A Time for War

by Michael Savage

  Perfect, he thought. None of them felt any need to be observant. His maneuvers would go unnoticed.

  Sammo went out to the pool and sat for a while, ostensibly checking e-mails on his cell phone, but actually taking pictures of aircraft. His successful test on the helicopter in Afghanistan had confirmed that the EMP device required a direct line of sight that was no more than two thousand feet away from the target. None of the jets he was currently observing were suitable. They were not flying low enough and they appeared to be commercial flights, which meant the collateral damage would be severe. Beijing was targeting the military, not civilians. He needed a military plane specifically.

  He returned to his room and got online to see if the air base organized any visits for civilians. He ran the language translation program on his computer and discovered that there were tours every Thursday for groups of twenty-five to forty people. However, the notices of heightened security protocols meant that it would probably be very difficult for him to wander away from the tour to get to the southern perimeter.

  The situation was frustrating. The base had been selected because of the proximity of the southern fences to public properties—easy access. And there were no buildings in the way— direct line of sight.

  Sammo tried to access the Federal Aviation Administration website to see what flight lanes were restricted to military use and if any of them were lower than two thousand feet. The FAA information was password protected and he didn’t have time to bounce the information back to Beijing.

  Instead, he did a general word search of air space restrictions in the larger area of Solano County and found something promising: minutes from a Suisun City Board of Supervisors meeting that referred to a land development problem because the proposed building was in the approach pattern for Travis. It referred to a parcel of land off Highway 12 between Suisun City and Fairfield. Sammo looked up the filing from the developer. He didn’t need a translator to recognize the logo of the Mother Hen Toy Company, an international corporation that had started out making chicken hand puppets in a British factory. They were looking for a height exemption to construct a North American distribution center.

  “The lowest-flying aircraft will be more than eleven hundred feet above the four-story structure,” said the proposal. “The sound concerns that affect general construction along the corridor will not impact this building, which will only be inhabited by day workers, only a few of whom will be assigned to the automated upper floors.”

  A four-story structure would be about sixty feet high. That would put the military aircraft approaching the air base well within range. All Sammo had to do was find a position along the flight corridor from which to operate the EMP device. He was sure there would be multiple suitable locations.

  Sammo called the consulate to have a car sent for him. It would take about an hour, during which time he would have lunch in the hotel dining room.

  ~ * ~

  The meal was delicious—he had assumed it would be, in a coastal town—and Sammo savored the taste of the fish, the tang of the capers, the rich crunch of the lettuce. It was useful to have nothing to do, at least for a short while. Not to relax but to acclimate. It was difficult for a foreigner not to stand out physically, far more challenging for him not to call attention to himself behaviorally.

  Sammo used this time to observe, mimic, adapt. He watched tourists argue over their maps. Mothers with babies having lunch. The soldier who had been waiting in the lobby, now seated at a table with his family, taking pictures. Loud teenagers who were school age, yet not in school. Sammo adjusted his behavior in several small ways, not least of which was learning how to watch without staring, a mannerism that caught the attention of one or two people, albeit briefly.

  The mannerism of a child, he reflected.

  But the single-minded purpose of a child had to be partnered with adult skills. Those were qualities the American agents following Sammo did not possess. He knew the agents would try to find him. He knew how they would try. He knew they would already have begun.

  And he knew he would be ready for them.

  ~ * ~

  Sausalito, California

  A day after the explosion, Jack still had a dull hum in his ear. In Iraq, IEDs would explode with a pop or crack. This one had been a pow and it had settled somewhere inside his inner ear. He was recovering, but slowly. Jack had to crank up the sound on his cell phone, his computer, and he found himself actually looking at lips when he spoke with people. He used to complain about how noisy the marina was. Never again. When he got back to the boat and walked Eddie, bells that he knew were crisp and sharp sounded like dull gongs. He couldn’t even hear some of the more distant gulls.

  Back in his workspace, he sat on the stool by his editing computer and shifted his jaw from side to side in a useless effort to clear his ears. Giving up, he put the phone on speaker and called the personal cell phone number Dover Griffith had given him.

  “How are you, sir?” she asked with a buoyant flourish.

  God, Jack thought. This deep into the day back east and she was still chipper. Either Dover Griffith was a special human being or they were breeding them differently in her generation. When he was fifteen years younger, Jack was already being described as a curmudgeon—and that was by his friends.

  “I’m good,” he said, “except that the FBI doesn’t know what killed their tail car. And I believe my guy. He’s in a position to know and— well, interviewing people for years, you kind of know when they’re telling the truth.”

  “Hence the name of your old show, Truth Tellers.”

  “Right. You have anything?”

