by Fritz Galt
“Officer,” Perry shouted above the excited voices. “I’m with the FBI. Are you the one who reported the brown Toyota?”
“Yes, sir. That’s me. Whoops.”
Having turned away from the hang glider, the patrolman lost his grip on the delta wing, and the young man pulled free digging up sand under his heels. The man threw his body over the cliff and soared out over the blue water.
“Damn it,” the patrolman shouted.
“Let him go,” Perry said. “He’s not the suspect.”
The crowd around them “ooh-ed” and “ah-ed” as the young man swung in graceful circles over the ships, a steady breeze lifting him higher and higher.
“Where’s the Toyota?” Perry asked.
“No longer here. It was parked up by the Presidio base, but now it’s gone.”
“See who was driving it?” Perry asked, holding up the photo of Ferrar.
The patrolman shook his head. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“Which direction did it go?”
Again, a shrug.
Another dead end. But if Ferrar were there earlier, he would have had a purpose, perhaps leaving a trail of witnesses.
“Look,” Perry said to the patrolman. “I want you to check out this crowd. In addition to Ferrar, look for anybody who looks like a foreigner, check his IDs and detain him under any pretext necessary. Ferrar is working with illegal aliens and he’s a master of disguise, so keep on your toes.”
The patrolman waded into the crowd, checking IDs.
Perry swept the crowd of mainly young people free from school who had been herded away from the beach by park authorities. Two retirees stood along the side of the road with fishing poles. They would have been on the beach long before the youngsters.
He showed them the photograph.
One man grabbed the picture and studied it closely.
“Yup. I seen that man this morning. Came down here to make out with a young woman.” He pointed to a log at the bottom of the dune. “After that, I minded my own business.”
“What did the woman look like?”
“Tall, blonde, good-looking.”
That matched the photographs found in Bonnie Taylor’s home.
“What were they doing?” Perry asked.
“Like I said, I don’t know. I respect other people’s privacy.”
“Did they have weapons?” Perry asked.
This got the man’s attention, then a snort. “Yup, they were rubbing their gun barrels together to stay warm.”
Suddenly mayhem broke out near a television crew up the road where the patrolman had wandered off. People’s attention turned from the swooping hang glider to the ruckus.
Perry pushed through the crowd to investigate.
“It’s Ferrar! It’s Ferrar!” a voice was shouting.
“Get your hands off me,” an infuriated, accented voice cried.
Camera lights and sun reflectors turned toward several men circling each other.
“I am Milos Guerve of Channel 6 News,” the man was shouting.
Cameras continued rolling. A producer had hopped up on a chair and was directing their angles.
When Perry arrived, he had to pry several young women aside. He was just in time to see the patrolman wrestling a nicely dressed fellow to the ground.
Perry knocked aside a cameraman and plunged into the fray, clawing at the man to try and get a better view of his face.
The suspect remained pinned to the sand on his belly, his face averted, his voice shouting out epithets in a foreign tongue and generally resisting arrest.
“It’s Ferrar, I tell you. I saw his driver’s license,” the patrolman insisted.
But the producer had jumped into the action and was swinging away at the two officers of the law.
Overhead, Perry was vaguely aware of several helicopters swinging low and darting toward them.
“Oh my God, the ships are aiming their guns at us,” a young woman screamed.
“Duck! They’re gonna lob missiles at us!”
Congressman Ralph W. Connors marched triumphantly through the Pentagon’s Ops Center waving the fax he had received from Ferrar that morning.
Amidst a chaotic hubbub of activity—officers swirling around, shouting commands, listening to several telephones at once, with Leo Pollo riding herd over the entire bunch—Lester Friedman sat calmly sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
Connors shoved the pictures under Lester’s nose. “Here’s your son.”
Lester shot to his feet, his composure instantly gone, and grabbed the fax. His jaw dropped. The two pictures clearly showed Tray dressed in a Coast Guard officer’s uniform leaving a quaint house in the dark. It was dated December 11.
“If Ferrar took these pictures today…” Lester spluttered, seemingly unable to grasp the implications.
“Then your son’s been on the lam since Tora Bora,” Connors finished his thought.
Just then Connors heard a shout from several officers standing in front of a television screen.
It was a San Francisco affiliate feed into CBS. At first Connors was confused.
It looked like several men wrestling in the sand.
The network anchor in New York was trying to explain. “It appears that officials in San Francisco are in the process of apprehending a suspect who might be wanted in connection with the imminent terrorist attack. It looks like American officials have taken one step closer to averting a potentially devastating strike.”
“Get him!” Lester shouted in the suddenly quiet room.
A cutaway shot showed the turrets of various destroyers and a battleship turning toward shore, and the fracas.
“Let’s try to listen in on the audio feed,” the CBS anchorman said.
For some unknown reason, the crowd around the wrestling men suddenly ducked to the ground and covered their heads with their hands, leaving a lone, bloodied producer to shout at his cameramen from atop a folding chair. In the eerie silence that ensued, the producer’s voice carried in the wind: “Get off him. Get off my man.”
