by Lewis Perdue
Most people either don't know about or studiously ignore the vast tracts of land owned by the U.S. Department of Defense. Some, like the 165,000 acres of Fort Hunter Liggett, appear on maps.
Others, like the scores of secret research, communications, and small-unit operational bases, remain blank spots on maps and aerial photographs, phantom installations tucked into arroyos, perched on remote ridgelines, and separated from the curious by miles of forbidding alkali flats, or sitting right over some forgettable rise in the road ahead.
San Luis Obispo sits near many of these installations, and when their personnel visit town for dinner, shopping, or a concert, there are no uniforms, no extreme haircuts or overtly military behavior to call them out of a crowd.
As Dan Gabriel jogged along Pecho Valley Road, south of Morro Bay and roughly west of San Luis Obispo, he recalled his command of just such a unit, Task Force 86M, a multiservice counterterrorist unit formed years before September 11. The Army had picked him to create this covert security and intelligence unit and concealed it in the remote, rugged hills northeast of the twin containment domes of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
The nuke provided good cover because the locals remembered not to remember it despite the emergency warning and evacuation instructions printed in the front of every phone book in the county and pasted on the backs of motel-room doors next to the regulations no one ever read and the prices no one ever paid.
Gabriel rounded the road's final curve down toward the mouth of Hazard Canyon. The morning's cool breezes hung deep with the unique littoral perfumes distilled from the ageless collision of this land and this ocean. He had dreamed on beaches and bluffs overlooking every ocean in the world, but none owned his heart like this; none resurrected in him such profound regrets.
He extended his stride downhill now to maintain the easy, thoughtful pace where the breaths came so easily. He'd begun two or three miles back where he'd parked his rented Taurus in Cuesta-by-the-Sea. Dan left the road, following a seasonal creek that wept softly into the ocean at Hazard Reef. The breezes stiffened, and by the time he reached the beach the wind stiff-armed him to a momentary standstill.
The Pacific Ocean had always incited Dan Gabriel's sense of wonder. He remembered standing with his father on the cliffs at Vandenberg, back in something like 1955 before it became a missile base and some of it still grew cows. He would stand there and let his imagination play hide-and-seek with the horizon, spawning the most remarkable dreams and desires a young boy's thoughts could possibly create.
But the most compelling of all the fantasies came when he traded the endlessly wide spaces of the horizon for the living, pulsing world of the tide pools and the ocean feeding them.
Climbing down from the table-flat cliff tops to the ocean, Gabriel would lose himself for hours—days if his parents had ever allowed it—to marvel at the life there and how it thrived. He could not remember a time when he had not marveled at how the waves came in with an almost humanlike pulse, carrying food and oxygen in a salty liquid nearly identical to human blood.
Dan wanted to study the sea. But in the mid-1950s few people had heard of marine biology, and even fewer considered the oceans a resource to be studied and preserved.
Gabriel's father was not among the few.
"How can you make a living?" Bill Gabriel asked his son. "You can't afford a wife and a house being a marine biologist. Hell, boy, even the piano player in a whorehouse has got job security and a damn-near guaranteed income."
You had to think about those things, Bill Gabriel told his son over and over. He'd survived both the Great Depression and Japanese war crimes in the Bataan death march. For such a dogmatically prudent man, risk played the same emotional notes as lung cancer.
Gabriel ran faster, harder now, trying to shake the memories grabbing tight against his heart like the coral-colored volcano limpets tiling the rocks below. Regret lingered like a shadow, so he sprinted the dune trail, south toward Spooner's Cove, but the past matched his pace.
Dan's father believed in the Army for security: national and personal. He had reenlisted in the Army after World War II and been assigned to Camp Cooke, an eightysix-thousand-acre former cattle ranch in the Lompoc–Guadalupe–Santa Maria Triangle north of Santa Barbara.
