc went to the bathroom, felt his toothbrush. The bristles were dry.

What the hell happened?
Doc wondered as he walked back to the door.
You drop your damn phone in the head?

Even if he did, the Defever Pilothouse had a radio. He would have called for assistance.

If Abe was hurt, minutes could matter. Angry that he'd waited even this long when he suspected something might be wrong, Doc called the small, family-owned marina where Abe kept his tub of a boat.

“It's gone,” the owner told him. “Been out since yesterday afternoon.”

“You haven't heard from him?”

“Not a single sour note,” she said.

That was it. He phoned ahead to Hayward to have his plane ready to go. Then he climbed on his Ultra Classic Electra Glide. Before he started it he pulled out his phone and scrolled through his text messages. There it was—Abe had texted,
I'm going to go listen to elephant seals fart, it'll be an improvement over you.
He'd been headed for the Farallon Islands. Doc fired up the Electra Glide and sped to the airport.

Less than an hour later he was headed west over the Pacific toward the Farallons. Seen from the air, the granite outcroppings were a jagged black curlicue of rock surrounded by churning white water. The highest of the peaks was 154 feet above the water on the Island of St. James, one of the total of three islands and four smaller, nameless rocks. Though he himself wasn't a sailor, Doc had always admired the pluck of Sir Francis Drake—reportedly the first human being to land here—for pausing during his 1579 around-the-world journey to collect eggs and seal meat from St. James, which the English privateer also named.

Doc didn't know whether to feel relief or concern as he neared the roiling coastline. There were only the birds and sea mammals that frequented the shores; he saw no sign of Abe or his vessel.

The westward-lying shadows were long and stark, and Doc flew low and wide around the island to make sure he wasn't missing anything. There were plenty of little inlets where a small vessel could have gone down.

There was no flotsam or jetsam that Doc could see, and the waters were opaque enough to hide anything that might be below the surface—including sharks, which was one reason they were able to prey successfully on the local fauna.

However, Doc did see something on Noonday Rock, named for a clipper ship that struck it in 1863 and sank in less than an hour. Doc looked back, saw the thin streak of light flash again. It looked almost like an old-school jeep antenna, one seen at night by muzzle flashes of an AK-47.

To each his own memory,
Doc thought as he heard an imaginary Abe yelling in his ear,
“Does everything have to be a gun or knife fight to you?”

Doc angled around for another look. Noonday was arguably the least welcoming spot in the national wildlife refuge, a desolate place that most of the tour boats avoided because of underwater outcroppings. But it was a natural, lonely, isolated place for someone as perpetually gloomy as Abe to visit, especially someone who knew these waters.