The CBS anchor was handed a sheet of paper. “Apparently,” he read, “the culprit is a male Caucasian named George Ferrar, a rogue CIA operations officer-turned-terrorist.”
“That’s him!” Lester shouted. “Blow him away.”
Leo and the other officers around him stood frozen at the television monitors.
Connors suddenly felt faint, as if the entire world was collapsing under his feet.
“A call from the Commander of Pacific Command, sir,” a communications officer said, holding a phone to his uniformed chest.
“I’ll take that,” Leo said grimly. He listened for a moment, then told the navy commander, “Just hold your fire for a moment while we identify the suspect.”
Sand was still billowing from the hand-to-hand combat high on a hillside that overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge.
At last the plainclothesman and patrolman gained the upper hand, to wild applause and cheers from the Ops Center. Briefly, the suspect’s head appeared above the tussle, an expression of confusion written on his young face.
“That’s not Ferrar,” Connors shouted at once. “That’s somebody else.”
“Commander, hold your fire,” Leo said sharply into the phone. “Get your finger off that trigger.”
Lester sank back into his seat and looked sick.
“That guy is a decoy,” Connors said. “Tray Bolton must be behind this.”
Lester stirred. “No. It has all the earmarks of George Ferrar. He’s diverting our attention away from whatever else he has in mind.”
Bonnie tried calling her office several more times without success.
She wheeled the Toyota around and headed back into oncoming traffic, aiming south toward where the Vigilant was normally berthed. Most of the patrol ships, crew quarters and maintenance facilities were on the opposite side of the bay in Oakland. Hers was a solitary Coast Guard station.
She was going to have to report the s
tolen cutter to her boss, Rear Admiral Vince Gerard, who was theater commander stationed on the Naval Frigate Tribute.
Gerard sounded distracted when he took her call. “Speak fast,” he said. “We’ve got our guns trained on Ferrar up in the cliffs overlooking the bay. It looks like he’s gonna commit some kind of terrorist act.”
“He isn’t there. He’s on the bay, heading out to my cutter. The Vigilant may have been hijacked. Turn your guns on her, if anything.”
“Hold on,” he said, and his voice grew muffled as he talked with someone else. She listened in. “What’s that, Commander? Of course you should take your guns off the shoreline,” he said to somebody who had to be the Commander of PACOM himself. “Ferrar’s already on the bay.”
“Don’t aim for Ferrar,” Bonnie said desperately when Gerard came back on the phone. “He isn’t the culprit. It’s another CIA operative named Tray Bolton who’s hijacked my cutter.”
“Does the Pentagon know about this?” he asked suspiciously, as if all truth had to originate from Washington.
“You have to call the Pentagon and let them know.”
“Where are you, Taylor?”
“Here in Bayview,” Bonnie said, “dodging cars. But I’m near a police port facility.”
“Well, I’ve got a marine chopper down there at Bayview right now. Get your ass up here to my ship on the double. I want you to tell the commander in person what the hell’s going on.”
“You’ve got it, sir,” she said.
The police port facility was an outcropping of buildings just a block away, and she noticed a chopper’s blades start to whirl above the rooftops.
But there was no access road to the facility.
She jumped out of her car and began to sprint.
Ferrar watched Tray Bolton and the Vigilant pass under the Bay Bridge without incident. Within minutes it would join a flotilla of curiosity seekers in pleasure boats congregated just short of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Gunning his engine to the max, Ferrar pulled up in the wake of the Vigilant as it threaded through the bank of sailboats, motorboats and cabin cruisers.
He cut back the power, broke through the huge wall of water and sidled up to the Coast Guard cutter. A bloody, motionless arm reached over the stern of the cutter, its fingers swinging back and forth in the spray. Curiously, Ferrar spotted nobody else on deck.
He took a running leap from his pilot boat onto the transom of the Vigilant. He caught it with both hands, his feet dangling just above the waterline.
Slowly, he pulled himself up on deck. Then he scrambled across the open area to a dark patch of shade on the port side.
From that position, he could see the world-famous, orange suspension bridge growing larger as they approached. Beyond that, a row of gunships sat poised out at sea.
Their turrets were all swiveling in his direction.
A man shouted in Arabic above him. Ferrar translated quickly in his mind, “They’re aiming at us. What should I do?”
“I’ll get the chief,” another man replied in Arabic, and ran down the steps from the bridge.
Through a porthole, Ferrar watched the man enter the cabin, where another kneeled hunched over a large metal box.
“Hurry up,” the voice shouted from above.
“I am hurrying,” the kneeling man called back. Ferrar recognized the voice at once. It was Tray Bolton speaking Arabic. “Atom bombs aren’t toys, you know,” he added in English.
Ferrar took one last look at the metal box. Two small lids were open on the device, both of which normally covered control buttons the likes of which he had never seen before.
He didn’t want to see the device blow up in the middle of the densely populated metropolitan area. But he also had to stop the terrorists before the military did. If the gunships opened fire on them, the resulting radiation leak might poison the environment for generations.
He needed to send out a message.
Prowling aft, he peered around the corner of the bridge. Directly below the bridge was some sort of office, perhaps the radio room.