  “Not really. By the way, I’ve been watching some of those episodes on YouTube. Or rather, listening to them while I researched this. You didn’t take any prisoners.”

  “Never. Someone comes on my show with an agenda, wants to attack me, they better be able to defend their position. It’s a tactical choice, too. Naysaying is a great way to get windbags to articulate.”

  “And it makes good TV,” Dover added quickly. “That wasn’t really a criticism, just an observation. I loved the animal rights activists you had on.”

  “The one who didn’t want eyeliner tested on bunny rabbits?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Jack grinned. The woman, who was in her fifties and twice widowed—once by a suicide— had actually suggested that new makeup formulas be tested on convicts instead of on animals.

  “With the added benefit that these guys will look great in the showers,” Jack had replied. His glib response ticked off the woman and PETA but earned him the first positive comments he had ever received from the gay community.

  “Enough about me,” Jack said. “Getting back to your ‘Not really’; did you find anything at all?”

  “Well, I can’t tell you more than this, but over the past two years there has been extensive, direct contact between Richard Hawke and high-ranking officials of the Chinese government.”

  “You can’t tell me because it’s classified?”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t tell you because we have nothing about those dealings on file. I got that information from The Economist and Forbes, and that’s basically all they said. Though it was interesting,” she added. “One of them openly wondered if the old Squarebeam technology was responsible for inadvertently bringing down that drone spy plane over Iran in December of 2011.”

  “Where would you be without the Fourth Estate?” Jack asked. That was no joke. Since 9/11, more than sixty percent of actionable intelligence came from journalists and ordinary citizens. “I suspect there are no files because Hawke has friends at the ONI, the CIA, and everywhere else in D.C.”

  “Most people at his level do,” Dover replied.

  Jack didn’t want to say more in case either of their phones was being monitored; being harassed by the government was not pleasant, especially if they recruited the IRS and local police in the project. He’d k
nown targets who were fined for disturbing the peace every time their dogs barked. But he had seen that kind of relationship before. One way intelligence agencies got personnel in-country was as ride-alongs with business entourages. He had witnessed secret deals with Saudi businessmen to gain access to Libya before the civil war, and pacts with Russian black-market tsars to get agents into Iran. In order to benefit from Hawke’s access to China, the Department of Defense would certainly have agreed not to track or interfere with his business activities. It was simply assumed that no American in Hawke’s position would do anything treasonous by design or stupidity.

  “Did you do that research on your office desktop?” Jack asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You do know that those searches are stored and filtered for keywords, don’t you?”

  “I do. In fact, I’m counting on it. If my superiors tell me to stop, it means Hawke is under our protection, as you suggest. That means he’s invisible to us, to the FBI, to the CIA, to Homeland Security, and to everyone else. And that leaves him or his people free to take any potentially unlawful, off-grid actions they want. I hate to think the worst of people, but it comes with the job.”

  “The rich and powerful aren’t immune to bad political judgment,” Jack said. “Charles Lindbergh was a racist and Nazi sympathizer. Lucille Ball was a registered Communist. So let’s assume you’re still worried about Squarebeam. What then?”

  “I file a report about my concerns. The higher-ups are aware of the dangers of this technology, but they may not realize it could be adapted and abused. Hawke himself may not know.”

  Jack felt she was being dangerously naive. It was also possible the ONI or one of the other agencies had helped to develop the technology and someone fed it to the Chinese for a lot of cash. But maybe innocence was also Dover Griffith’s shield. The ONI might not be inclined to dismiss a valued analyst who was simply pursuing a reasonable lead. Not without first firing a shot across her bow.

  “Maybe.“ “Might not,“ Jack thought. Those were not words that inspired confidence. If any of this was true, then coming down on Griffith, the ONI would also find him. And he had no facts, no protection of any kind, nothing to bargain with. He had to move this along before it made its way through channels in D.C. Besides, this was more than a matter of information being power. It was also news, and that’s what he did for a living.

  “So,” Dover said, “before I talk to the other agencies, is there anywhere else we can go for information?”

  “I was just thinking about that,” Jack said. “There is one thing I can do.”

  “What’s that?” Dover asked.

  He told her, “I can call Richard Hawke.”

  ~ * ~

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  On January 1, 2008, after existing separately for nearly a century and a half, three Canadian entities—the Fraser River Port Authority, the North Fraser Port Authority, and the Vancouver Port Authority—were joined to create the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, popularly known as Port Metro Vancouver. Located on the southwest coast of British Columbia, Port Metro jurisdiction spanned over 600 kilometers of shoreline from Point Roberts at the U.S. border to Port Moody and Indian Arm, east along the Fraser River and north along the Pitt River. It is one of the largest tonnage ports in North America, with twenty-eight major cargo terminals and three rail lines. Port Metro is a trade hub for over 160 world economies, handling nearly 130 million tons of cargo each year.

