A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  ~ * ~

  A Time For War

  Michael Savage

  No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  Prologue

  Tangi Valley, Afghanistan

  Chief Petty Officer James Grand sat on the rattling red canvas seat among thirty-eight of his fellow SEALs as the CH 47-D Chinook slashed across the dusty valley. He didn’t really see the men sitting across from him, wasn’t aware of the white sunlight coming through the big windows, washing color from the cabin—save for the bright red, white, and blue of the flag stretched across the roof three feet above him. Some genetic part of him was always aware of Old Glory, wherever he was, wherever it was, however small or large, whether it was a grocer’s lapel pin or high on a staff.

  But right now, ferrying the quick-reaction team to a firefight, James Grand wasn’t thinking of the present. He did what he always did when the uncertainty of the war closed in, when nothing was guaranteed but the present, this moment. He went back to his one pure and perfect time—the thirteenth of May 2010.

  Spring was new and their life together was younger still. James Grand and Genie Bundy stood in her parents’ backyard under a sharp blue Arizona sky, two dozen friends and relatives watching them marry. It was the last thing Chief Petty Officer Grand would do before shipping off to Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  Joining the SEALs was a tradition begun by his grandfather in 1963, a year after the Navy’s special operation force was founded. Taking a bride was part of that “big, holy deal,” as his own father had once described it. You wed, you wore your country’s uniform, and you served God by doing both. That was the proud Grand way, dating to the French and Indian War and Major Richard Grand of the Virginia militia. An only child of an only child, James felt a particular pride in being the standard-bearer for a generation.

  The shrill, clipping sound of the Chinook’s wings edged into his mind. Chief Petty Officer Grand willfully held on to the image of Genie in her simple white gown, like a little ray of sun given form and breath and a loving, trusting expression. As he spoke the vows and looked into her innocent eyes, life seemed full and complete, the future given form and clarity, the world made comprehensible. He smiled at the memory.

  ~ * ~

  The smile lasted as long as a heartbeat. A moment later the Chinook made a sickening drop that kicked Grand’s entire body up against the padded roof of the cabin. There were shouts, but they were just words: “Power…“ Down ...” “Christ ...” His body, along with those of the other men, didn’t come down until the helicopter did, smacking the barren ground like a monstrous flyswatter, the fore and aft rotors springing earthward and then up before settling into ugly, still-twisting shapes as the cabin collapsed beneath them. Sand billowed from the impact zone, followed by a fanning array of sparks. Then they were swallowed by a massive red-orange fireball that punched from the olive-green chopper to both sides of the valley before the wreckage had even settled. The flames rolled back, seeking something to burn, as black smoke churned upward, driven by the dying turns of the rotors.

  A Grand tradition perished in an instant, along with thirty-nine lives and countless futures.

  ~ * ~

  Sammo Yang, the man nearest the explosion— the only man in this remote section of the valley—smiled.

  He was behind a large rock, dead brushwood and gnarled juniper branches piled high on either side for camouflage. The Chinese national was still crouched on the balls of his feet, ready to retreat in case the helicopter was not traveling alone. It was difficult to be sure with the deafening echo generated by the twin Chinook rotors and visibility limited by winds that whipped up swirling dust devils the size of a mango tree. These windstorms were made visible by the dead foliage and sand they swept up.

  The rolling heat of the explosion hit the boulder like a silent scream blazing around him. When he felt the initial punch roll past him, the man pulled a billowing sleeve over the device strapped to his forearm. He looked over the rock, and did not see another helicopter.

  A solo flight, as most of these missions were. Tandems typically came if there was a firefight and reinforcements were required.

  The young man picked up the Type 56 assault rifle that had been hidden beneath the branches and slipped it over his right shoulder. Then he stepped sure-footedly along the rocky foothill, away from the blast. After four hours since his last break it felt good to stand, to move. He picked his way across a field with rocks the size of fists.

  The short man was dressed in the shalwar kameez of the region, a loose-fitting, long-sleeved black tunic over drawstring trousers. He wore a beard cut in the short style of Tangi Valley tribesmen and his head was covered with a black-and-white checked keffiyeh. The sweltering Arab headdress was not requisite—a topi or kufi pillbox cap would have sufficed—but he did not want anyone to see his features or skin color. Though his superiors had selected a region that was rarely traveled on the ground, there were still roving Taliban and unaffiliated bandits. If seen, he would rather not attract their attention. The Taliban would execute you if you weren’t groomed and dressed in accordance with Islamic law, and a keffiyeh was indicative of respect for tradition over comfort; the others would kill you if they thought you were an outsider carrying goods that could be sold on the black market. That included tribal messages about alliances with Americans, Pakistanis, Iranians, or local warlords; as well as American troop locations, temporary special forces outposts, and drone patterns. In war, information was as valuable as currency.

  He had none of that. What he carried was far more valuable.