Bill Gabriel rose in the ranks and before retiring made full-bird colonel. Starting in 1957, he played a vital role in Camp Cooke's transition to Vandenberg Air Force Base, the home of ballistic missiles heading to rendezvous in the South Pacific and secret spy satellites.
Against that background, Bill Gabriel would have nothing of his only son's desire to squat with his wet ass in a tide pool watching green sea anemones procreate.
Sweat poured off Dan Gabriel as he made his way down to the small, semicircular beach at Spooner's Cove, now part of the Montana de Oro State Park, which ran from Morro Bay down to the Diablo Canyon exclusion zone. Dan skirted the cove to avoid the early-morning beach-combers, charged up the hill past the small park headquarters, and set off along the rim of the bluffs above the surf.
He had inherited his father's stubbornness. So it came as no surprise to anyone but Bill Gabriel when Dan enlisted in the Navy right out of high school, despite having stellar grades, all-around athletic ability, and a family mailbox filled with offers of scholarships from prestigious universities on both coasts. Dan saw the Navy as his back door to the ocean and the underwater demolition teams as a way to get a face-to-face view.
South of the park's campground, Gabriel veered off the paved road onto a serpentine dirt track paralleling the bluffs rim.
About the time Dan had completed his basic training and had begun the rigorous physical and mental preparation for what was then known as the Underwater Demolition Teams, Bill Gabriel mounted a campaign to reclaim his son for the Army.
Bill secretly used his considerable network of military and political contacts to petition the California congressional delegation for an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
In January 1962, President John E Kennedy created the Navy's unconventionalwarfare unit known as the SEALs. Dan and three of his UDT comrades made the cut for SEAL Team One. Bill Gabriel did not attend the commissioning ceremony.
The ceremony to mark a new beginning for the first SEAL unit brought an ending for Dan instead. After the events, the base commander, and a full-blown captain with more scrambled eggs on his hat than a Grand Slam special at Denny's, approached Dan. A fullbird Army colonel accompanied them.
The base commander introduced Dan to the captain, who presented him with honorable discharge documents. The colonel introduced himself as a friend of his father's and handed him the documents for the U.S. Military Academy.
Before Dan could speak, his base commander delivered the finale of the lifechanging trifecta: Whether Dan accepted or rejected the appointment to West Point, his Navy discharge was final.
His father had won.
Coming around the rim of the little cove where the rock layers on the beach were tilted nearly vertically, Dan slowed to run his eyes over the narrow battle zone between the waves and the earth and caught sight of a man and a boy of maybe ten, kneeling around a tide pool. His heart snagged on the scene and he slowed first to a jog, then a fast walk.
At that singular moment, he would have given anything to exchange places with the boy on the beach. Or his father.
West Point had turned him out in time to command a Special Forces unit that made a covert grand tour of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Later, he had been assigned to Clark Braxton's regular Army unit to do some training and scouting for potential Special Forces recruits when the now famous shrapnelthrough-the-head incident launched Braxton on a trajectory no one could ever have predicted.
The wind buffeted Dan and chilled his sweaty T-shirt as he gazed at the father and his son poking about in the tide pool. Reluctantly, he turned and resumed his run at a jog.
The shrapnel incident made Braxton and him a popu
lar media duo. While Clarke Braxton thrived on the attention, Gabriel found a graceful exit in a command where publicity equaled failure: Task Force 86M.
Pentagon planners originally envisioned TF86M as a covert team designed to challenge security operations at nuclear power plants and military facilities.
The job of the small groups of the most highly skilled Special Forces members, pulled together from all the military branches and wired into the intelligence community, had been to play the role of terrorists and enemy special-forces teams and attempt security breaches at high-priority targets.
While Dan's tactics stirred a firestorm among facilities embarrassed by their penetrations, it also improved security in places most in need. It also kept base commanders on their toes because nobody wanted to be Dan Gabriel's latest victim.