  Security at Port Metro met or exceeded the standards set by MARSEC—the U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Security system—which was a collaborative between all hemispheric ports and the Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Advisory System, the National Terrorism Advisory System, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, and their corresponding Canadian institutions. The port maintained round-the-clock high-definition video surveillance, secure card-gate access, sophisticated gamma-ray screening equipment, radiation detectors at all terminals, hands-on passenger and baggage screening, and random tracking of personnel who passed through Customs. MARSEC euphemistically referred to this as “visa support inspection” and “foreign personnel studies,” when it was, in fact, profiling. Any foreign individual whom agents felt was potentially suspicious earned a tail at least as far as the bar or motel they visited.

  Among the visitors who received the least attention were those who entered the port without cargo. Lone Wolf fears were mostly centered on homegrown anarchists like radicalized Muslims or misguided Occupy Wall Street puppets. It was presumed that terrorists entering North America were doing so increasingly through the porous Southwestern border of the United States, typically under the protection of Mexican drug cartels; or via plane or boat that snuck in under the radar, quietly in the small hours of the night; or occasionally on private jets or yachts owned by oil sheiks who were happy to take American money but detested American morality and “multiculturalism”—a catchword that actually meant Christians and Jews.

  The vessels whose personnel received the least attention were those that carried paying passengers. Among those were the 66,000 deadweight-ton freighters of the French New Wave fleet: the Godard, the Chabrol, and the Truffaut. Each working vessel provided simple accommodations for up to six paying guests. It was a comparatively economical way for travelers to visit multiple ports of call or even circumnavigate the globe.

  The three-hundred-meter Godard was the freighter that made the round-the-world voyages, though passenger Liu Tang came aboard very late in an eastbound journey whose midpoint was Tangier. He joined the trip at the Port of Chiwan in Chiwan, Guangdong, China, having been detained by business. He had, in fact, applied for a partial refund—which, by the terms of his contract, could not be provided.

  As he knew full well. Liu had never intended to go around the world. He merely wanted it noted that he had attempted to disengage himself from this voyage. That fact would show up on the manifest provided to MARSEC. It would suggest he had no urgent reason to be in Vancouver. He was coming to visit a half-brother in San Francisco—John Lee, of which there were over one hundred. That would immediately place him under low Level Three scrutiny: a border crossing that did not come with a ticking clock or imminent departure date. In short, it implied that he represented no timely terror threat.

  The opposite was true. The threat was both real and immediate.

  That was the problem with security measures, he thought as he gathered his things in his modest compartment. They were designed to spot aberrations. All Liu had to do was not stand out.

  Part of his strategy was to establish a routine in which the slightly unusual was done in sight of all and seemed normal. In Liu’s case, that was playing chess. He had a small board with plastic pieces that folded into a neat leather carrying case. He had a pair of books with illustrated games and tactics. He had videos he watched of classic games. He played by himself on deck and carried his board with him at mealtimes, even if he had no intention of using it.

  The other part of his strategy was an ivory chess set, which he proudly displayed to the crew and his fellow passengers, telling them he had purchased it for his brother. The pieces were large and ornate, manufactured before international regulations banned the hunting of elephants for their tusks.

  “Very rare,” he told everyone in the limited English he had been taught.

  But the real value of the chess set lay in how it would be wielded, like a chess piece in a game. Liu was going to use it as a false aberration—a distraction.

  Having left the ship with the crew, Liu brought all his belongings through Port Metro Customs. He had one bag and a separate, expensive case for the ivory chess set. The inspecting agent, a big man with a big mustache, asked about the chess set. Liu winced and gestured that he didn’t understand.

  One of the deck boys standing behind Liu explained, “It’s a gift for his brother in the States.”

  The agent handled one of the pawns and frowned. “This
is ivory,” he told Liu. “Contraband. No-no. Unless you have a certificate of antiquity, I cannot allow this into the country. The Americans won’t let it in, either.”

  “Sorry?” Liu said.

  “Elephants,” the agent said. “Killing. It’s illegal.” He spoke loudly and slowly as if that would make the English understood.

  Liu grew anxious. “Sorry? China.”

  “Yes, China is very lax about this sort of thing,” the agent said. “We are not.”

  The deck boy grew restless. “Hey, can’t you cut the guy a break?” The young man was in his twenties, Tasmanian, on his first voyage. He was eager to get to the city. “He’s some kind of grand master. Always has his board and books.”