  The young man rounded the edge of a bare, thousand-foot outcropping that stood jagged against the bright, late morning sky. A rugged slope spread before him. It was ten kilometers to the base: that was where he would meet his ride from Pakistan, an Aerospatiale SA 330 Puma. He didn’t have to check the GPS device tucked in an inside pocket. He knew, from photographs, the precise geologic location of latitude 34 degrees, 41 minutes, 25.08 seconds; longitude 68 degrees, 23 minutes, 54.96 seconds—the outside limit of the helicopter’s fuel capacity.

  At least the trek home was downward, though he had to cross it before sunset. Satellite reconnaissance showed that the slopes—a popular route for drug runners and Taliban fighters— were rarely traveled during the daytime when the temperature was headed to a noontime high of 120 degrees. Even scorpions and marauders waited until dusk before stirring.

  He ignored the perspiration that slipped past the folds of his headdress. He hooked a finger around the fabric and pulled it from his mouth so he could breathe the hot air. He ran the finger from side to side to expose some of his cheek to the hot wind. It let body heat out, and helped to keep him from overheating. He moved quickly, wanting to put as much distance between himself and the crash site as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t be long before the Americans came to see what had happened to their chopper and to check for any survivors among the SEALs.

  The young man moved across the rocks, their radiant heat rising up his pant legs. He left trails of sweat where he walked, but they evaporated quickly. He kept his eyes on the horizon, felt for footholds rather than looked for them, since the shadows and perspiration-blurred vision could be misleading.

  He had trained for this mission in secret, in hostile environments, so he would be ready. The first part had gone exactly as planned. But it was just the beginning of a process that would end with an enemy broken forever and, more importantly, humbled. Economies can be restored, armies repopulated, and cities rebuilt. But “face,” a nation’s honor, was something not even the centuries could repair.

  In less than a month, there would be only one world power.


  ~ * ~

  PART ONE

  The Beachhead

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  1

  Sausalito, California

  “… killing all thirty-eight Navy SEALs on board...”

  Jack Samuel Hatfield slapped off the alarm on his clock radio. The words hadn’t quite registered as he blinked to clear his vision, tried to make out the luminous red numbers. He pushed the black hair from his high, strong forehead, dragged a hand across tired eyes.

  “You’re late, champ,” he smiled, as Eddie bounded toward him from the foot of the queen-sized bed. The four-year-old gray poodle, all tongue and forepaws and big brown eyes, usually woke him up a minute or two before the six A.M. alarm. Jack dug his fingers behind the dog’s ears and Eddie drew back his head and jerked approvingly.

  Jack ended their morning ritual by pulling a well-worn chew toy from the drawer of his night table and flinging the toy to the floor. Eddie followed, landing on the rubber steak with a single, mighty leap and a whimpering squeak from the steak.

  “Lie back and think of England,” Jack told the chew toy. Then he groaned. He hadn’t been awake two minutes and already England was back on his mind. Eddie had landed on the rubber steak like the full weight of Britain’s blinkered bureaucracy had landed on Jack, who was still banned by the British Home Office from entering the United Kingdom, along with terrorists and criminals. Normally it never crossed his mind, but he had a lead for a story he was writing on the smuggling of illegal Chinese medicines. The lead was in London and London was off-limits.

  Jack stood up, his body automatically adjusting to the gentle sway of the forty-ton Sea Wrighter. The cast-off bedsheet buried Eddie, who pulled his toy to safety and continued gnawing.

  Jack Hatfield, Jack thought, the defrocked talk show host and the last truly independent journalist in America, hounded by the illiberal left and defamed worldwide, needs coffee. But he still headed to his office-cum-video-editing station in the converted lower-deck stateroom before he made it to the kitchen. He clicked on the radio and started going through his e-mail.

  “ ... Prince William and the lovely Princess Kate will be touring.....”

  He turned off the radio.

  “They probably spent sixty seconds on the Navy SEALs,” he muttered, “but they’ll spend a full five minutes on the vacation plans of royalty.”

  Every day he wondered, was his profession dead now? How about now? News channels were afraid to report anything that their audience might whine about, never mind topics that could scare them. Changing people’s minds was serious, vital business, and nobody had the guts to do it anymore. Jack had received regular death threats when he was hosting his cable news talk show Truth Tellers, but they had never discouraged him. Instead, it had taken all the resources of a giant to swat Jack down, back when he posed one simple, rhetorical question to the panel on his show:

  “How would you feel if Muslim extremists got hold of a nuclear weapon?”

  Within hours Media Wire, the leftist radical watchdog group funded by reclusive, Austrian-born billionaire Lawrence Soren, had organized a smear campaign. They had been looking for a hook on which to hang Jack like a slaughtered bull. He was labeled an Islamophobe and the liberals gleefully piled on with the kind of manic indignation only aging hippies and ignorant youth could muster. By the time Soren was done, Truth Tellers had not only lost half of its sponsors but Jack was out of a job. And he was barred from the United Kingdom, due to his “radical and provocative statements” that were deemed “a threat to public security.”