Many of those embarrassed by Task Force 86M never forgot, and it earned him enemies in high places. But in the early days of Task Force 86M, it didn't take long for the Pentagon brass to recognize Gabriel's task force as the best-trained covert attack team in the armed forces. Under Gabriel's command, TF86M became the "go to" unit for covert action. More important, the location of the unit's HQ allowed Dan to study the ocean. He took classes at nearby Cal Poly and entertained fantasies of retiring to live as a latter-day Doc Ricketts.
But before the dream could spin itself out, Braxton tapped Dan as chief of staff and launched him on another career in the upper echelons of the Pentagon.
On this warm summer morning he gave his best finish-line sprint, trying to outrun the memories as the fence ahead rushed toward him.
The military had sustained him, nourished him. Braxton became the axis about which Dan's life had revolved for decades. But now Braxton had handed him a corrosive order that ate at Dan Gabriel's heart more caustically and painfully than his father's betrayal: killing Brad Stone.
Nothing felt right. None of Braxton's arguments had found the usual decisive tipping points in his heart: sacrificing for the greater good, closing off the compartments of a sinking ship, the personal obligations, the hell of war. None of those balanced the acids eating at Dan.
Things had grown worse when he pulled Stone's records. He shared a lot with Stone. They'd been enlisted men, performed some of the same kinds of missions. Stone would have fit in at Task Force 86M but had followed his medical dream instead.
Nothing Dan clutched at justified ending Stone's dream. But if he didn't follow through with Braxtons order, he was pulling the pin on a grenade with national— international implications—it would leave Braxton's career and his reputation mortally wounded, his presidency dead, the nation with no other choice but to choose one of the intellectual pygmies and sleazy political tools who had run a great country into the ground with rancor and self-dealing.
Failure to follow the General this time would be the ultimate career suicide as well. Dan had no friends outside the military, no colleagues not connected with it, no support mechanism. Even more seriously, doing this would create mortal enemies among those he had served for decades. He'd be completely isolated, and he had little doubt his actions would push some over the edge and they would eventually come after him. He'd spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Gabriel did not stop when he got to the fence where signs warned of dire consequences for trespassers. Instead, he cut sharply up the hill and redoubled his pace, slowing only when he got to the road near the restrooms.
He broke into a fast walk here and followed the road beyond the fence with his eyes, spotting his favorite trail in the forbidden area, the one south of Coon Creek making its way over the ridgeline. His old unit still trained over there; somebody would eventually shoot at him if he tried running the trail now.
The decision about Stone twisted like a blade in his chest. Duty and loyalty struggled with right and wrong. His entire career had been about subordinating free will to the command structure. You could not win a war by allowing soldiers to act on orders or not depending on how they felt about the moral implications.
Despite this, Dan realized then he had to stop letting other people make his decisions. And that came down to his life or Stone's. Nothing could alter that no matter how fast he ran.
CHAPTER 59
In less than ten minutes, we settled Myers on the front-room bed with a quilt and loaded our gear, the sniper's personal effects, and her pistol into his truck. I wanted the M21 but Myers needed it for his case.
With time fast running out on our call to Shanker, Jasmine and I said good-bye, and got in Myers's pickup. I drove us away from the shack.
Jasmine stared straight ahead, alone with her thoughts. Somewhere overhead, the sun burned at the fog, turning it into an omnipresent, white, luminous glare that made me squint through the cross-hatching of my own eyelashes. The glare dimmed as the woods closed in on us again. I followed the road through another bright white clearing and back into the trees.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Ten fifty-nine."
I slowed the truck where the road widened into a flat area, and suddenly a pale silver SUV emerged from the fog way too fast.
"Damn!" I jammed on the brakes and we skidded to a stop inches behind a Toyota 4Runner parked alongside the road.
"Do you suppose… ?" Jasmine bent aver, pulled the rental car keys from the sniper's hat, and held them up. I waved a hand at them and looked at my watch.