He slipped through the main hatchway past the busy men and crossed into the room, closing the metal door behind him. Unfortunately, there was no lock.
In the dim light of a single porthole, he found a narrow-band direct-printing telegraph machine, the modern name for what was formerly called a wireless telegraph.
He put on a set of earphones and turned a dial until he picked up a frequency that chattered with electronic traffic. That would have to do.
Then he tapped out a message in Morse code, just as footsteps approached. He was tapping in the final dash-dot and dash when the door creaked open.
Since September 11th, half the Seventh Fleet had steamed from ports in Hawaii, San Diego and Japan to defend California’s coast. Among the activated ships was an electronics marvel, a signals ship bristling with satellite dishes, radars and antennae of every sort.
That morning, the USS Endorse had gotten a call to head two hundred nautical miles north toward San Francisco.
Not a fast ship, the Endorse lagged behind the battleship group. Military and police radio signals were crisscrossing the airwaves a mile a minute, mixing with communications among ships and between ships and shore.
Seaman First Class Anthony Carlson sat in the radio room, handling electronic transmissions, essentially faxes and electronic messages destined for other ships. His job was to ignore the official messages and eavesdrop on any possible terrorist transmission. His signal processor looked for key phrases such as “terror,” “bomb,” and “Allah.”
A hand-entered message that he was picking up at that moment seemed to fit the bill.
He printed directly to a sheet-fed printer and hurried to the officer in charge of the radio room.
“Got a hit, sir,” Anthony reported, handing over the sheet of paper.
It read, “terrorist nuclear warhead on uss vigilant.”
Lieutenant Terry Whitcomb took one look at it and asked, “Source of transmission?”
Anthony returned to his workstation and checked the screen. “Signal triangulated to a source on the Oakland Bay side of the Golden Gate Bridge. From a ship, it seems.”
“Try to contact back on the same frequency.”
Anthony bent over his telegraph arm. “Please identify yourself,” he said aloud as he tapped.
They waited for a full minute. No response.
“I’m taking this to the captain,” Lieutenant Whitcomb said, and bounded out of the room.
Anthony turned back to his computer screen that was divided into four parts to monitor several active frequencies at the same time.
There were no more signals from the mystery ship on the bay.
Chapter 29
Ferrar allowed the metal door to swing open into the radio room. A breathless Middle Eastern man shivering in a football jacket stepped through.
The man bore a mystified look, as if he were trying to figure out how the door had shut in the first place.
Ferrar didn’t give him time to work it out. A blunt blow with two interlocked fists to the back of the man’s neck sent him stumbling into the room.
Ferrar caught the muscular body before it knocked over the radio table and attracted more attention.
“That was for Gopher O’Brien,” Ferrar said, recalling the first victim tumbling down the slope outside the Tora Bora cave in an ambush that had set off the entire downward spiral of events.
One down. How many more to go?
Overhead, a helicopter was shooting past.
Through the side window of the U.S. Marine Corps UH-1N Huey helicopter, Bonnie looked down at her Coast Guard cutter, the Vigilant. It was heading for the center of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Suddenly something clicked in her mind. The bridge! Tray had looked so earnest and stalwart that spring evening as they stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. Out of nowhere, he had produced an enormous diamond ring for her and proposed marriage.
She ha
dn’t wanted him or needed him. But she feared him, so she had let him down gently. Then she had hightailed it out of California. And so had he, straight into the Navy.
The situation had felt awkward at the time, but in the end Tray seemed adequately placated. He was a big man and he could take a hit. Or could he?
Was he seeking some sort of revenge?
“What’s happening down there on the Vigilant?” the marine pilot asked his crew.
His copilot shook his head. “No crew on deck. They must be below.”
How could she alert George? The Golden Gate Bridge was a likely site for Tray’s revenge. But how did he intend to carry out his act? She couldn’t imagine.
Beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, a line of warships blockaded the bay. They faced the bridge broadside in a threatening posture.
Looking down at the Vigilant again, Bonnie flinched. Two men were scrambling up on deck.
“Watch out, sir,” she cried. “They’re manning the twenty-five-millimeter gun, and they’ve brought up the rocket launcher.”
The pilot performed an evasive maneuver, sending Bonnie hard against the window. A rocket-propelled missile shrieked past the fuselage to one side. On the other, tracer bullets arced past.
Then there was a terrific boom below. Just after a cloud of smoke billowed off the gun deck of the ship, an explosive projectile whistled past.
“They’ve got missiles and anti-aircraft guns,” the co-pilot reported.
“Go to decoying countermeasures,” the pilot ordered.
“Deploying chaff and flares,” the co-pilot said.
Bonnie watched out her left-side window as chaff glittered away in a silvery cloud. Then a red flare burst out of the helicopter on the right side.
A heat-seeking missile flew up in that direction and exploded with a twang, followed by an ear-shattering blast that rocked the helicopter onto its side.
The pilot struggled to correct the pitch and roll.
The co-pilot fingered the trigger of the 2.75-inch rocket pods. “Request permission to return fire,” he said over the radio to the Commander of PACOM.