  Eddie trotted into the office, the chew toy in his mouth. He lay down and sank his teeth into it.

  Now Jack was freelance, but San Francisco had been quiet for weeks. The most promising story was the smuggling ...

  His phone rang. The caller ID said it was Max. “I don’t care if it’s good or bad,” he said into the phone, “as long as it’s news.”

  “It’s one of yours,” she said, “so it’s news.”

  Maxine Cole, twenty-seven years old, was a triathlete of Somali descent who’d moved to the United States when she was a kid. She’d spent her teens in the projects but got herself out by teaching herself how to shoot network-quality video. She’d managed to keep her street sense and her fearlessness, too, and the result was a coworker who could keep up with Jack in any situation, no matter how dangerous.

  “The arrest of the state senator’s son?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I read your report.” Jack had sent it to her for a few tweaks and some feedback. “Listen, Jack,” she continued, “for ninety-nine point ninety-nine-percent of the world, this report is going to be exactly what we expect from you. But I have to say this. I think you’re dialing it in. You’re not fully in it.”

  Jack was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’re right.”

  “Just a tiny bit. Like I said, no one except me is going to notice. But I didn’t feel right, not saying something to you.” “It’s just...”

  “It’s just that it’s not the smuggling story?” she asked.

  “Exactly. It’s a rich kid getting arrested for drugs. Meanwhile in China there are farms where bears are caged, lying on their backs with no room to move, with tubes in their abdomens to collect bile for so-called medicines. Some of the bears have actually committed suicide by starving themselves to death. And multiple smuggling operations are carrying the bear bile along with body parts from tigers and other endangered animals out of China to the rest of the world. I covered it on Truth Tellers until the network got too scared of offending their Chinese investors. Now I have a chance to break the story again and I can’t.”

  “You have contacts in London, you can ask them to follow up on it, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “But it’s not the same.”

  He didn’t reply. She knew him well. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his contacts to do a good job. He simply wanted to be the one doing it.

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me, Max. I’m just frustrated.”

  “Well then, get over it,” she laughed. She added gently, “And find a way to reconnect, OK?”

  They said good-bye and hung up. Jack ran his fingers lightly over his computer keyboard. She was right; he needed to put his finger, not just a plug, back in the socket. He needed to recharge. And he knew exactly where to go to do that.

  ~ * ~

  San Francisco, California

  Standing just over five feet tall and “slight as a snowpea,” as her father put it, there was nonetheless something about twenty-six-year-old Maggie Yu that commanded the aisles of the Yu Market on Clay Street. It was partly her posture, erect and centered, creating a straight line from the top of her head to her feet. It was partly the serenity of her expression, her dark eyes never seeming to blink, her lips together in a relaxed line, her round face untroubled with lines or color other than the natural blush of her cheeks. And it was partly the unwavering focus she brought to the task at hand.

  Maggie finished checking the inventory her father had brought in before dawn. There were fresh fish neatly arrayed on ice, vegetables harvested just hours before, sliced fruit he had cut himself and placed in plastic containers. The beverages, candy, and cigarettes had all been restocked, the floors carefully swept, and the mousetraps and fly strips cleared away. In her hand she held the clipboard with the receipts for all the goods, including the note he always left her—”I love you” he wrote in Cantonese on the topmost sheet before he went upstairs.

  Taking a last look around, the young woman placed the clipboard on its hook beneath the counter. She removed the apron—it had belonged to her mother—checked herself in a hand mirror she had beside the baseball bat her father kept beneath the register, then unlocked the door and turned around the OPEN sign.

  The century-old brass bell tinkled above the door. Maggie smiled as she welcomed her first customer, Mrs. Chan.
The smile was sincere. Maggie felt blessed to be surrounded by three of the four things she loved.

  One was her father. Johnny Yu had opened the grocery store in 1986, the year before Maggie was born. It was originally going to be named the Huangpu Market for the river where he used to sit as a boy growing up in Shanghai, his eyes on the ships that used to come and go—one of which, a freighter, eventually took him to his new home with his new bride. But Anita Yu did not want to be reminded of their old life: she insisted he name the grocery for his ancestors but also for himself and Yu descendants. He agreed that was a better idea.

  Maggie’s mother Anita died fourteen months after Maggie was born. All Maggie remembered of the woman was the hole it left in her father’s life.

  The second thing Maggie loved was the store itself. The checkout counter was straddled by a four-foot-tall dragon gate made of empty boxes of Chinese tea. It was held together by the flaps of the boxes, nothing more; it had survived the 1989 earthquake. There were three short aisles, each of which was lit by bulbs that reflected the contents: green for produce, red for condiments and spices, amber for grain. Small freezers and refrigerators lined the back wall. Mrs. Chan was pulling a bag of lime leaves from one of the freezers.