"It's eleven," I said. "Got to stick to our mission."
"The number's already punched in." She handed me one of the prepaid cell phones. I pushed the send button and got voice mail on the first ring.
"Listen carefully, I don't have much time," Shanker's voice quavered. "Forget my office. They're watching. We have to do this now. I don't think they're listening to this, but in case they are, here's what you have to remember: your grandfather, the Judge, used to tell a lot of stories about you. One he told over and over concerns how that cotton gin made you wet your pants. Meet me there at three A.M. The moon should be down by then. Make sure you're not followed. Park somewhere away from the place. Meet me at the wagon pass-through."
I waited for the menu options, selected the one for replay, and handed it to Jasmine. I studied the Toyota SUV and a plan emerged.
"That's it?" she said as she pressed the "end" button.
"It's enough."
"You know what he's talking about?"
I nodded. "It's local legend. I was seven… I sneaked off from Al Thompson out at Mossy and climbed into a wagon full of freshly picked cotton. The wagon got hitched up and headed for the gin in Itta Bena with me inside."
"Why Itta Bena? The Morgan City gin's closer."
"The Judge owned part of the Itta Bena gin."
"I get the picture. So, what scared you so badly?"
"Well, I was seven and being all alone in the wagon was bad enough. Then knowing I was in trouble for sneaking away But when they pulled the cotton wagon under the tin overhang and cranked up the huge suction hose that pulled the cotton into the main ginning section, I wet my pants.
"There was a place, an observation port, showing all the whirling cogs stripping the fibers off the seeds. I had watched it any number of times and seen the workers suck up an entire wagonload of cotton with that giant vacuum hose in what seemed like seconds.
"So, when they got to my wagon, my seven-year-old brain visualized every inch of my doom… sucked up through the hose and shredded by the gin."
"Obviously that didn't happen."
"Obviously. The suction hose is probably a foot in diameter and I would never have fit."
"But they played you like a violin."
"Oh, yeah. Made sure I wouldn't do it again. When the Judge found out I had wet my pants, he figured that was punishment enough." I smiled at the memory. "So anyway, we know where to meet Shanker. The big problem is how do we avoid cops until then. They're out there and the fog can't last forever. We can't just park somewhere. We can't call anybody you know, and I don't know anybody here any mor
e."
"Let's think about that while we see if this key fits." Jasmine held up the sniper's rental-car key.
"Remember: John's calling 911. We better be gone before the first vehicles arrive." She nodded. We got out and made our way to the SUV. Jasmine tried the key in the driver's door; it opened easily.
"Start the engine," I said. "If we have gas, let's take this one and leave John's here."
Jasmine got in and started the engine.
"Three-quarters of a tank."
"Okay: I said. "Open the back." I grabbed my duffel and one of Jasmine's bags from the back of the pickup. Jasmine opened the back of the SUV, and when I saw what was inside, I nearly dropped our luggage in the mud.
"Whoa!"
I set the bags on the tailgate and jumped in. The first thing I picked up was a Night Quest PVS-14. I held it up.
"What?"
"This is serious night-vision gear." I put it down, then picked up the Raptor nightvision scope. "This is the civilian version of a heavy-duty night sniper scope." I put the scope down and peeked into the other bags.
"There's a freaking armory here!" An empty hard-sided rifle case lay open, then next to it another one with an M21 rifle and Leupold scope. "She's not working alone. And from the looks of things, she's got military backing.
"We need to move fast," I said.
Jasmine opened her mouth to reply, then the first faint notes of a siren made their way through the fog. She lunged for the driver's seat and put the SUV in gear as I slid in and slammed my door.
CHAPTER 60
Dan Gabriel squinted against the gusting wind and made his way along the treelined sidewalk of Higuera Street toward the heart of old San Luis Obispo. Tourists and summer-school students from Cal Poly jammed the sidewalks along with an army of panhandlers trolling for spare change.
